While the media focuses obsessively on Harvard, the state universities that the majority of American students actually attend are under attack. We’re joined by faculty at three universities, all reeling from a similar combination of austerity, vocationalizing and the growing right-wing hostility to higher education. What emerges is an old story with a new twist–the latest installment in a raging battle over what college is for, who gets to decide, and who gets to attend. Our all-star cast includes, Jon Shelton, UW Green Bay; Rose Casey, West Virginia University; Audrey Berlowitz, UNC Greensboro; and Will Bunch, author of After the Ivory Tower Falls.

The recent elections issued a stinging rebuke to conservative culture warring candidates. But the Democratic Party has been largely MIA when it comes to articulating its own vision for public education. So what should that vision look like? We invited four experts–Randi Weingarten, Jon Valant, Rick Hess and Jamaal Bowman–to lay out a path forward for Democrats.

As long as immigrants have been coming to this country, we’ve been debating how schools should educate and “Americanize” them. In her new book, Making Americans, history teacher Jessica Lander says that schools today are far more welcoming to immigrant-origin students than in the past. But even as star educators like Jessica, Carlos Beato, who co-founded a high school for immigrant students in Maryland, and Leah Juelke, the 2017 North Dakota Teacher of the Year, show us what truly welcoming schools and teaching look like, the rising tide of anti-immigrant rhetoric threatens their efforts, as well as the students they advocate for.

Everybody loves to hate on school boards these days. But as education policy scholar Jonathan Collins reminds us, these beleaguered bodies are actually the most accessible entry points to democracy that we have. At a time when calls to make school oversight less democratic are coming from the right and education reformers, Collins makes an urgent case for using participatory local democracy to collectively solve our most pressing problems.

We hand the mic to the brilliant podcasters behind the Voucher Scam, a limited series exposing the big money push to bring school vouchers to Texas and beyond. Claire Campos-O’Neal and Nicole Abshire of the Mothers for Democracy Institute visit a rural community where the elected representative is no longer, well, representing. Claire and Nicole do a masterful job connecting school privatization with the rise of Christian Nationalism and the erosion of democracy. We hope you appreciate their brilliant work as much as we did.

Have You Heard heads to Houston, where the state now controls Texas’ largest school district. We’ll meet teachers and parents who say the takeover of the schools in this Democratic city is fundamentally about politics. And we’ll try to make sense of how the takeover fits into the efforts by Governor Greg Abbott to bring private school vouchers to the Lone Star state. Spoiler: it does.