From the end of federal COVID relief money to declining enrollment, school districts are in a world of hurt right now. But while the causes for the rising tide of red ink are complex, the recommendations from school finance experts are always the same: cut, fire and close. Our guest, school district finance whisperer David Backer, takes serious issue with these supposed solutions and wants to arm teachers and public school advocates with the tools and knowledge necessary to fight back.

This is a special episode of Have You Heard, and not just because co-host Jack Schneider is MIA. We’re paying tribute to Jennifer’s dad, Tom Berkshire, a tireless advocate for kids and for fixing the nation’s broken foster care system. We’re headed to a magical community in western Massachusetts called Treehouse that surrounds foster kids and their adoptive families with love while providing senior citizens with affordable housing. In other words, this is a feel good episode at a time when we could all use a little uplift. Special guest: journalist and educator Nora De La Cour.

To celebrate the release of The Education Wars, we’ve gathered a cast of thousands to help bring the book to life. Our special guests help us understand what’s driving the intense push to privatize schools, what we’ll lose when public schools are gone, and how we can fight to protect and transform public education in this country. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll be inspired, you’ll want to buy the book–and then give it away. Special guests include Erik Anderson, Noliwe Rooks, Derek Gottlieb, Jess Piper, Heather DuBois Bourenane, Letha Muhammed, Nora Flanagan and Johann Neem.

Students who lived through court-ordered desegregation in the South grew up to become less conservative, more tolerant adults. That’s the finding of provocative research from education scholar Mark Chin, who compared students who attended integrated schools with their peers in the same county who didn’t. Mark says his research is a reminder to academics to think bigger than test scores when looking at the impact of education policy. But it also provides us with essential context for understanding today’s wave of school privatization in the South: an effort to produce kids who will be more conservative and less tolerant as adults.

Raise your hand if you think that all of the partisan rancor over public education is bad for kids? That’s the premise of Braver Angels, a citizen’s group that aims to make America less crazy by getting people talking more and hating each other less. Co-founder Bill Doherty joins us to talk about why our debates over education are so pitched and polarized and what we can do about it. And Jack reminds us that even highly technocratic policy issues can become supercharged in an age of distrust and division.

Market-based education reform may be on the wane, but what’s the alternative? Our guest, Jonathan Gyurko, author of the provocative new book Publicization, argues that public education advocates need to rally around a goal of making public schools as public as possible. That means changing the way we think about funding, governance, accountability–indeed, the very purpose of school. If we want to move beyond decades of privatization, says Gyurko, we need a hopeful vision of what schools could be.