Donald Trump’s return to office is likely to have profound implications for the nation’s public schools. In this episode we start to grapple with five major policy areas that are likely to be impacted: immigration, school choice, teacher unions, student civil rights and religion. With the aid of experts Sophia Rodriguez, Jon Valant, Mimi Arnold Lyon, Derek Black and Ben Justice, Have You Heard gives you a sense of what to expect and how to prepare for what’s coming.

Schools are in for more chaos and conflict, whatever specific policies are enacted by a second Trump Administration. We talk to two scholars about just how much the politics of disruption are costing, in terms of the material costs to school district budgets and the erosion of community trust. The research of Rachel White, co-author of a new study, “The Cost of Conflict,” and Rebecca Jacobsen, co-author of the forthcoming “The Politics of Disruption” is a timely reminder that the consequences of our school wars are all too real.

Massachusetts’ voters will soon weigh in on whether to abandon the state’s defacto high school exit exam. That prospect has pitted elected officials and business leaders against teachers and their union, as well as a majority of voters, who’ve grown weary of schools’ focus on standardized testing. But the contentious debate also reflects a deep–and old–divide over the purpose of high school. We’re joined by education historian David Labaree who argues that high schools are not equipped (and never have been) to prepare students for the jobs of the future, and that policymakers and business leaders who insist on that goal have ended up dramatically narrowing the purpose of school.

As long as we’ve had public schools, we’ve had ‘edu-grifters,’ slick salesmen armed with promises to provide education on the cheap. In this episode, we meet one of the OG edu-grifters, one Joseph Lancaster, who arrived on these shores in the 1820’s with an irresistible sales pitch: schools that were basically free because, wait for it, the kids taught themselves. Adam Laats, author of the amazing new book, Mr. Lancaster’s System, joins us to talk about the American addiction to education ‘silver bullets,’ the age-old resistance to investing in other people’s kids, and why the vision of school privatization on offer from Betsy DeVos failed the first time around. 

We head to Fort Collins, CO where a plan to shutter multiple schools and “rightsize” the school district ran into a wall of community opposition. A feel-good tale for our feel-bad times, Fort Collins’ example signals, not just resistance to school closures, but to the larger vision of school choice and competition that pits parents against one another, deepening disparities in the process.

When Courtney Gore ran for school board in a deep red Texas county, she pledged to root out indoctrination. But once she got into office, Gore could find no evidence of indoctrination happening in the local schools. She has since disavowed the far-right platform she ran on and now argues that the school culture wars are being ginned up in order to build support for private school vouchers–and a growing number of local Republicans agree with her. Education journalist Karin Chenoweth interviewed Gore on her podcast, Democracy and Education, and gave us permission to share their conversation on Have You Heard.