It’s time for a new calendar, new year’s resolutions and new predictions from John Fensterwald.

John is a veteran reporter, with decades of experience reporting on education. At the turn of the year, we at EdSource turn to John to give us a sense of what we have to look forward to — or dread — in education.

Guest:

John Fensterwald, Editor-at-large, EdSource

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Strikes, cuts, state superintendent race: Our 2026 California education predictions. What are yours?

Education Beat is a weekly podcast hosted by EdSource’s Zaidee Stavely and produced by Coby McDonald.

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This week we are honoring the life of Betty Reid Soskin, who was the nation’s oldest national park ranger and a civil rights icon. She passed away on December 21st at 104 years old.

To honor her, we are rebroadcasting an episode from 2021, about how a California school district came to rename a school after her.

Guests:

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Education Beat is a weekly podcast hosted by EdSource’s Zaidee Stavely and produced by Coby McDonald.

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In the bilingual education world, José Medina is a superstar. A former teacher turned principal turned researcher, he spreads his message of respecting students' languages on social media and in schools across the country with a sassy, no-nonsense style, telenovela-level energy and strong research to back it up.

Listen to him tell his own story and how his own experiences in childhood fuel his fight for inclusion.

Guest: José Medina, Biliteracy and dual-language researcher

Read more: Meet the researcher using sass and social media to transform bilingual education

Education Beat is a weekly podcast hosted by EdSource’s Zaidee Stavely and produced by Coby McDonald.

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In California’s Central Valley, a small K–8 school district is getting big results. Livingston Union School District in Merced County was recently recognized by the UCLA Center for the Transformation of Schools for outperforming the state in key areas — reducing chronic absenteeism and suspensions while improving student well-being.

How did the district do this? By investing deeply in school counselors and pushing a comprehensive program that goes above and beyond what most schools offer in both academic and mental health support.

Guests:

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Education Beat is a weekly podcast hosted by EdSource’s Zaidee Stavely and produced by Coby McDonald.

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The vast majority of students who graduated high school while detained in California's juvenile facilities in a five-year span between 2018 and 2023 did not pass a 12th grade reading assessment. In fact, over a fifth of them were reading at lower elementary-school grade levels.

Now California's finally doing something about it. A new literacy intervention program is now being rolled out in San Diego, Alameda, San Mateo and Riverside counties, to help teenagers in juvenile detention grasp the basics of reading.

Guests:

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Education Beat is a weekly podcast hosted by EdSource’s Zaidee Stavely and produced by Coby McDonald.

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This week many listeners may be in their kitchens preparing a big meal for Thanksgiving, so we're rebroadcasting an episode from 2022, where we visit a kitchen in Davenport, California, a little seaside town, south of San Francisco, not far from Santa Cruz.

The town is home to a tiny district with just one school, nestled between ocean, farmland, and mountains. John Fensterwald is taking us there for lunch, cooked from scratch by the fifth and sixth graders.

Pacific Elementary’s unique Food Lab program is a boon for the district, boosting its enrollment by attracting students from nearby wealthier districts.

Guests:

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Education Beat is a weekly podcast hosted by EdSource’s Zaidee Stavely and produced by Coby McDonald.

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Over the last ten years, San Luis Coastal Unified School District has changed up its menu, replacing packaged pizza and chicken nuggets with freshly baked chicken drumsticks, sweet potato, black bean chimichurri bowls and plates of coconut rice with a red lentil dal.

The district has done that in part through a federal grant program that helps school districts buy ingredients from local farms to make more nutritious school lunches from scratch.

Now, that federal program has been gutted, leaving many districts, especially smaller ones or those just starting out on the journey of making over their menus, without a crucial funding stream.

Guests:

Read more from EdSource: Schools, farms grapple with lost funds after federal program is gutted 

Education Beat is a weekly podcast hosted by EdSource’s Zaidee Stavely and produced by Coby McDonald.

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Improve Your Tomorrow provides mentorship services to about 1,000 students at Stockton Unified School District, transforming struggling students into leaders prepared for college.

But funding is uncertain under the second Trump administration. Improve Your Tomorrow, like many mentoring and tutoring programs in K-12 schools, relies partially on federal grants through AmeriCorps — funding that President Donald Trump has proposed entirely eliminating.

Guests:

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Education Beat is a weekly podcast. This week's episode was hosted by EdSource’s Emma Gallegos and produced by Coby McDonald.

As a kindergarten teacher, a big part of Violet Nye’s job  is teaching kids how to read. But the way she teaches her students is very different from how she learned as a kid. She remembers being taught to memorize whole words.

Now, she's steeped in the practice of teaching kids how to sound out words, while also building up their vocabulary and helping them lift words off the page to imagine whole new worlds from stories.

A new law aims to get more California teachers to teach reading the way Violet does. It comes after years of advocacy and debate and required a significant amount of compromise.

Guests:

Read more from EdSource: New law changes how California kids learn to read

Education Beat is a weekly podcast hosted by EdSource’s Zaidee Stavely and produced by Coby McDonald.

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Miliani Rodriguez is a senior at Coachella Valley High School. The school buildings are old, she says, and they show it. The air conditioning often breaks in over 100-degree heat. When it rains, the ceilings leak. The sinks in her ceramics classroom broke and flooded the classroom.

Miliani thought these kinds of things were  normal, after attending school in the Coachella Valley Unified School District since kindergarten. But last year she visited her cousin’s high school, just a couple of miles away from her, and found modern buildings, spacious athletic fields, and working air conditioning.

Now, she is the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit, Miliani R. v. State of California, which claims the way the state subsidizes school renovations perpetuates vast inequalities for students, sending more money to districts that already have more property wealth, and locking out poor districts from accessing funding.

Guests:

Read more from EdSource: California sued over bond program that sends more money to fix facilities in wealthy school districts

Education Beat is a weekly podcast hosted by EdSource’s Zaidee Stavely and produced by Coby McDonald.

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