FreshEd

Last week, the Trump administration invited university, higher education association, and private company officials to the White House to discuss international students and post-college work.

At the time of this recording, we aren’t sure what exactly was said or decided. But in an effort to provide some background on international student experiences in American Higher Education, Jenny Lee is with me today to discuss the underlying U.S. political climate for international students and scholars. In our talk, Jenny discusses the rise in discrimination and hate crimes since Trump’s election and the presence of neo-racism on campuses.

Jenny J. Lee is a Professor at the Center for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Arizona. She is currently a NAFSA Senior Fellow, Associate Editor of the Review of Higher Education, and Co-editor of the book series, Studies in Global Higher Education. Her latest piece can be found in the NAFSA newsletter, Trends and Insights.

www.freshedpodcast.com/Lee

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twitter: @freshedpodcast

The University of Sussex was ranked the world’s best for development studies in the 2019 QS World University Rankings by subject. To celebrate, we re-air Mario Novelli's 2016 FreshEd interview.

In that interview, Mario talked about the role of schools in the production of inequality. Mario not only details how modernity, capitalism, and colonialism combine to create systems of inequality inside school systems but also publicly struggles with his role in the production of inequality through his work in international educational development.

Mario Novelli is Professor of the Political Economy of Education and Director of the Centre for International Education (CIE) at the University of Sussex. His latest article discussed in this podcast can be found in the most recent issue of the British Journal of the Sociology of Education.

Citation: Novelli, Mario, Interview with Will Brehm, FreshEd, 41, September 12, 2016.

Transcript, translation, and resources: http://www.freshedpodcast.com/marionovelli/

My guest today is Iveta Silova, Director of the Center for the Advanced Studies in Global Education at Arizona State University. Professor Silova has spent her career studying post-socialist education transformation processes.

In today’s show she discusses some of her new work comparing Latvian textbooks before, during, and after Soviet occupation.

http://www.freshedpodcast.com/ivetasilova/

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Last week, Linda Darling-Hammond was named the head of California’s State Board of Education, the governing and policy-making body of the California Department of Education. With over six million students and nearly 300,000 teachers in California, this is a powerful position.

Last year, Linda Darling-Hammond joined me to talk about her co-authored book Empowered Educators: How high-performing systems shape teaching quality around the world.

The book explores how several countries and jurisdictions have developed comprehensive teaching and learning systems that produce a range of positive outcomes, from student achievement to equity and from a professionalized teaching workforce to the integration of research and practice.

Linda Darling-Hammond is the president of the Learning Policy Institute and a Professor of Education Emeritus at Standard University.

http://www.freshedpodcast.com/lindadarlinghammond/

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How did vouchers and charter schools become key elements in the education reform agenda in the United States?

My guest today, Professor of Education Policy at the University of Illinois, Chris Lubienski, speaks about the rise of policy orchestration among a network of private and non-profit actors and what this means for democratic decision making.

His research shows how Philanthropic Foundations, such as the Gates and Walton Family Foundations, and think tanks, such as the Brookings Institute and RAND Corporation, have come to promote a common agenda that has helped propel vouchers and charters into the national spotlight.

Professor Lubienski explores the changing structures of educational policy making in the United States, and argues that the contracting out of policy making to actors such as Gates, Brookings, and RAND has resulted in the privatization of public policy making.

http://www.freshedpodcast.com/chrislubienski/

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A group of Yale graduate students are protesting their labor conditions as teachers. They are demanding the administration recognize them as a union and negotiate their contract as full employees of the university. After all, graduate students teach many undergraduate classes.

But the administration is stalling, waiting for Donald Trump to appoint an anti-union National Labor Relations Board that, they hope, will throw out the union’s right to exist.

My guest today is Jennifer Klein, a professor of history at Yale University who has followed the unionization efforts closely. She’s written a recent New York Times op-ed detailing the events at Yale.

The fight over graduate student’s right to unionize at Yale is a microcosm of the reliance on precarious work across the American higher education system.

You can find the solidarity statement in support of the graduate students here.

http://www.freshedpodcast.com/jenniferklein/

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Many countries around the world participate in the Programme for International Student Assessment, the cross-national test administered by the OECD. Today we look at the economic costs for a country to participate in PISA. My guests are Laura Engel and David Rutkowski. They followed the money through publicly available budget documents in the United States to uncover exactly how much the test costs both the federal and state governments.

Through this complicated web, they found a host of contractors and sub-contractors hired to implement PISA and call for a full cost-benefit analysis in order to determine if PISA is worth it.

Laura Engel is an Associate Professor of International Education and International Affairs at the George Washington University and David Rutkowski is an Associate Professor with a joint appointment in Educational Policy and Educational Inquiry at Indiana University School of Education. Their latest co-written article published in the journal Discourse is called “Pay to play: What does PISA participation cost in the US?”

www.freshedpodcast.com/LauraEngel-David Rutkowski/

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What’s the connection between education and development? My guest today, Dan Wagner, argues that it’s past time to move beyond conceptualizing development as economic growth.

For Dan, the framework we should use is learning as development. He calls on social scientists to work towards a Learning Gini Index that not only takes learning seriously but also equity.

Dan Wagner is Professor of Education and UNESCO Chair in Learning and Literacy at the Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania, where he is also the director of the International Literacy Institute and International Educational Development Program.  In today’s show we talk about his new book, Learning as Development: Rethinking International Education in a Changing World (Routledge 2018). He has also published a new book for UNESCO entitled Learning at the Bottom of the Pyramid (UNESCO 2018).

www.freshedpodcast.com/danwagner/

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What’s the connection between education and climate change? My guest today, Arjen Wals, takes a critical take on sustainability yet offers a hopeful outlook.

In our conversation, Arjen details a few examples of school-level practices that could be seen as working towards a sustainable future while also critiques educational competition and the hidden curriculum of commodification.

He ultimately calls for more dissonance in education systems as a way to learn new forms of sustainability to combat climate change.

Arjen Wals is the UNESCO Chair of Social Learning and Sustainable Development and Professor of Transformative Learning for Socio-Ecological Sustainability at Wageningen University in The Netherlands.

I spoke with Prof. Wals at the 2018 Global Education Meeting, which was a high-level forum held in Brussels in early December that reviewed the progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals.

www.freshedpodcast.com/arjenwals/

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Today we look at the role of education in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. My guest is Parfait Eloundou, professor and department chair of development sociology at Cornell University and member of the independent group of scientists writing the Global Sustainable Development report. I spoke with Parfait during a break at the UNESCO Global Education Meeting held in Brussels in early December.

In our conversation, Parfait calls wealth inequality, demographic changes, and parental choices the perfect storm of inequality. Education plays an important role in overcoming this social trifecta of disparity.

We also discuss the assumption of meritocracy in education and the lack of a class analysis in the SDGs.

www.freshedpodcast.com/parfait-eloundou-enyegue/

email: [email protected]

twitter: @freshedpodcast