Waste, fraud and abuse. That’s how education policy expert Jon Valant characterizes the new federal voucher program that was tucked into Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill last year. Valant walks us through the nuts and bolts of the program and explains how it undoes the federal commitment to civil rights and progressive education funding. Valant’s ultimate conclusion: Trump’s voucher program will be the greatest source of waste, fraud, and abuse that we have seen in our lifetimes in K-12 education.

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A steep decline in the birthrate means fewer students, and for a growing number of communities that means closing schools. We head to New Orleans where the ‘demographic cliff’ poses a unique problem for a market-based school system in which schools are constantly opening and closing. A recent decision by KIPP to close a school without consulting parents or students has set off an uproar and called new attention to the democracy deficit in New Orleans’ all-charter-school model.

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Sarasota Florida was supposed to be the new capital of Magamerica. But a funny thing happened on the way to making this coastal community and its school board the epicenter of right wing activism. A whole lot of Sarasotans woke up to the reality that their schools, vulnerable students and indeed local democracy hung in the balance. Call it the backlash to the backlash or the revenge of the normies, the resistance is alive and well in southwest Florida.

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As Silicon Valley’s tentacles reach ever more deeply into the nation’s public schools, a provocative new book sounds an emphatic “stop”! We talk to Tim Scott, author of Schooling for Silicon Valley, about big tech’s dystopian vision for education, and what the sales pitch for personalized, adaptive and data-driven learning is really about.

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It isn’t just red states where books are being pulled from schools. In blue states, books have given way to out-of-context passages in the name of test and career prep. Add in new literacy laws that seek to tightly control how teachers teach reading and we’ve got a serious case of the blue state blues on our hands. Four current and former teachers join us to discuss what blue states keep getting wrong about public education. Special guests: John Downes-Angus, Annie Abrams, Nora De La Cour and Jeff Austin.

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What should kids learn about sex? Who should teach them? And if they learn too much, will they become deviants? According to Margaret Myers, the author of The Fight for Sex Ed, we’ve been fighting over these exact same questions for more than a century, obscuring the essential purpose of sex education. And Nawal Umar of the sex ed advocacy group SIECUS joins us to talk about the present day push to mandate the teaching of the so-called success sequence in schools.

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Forget about ‘education freedom’ and ‘school choice.’ These conservative see the expansion of school vouchers as a government takeover of private and home schools. We head to Texas, where opposition to vouchers has emerged as a potent cause on the right, even as moderates are turned off by the GOP’s hostility to public schools. The result: an issue that could end up upending politics in the Lone Star State.

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Decades before high school students were walking out of school to protest ICE, they embraced political activism against the Vietnam War and in favor of school desegration and expanding civil rights. In a new book, scholar Aaron G. Fountain Jr. unearths the largely forgotten history of high school student activism, locating student groups, and underground newspapers, in every part of the country. And just like today, adults often reacted with suspicion, warning that ‘outside agitators’ were manipulating children, even calling upon the FBI to surveil their own children.

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Our ability to disagree has turned toxic, and frayed relationships are leaving Americans more isolated and lonely than ever. Can schools help? Educational psychologist Hunter Gehlbach is convinced that teachers hold the key by helping students learn how to disagree better. That is unless AI replaces all of the teachers first.

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In the schools of the (near) future, teachers will be replaced by robots and learning will be personalized, allowing each student to move at their own pace. AI refuser and self-described ‘ed tech Cassandra’ Audrey Watters says that the vision of education being peddled by Silicon Valley today is virtually indistinguishable from the Cold War fantasy of futuristic schools. Watters makes the case that seventy years after the Soviets launched Sputnik into space, the US and its schools remain trapped in a ‘Sputnik moment.’

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