Have You Heard

It's been one year since Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos squeaked into office via a tie-breaking vote courtesy of VP Mike Pence. Jack and Jennifer listened, read and watched their way through a year's worth of DeVos remarks - and lived to tell the tale. Their top takeaways: after 365 days of DeVos, she remains misunderstood and misunderestimated.

We talk to Rebecca Klein, education reporter for the Huffington Post, about her recent series on what students at voucher schools - private schools, overwhelmingly religious, that receive taxpayer dollars. Klein introduces us to three popular curricula used in the schools. As she explains, kids on the receiving end of these widely-used lessons are being schooled in an extreme religious and ideological worldview.

Education reform is often referred to as the "civil rights issue of our time." But what would have happened if "edupreneurs" (like Mark Zuckerberg, Wendy Kopp or Dave Levin) had used their money, influence, connections and access to solve the riddle of why we can't integrate schools? Have You Heard talks "segrenomics" with Noliwe Rooks, author of Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education.

For decades, Republicans and Democrats alike have held out "college for all" as the key to social and economic mobility. Have You Heard talks to Joan Williams, author of White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness about the starkly different class-based attitudes towards college. On the one side: professional elites, who groom their kids for college from day 1. On the other: working class Americans, who often view college--not to mention "credentialed" elites--with suspicion.

Mihir Garud left a job as a stockbroker to teach personal finance at a Chicago charter school. He's also the treasurer of a union that now represents 25% of charter school teachers in the city. Garud, who sees unions as the "last brake" on a system of free market capitalism run amok, turns out to have a lot in common with the teachers in Chicago who organized the country's first just-for-teachers union back in 1897.

When questions produce quarrels, it can be easy to blame our current state of politics. But coping with contention is a learned skill—a skill that our schools have been actively avoiding for over a century. In this episode, we talk with historian Jon Zimmerman about the teaching of controversial issues: past, present, and future.

"Corporate education agenda" gets thrown around a lot - but what does it actually mean? Have You Heard talks to economist Gordon Lafer, who tracked the state-level legislation backed by the corporate lobbies, including the Chamber of Commerce and the American Legislative Exchange Council, in the wake of the Great Recession. Lafer paints a disturbing picture of the corporate vision for education, an agenda that remains deeply unpopular with voters. Perhaps the bleakest episode of Have You Heard so far!

Chicago shuttered some 50 schools in 2013. Since then, voter turnout and support for Democrats in the affected neighborhoods has plunged. What's the connection? Have You Heard talks to political scientist Sally Nuamah about the political fallout from the school closures--and what the debate about closing schools as a means of raising student achievement is missing.

Have You Heard listens in on the recent XQ Superschools extravaganza, the latest big money effort to "rethink" public education. We're joined by Megan Tompkins Stange, author of Policy Patrons: Philanthropy, Education Reform, and the Politics of Influence, who helps us see the world through the eyes of a billionaire school reformer

The claim that "your zip code shouldn't determine your education" is made by education experts of every stripe. And yet as Have You Heard guest Richard Rothstein, author of the Color of Law, explains here, our racially segregated zip codes were created by design, the result of federal housing policy. The legacy of those policies today is not just segregated schools but a stark racial wealth gap. And the solution to the problem isn't choosing schools, argues Rothstein, but integrating neighborhoods.