The recent elections issued a stinging rebuke to conservative culture warring candidates. But the Democratic Party has been largely MIA when it comes to articulating its own vision for public education. So what should that vision look like? We invited four experts–Randi Weingarten, Jon Valant, Rick Hess and Jamaal Bowman–to lay out a path forward for Democrats.

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We've been debating how schools should educate and "Americanize" immigrant students for more than a century. In her new book, Making Americans, history teacher Jessica Lander says that schools today are far more welcoming to immigrant-origin students than in the past. But even as star educators like Jessica, Carlos Beato, who co-founded a high school for immigrant students in Maryland, and Leah Juelke, the 2017 North Dakota Teacher of the Year, show us what truly welcoming schools and teaching look like, the rising tide of anti-immigrant rhetoric threatens their efforts, as well as the students they advocate for.

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Everybody loves to hate on school boards these days. But as education policy scholar Jonathan Collins reminds us, these beleaguered bodies are actually the most accessible entry points to democracy that we have. At a time when calls to make school oversight less democratic are coming from the right and education reformers, Collins makes an urgent case for using participatory local democracy to collectively solve our most pressing problems.

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We hand the mic to the brilliant podcasters behind the Voucher Scam, a limited series exposing the big money push to bring school vouchers to Texas and beyond. Claire Campos-O’Neal and Nicole Abshire of the Mothers for Democracy Institute visit a rural community where the elected representative is no longer, well, representing. Claire and Nicole do a masterful job connecting school privatization with the rise of Christian Nationalism and the erosion of democracy. We hope you appreciate their brilliant work as much as we did.

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Have You Heard heads to Houston, where the state now controls Texas’ largest school district. We’ll meet teachers and parents who say the takeover of the schools in this Democratic city is fundamentally about politics. And we’ll try to make sense of how the takeover fits into the efforts by Governor Greg Abbott to bring private school vouchers to the Lone Star state. Spoiler: it does.

The power of plutocrats to shape and limit public debate is on the increase. That’s bad for K-12 education and for democracy, argues Nora Reikosky, the winner of the 2023 Have You Heard Graduate Student Research Contest. As a young “Googler,” Nora witnessed first hand the power of corporate philanthropy and its slick sales pitch, an experience that shapes her research into what she calls “pipeline philanthropy.”

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Get the right credentials to get ahead in the world. For many students and their families that IS the purpose of K-12 education. Even students who don’t have their sights set on selective colleges often see learning as secondary to the work of collecting badges and tokens. How did we get here? Why do grades and test scores exert such a powerful influence over our schools? In this episode, we talk with Jack's co-author Ethan Hutt about their new book Off the Mark: How Grades, Ratings, and Rankings Undermine Learning (But Don't Have To).

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North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper recently declared a state of emergency for public schools in that state, warning that the GOP-controlled legislature aims to “choke the life out of public education.” Our guests, a cast of thousands, argue that the attack on public schools is part of a right-wing takeover, one that seeks to take the state back to the pre-civil rights era. But this state of emergency also represents an organizing opportunity, say public education advocates. While the word “bleak” appears multiple times in this episode, it ends on a note of hope and optimism.

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AI is about to upend teaching and learning. So tell us the techno optimists who have made essentially the same claim about every technological innovation, dating back to the film strip. Our guest, historian Larry Cuban, predicts that AI will join a long list of tech ‘silver bullets’ that have been overhyped, only to fall short of the promised utopia. Cuban argues that tech boosters are prone to such overselling because they don’t understand the nature of teaching and its reliance on human connection.

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A wide segment of Americans now view public schools as partisan. That’s a major problem, argues historian Johann Neem, because the project of public education depends on ALL Americans seeing themselves and their interests represented there. Neem warns that the perception that schools are carrying out a political agenda is super-charging the privatization agenda and could undermine what’s left of our “common” schools entirely.

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