Heartwood

Who Gets to Decide?

It’s your classroom. But who decided what happens inside it?

A teacher stands in front of twenty-eight students.

She adjusts her explanation. She asks a better question. She notices who understands, who is struggling, and who needs something different.

Those decisions belong to her.

But many of the conditions surrounding those decisions were established somewhere else.

The standards. The curriculum. The assessment. The pacing. The schedule. The intervention program. The accountability system.

So who actually gets to decide what happens in American education?

In this episode, Chad follows that question from the reforms that followed A Nation at Risk to the classroom of today.

The story begins with two reform currents that emerged during the 1980s. One focused on standards, assessment, and accountability. The other asked whether improving schools required strengthening teaching as a profession.

Over the decades that followed, standards became connected to assessments, assessments to accountability, and accountability to an increasingly complex network of decisions made by states, the federal government, districts, school boards, principals, teachers—and even the educational marketplace.

But another question remained:

What kind of profession are we building around the people we expect to navigate all of it?

Because responsibility, authority, and influence are not the same thing.

And understanding the difference may help explain why the work of educators feels the way it does today.

In This Episode

• The two reform currents that emerged after A Nation at Risk
• What A Nation Prepared and Tomorrow’s Teachers proposed for strengthening the teaching profession
• How standards, assessments, and accountability became increasingly connected
• How federal policy influenced education without creating a national curriculum
• Why No Child Left Behind made accountability more consequential
• What Common Core reveals about the complicated question of who actually makes educational decisions
• How curriculum companies, publishers, assessments, and technology influence classroom practice
• Why teacher autonomy depends on what decision you are talking about
• What happened to the 1980s movement to professionalize teaching
• The difference between developing professional expertise and granting professional authority
• Why implementation training and professional development are not always the same thing
• Why responsibility, authority, and influence often reside in different places
• Why understanding the limits of your authority does not mean underestimating the reach of your influence

One Question to Carry with You

What does it mean to be entrusted with responsibility for students’ learning when the authority to shape the conditions of that learning is shared among so many people and institutions?

Research & Resources Mentioned

• National Commission on Excellence in Education. A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform (1983).
• Carnegie Forum on Education and the Economy. A Nation Prepared: Teachers for the 21st Century (1986).
• The Holmes Group. Tomorrow’s Teachers (1986).
• National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. Standards and voluntary certification for accomplished teachers.
• Goals 2000: Educate America Act (1994).
• Improving America’s Schools Act (1994) and Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
• No Child Left Behind Act (2001/2002).
• Common Core State Standards Initiative.
• Race to the Top.
• Federal Title II programs supporting educator development.

Heartwood is a podcast for educators in the broadest sense—teachers, school leaders, homeschool parents, and anyone who helps another human being learn, grow, and become.

Remember who you are.

And remember the influence you’ve been entrusted with.

The Crisis That Changed the Story

When did America decide its schools were failing?

On April 26, 1983, a national commission released a report called A Nation at Risk.

It warned that America's educational foundations were being eroded by a “rising tide of mediocrity.”

The report captured national attention and helped reshape the conversation about American education for decades.

But what if the evidence told a more complicated story?

In this episode, Chad goes looking for an answer.

The investigation begins in the 1960s and 1970s, when educators were experimenting with open classrooms, student choice, flexible learning environments, and new ideas about what schools should be.

Then the conversation began to change.

Parents worried about academic fundamentals. SAT scores were declining. Colleges and employers raised concerns about preparation. Americans were becoming increasingly uneasy about the condition of their schools.

And in 1983, A Nation at Risk offered a powerful way to understand those concerns.

But how much of the crisis did the evidence actually support? Who were the people behind the report? And why was America so ready to believe the story it told?

The answers are more complicated—and more interesting—than a simple story of failing schools or a manufactured crisis.

Because the report didn't invent America's educational problems.

It helped define what those problems meant.

And the way we define a problem determines which solutions seem reasonable.

In This Episode

• Why educators experimented with open classrooms, student choice, and flexible learning environments

• How concerns about academic fundamentals fueled the back-to-basics movement

• Who created A Nation at Risk and how its commission differed from President Reagan's educational agenda

• What SAT scores, national assessments, and international comparisons actually revealed

• Why low performance and declining performance are not the same thing

• How complicated evidence became a powerful national warning

• Why researchers challenged the crisis narrative—and disagreed with one another

• How existing public concerns helped the report gain national attention

• Why A Nation at Risk accelerated educational reform rather than creating it from nothing

• How the crisis narrative raised a new question: Who should decide how to fix the schools?

One Question to Carry with You

How carefully have I understood the problem before deciding what needs to change?

Research & Resources Mentioned

• National Commission on Excellence in Education. A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform (1983). The original report.

• Dewey, John. Democracy and Education (1916). An influential work in progressive education.

• Holt, John. How Children Fail (1964) and How Children Learn (1967). Critiques of conventional schooling and explorations of how children learn.

• Silberman, Charles E. Crisis in the Classroom: The Remaking of American Education (1970). A critique of rigid and overly controlled classrooms.

• National Center for Education Statistics. The Nation's Report Card: NAEP. Historical student achievement data.

• Berliner, David C., and Bruce J. Biddle. The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America's Public Schools (1995). A critique of the educational crisis narrative.

• Stedman, Lawrence C. “Review of Berliner & Biddle's The Manufactured Crisis” (1996). A scholarly critique of their interpretation of achievement evidence.

• Gallup and Phi Delta Kappa. Polls of the Public's Attitudes Toward the Public Schools. Historical surveys of public confidence, standards, and testing.

Heartwood is a podcast for educators in the broadest sense—teachers, school leaders, homeschool parents, and anyone who helps another human being learn, grow, and become.

Remember who you are.

And never underestimate the influence you have on the people around you.

How Did Education Get So Complicated?

It's Tuesday morning.

A teacher is trying to teach while keeping track of interventions, accommodations, behavior plans, emails, meetings, students who need extra help—and the child who quietly says he didn't eat breakfast.

Across the building, a principal has a plan for the day too.

Then the radio goes off.

How did education become this complicated?

In this episode, Chad goes looking for an answer—not in one bad policy or misguided reform, but in the history of American education itself.

From the multiple purposes Americans have assigned to schools, to industrialization and the efficiency movement, to Sputnik, civil rights, poverty, disability rights, and expanding expectations, a pattern begins to emerge.

Again and again, Americans have looked at something important and said:

Schools should help with this too.

Often, we were right.

But every new responsibility has to land somewhere.

And eventually, history becomes somebody's Tuesday morning.

This episode introduces the ideas of mission accumulation, role accumulation, coordination accumulation, accountability accumulation, priority overload, and priority collision—a way of understanding educator workload not simply as having too much to do, but as legitimate responsibilities competing for the same finite time and attention.

Maybe educators didn't suddenly become less capable of doing the work.

Maybe we changed the work.

In This Episode

• How American schools accumulated multiple—and sometimes competing—purposes

• What industrialization and the efficiency movement contributed to the organization of schools

• Why the familiar “factory model” of schooling is partly useful—and partly too simple

• How Sputnik accelerated federal involvement in education

• How civil rights, Title I, and disability rights expanded educational opportunity and responsibility

• Why some of education's complexity represents progress we should not want to undo

• The four forms of accumulation: mission, role, coordination, and accountability

• The difference between priority overload and priority collision

• Why educator workload is about more than hours worked or the length of a to-do list

• Why rebuilding the profession may require examining what we've asked the work to become

One Question to Carry with You

What does the work already contain?

Research & Resources Mentioned

• Taylor, Frederick Winslow. The Principles of Scientific Management (1911). A foundational text of the early twentieth-century efficiency movement.

• Cubberley, Ellwood P. Public School Administration (1916). An important example of efficiency and industrial-era management ideas applied to educational administration.

• United States Senate Historical Office. Sputnik Spurs Passage of the National Defense Education Act. Historical background on how Sputnik helped create the political opening for the National Defense Education Act of 1958.

• Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).

• Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, particularly Title I.

• Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975 (Public Law 94-142), later renamed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).

• National Commission on Excellence in Education. A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform (1983)—introduced briefly here and explored much more closely in the next episode.

Heartwood is a podcast for educators in the broadest sense—teachers, school leaders, homeschool parents, and anyone who helps another human being learn, grow, and become.

Remember who you are.

And never underestimate the influence you have on the people around you.

Reclaim Your Influence

How much control do educators really have?

We can't make a student learn. We can't make a teacher grow. We can't control every decision, policy, circumstance, or outcome.

But control and influence are not the same thing.

In this episode, Chad explores the influence educators already possess—and why recognizing, reclaiming, and learning to steward that influence may be one of the most important parts of becoming an educator.

Through stories of the teachers and family members who shaped his own life, research on teacher-student relationships and long-term teacher effects, and reflections on authority, agency, character, and professional judgment, Chad considers how influence often works quietly through the ordinary moments of education.

Whether you're teaching in a classroom, homeschooling around the kitchen table, coaching a team, leading a faculty, or supporting educators across an entire system, the question isn't simply whether you have influence.

It's what you're doing with the influence already within your reach.

In This Episode

• Why authority, control, and influence are not the same thing

• How educators can lose sight of the influence they already possess

• Why relationships and engagement matter for learning

• How expectations, judgment, and everyday interactions shape the people around us

• Why our intentions and our influence are not always the same thing

• What it means to steward influence rather than simply possess it

• Why professional growth is about more than climbing a career ladder

• How great teachers, coaches, parents, and leaders build capacity rather than dependence

• How influence can multiply through others and become a living legacy

• Why the influence that matters most may be waiting for you tomorrow morning

One Question to Carry with You

How do people experience me?

Research & Resources Mentioned

The ideas in this episode are informed by personal experience, classical thinking about education, research on teacher-student relationships and teacher effects, and ideas from the Sociis Educator Influence Model. Listeners interested in exploring these ideas further may find these resources helpful:

• Plato. The Republic, Book VII. The discussion of education as a “turning” of the learner toward what can be seen and understood.

• Aristotle. Politics, Book VIII. Reflections on education, character, and the relationship between education and the broader community.

• Roorda, D. L., Jak, S., Zee, M., Oort, F. J., & Koomen, H. M. Y. (2017). Affective Teacher–Student Relationships and Students' Engagement and Achievement: A Meta-Analytic Update and Test of the Mediating Role of Engagement.

• Chetty, R., Friedman, J. N., & Rockoff, J. E. (2014). Measuring the Impacts of Teachers II: Teacher Value-Added and Student Outcomes in Adulthood.

• Sociis Education. Educator Influence Model. The model explores educator growth as expanding capacity and stewardship rather than movement up a career ladder, culminating in Legatum Vivum—“Living Legacy”: influence that continues through the growth of others.

Heartwood is a podcast for educators in the broadest sense—teachers, school leaders, homeschool parents, and anyone who helps another human being learn, grow, and become.

Remember who you are.

And remember the influence you've already been entrusted with.

The Purpose Beneath the Practice

Why do we do the things we do in education?

Why do we post standards? Write lesson plans? Use exit tickets? Talk about engagement? Check for understanding?

Most of these practices began because someone was trying to solve a legitimate problem. But over time, it's easy for the practice itself to become the goal rather than the purpose it was originally meant to serve.

In this episode, Chad explores the relationship between attentiveness, engagement, checking for understanding, and clarity—not as isolated instructional strategies, but as connected parts of something much deeper: helping one human being influence another to learn, grow, and become.

Whether you're teaching in a classroom, homeschooling around the kitchen table, leading a faculty, or supporting educators across an entire district, the same questions remain:

What are we actually trying to accomplish?

And are the things we're doing actually helping us accomplish it?

In This Episode

• Why attentiveness and engagement are related—but not the same thing

• Why communication requires both a sender and a receiver

• How checking for understanding becomes far more powerful when it's a habit rather than an event

• Why the purpose behind a practice matters more than the practice itself

• How small misunderstandings can become large organizational problems

• Why clarity often dissolves conflict that blame only intensifies

• How influence—not control—is at the heart of education

One Question to Carry with You

What am I actually trying to accomplish?

Research & Resources Mentioned

The ideas in this episode are informed by both classroom and school leadership experience and research on learning, engagement, formative assessment, and teacher workload. Listeners interested in exploring these topics further may find these resources helpful:

• Black, P., & Wiliam, D. (1998). Inside the Black Box: Raising Standards Through Classroom Assessment.

• Black, P., & Wiliam, D. (2009). Developing the Theory of Formative Assessment.

• Chi, M. T. H., & Wylie, R. (2014). The ICAP Framework: Linking Cognitive Engagement to Active Learning Outcomes.

• Education Endowment Foundation. Teacher Feedback to Improve Pupil Learning.

• OECD. Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS 2024): Results on Teacher Workload and Well-Being.

Heartwood is a podcast for educators in the broadest sense—teachers, school leaders, homeschool parents, and anyone who helps another human being learn, grow, and become.

Remember who you are.

And remember the influence you've already been entrusted with.

Why does education no longer feel like the profession so many educators chose?

In the first episode of Heartwood, Chad McLeod explores a feeling many teachers and school leaders have struggled to put into words. Educators haven't stopped caring. But over time, the responsibilities, expectations, initiatives, and systems surrounding their work have accumulated—making education increasingly complex and harder to hold together.

This is a conversation about what changed, why it matters, and why there is still reason for hope. Most of all, it's a reminder of who educators are, why their work matters, and the extraordinary influence they've already been entrusted with.

Sociis Education - www.sociised.org

Welcome to Heartwood.

In this brief trailer, I share the heart behind the podcast—why I created it, who it's for, and what you can expect from future episodes.

Whether you're a teacher, school leader, homeschool family, or someone who simply believes education matters, Heartwood is a place to step back from the noise, think more deeply about what matters most, and rediscover perspective, encouragement, and hope.

If this trailer resonates with you, I invite you to follow the podcast and join me as we explore the ideas, challenges, and enduring principles that strengthen people, deepen influence, and help us make sense of education.