The Round Table: A YVote Podcast

At this week’s Round Table, Inica and Madeline spoke with inspiring rising high school freshman Lyla Petroske about her work in electoral college reform. Lyla recently founded The Electoral College Reform Movement (ECRM) as part of her mission to fundamentally reform the Electoral College in a way that will destroy its faithfulness to the majority and give a voice to the United States' minorities. She is a fierce advocate for a fractional proportional system that would be a compromise between the Electoral College and the popular vote, and what would provide what she perceives as the best of both worlds. When Lyla first started investigating the Electoral College–back in fifth grade…–she initially thought it should be abolished and that it was standing in the way of democracy, truth, justice and the American Way. Upon deeper investigation, she came to feel that the Electoral College serves a significant role in the United States and should NOT be outright abolished. She came to feel that something more than the popular vote is necessary to incorporate different priorities in different places with integrity, reminding us that the United States is more than just a country: it’s a collection of states. We talked about Lyla’s “click moment”--what activated her around this complex topic at such a young age; the youth enthusiasm gap; and what ECRM is and how you can get involved. Oh and we also celebrated INICA’S FIRST VOTE. Thank you for listening!

At this week’s Round Table, Inica, Kenisha, andMadeline spoke with the energizing Ave Mateo, Executive Director of 18byVote. Ava believes deeply in the power of youth and works to spread opportunity for meaningful engagement among teens and young adults. In addition to her work leading 18by, Ava recently completed a Sociology and Education Masters degree at Columbia University, Teachers College, where her research  focused on the influence of youth-led organizations  and youth-led educational programs on young people’s sociopolitical identity development. Needless to say, we were THRILLED to speak with her and to learn more about what she’s done and what she’s cooking up with 18byVote. We talked extensively about what it takes to get young people ready, excited, and prepared to vote–especially those who haven’t historically been politically engaged.  We explored what Ava thinks are the most impactful things young people can do BEYOND voting, the power of nonpartisan approaches, how to channel disagreement into productive discourse, and the core values that draw us to and ground us in this work. We also talked about where work like this should be rooted: Ava shared her belief that public schools should be stimulants for democracy, providing access and education to create informed engaged citizens, BUT schools have instead strayed to be more focused on workforce development. She encouraged as, as young people, to advocate for more civics in and out of the classroom to be active participants in democracy. We will, Ava, we will–and we hope you will too. Thank you for listening!

At this week’s Round Table, Erina, Jack, and Madeline spoke with Geanne Belton, Director of Baruch College’s High School Journalism Program which hosts the annual Newsies for high school journalists from across New York City and helps prepare teacher advisors to start new school newspapers. As all of us podcasters are involved in journalism, we were particularly eager to learn from Geanne’s perspective as a former journalist who has been teaching for 20 years at Baruch College, where she’s blended her interests in, law, media, and ethics (which can be murky in journalism!)  We talked about some of the core tensions in journalism today: ensuring privacy of sources WHILE doing one’s job to inform the public; protecting against plagiarism; promoting news literacy and ethics; and mitigating risks of various kinds. We talked about the challenges and opportunities of the lines between producers and consumers being blurred in ways they didn’t used to be. And we talked about the powerful role student journalists—and journalists across the board!--can play in asking hard questions, bringing issues to the forefront, building community, informing community, and holding community accountable. We emerged from the conversation feeling more committed than ever to our journalistic endeavors.  Thank you for listening!

At this week’s Round Table, Jack, Jedd, Kenisha, and Madeline spoke with Eli Dvorkin, Editorial & Policy Director of the Center for an Urban Future (CUF). CUF is an independent nonprofit research and policy organization focused on building a stronger and more equitable economy in New York City. It’s pretty unique in being deeply place based and focused on driving IMPACT with research by giving policymakers specific and concrete ideas. Eli oversees the development of all publications and advances CUF's research and recommendations on the critical policy challenges facing the city and state, splitting his time between DOING the research and getting it out there.  A journalist by trade and passion, Eli loves getting to talk to smart, interesting people and to ask them questions from fresh angles. He also loves working to ensure that what CUF produces is clear, concise, and accessible and has actionable implications on important issues like helping city policymakers unlock the full potential of CUNY and creating a more equitable economy. We talked at length about the challenges of taking on big goals like this given the pull of underlying issues like systemic racism and misogyny that operate outside of public policy and economics. How can journalism be a tool in making systemic change? Eli underscored that while many things conspire to make us feel systemic change is impossible, making incremental progress–for ex, on things like building better and stronger career pathways into adulthood–can still be really satisfying. Rather than just focusing on the bad and negative, he and CUF work to engage with important ideas and create tangible change even if they can’t resolve all of the deepest challenges. We agree and hope you enjoy this conversation as much as we did!

At this week’s Round Table, Erina, Inica, Jack, and Kenisha spoke with Mika Rao, Communication Partner at Transcend Education and a proud South Asian American, professional, and woman about the role her identity has played in her life and work over the past 25 years. Mika shared how, growing up in a majority white neighborhood in the 1980s, she was curiously “unraced” and didn’t really come to consciousness about her heritage until she reached college, and she’s been making up for lost time ever since.  Inspired by Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month, we talked about how a person’s identity intersects with their experiences in education (three of us are AAPI women) and how seemingly little things–like having one’s name pronounced correctly in roll call–can affect students’ world view and sense of well being, separating you from the community and make you feel like an outsider over the years. We suspect at least 80% of students of color have had their name stumbled over, in a micro aggression that many have come to accept. This is one of the reasons Mika is so passionate about her work at Transcend, which works to foster leaps towards equitable learning that focus more on belonging and identity than most traditional school reform models do because research shows that students do better when that’s the case. We talked at length about the problems with the model minority myth and Mika shared how what used to irritate her a little bit now outrages her, because minority communities shouldn’t be made to feel we have to compete instead of to work together. She is committed to being a good ally and to recognizing how, although we ALL experience racism and micro-aggressions, the history of African Americans in this country requires all of us to work together for change around anti-Blackness WHILE working to lift up and celebrate our AAPI identities. Thank you for listening!

At this week’s Round Table, Jack, Jedd, and Madeline spoke with Jennifer Brandel, Co-founder & CEO of Hearken, a company that helps organizations around the world develop and operationalize participatory processes. Jennifer was "an intensely curious kid," and that curiosity has been her guiding principle all her life and what brought her into journalism. Jennifer envisions a shift from a model of readers as consumers to readers as partners, and from a model of journalism as autocracy to journalism as democracy. She is deeply concerned about what makes “a good story.” Currently, the perception is that conflict —two sides opposing each other—is what sells, which is damaging to democracy unto itself. In today’s newsrooms, things are optimized for speed and efficiency and the reader is only involved after something is published. Jennifer’s Hearken aims to involve the public in news coverage at all four stages—pitching, assigning, reporting, and editing.  Journalists should see themselves more as stewards for the public: what does the reader want and need to know? This leads to dramatically different stories because the public asks questions that are far more expansive, like what will this city look like 50 years from now? Or What would it be like if our statues were reflective of women and the full population?  We talked a lot about the pros and cons of technology in journalism. Jennifer reminded us that tech is like fire: it can be applied in ways that are positive and productive or damaging and destructive. The question she and the Hearken team ask themselves is how can we avoid extractive engagement, in which media is selling your attention and data to third parties and instead use tech to create a reinforcing feedback loop. Jennifer underscored that the introduction of tech into journalism provided great potential to get feedback from readers but was instead designed sub-optimally around comments and opinions, not authentic input into production. As she put it, “When you invite people to ask what they don’t know rather than share their opinions, you open up a new model.”  The irony is, it’s not as if the public’s ideas aren’t good and won’t help you meet metrics—quite the opposite! WHEN newsrooms listen to the public, consumption metrics are much higher but it is relatively rare. What gets in the way is capitalism: it is hard to finance investments in tech in a way that doesn’t create negative repercussions down the line. We are particularly excited by Jennifer’s work on The Citizens Agenda– a people-powered approach to journalism applied to elections that focuses on what do people voting need to know in order to be informed at the ballot box? The public actually has FAR more detailed and interesting questions than politicians tend to think and there is deep value in bringing the public into the process of elections, a cornerstone of democracy. Thank you for listening!

Jennifer recommends the books The View From Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity –and wonders whether objectivity is either possible OR desirable!

At this week’s Round Table, Kenisha, Jedd, and Neil spoke with Dr Frederick (Rick) Hess, senior fellow and the director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, founder and chairman of AEI’s Conservative Education Reform Network, editor of Education Week’s Straight Up column, and a prolific author, educator, and political scientist. Rick has been studying education reform–and its failures–for decades, and shared his astute analysis of why. At root, schools weren’t built for what we’re asking them to do. Public schools were founded back in 1635 by Protestant New Englanders to promote virtue. Only 1 in 20 citizens WENT to high schools way back then. Today, we have VERY different expectations and demands yet our schools are predicated upon the same model. Meanwhile, most Fortune 500 companies don’t last more than 50 years because they were built on models that have become antiquated or obsolete. Such businesses didn’t reform; they went out of business. Schools don’t have the option of doing so. We’re asking them to do something that’s incredibly hard to do and, unsurprisingly, they fall far short. Rick notes that today, we need schools that are much more comfortable with individualization and personalization–and we need to build systems that are comfortable embracing that, which is a really big lift after centuries of doing things a different way. We talked about intellectual curiosity and equity, whether teachers have a responsibility to meet the needs of every student, the pros and cons of technology in schooling, how schools can balance passion and standardized testing–and what standardized tests are and aren’t good for. Thank you for listening!

At this week’s Round Table, Kenisha and Madeline spoke with Dr. Adeyemi Stembridge, author of “Culturally Responsive Education in the Classroom: An Equity Framework for Pedagogy” and a gifted educational consultant and thought partner specializing in equity-focused school improvement. We talked about Yemi’s lifelong love affair with teaching– and with equity– sparked by his own experiences in high school at City-As-School, which forged his vision of what education can and should be. As Yemi put it, “There are few situations in which he feels more alive than investigating a worthy idea from multiple perspectives.”  We feel the same! Yemi shared his feelings about teaching being the most profoundly human activity there is, doing some of the most important work there is. He wants to help as many teachers as possible be able to teach better and Culturally Responsive Education–along with thinking about who we are being culturally responsive to– is a key way to do so. Cultural identity is the composite of our cultural selves. Well beyond food and fashion and holidays, culture is information that lives in your brain and affects your deepest values. A culturally responsive learning environment is one where students get to build an understanding around a worthy idea by drawing down from their cultural background. In fact, Yemi asserts that learning can’t be truly rigorous unless students pull from the full range of their background to show what they’re coming to understand. As he notes “When you draw on fluencies of what it means to be human, the classroom becomes electric.” It sure does. Yemi has honed in on six key CRE themes–cultural identity, relationships, vulnerability, assets, rigor, and engagement–and he works with teachers through week-long residencies focused on how to operationalize these themes in our classrooms. Yemi underscored–wait for it—that the standardized testing regime we have in the US is a bigger challenge to equity than racism. That’s right. Test scores do not measure the effects of good teaching and the biggest influence on how students perform on tests is zip code so what’s the point? He’s not opposed to testing; he’s opposed to the models we have now and thinks that canceling the tests in 2020 and 2021 was an implicit admission of guilt. If the tests were deemed “not good for kids” in a pandemic, why would they be good for kids at any other time?

Yemi is working on a new book coming out this fall focused on his key insight: teaching that’s effective for closing the equity gap is much more artful than it is algorithmic. You won’t want to miss it. Thank you for listening!

at this week’s Round Table, Inica, Madeline and Jack spoke with Raj Vinnakota, President of the Institute for Citizens and Scholars. Raj has dedicated his career to educating, empowering, and supporting America’s youth, particularly those from disadvantaged communities. Did you know that the United States spends on average just 5 cents per student on civics vs an average of $50 per student in STEM?? Compound that over four years and you can better understand the civic catastrophe we’ve been living through. A few years back, fueled by concerns about the state of our country, Raj led a national study focused on rethinking civic education, supported by funders across the ideological spectrum. A core conclusion of the report is that developing citizens is much broader than anything that can be taught within the typical senior elective. Schools can’t do it all; this is a societal responsibility and to equip youth for the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century, we must tap into ALL the places citizenship in ALL the places it can be developed. This informs the Institute of Citizens and Scholars’ mission to ensure that a majority of young people become effective citizens who are well-informed about civic issues, productively engaged for the common good, and hopeful about the future of democracy. We couldn’t endorse this mission more and hope you feel the same.  Thank you for listening!

At this week’s Round Table, Inica, Jack & Kenisha spoke with Lina Sergie Attar, Founder and CEO of the Karam Foundation, about the refugee crisis, which is on many of our minds given what’s happening in Ukraine. Karam means generosity in Syrian and the Karam Foundation, founded in 2017, invests in young Syrian refugees to help shape a new generation of kind, courageous future leaders. Lina’s path to, and vision for, refugee education was unconventional from that of many others in the humanitarian field, which provides her with a different perspective on refugee work. With a background in architecture, creativity is at the forefront of what she does.  Coming to the work with fresh perspective, and listening DEEPLY to people, she has learned a LOT about what refugees need versus what is actually offered to them. Her work is steeped in notions of radical generosity, which is necessary to help those who have been displaced recover from what they’ve lost and to prepare for lives and livelihoods beyond. The Karam Foundation approaches this work as investment rather than aid. It’s not about providing “just enough” or basic skills–it’s about helping people hone in on their potential and work towards their dreams. Karam is committed to giving refugees’ agency and enabling  them to be co authors in forging solutions rather than subjecting them to top down solutions we know don’t work. Through this, Karam creates a ripple effect, instilling the people they serve with commitment to creating positive change wherever they are and whatever they are doing. She–and we–feel it’s not enough just having your life protected; it’s about having your humanity protected. It’s about thriving, not just surviving. Refugees want no less—and need much more. We were incredibly inspired by Lina’s transformative mindset. Refugees are not a monolith and there are no forever solutions, which is why we need people like Lina and the Karam Foundation blazing the trail. If you'd like to support the Karam Foundation's vital work, you can do so here. Thank you for listening!!