Have You Heard

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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