Human Restoration Project

The reach and impact of our food systems – that is, the complex, interconnected, and globalized web of institutions, resources, and processes that bring food from the farm, to the table, and into the waste stream – is universal: every single one of us has either worked in ourselves, or known people who work growing, raising, producing, processing, packing, transporting, preparing, or serving the food we all eat. In the food we consume, we become connected to the conditions, the labor, and the people of the food system that produces it. Fully 1 in 10 American workers, over 17 million people, work in paid frontline food system jobs. And millions more work at home to plan, shop, prepare, and in many households, grow the food their children and families eat. There are massive implications for schools as well, as they participate in the food system directly to bring literally billions of meals to children each year, and as labor in the food system impacts the families, children, and communities our schools serve. My guests today are Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern and Teresa M. Mares, associate professors and co-authors of Will Work for Food: Labor Across the Food Chain, available from University of California Press in September. Their book captures the grim realities faced by food workers alongside the opportunities for solidarity at every point in the system while amplifying the successes and challenges faced by movements to make food work, good work. "As long as people are suffering to get food to our plates," they write, "we need to center food workers in any vision for a just food system." Will Work for Food book from UC Press [https://www.ucpress.edu/books/will-work-for-food/paper]

Please note that Human Restoration Project is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization and that this interview is not an endorsement of Morales as a candidate for office. Before Howie Morales became Lieutenant Governor of New Mexico, before he was ever a state senator, he was a teacher and a state-championship winning baseball coach in rural New Mexico. He also holds a Master's in bilingual education and a doctorate in curriculum and instruction. So it'd be difficult, it seems, to understand what he's accomplished in those elected positions except through the lens of his experience in the classroom. And he joins me to talk about that experience, how it informs his work and achievements in office, and the challenges New Mexico public school students, families, and teachers still face.

In the opening pages of my guest's book, she recounts a colleague's bumpy plane ride that provided the insight for the title of the book, Taming the Turbulence in Educational Leadership: "We are facing turmoil in education, and the job of good leaders is to 'tame the turbulence'...educators have been caught in this turbulence; it permeates our profession and we haven't been able to get above it. As a result, it is the role of leaders to help teachers see how even small, simple shifts can change a child's experience of school." Rooted in real-world stories, Taming the Turbulence offers solidarity and actionable strategies to education leaders committed to centering the needs of all learners in increasingly polarized societies. And the author, Jennifer D. Klein, is an experienced educator and advocate for student-centered, experiential learning as a catalyst for positive social change. With two-decades of classroom teaching across a number of diverse international settings, as a teacher in Costa Rica and a school leader in Colombia, she now focuses on inspiring and training educators worldwide, working with groups like  What School Could Be, The Institution for International Education, and The Buck Institute. Her previous books include The Global Education Guidebook: Humanizing K–12 Classrooms Worldwide Through Equitable Partnerships and The Landscape Model of Learning: Designing Student-Centered Experiences for Cognitive and Cultural Inclusion, coauthored with Kapono Ciotti, who we spoke with about that work back in episode 159. You can connect with Jennifer at principledlearning.org [https://zencastr.com/preview/episode/68b24e6c1a00b16b37940368] Taming the Turbulence in Educational Leadership [https://www.corwin.com/books/taming-turbulence-ed-leadership-291724?srsltid=AfmBOoq4usON1WKOyXwtu3I2q_R74lFG6ZdTSQr5EV_PLn6doOGXRCf3#main-content] from Corwin

"Any assessment of the potential of AI to contribute to education must begin with an accurate understanding of the nature of the outputs of AI," my guests today write, "The most important reason to resist the use of AI in universities if that its outputs are fundamentally bullshit – indeed, strictly speaking, they are meaningless bullshit." That particular term of art may appear to be attention-seeking or dismissive of the issue of AI entirely, but it's actually the root of a much deeper philosophical critique, like the late anthropologist David Graeber's notion of "bullshit jobs", but leveled at Generative AI and the way it distorts the purpose and function of teaching, learning, and education itself. My guests today are Robert Sparrow and Gene Flenady, professor and lecturer, respectively, in philosophy at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, where they join me from, and they are collaborators on two recent articles: Bullshit universities: the future of automated education and Cut the bullshit: why Generative AI systems are neither collaborators nor tutors. As a heads up, we're gonna be saying bullshit a LOT, sometimes in an academic context, sometimes not so much. Bullshit universities: the future of automated education [https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-025-02340-8] Cut the bullshit: why GenAI systems are neither collaborators nor tutors [https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13562517.2025.2497263]

Back in December 2024, I got an email from Tom Rademacher raving about an upcoming book from a teacher who is now a licensed counselor that read, "The thing that hooked me when I read it the first time was a whole part on teachers recognizing their own triggers to their anger and stress and learning to understand and adapt to them... but the whole thing is gorgeous." The author was of course my guest today, Maria Munro-Schuster, and the book, which is now in print, is The Empathetic Classroom: How A Mental Health Mindset Supports Your Students – And You, which the HRP team was more than thrilled to contribute the forward: "The Empathetic Classroom provides therapeutic self-reflection activities and prompts for educators and colleagues, the psychological theories underpinning them, guidance for applying them with students, and scalable activities for classroom implementation. Maria Munro-Schuster's call to consider the mundane over measurement is essential in improving the current state of education. This proactive approach acknowledges that we are all learners and that all of humanity has something to gain from this mission. We can create school climates that are no longer so arid that a single spark or gust of wind sets everything ablaze. If we can do this we may find that the fires are more manageable and less frequent." Order: The Empathetic Classroom (Teacher Created Materials) [https://www.teachercreatedmaterials.com/products/the-empathetic-classroom-how-a-mental-health-mindset-supports-your-students-and-you-ebook-153688?srsltid=AfmBOor8uINrWPYrLI-3jK0tycK66qsuvi_zbUgRls-y7W-Af6hyh4JJ]

"The problems we face are not the fault of any single individual or organisation. They are often the by-product of good intentions. And yet, alongside children and young people and their parents and carers, it's educators who are most exposed to these pressures – who confront them every day, and try to make it all work regardless," writes today's guest in a piece from May titled Confronting the educational polycrisis. Joining us from Brighton, UK Dr James Mannion is a keynote speaker, teacher trainer, researcher, consultant and author with a passion for educational and political reform. He is the co-founder and Director of Rethinking Education, a teacher training organisation specialising in implementation and improvement science, self-regulated learning and practitioner inquiry. A former teacher of 12 years, James has an MA in person-centred education from the University of Sussex and a PhD in self-regulated learning from the University of Cambridge. He is also the host of the popular Rethinking Education podcast, of which I have been a huge fan for a long time. In fact, HRP contributed the very first video essay we ever made to a virtual arm of James's Rethinking Education Conference back in 2022. This conversation crossover has certainly been a long time coming! "We have multiple crises on our hands," James writes, "They interact and have become entangled. This makes them difficult to resolve - but resolve them we must." And my hope today is that even if we can't untangle the polycrisis today, we can at least get a better grasp and perhaps loosen their hold on our education systems. https://drjamesmannion.substack.com/ https://makingchangestick.substack.com/ https://www.educationpa.org/ https://wssnow.org/ https://www.ucyottawa.com/invitation-to-the-rcen-book-club/

"We are a community affair. We're Autistic, ADHD, OCD, PTSD, Tourettes, schizophrenic, bipolar, apraxic, dyslexic, dyspraxic, dyscalculic, non-speaking, and more. We've collectively experienced rare diseases, organ transplants, various cancers, many surgeries and therapies, and lots of ableism and SpEd. We've experienced #MedicalAbleism, #MedicalMisogyny, #MedicalRacism, #MedicalTrauma, and #MedicalGaslighting. We understand chronic pain, chronic illness, and the #NEISvoid "No End In Sight Void". We know what it's like to be disabled and different in our systems. We know what it is like to live with barriers and what it means to not fit in and have to forge our own community. Disabled and neurodivergent people are always edge cases, and edge cases are stress cases. We can help you design for the edges, because we live at the edges. We are the canaries. We are "the fish that must fight the current to swim upstream." And that's just the opening statement on Stimpunks.org [http://stimpunks.org/]. Stimpunks has been among HRP's closest allies over the years, and I am so grateful to be joined by an amazing cross section of Stimpunks today -- Ryan Boren, Chelsea Adams, Norah Hobbs, and Helen Edgar, who also runs Autistic Realms – to speak to their roll your own, DIY, Mutual Aid and Human-Centered Learning for Neurodivergent and Disabled People. Chelsea had to step away during recording so you'll hear her voice just in the first half. This episode was a long time coming, and I hope you enjoy it. You can connect with Stimpunks and find all of the resources mentioned in this episode at Stimpunks.org [http://stimpunks.org/]. Mentioned in this episode: Stimpunks Website [https://stimpunks.org/] Community Discord [https://stimpunks.org/community/join/] Mutual-Aid [https://stimpunks.org/aid/grant/] Map of Monotropic Experiences [https://stimpunks.org/2024/10/21/map-of-monotropic-experiences/] The Five Neurodivergent Love Languages/Locutions [https://stimpunks.org/2022/01/22/the-five-neurodivergent-love-languages-2/] 10 Obstacles to Neurodiversity Affirming Practice [https://stimpunks.org/2024/07/29/10-obstacles-to-neurodiversity-affirming-practice/]

At the time of recording, New York Magazine had released an article titled "Everyone is Cheating Their Way Through College: How ChatGPT has Unraveled the Entire Academic Project" [https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/openai-chatgpt-ai-cheating-education-college-students-school.html] which launched a thousand takes. The piece outlines an arms race, characterized as "a siege on education" between college professors, sneaking white-text Trojan horse prompts like "mention Dua Lipa" to confound the chatbots, and students, one of which is quoted as saying, "the ceiling has been blown off" cheating. One ethics professor elaborates to add that, "Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate. Both in the literal sense and in the sense of being historically illiterate and having no knowledge of their own culture, much less anyone else's." Which captures, in my opinion, the overall tone of the piece: college is an expensive and fixed game that students endure on their way to credentials and that institutions are powerless in a losing battle to stop. Education and learning have…little to do with it. But it's also a chicken-egg issue where institutions of higher education are themselves contributing to the same attitudes they're complaining about: if students copy-paste a prompt from Blackboard into the chatbot, copy-paste the output, and submit it all to be read and graded…by an AI…whose problem is that? My favorite take on the topic of AI in education is a satire meant to be read in the bulldog diction of philosopher-provocateur Slavoj Zizek: "That AI will be the death of learning and so on; to this, I say NO! My student brings me their essay, which has been written by AI, & I plug it into my grading AI, and we are free! While the 'learning' happens, our superego satisfied, we are free now to learn whatever we want. This is all to say that the conversation with my guest today, Texas educator Chanea Bond, was prompted by all of this, as she shared the New York Magazine piece with the challenge,  "Somebody invite me on your podcast to talk about this article!" and three weeks later…here we are. I'm hoping today to get Chanea's insight on the impact of AI in education and so much more facing teachers, students, and schools in 2025. EduTopia - Why I'm Banning Student AI Use This Year [https://www.edutopia.org/article/banning-student-ai-use-chanea-bond/] by Chanea Bond

For as much as schools are a necessary collaboration of communities and families, we haven't spent much time, if any at all, on this podcast focused on parenting itself. Well that changes today, as I'm joined by Steve Shapiro and Nancy Shapiro-Rapport, siblings, and co-founders of Our Family Culture. Our Family Culture is a platform dedicated to helping families build strong, intentional cultures rooted in shared values, traditions, and meaningful connections. Through stories, guides, and community support, it empowers families to create lasting legacies centered on purpose and togetherness. https://ourfamilyculture.org/ Founder's Discount: FOUNDER

Our conversation today is with educator, author, and Director of National Faculty at PBLWorks, Ryan Sprott, about one of the most contentious topics in education today, that is Teaching Contentious Topics in a Divided Nation: A Memoir and Primer for Pedagogical Transformation, which is also the title of his self-published book. In this conversation we be talk about his experience teaching an inquiry approach to teaching contentious topics. In part time project-based inquiry, his students in Texas, of all places, engaged with some of the most difficult open-ended, wicked questions around, as Ryan refers to them, "A question to open hearts and minds"– What is the purpose of a border and what has shaped your answer to this question?  How can we improve energy policy and what has shaped your answer to this question?  And what is the purpose of school and what has shaped your answer to this question?  Students visited the Texas border with Mexico, worked with immigrant aid organizations and hosted dialogue with Border Patrol agents. They visited Texas oil fields to speak with oilmen on the ground, engaged in interviews, documented their experiences in field journals, created collaborative community art projects, and so much more. You'll hear student testimonials about how they came away transformed forever by the experience.  Ryan Sprott @ PBLWorks [https://www.pblworks.org/author/ryan-sprott] Teaching Contentious Topics in a Divided Nation (Amazon) [https://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Contentious-Topics-Divided-Nation/dp/B0DGRPB45J]

I'm joined today by Dr Chloe Keegan. Chloe Keegan is Lecturer of Early Childhood Education in the Froebel Department of Primary and Early Childhood Education in Maynooth University, Ireland. Dr Keegan is an early childhood expert with over a decade of experience as an educator, researcher, and policy advocate. Her work focuses on children's rights and power, play and participation, and influencing practice and policy in early education. She completed her doctoral thesis at Maynooth University, developing an innovative method using GoPro cameras to involve children as co-researchers in studying power dynamics. Her research also explores the impact of play bans on children's well-being, moral development, the influence of stereotypical media on children's views of sex, gender, and race, and participatory art-based methods in children's research and video-based reflective practices. Connect w/ Dr Keegan on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/chloe-keegan/] Full thesis: It's Like a Baby Jail [https://mural.maynoothuniversity.ie/id/eprint/19041/1/Revised%20PhD%20Thesis%20Chloe%20Keegan%20June%2030th%202024.pdf]

https://www.humanrestorationproject.org/conference "True light is dependent on the presence of other lights. Take the others away and darkness results. Yet the reverse is not true: take away darkness and there is only more darkness. Darkness can exist by itself. Light cannot." ― N.K. Jemisin, The Broken Kingdoms (as read by Zoe Bee) In stressful, uncertain times, when cynical powers attempt to divide and isolate us, community and solidarity are acts of resistance. But there are no superheroes here, and no simple answers to be found, only the Quest for Connection.  In 2025, we're responding to the need for community and solidarity in uncertain times by turning Conference to Restore Humanity into a model for humanizing critical discourse and dialogue: bringing together students and teachers, researchers and doers, thinkers and visionaries to explore complex topics in education and illuminate a path forward together. Our virtual Conference to Restore Humanity 2025 runs July 21st through the 23rd. To make this year as accessible and sustainable as ever, we've cut the ticket price to just $50. You can learn more about Conference to Humanity and register on our website at humanrestorationproject.org/conference Nebula Nostalgia by FSM Team feat. < e s c p > | https://www.free-stock-music.com/artist.fsm-team.html https://escp-music.bandcamp.com Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com Creative Commons / Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

My guest today is Nika Dubrovsky. Nika is an artist and writer whose work has been exhibited internationally, her children's books have been translated into several languages and, remarkably, as you'll hear in the episode, Nika is directly responsible for bringing Russian translations of Dr. Suess to post-Soviet Russia. Nika is the co-creator of Anthropology For Kids alongside her late husband: Anthropologist, best selling author, and activist, David Graeber, who passed away suddenly in 2020. A4Kids.org is an open-source platform which experiments with new educational formats. After David's passing, Nika also founded the David Graeber Institute as a platform to develop ideas and projects that continue his legacy. Most of Nika's projects are dedicated to the building and maintaining of social relationships, among which are the "Museum of Care", a nomadic 'anti' institute,  and the Playground of the Future, a collaborative and interactive art project imagining playgrounds as a space of collectivity and care. "Playgrounds are vital public spaces," she writes, "—they bring communities together, bridging generations and social divides. They're also about fun and play, which is exactly the kind of atmosphere we need when making collective decisions. A network of community-built playgrounds, designed around Visual Assemblies, could become spaces where people gather, play, and make decisions together." https://museum.care/playgrounds-notes-from-the-curator/  Anthropology For Kids [https://a4kids.org/] https://museum.care/  Radical Playgrounds: From Competition to Collaboration [https://www.berlinerfestspiele.de/en/programm/2024/radical-playgrounds] Cities Made Differently (MIT Press) [https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262549332/cities-made-differently/] David Graeber Institute [https://davidgraeber.institute/]

This is the latest in our "spotlight series", the first of 2025, where we reach out to schools who are engaged in awesome work, and talk to teachers, school leaders, and students about it to shine a light, inspire, and influence others to do the same. As with all learning, process is the point, not perfection, and there's so much to learn from these schools as we reimagine education in our communities. Empower[Ed] is a personalized, competency-based education program designed to give high school juniors and seniors control over their learning. We integrate core academic subjects with real-world, community-embedded projects and Career and Technical Education (CTE) courses. Students primarily work independently, demonstrating mastery through projects that align with their passions and career interests. Empower[Ed] fosters learner agency, helping students build critical skills like problem-solving, time management, and collaboration, while crafting personalized learning paths that prepare them for success beyond high school. It's a flexible, self-directed learning experience aimed at making education more relevant and engaging.  Empower[Ed] School Page [https://sites.google.com/bismarckschools.org/empowered/home] Empower[Ed] Community Impact [https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/e3b710bebae74233bbf74f2a418146c5] ArcGIS

With the help of Teacher-Powered Schools, Socol-Moran Partners, Stimpunks, and What School Could Be, we've completed the lineup for our 4th annual virtual Conference to Restore Humanity for July 21-23, focused this year on the Quest for Connection. Tickets are just $50 and you can find out more info at humanrestorationproject.org/conference [http://humanrestorationproject.org/conference] We're excited to have members of the team from Story Xperiential with us for today's episode, which was recorded way back in 2024. Developed by veterans from Pixar and Khan Academy, Story Xperiential brings the art of professional storytelling into the classroom, giving students the tools to craft and share their own stories using the same creative process as major studios. The program is structured to fit into school schedules, offering a two-part curriculum: Storytelling Essentials, where students develop a story outline into a story reel, and Mastering Storytelling, where they expand their work into a full narrative. Through self-paced lessons, hands-on projects, and a moderated peer feedback system, students not only learn the technical aspects of storytelling but also gain confidence in their creative abilities. One unique aspect of Story Xperiential is how it can be integrated into every subject area, aligning with interdisciplinary content standards -- bringing together social studies and ELA, for example, or STEM and fine arts -- while also fostering skills like collaboration, critical thinking, and visual communication.  In this episode, we'll explore how Story Xperiential is being implemented in schools, hear about the impact it's having on students, and discuss how storytelling can be a powerful tool for learning and self-expression. You're gonna be hearing a few voices in this conversation. HRP director Chris McNutt is hosting this one, who you're probably used to hearing on this show, and he'll be talking to a few people on the StoryX team: Dennis Henderson VP of Education and Strategy Chief Technical Officer, Tony DeRose And Chief Learning Officer, Brit Cruise You can learn more and sign your students up at https://www.storyxperiential.com/ [https://www.storyxperiential.com/home-1]

With the help of Teacher-Powered Schools, Socol-Moran Partners, Stimpunks, and What School Could Be, we've officially announced our 4th annual virtual Conference to Restore Humanity for July 21-23, focused this year on the Quest for Connection. If you're interested in joining us, tickets start at just 50 bucks and you can find the full lineup at humanrestorationproject.org/conference [http://humanrestorationproject.org/conference] Today I'm joined by Christian Moore-Anderson. And I wanted to have Christian on to talk about the ideas that drive his teaching practice and that he shares in his book, Difference Maker: Enacting systems theory in biology teaching. While that title may seem daunting, Christian's teaching would immediately look and feel to observers like "just good teaching." But that's just the tip of the iceberg. Informing his theory and practice of teaching is a set of related ideas that I was largely unfamiliar with before encountering it in his book: cybernetics, systems theory, and enactivism. Cybernetics is simply a feedback loop. Just as someone steering a ship adjusts the rudder based on feedback from the ocean, so too does good pedagogy depend on what Christian calls "recursive teaching", or a constant feedback loop of action, interpretation, and learning between teachers and students. You can connect with Christian on BlueSky @cmooreanderson.bsky.social. Difference Maker: Enacting Systems Theory in Biology Teaching - Christian Moore-Anderson [https://www.amazon.com/Difference-Maker-Enacting-Systems-Teaching/dp/8409634309?source=ps-sl-shoppingads-lpcontext&ref_=fplfs&psc=1&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER&gQT=3] Christian's Recommended Reading: From Being to Doing: The Origins of the Biology of Cognition - Humberto Maturana, Bernhard Pörksen [https://www.carl-auer.com/product/from-being-to-doing/] The Pragmatic Turn: Toward Action-Oriented Views in Cognitive Science Edited by Andreas K. Engel, Karl J. Friston and Danica Kragic  [https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262545778/the-pragmatic-turn/#:~:text=Cognitive%20science%20is%20experiencing%20a,it%20is%20grounded%20in%20sensorimotor] Understanding Systems: Conversations on Epistemology and Ethics - Heinz von Foerster  [https://link.springer.com/book/9780306467523] The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future - Andrew Pickering  [https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo8169881.html] Runaway: Gregory Bateson, the Double Bind, and the Rise of Ecological Consciousness - Anthony Chaney  [https://uncpress.org/book/9781469631738/runaway/]

If you go back through the HRP podcast archives, and I encourage you to do just that, you'll see that we've covered just about every topic imaginable in the world of education, with some that keep returning again and again. One area you'll probably notice a regrettable gap is in early childhood education, PreK-early elementary. One reason is that it's just out of the experience of the two high school social studies teachers who started the podcast, and another is that foundationally, at least for the classrooms I've visited since, PreK-early elementary tends to get a lot more right about developmentally appropriate instruction and schooling than the middle and high school grades that follow. That's a large part of why I reached out to my guest today to help unpack the ideas that make early childhood education such a powerful and important part of a child's life. Heidi Echternacht is co-founder of Kinderchat, a weekly professional conversation, resource library, and online network for early childhood advocates and educators. Created and led by teachers, Kinderchat has hosted global discussions between and among professional educators and in-service teachers for over ten years. Author of The Kinderchat Guide to the Classroom, Heidi has been an educator of children for over 20 years and currently teaches second grade in Princeton, New Jersey. Kinderchat Substack [https://kinderchat.substack.com/] Kinderchat.org [http://kinderchat.org/] Connect with Heidi on Bluesky [https://bsky.app/profile/hechternacht.bsky.social] Kinderchat Guides [https://www.routledge.com/The-Kinderchat-Guide-to-Elementary-School-Projects-A-Playful-Approach-to-Learning/Echternacht/p/book/9781032328959] In Dialogue with Reggio Emilia [https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9780367854539/dialogue-reggio-emilia-carlina-rinaldi] Peter Gray - Free to Learn [https://nifplay.org/books/free-to-learn-why-unleashing-the-instinct-to-play-will-make-our-children-happier-more-self-reliant-and-better-students-for-life/] Visible Learners - Mara Krechevsky [https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Visible+Learners%3A+Promoting+Reggio-Inspired+Approaches+in+All+Schools-p-9781118345696]

Today we're joined by Mike Tinoco. Mike is a full time public school teacher from California, and author of Heart at the Center: An Educator's Guide to Sustaining Love, Hope, and Community Through Nonviolence Pedagogy. Gholdy Muhammad called the book "an urgent call for truth, love, and justice for every educator and community member who deeply dreams of and seeks peace." Further, Mike is a certified Kingian Nonviolence and Center for Nonviolent Communication (CNVC) trainer who provides workshops around the country. And, he's an award winning beat-boxer. miketinoco.com [https://www.miketinoco.com/] Heart at the Center: An Educator's Guide to Sustaining Love, Hope, and Community Through Nonviolence Pedagogy [https://www.routledge.com/Heart-at-the-Center-An-Educators-Guide-to-Sustaining-Love-Hope-and-Community-Through-Nonviolence-Pedagogy/Tinoco/p/book/9781625316288]

I'm thrilled to be joined today by Pernille Ripp — a passionate educator, author, and literacy advocate. She is the author of Passionate Readers: The Art of Reaching and Engaging Every Child, Passionate Learners: How to Engage and Empower Your Students, and Reimagining Literacy Through Global Collaboration. She's also the founder of the Global Read Aloud, a program that has connected millions of students and teachers around the world through the shared joy of reading. And for all of our benefit, Pernille is also a prolific sharer. After teaching in Wisconsin for over a decade, In her BlueSky re-introduction she noted she was "back living in Denmark because she needed to breathe a bit easier." And she frequently posts about her experience in the Danish education system, "Fun fact about teaching at my Danish school," she writes, "when we are sick, we're not required to write sub plans because we're sick."  And by most measures, Danes are among the happiest in the world, despite having among the highest tax rates. Healthcare and PreK-College education is free. Hygge conjures cozy seasonal vibes. Denmark has some of the highest public education participation and teacher pay and some of the lowest student:teacher ratios and class sizes among their OECD peers, including the United States. On a more grim note of comparison, the Wikipedia page for "school shootings in Denmark" contains a single entry from 1994, the only school shooting in Danish history. However, as a PDF, the list of school shootings in the United States since 2000 is 169 pages long with footnotes. Regular listeners of this show will know just how immediately all of this grabbed my attention. In the past we've had guests talk about their experiences with everything from the education system in Trinidad & Tobago to the national Chinese college entrance exam, so I am thrilled at the opportunity to dig into both American and Danish society and education systems with someone who has knowledge and experience in both. Pernille Ripp Bluesky [https://bsky.app/profile/pernille.bsky.social]

There are any number of narratives that emerged from the 2024 election and that will be hotly debated over the next four years. However, one of those is not up for debate: that vouchers and school choice lost everywhere they were on the ballot in 2024. In Colorado, voters rejected a constitutional amendment that would've added "a right to school choice." And in red-state Kentucky and Nebraska, voucher programs failed by nearly the same proportion that Donald Trump won.  On this show we've focused a lot on culture war issues as they directly impact what and how classroom teachers can teach, and I suspect the culture war will come up in this conversation. But we've never actually dug into the specific issue of voucher programs, which also impact educators, parents, schools, and kids in over a dozen states, with even more to come in an explicit push for a national universal voucher program as a long-term federal policy goal.  My guest today is Josh Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University. He's written extensively about education politics, school choice, and culture wars in the United States, and you should definitely give him a follow on BlueSky @joshcowenmsu as he is very persistent in addressing the topic of his latest book, titled The Privateers: How BIllionaires Created A Culture War and Sold School Vouchers. I wanted to have Josh Cowen on to better understand, as we head into a new year and the next administration, how, like unsinkable rubber ducks, vouchers continue to fail to deliver on their promises and continue to be rejected by voters, and yet, we find ourselves on the verge of a nationwide voucher and school choice program.  The Privateers @ Harvard Education Press [https://hep.gse.harvard.edu/9781682539101/the-privateers/] Josh Cowen @ BlueSky [https://bsky.app/profile/joshcowenmsu.bsky.social] The Effect of Taxpayer-Funded Education Savings Accounts on Private School Tuition: Evidence from Iowa [https://edworkingpapers.com/ai24-949]