November 1, 2025

Making Kids Work a Second Shift

Listen to the episode here.

Too often the debate over homework is restricted to its quantity — or, at best, its quality. But such discussions take for granted the need for some homework, as if it were impossible to question that premise. It may come as a surprise, therefore, to learn that research generally fails to support the value of, let alone the need for, requiring children to complete more academic tasks when they get home from school. (For elementary and middle school students, no controlled studies ha...

October 15, 2025

A.I., as in Anti-Intellectual

People who express concern about the use of AI in schools often focus on how it allows students to get away with something (by using OpenAI to write their essays). But shouldn’t we be talking more about its potential effects on teaching and learning than whether it will impede our ability to evaluate students? The problem is not just that we seem to be overestimating the capabilities of LLMs but that we seem to be underestimating the essence of education, which is a process, not merely a series of...

October 1, 2025

Death by Civics

A Conversation with Joel Westheimer About the Role of Education in Democratic Life

Suppose you wanted young people to develop a commitment to democracy, particularly at a time when it’s under assault. How would you do that? Not by creating a school culture in which following the rules is valued more than critical thinking. And not by offering conventional civics courses with mind-numbing recitations of facts about how government is supposed to work. There’s a big difference between teaching about a country’s political system (or even...

September 15, 2025

The Failure of Failure

The notion that kids today have it too easy and would benefit from more experiences with failure is no longer a surprising, contrarian claim; it has become the conventional wisdom. But it’s dead wrong on two levels: Most children deal with frustration and failure quite a lot, and those experiences tend not to be beneficial, according to research. Either naïveté or conservative ideology leads many adults to believe that when students fall short, they’ll react by trying harder next time. But more commonly students are trapped in a vici...

September 1, 2025

Bad Signs

The posters and signs adorning school walls speak volumes about the people who put them there, revealing a surprising amount about their views of children, their assumptions about learning, and even their beliefs about human nature. There’s the enforced positivity of slogans that basically tell students: “Have a nice day….or else,” the individualistic worldview of inspirational slogans with their messages of strenuous uplift, the chirpy banalities airily informing kids that structural barriers don’t exist: All they need is perseverance and a dream, so they have only themselves to blame if they fa...

August 15, 2025

Confusing Harder with Better

What do the following have in common?

a) parents who don’t seem particularly concerned about whether what their kids are doing in school is engaging or meaningful, but are quick to complain if their assignments aren’t sufficiently challenging

b) people who assume that Advanced Placement classes must be the best that a high school has to offer just because these classes are really tough

c) proponents of school reform who use the language of “rigor” and “raising the bar”

d) legislators...

August 1, 2025

Number Sense and Nonsense

A Conversation with Jo Boaler About Learning Math(s)

Question: Why do so many people write off math as uninteresting if not downright unpleasant, and as something they just don’t have a knack for? Answer: Years of traditional instruction with textbooks and worksheets and quizzes, memorization of math facts and algorithms, direct instruction of the approved technique for arriving at the right answer (followed by endless practice problems) that leaves you with no understanding of what you’re doing, let alone why.

This exten...

July 15, 2025

Skip the Sugarcoating

If your company is offering unappealing food, you’ll be tempted to add artificial sweetener. And if your schools are offering unengaging lessons (which students had no role in creating), you’ll be tempted to use some kind of gimmick to make them seem less dreary. This episode considers how, long before “gamification,” John Dewey hit on the metaphor of sugarcoating to describe efforts to distract kids from the “barrenness” of what they were being made to do. Half a century later, give or take, a pair of early-childhood educators, Rheta DeVries and...

July 1, 2025

Little Ed Koches

Grades and tests get in the way of learning for multiple reasons, but this episode digs deeper to explore how any practices that lead students to focus on how well they’re doing in school — as opposed to what they’re doing — are bad news. Policy makers who trumpet their demands for higher standards, “rigor,” and “raising the bar” may not realize that this focus on achievement makes kids think less about learning because, like a certain bald former mayor of New York City, they’re constantly asking, “How’m I doin’?”

For det...

July 1, 2025

The Back-to-School-Night Speech We’d Like to Hear

This introductory episode offers an overview of education issues that will be discussed on the podcast — a sort of a Cliff’s Notes to what distinguishes traditional from progressive education. It takes the form of a (fictitious) principal’s remarks to parents delivered one evening in a school auditorium. The premise was inspired by a movie-satire feature that occasionally appeared in Mad magazine called “Scenes We’d Like to See.” It was also inspired (or, um, counterinspired) by some back-to-school talks we’ve actually heard.

A not...