Have You Heard

Civic centers are all the rage on red state campuses. Designed to reclaim and “save” the humanities, reinstate ideological diversity in higher ed, and bring back the Great Books, these centers are growing rapidly, even as the old school humanities wither away. But when writer Ann Manov visited a new center at her alma mater, the University of Florida, the reality fell far short of the sales pitch.

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Waste, fraud and abuse. That’s how education policy expert Jon Valant characterizes the new federal voucher program that was tucked into Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill last year. Valant walks us through the nuts and bolts of the program and explains how it undoes the federal commitment to civil rights and progressive education funding. Valant’s ultimate conclusion: Trump’s voucher program will be the greatest source of waste, fraud, and abuse that we have seen in our lifetimes in K-12 education.

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A steep decline in the birthrate means fewer students, and for a growing number of communities that means closing schools. We head to New Orleans where the ‘demographic cliff’ poses a unique problem for a market-based school system in which schools are constantly opening and closing. A recent decision by KIPP to close a school without consulting parents or students has set off an uproar and called new attention to the democracy deficit in New Orleans’ all-charter-school model.

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Sarasota Florida was supposed to be the new capital of Magamerica. But a funny thing happened on the way to making this coastal community and its school board the epicenter of right wing activism. A whole lot of Sarasotans woke up to the reality that their schools, vulnerable students and indeed local democracy hung in the balance. Call it the backlash to the backlash or the revenge of the normies, the resistance is alive and well in southwest Florida.

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As Silicon Valley’s tentacles reach ever more deeply into the nation’s public schools, a provocative new book sounds an emphatic “stop”! We talk to Tim Scott, author of Schooling for Silicon Valley, about big tech’s dystopian vision for education, and what the sales pitch for personalized, adaptive and data-driven learning is really about.

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