NEPC Talks Education

NEPC Talks Education is the National Education Policy Center's interview podcast, and it hands the microphone to researchers. Chris Saldana introduces the guests with their departments, universities and books, then lets the conversation run. Guests have come from Harvard, Stanford, Seton Hall, Swarthmore, Kansas, Houston, Texas at Austin and Wisconsin. Some episodes feature a single scholar, while others put two or three in conversation. The territory stays consistent. School choice, school money, school leadership and race keep coming back. Choice gets the deepest history. One conversation traces the voucher idea to Tom Paine, who proposed public subsidies for families unable to pay for schooling. It also covers the town tuitioning that some Northeastern states have used for over a century, paying private schools in towns where public schools were unevenly spread. That episode is framed around how people who love their public schools can push back against recent voucher legislation and Supreme Court decisions. In the episode with Erica Turner, the origins of school choice are tied to efforts to maintain racial inequality and undermine desegregation. The same conversation describes inter-district choice as a competition bound up with school funding, a pressure board members and superintendents feel directly. Money is the second thread. David Backer, author of As Public as Possible, is paired with a Swarthmore scholar who has written on why racial equity in school funding is so hard to achieve. They talk through bond statements and funding formulas, and they treat the funding structure itself almost as a character. They finish on a case for 'green fiscal mutualism', investing in infrastructure that current and future students and educators will use. History runs underneath all of it. Jarvis Givens, author of American Grammar, describes early school funds in Georgia and elsewhere in the Southeast drawing heavily on slave taxes, and Northern states such as New York investing school funds in banks tied to the slave trade. That conversation ends on the claim that education has always been political. An emeritus Stanford professor, whose work casts American schools as credentialing machines, reads recent trends through sociology and history. He covers the small role the federal government has historically played in K-12 and the interventions that came with the standards movement. School leadership rounds it out. Three researchers studying equity-centered principal pipelines, a project supported by the Wallace Foundation, discuss how school leaders are rebuilding the trust with families that the pandemic broke. The register is academic without being stiff. Guests cite other scholars' books by name, and one gets openly thrilled about what a funding formula does. What a listener takes away is the research and history behind current school fights, from the people who produced it.