All of the Above Podcast

This Week: Sigh… how did we get here? More than half of young people in America are gambling, including more than 40% of teens aged 13-17 . Manuel shares a story about an encounter with a student this week who begged to use their phone in class to check on a bet. Plus, we send our love and respect to the real ones we lost this week - Dolores Huerta, and Sir Patrick Stewart. Then, we throw all the...

This Week: A new data set from orgs that study the impacts of heat and lack of canopy coverage on school campuses sheds light (no pun intended) on the extent of a long-standing problem with California’s public schools. Extreme heat, lack of tree canopy coverage, and the combination often being present in the communities serving the most marginalized communities across the state. And, we check back...

This Week: Remember Betsy Devos?  Remember how she used her power back in 2020 to make it easier for predatory men to get away with sexual harassment and assault on college campuses? Well, we do, and we’re sure that has absolutely nothing to do with what happened at Cornell. And, for our main story today, we dive into grades. Specifically, a fascinating story out of Indianapolis where the district...

This Week: Nearly 2000 high schools across France are closed amidst a wave of student protest that has taken over the nation . Demanding change to dilapidated conditions of school facilities, extreme heat and cold, leaky ceilings, exposure to toxic chemicals in aging buildings, staffing shortages, and more, the student protests have drawn an expanding set of the French population into a larger mov...

This Week: Few things have gotten more people in America to have a (hopefully) substantive conversation about the core issue of segregation in American public education than has this phenomenal article by the legendary Nikole Hannah Jones in the NY Times magazine this week. In the nation’s largest school system, in a city boasting with pride about its democratic socialist mayor and its proud tradi...

This Week: Who knew the plastics industry was infiltrating K-12 science curricula with lessons that help kids do things like pretending to be an employee of Dow Chemical and building a better plastic bag, or understanding the ubiquitous and positive nature of plastics in our lives?  Yeah, it’s happening. Also, a sad, if not shocking piece in the Hechinger Report calls out persistent disproportiona...

This Week: It has been a busy few weeks of stories in education, so we begin with a lightning round of headlines covering everything from a hero teacher saving 900 students in Nepal, to the Catholic Bishops in Florida telling the attorney general to kick rocks. Then, we dig deep into the big news out of the nations’ two largest school systems - NYC and LA - which have both taken bold moves to rest...

Today on AOTA Shorts: Varsity Tutors for Schools, one of the nation’s largest virtual tutoring providers, has abruptly closed up shop. Citing a lack of evidence of effectiveness , it appears their district partners had begun seeking other providers. As we emerge from the pandemic era, where billions in additional federal funding for education sparked a wave of high-dose tutoring and other ed tech...

Today on AOTA Shorts: A group of families and education advocates in Massachusetts join a growing number of lawsuits challenging school segregation across the country.  Since the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, America begrudgingly inched forward in its efforts to integrate public schools, and then almost immediately began backtracking on that promise systematically. Today s...

Today on AOTA Shorts: Citing a lack of evidence showing any systemic pattern of antisemitism, a federal judge dismissed a Trump admin lawsuit against Harvard University. This is the latest in a growing number of legal losses the administration and its allies are experiencing as legal scrutiny is applied to their weaponized allegations of antisemitism, their fascist attempts to constrain free speec...

This Week: Turns out if you invest resources equitably to meet the needs of students and communities who have been systematically underserved, you do see results. Shocker. In Los Angeles, the district’s Black Student Achievement Plan has faced racist legal challenges and the doom of an impending budget crisis. And yet, state test scores show the achievement gap for Black students is shrinking. And...

This Week: There’s a lot going on… and it’s a hot mess.  Tuskegee University, one of the pillars of HBCUs in America, announces a new dress code that prevents students from wearing things like duy-rags, bonnets, and bedroom shoes in classes, dining halls, and other academic settings. The administration says it’s part of the school's “responsibility to prepare its students for professional envi...

This Week: A superintendent in Massachusetts has put out a fascinating take on a revision to the ubiquitous Bloom’s Taxonomy , the helpful tool which has defined orders of thinking for decades in education. In the age of AI, he claims, the hierarchical nature of Bloom’s no longer reflects the more complex arc of thinking students will do in a world where humans think with AI. It’s an interesting t...

This Week: The Romeo Community School District in Michigan has issued educators a list of  32 phrases that are pre approved for us on classroom posters. The phrases are, perhaps excruciatingly, unoffensive. Classics like: be yourself, you belong here, you matter, and lift others up, make the list. But, not coincidentally, absent from the list are any phrases making note of any identity markers, or...

Today on AOTA Shorts: The price of housing has grown so astronomical in some parts of the country, like much of California, that districts are turning to a strategy of building their own housing in an effort to attract and retain teachers. Also, in some areas, community groups are organizing to solve this problem internally. In places like the Bay Area where a 1 bedroom apartment can cost $3500/mo...

Today on AOTA Shorts: As America turns 250 years old, the cold ripple effect of the right wing ascension in American politics is being felt in classrooms across the country, with more than 6 in 10 teachers worrying about the possible ramifications of teaching the truth about American history . Despite this hostile climate, and the potential threats they face, educators persist with bringing the im...

Today on AOTA Shorts: For those in the AOTA family with kids, this comes as no surprise, but the process of finding good summer care for children can be cumbersome to navigate, unnecessarily complex, and insanely expensive. A new piece in the 19th profiles American moms who handle these complex arrangements for their children, and the real costs of providing summer care. It reveals the extent to w...

This Week: In what can only be understood as a shocker, new survey data shows the vast majority of Americans of nearly all demographic groups support undocumented students having access to public education . With some variation across groups, this goes for all ages, races, and even religious groups. In fact the only group that had less than 50% agreement with this idea was Trump voters, which I me...

This Week: The UC system mulls joining a number of elite universities around the country that have brought back the SAT/ACT testing requirements that went by the wayside during the pandemic. Citing examples of professors having to reteach middle school level math to undergrads, regardless of where you stand on testing, this feels like a canary in the mine shaft kind of moment. At the same time, AI...

Today on AOTA Shorts: Democrats and Republicans can’t agree on much these days.  Except, apparently, what it means to be a good teacher. Researchers at Arizona State and CSU East Bay have published fascinating new data showing that actually, Ds and Rs show striking alignment on the features of a good teacher , including caring about students, making learning relevant, and helping students with sup...

Today on AOTA Shorts: Gov. Ron Desantis is at it again, ensuring his state continues to lead the way on the most draconian and fascist education policies on the books. Florida has now unleashed its new suite of accelerated courses known as FACT - Florida Advanced Courses and Tests. The US History course aspires to challenge the College Board’s AP US History course, by pushing a decidedly biased cu...

Today on AOTA Shorts: The learning loss hawks are back, maybe, and this time with new data. Almost everywhere in America students are performing worse than their peers were 10 years ago according to new data from the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford. From 2015-2025 the trend holds for nearly all demographic groups. Wealthy and poor districts, racial groups, students with special needs....

Today on AOTA Shorts: A ⁠new study⁠ from researchers at Stanford, Duke, Michigan, and Penn that analyzes data from Yondr, the makers of cell phone pouches used in many districts with new phone restrictions, shows mixed results, depending on how you look at the data. Big picture, the bans work to dramatically reduce phone usage during the school day. But data regarding improvements in discipline, s...

This Week: As the cost of living skyrockets in America, the dissatisfaction with the American-Israeli wars in Palestine and Iran grows. But what doesn’t get discussed is the effect of these wars on their children and schools. In Gaza a scholasticide has resulted in the obliteration of nearly every school, the deaths of 17,000+ students, and over 700 teachers and faculty. In Iran, many students are...

This Week: The board of the nation’s 2nd largest school district unanimously approved a resolution to place strong limits on screen time for students starting in the 26-27 school year. Citing extensive research showing the negative consequences of too much screen time on everything from vision, to engagement, to mental health, the district’s policy will have a sliding scale of maximum screen time,...