FreshEd

Laws that mandate education for special needs students have not always existed. In the United States, courts only began referring to students with special needs in the early 1900s. At the time, such students were typically excluded from public school. Things began to change after the Brown v. Board of Education supreme country ruling in 1954. Twenty years later in the 1970s, congress enacted vario...

Today we talk about the history and recent rise of Islamophobia worldwide. My guest is Mariam Durrani, an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Hamilton College. In our conversation, we discusses both the state policy infrastructure enabling Islamophobia while also the everyday discourses and actions that normalize the Othering of a particular group. Dr. Durrani also discusses her own life story...

Today we continue our Education and Law mini-series with a show on the legal and policy issues surrounding special education. My guest is Janet Decker, an Associate Professor in the Educational Leadership and Policy Studies Department at Indiana University. Dr. Decker became interested in special education policy when she taught students with autism. In our conversation, Dr. Decker talks about the...

Today we air the first ever FreshEd Live event, which was recorded last night in San Francisco. Gita Steiner-Khamsi joined me to discuss the ways in which the global education industry has altered the State and notions of free public education. We touched on a range of topics, from Bridge International to the International Baccalaureate and from network governance to system theory. Gita theorized...

Today we kick off a mini-series on education and law. Intermittently, overly the next 8 months or so, we’ll be airing a collection of conversations with scholars affiliated with the Education Law Association. These shows will touch on timely legal and policy issues affecting education. For our first show in the education and law mini-series, I speak with Julie Mead about her new co-written report...

Today we look at US imperialism in Venezuela. For the past 20 years, since Hugo Chavez was elected in 1998 in what is known as the Bolivarian revolution, the US has attempted to overthrow a democratically elected government. The US has wanted to install a leader who supported its political and business interests. In January, the US tried again, thus time putting its full support behind Juan Guaido...

The UK is set to leave the EU on March 29, 2019. Will there be a delay? A hard exit? A people’s vote? With four days before the deadline, it is too unpredictable to tell with any certainty. In an effort to reflect on the Brexit process, today we re-air Will’s conversation with Susan Robertson about Brexit, which took place mere days after the vote on June 23, 2016. As we await the conclusion of th...

Today we dive into the nightmare that is the growing tide of fascism worldwide and the prospects and perils this nightmare holds for public education. My guest today is the renowned scholar, Henry Giroux. He has a new book entitled American Nightmare: Facing the challenge of Fascism, which will be published in May. Henry Giroux is the McMaster University Professor for Scholarship in the Public Int...

Last week, the Trump administration invited university, higher education association, and private company officials to the White House to discuss international students and post-college work. At the time of this recording, we aren’t sure what exactly was said or decided. But in an effort to provide some background on international student experiences in American Higher Education, Jenny Lee is with...

The University of Sussex was ranked the world’s best for development studies in the 2019 QS World University Rankings by subject. To celebrate, we re-air Mario Novelli's 2016 FreshEd interview. In that interview, Mario talked about the role of schools in the production of inequality. Mario not only details how modernity, capitalism, and colonialism combine to create systems of inequality inside sc...

My guest today is Iveta Silova, Director of the Center for the Advanced Studies in Global Education at Arizona State University. Professor Silova has spent her career studying post-socialist education transformation processes. In today’s show she discusses some of her new work comparing Latvian textbooks before, during, and after Soviet occupation. http://www.freshedpodcast.com/ivetasilova/ Email:...

Last week, Linda Darling-Hammond was named the head of California’s State Board of Education, the governing and policy-making body of the California Department of Education. With over six million students and nearly 300,000 teachers in California, this is a powerful position. Last year, Linda Darling-Hammond joined me to talk about her co-authored book Empowered Educators: How high-performing syst...

How did vouchers and charter schools become key elements in the education reform agenda in the United States? My guest today, Professor of Education Policy at the University of Illinois, Chris Lubienski, speaks about the rise of policy orchestration among a network of private and non-profit actors and what this means for democratic decision making. His research shows how Philanthropic Foundations,...

A group of Yale graduate students are protesting their labor conditions as teachers. They are demanding the administration recognize them as a union and negotiate their contract as full employees of the university. After all, graduate students teach many undergraduate classes. But the administration is stalling, waiting for Donald Trump to appoint an anti-union National Labor Relations Board that,...

Many countries around the world participate in the Programme for International Student Assessment, the cross-national test administered by the OECD. Today we look at the economic costs for a country to participate in PISA. My guests are Laura Engel and David Rutkowski. They followed the money through publicly available budget documents in the United States to uncover exactly how much the test cost...

What’s the connection between education and development? My guest today, Dan Wagner, argues that it’s past time to move beyond conceptualizing development as economic growth. For Dan, the framework we should use is learning as development. He calls on social scientists to work towards a Learning Gini Index that not only takes learning seriously but also equity. Dan Wagner is Professor of Education...

What’s the connection between education and climate change? My guest today, Arjen Wals, takes a critical take on sustainability yet offers a hopeful outlook. In our conversation, Arjen details a few examples of school-level practices that could be seen as working towards a sustainable future while also critiques educational competition and the hidden curriculum of commodification. He ultimately ca...

Today we look at the role of education in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. My guest is Parfait Eloundou, professor and department chair of development sociology at Cornell University and member of the independent group of scientists writing the Global Sustainable Development report. I spoke with Parfait during a break at the UNESCO Global Education Meeting held in Brussels in early Dec...

This is the final episode of 2018. It’s been an incredible year for FreshEd. We’ve aired 41 new episodes and had nearly 130,000 downloads over the past 12 months. We’ve also received financial support from the Open Society Foundations, which is allowing us to transcribe episodes and translate a few into Chinese and Arabic. I’d like to say thank you to Sherry, Hang, and Lushik for their tireless ef...

Sustainable Development Goal 4 is all about education. Under the goal, there are seven targets, ranging from providing equitable access to education worldwide to making sure students have relevant skills for the future. The most revolutionary yet incredibly complex indicator is 4.7. My guest today, Aaron Benavot, takes us through the history of target 4.7. How did the international community agree...

Today we take stock of the Sustainable Development Goals, which were adopted by the United Nations three years ago. With me is Silvia Montoya who is the director of the UNESCO Institute of Statistics. UIS is charged with monitoring some of the SDGs. In our conversation, which we had on the sidelines of the Global Education Meeting in Brussels, we dive into the problems and challenges of trying to...

How can we define comparative education? That question has long vexed scholars in the field. My guest today is Angela Little, who has spent her entire career in comparative education and has wrestled with this very question. Angela argues that it is best to define the field through shared action rather than agreed-upon definitions and talks about the challenges of being an academic-slash-practitio...

Is there a worldwide learning crisis today? My guest, Keith Lewin, argues that the real issue in much of international education development has to do with financing. In our conversation, we discuss aid to education and the ways in which the Sustainable Development Goals don't take the idea of sustainability seriously. Keith Lewin is an Emeritus Professor of International Education and Development...

Today we look at the power of Participatory Action Research in public science. My guest is Michelle Fine. In the 1990s, she worked on a study called Changing Minds, which looked at the impact of college in a maximum-security prison. The research team comprised of women in and outside of prison. For Michelle, participatory action research plays an important role in the struggle for social justice....

Today we bring you a special episode of FreshEd. With me is Manos Antoninis, the Director of the Global Education Monitoring Report, which was just released. Each year, UNESCO publishes an editorially-independent Global Education Monitoring report to monitor the progress towards the education targets in the Sustainable Development Goals. This year’s topic is migration, displacement and education....