The School Doctor Podcast

"Can't repeat the past? Why of course you can!" Almost every independent and parochial school runs on a financial model it chose to imitate from wealthy universities: an endowment, an annual fund, a capital campaign. In this episode I diagnose where that model came from, why it fits a research university and strains a small tuition-funded school, and what a healthier one looks like. I trace the tw...

"We'd love to give, but we want to make sure it goes to the right place." A donor offered the school a million dollars with a list of conditions attached, and the room applauded. Somewhere in the back, the CFO was doing the math on what twenty years of administering that gift would cost. This episode walks through how the traditional independent and private school pays for itself, the strain that...

"Is this going to be on the test?" Every teacher has heard it. Every teacher has felt that small sinking feeling when they hear it. Because that question from a fourteen-year-old is a perfect diagnostic tool: it tells you exactly what your assessment system has taught students to value. In this episode, I open the school's golden record, the transcript, and ask what we're actually putting on the d...

"This is going on your permanent record." Turns out the permanent record is real! It's just scattered across a dozen platforms, half of them owned by vendors, and the student it describes is the last person who gets to see it. In this episode, I trace what happens when schools collect more data about students than any previous generation of schools in history, with less coherent policy about that...

When was the last time your school had a new initiative that actually stuck around? Your school has probably launched at least three tools in the last five years that were supposed to change everything. Most of them didn't survive two academic cycles, and the ones that did probably succeeded for reasons nobody on the leadership team planned for. This episode traces the pattern from enthusiastic Au...

If ChatGPT can write an essay that gets an A in your class, what exactly was that paper assessing? That’s the question nobody in education wants to sit with. Schools are spending thousands on AI detection software, rewriting honor codes, and reverting to handwritten exams. Universities are dusting off blue books like it’s 1987. And none of it is treating the actual problem. In this first episode o...