The School Perceptions Podcast

Derek talks with Damian LaCroix, who became executive director of the Wisconsin Association of School District Administrators (WASDA) on July 1 after 33 years in public education, including nearly 20 as a superintendent in Howard-Suamico. Derek raises a pattern out of a summer spent in the data: roughly 53 Wisconsin districts that are small and rural, with older communities and fewer households wi...

We're joined today by Harvard's Jal Mehta and Radford's Max Yurkovsky to discuss their new book, A Chance to Solve Their Own Problems: Inside the New Methods to Remake Public Schools. Their project was motivated by a fascinating question: Why do reforms sometimes work? The resulting book splits the difference between "improvement is impossible" and "improvement is easy i...

A summary of a summer's worth of research on all of our climate surveys and what they mean for the outcomes that districts and states tend to track, with a bonus section on Wisconsin referendums -- what impacts they have on various outcomes, how our surveys predict passage and vote share, and so on.

Dr. Ashley Carey joins us to talk about her recently-published study on students' experience of the Covid years. Tracking student survey data across six years and nearly 100,000 survey responses from Massachusetts schools, Ashley ranges from the specific findings of her paper to broader questions about what schools should be accountable for, what the pandemic did and didn't do to students,...

This week, Mia Trippi , Senior Director of Public Affairs at Mueller Communications , joins us to unpack how public institutions build — and lose — the trust that makes hard conversations possible. She talks about why the act of communicating sometimes matters more than what you're actually saying, how a website's ease of navigation predicts public trust more than you might expect, and the...

We're not out of the nerd woods yet, folks! Continuing in our summer deep-dive series into our own survey data, today we're testing candidate predictors of teacher retention. We have now sorted through literally every response to each staff, student, and parent survey we have run from the fall of 2021 to the present. Filtering for Wisconsin public school districts in order to compare findi...

Across every kind of district, "Our school's discipline policies and practices are effective" remains one of the lowest-ranked items on our staff surveys. It's been that way for five years (at least). Even as the average rating improves, its place in the pecking order of staff concerns does not. What's going on? In this episode, Derek takes a deep dive into SP's internal...

Rob DeMeuse is back for a deep dive into five years of survey data from staff, students, parents, and community members across the districts we work with! No special focus -- just two research nerds talking about what our data has been telling us lately and what it might mean. For more background on the things we're talking about, see our recent blog posts: Five Things We Learned , obviously M...

By popular demand (as measured by frequently-asked questions), I invited Rob DeMeuse and Scott Girard to stop by the old podcast studio to talk a little bit about the survey methodology we use, and why we use it rather than other approaches. In a lot of ways, this conversation expands on a blog post we wrote a couple years ago , where you can find even more depth on the topic.

Jeremy Singer , professor at University of Michigan-Flint, talks to us about his exhaustive study of how principals are stemming the tide of absenteeism -- what's proving effective, and what isn't? (It's a big deal! The Hechinger Report wrote it up too !) A related piece , coming out of the same research project, is going to be the subject of an Annenberg EdWorkingPapers webinar on Jun...

With a host of new school board members taking their seats after April elections, Mike Barry and Danielle Bosanec of WASBO stopped by to talk about what makes school finance difficult to understand, what sorts of questions board members should be asking, and what degree of budgetary flexibility district leaders actually have. See links below for more WASBO resources! WASBO professional learning ca...

Jack Schneider joins us from UMass-Amherst to talk about what community members have to offer local schools beyond tax dollars, and what schools have to offer community members beyond test scores (to coin a phrase). You can email him with follow-ups, as he offers in the episode. We talked about an article ( "In Praise of Ordinary Measures" ) on the show, so here is that resource, and her...

Cara Jackson , recent President of the Association of Education Finance and Policy (AEFP), joins us to talk about her presidential essay and what she's learned over two decades of work in the "evidence-informed education ecosystem" about what it takes for policymakers, school leaders, and classroom teachers to their very best for their students. Additional links to things we talked a...

Professor Jay Plasman, of Ohio State, joins us to talk about a recent report he published with the Fordham Institute , entitled "College or Career Readiness: Postsecondary and Labor Market Outcomes for Ohio High School Students Earning Industry-Recognized Credentials." The full report is available for download, as well. It turns out that industry-recognized credentials pay off in some in...

Superintendent Kyle Luedtke, of Frederic, joins the podcast today to talk through his well-honed approach to improving staff engagement, and using that positivity to drive educational growth.

Our VP of research stops by the podcast to talk about what happened in Wisconsin referendums in the Spring of 2026. How did this April compare to previous Aprils? What trends are we seeing? What does it all mean? I promised to link to Rob's dissertation , in case anyone wanted the deepest deep dive into Wisconsin referendum trends up to 2020.

Bob Soldner sits down with Derek to talk about the processes, actors, and decisions involved when Wisconsin school districts need to fold or join their neighbors in order to provide a quality education. What role do finances play? Will taxpayers in those districts save money? What things ought district leaders and community to think about?

Veteran guests Ross Herdina and Dennis Pauli are back with us in this episode to talk us through The strategic challenges school districts are facing How facilitated planning processes can help How facilitation works in practice And how high-level plans are connected to ground-level practice. For more information on our School Perceptions Strategic Planning offer, please contact us .

Today we dive back into strategic planning, with Janell Bullard from Paynesville Area Schools (Minnesota) and Zack Fugate of Unity School District (Wisconsin). You’ll hear how strategic planning can help districts: • Gather meaningful community feedback before making major decisions • Engage staff, parents, students, and community members in planning conversations • Turn survey results into action...

VP of Research Dr. Rob DeMeuse joins Derek to talk about trends in the staff, student, and parent survey data we collected during the first semester of this school year. Spoiler: lots of items are trending in the right direction!

Grand Meadow (MN) District Administrators Paul Besel and Phil Strong sit down with SP's Daren Sievers and Agile Ideas Leadership's Shannon Helgeson and Ross Herdina to talk about their experience using rich data and external facilitators to guide continuous improvement. See this handout for more on the Grand Meadow story. You can find Shannon and Ross at Agile Ideas Leadership .

In this episode, Kit Dailey from EUA , Erika Freeman from Findorff, and Megan Prestebak from Miron discuss the facilities challenges that Wisconsin school districts are facing, the solutions that communities are considering, and the processes of communicating, planning, and executing school building projects.

We brought our recording equipment to our booth, and we asked board members, superintendents, other vendors, and parents to sit down with us and share what's going on in their districts. Lots of exciting stuff happening around the state -- take a listen!

Next week, school leaders will flock to the Baird Center in downtown Milwaukee to share what's working for them and learn from one another. We've put together a preview of nine sessions we're particularly looking forward to. The whole program is available here . In this episode: 1:57-8:30 --Emily DeBaker and Debbie Brewster on School Finance Storytelling 8:55-16:10 --Andrea Gribble on Building Tru...

Alyssa Burrage and Luke Pinion join Derek to talk about their districts' experiences with designing and rolling out personal communications devices policies over the last several years. What gave rise to the need, how did it all go, what have been the effects so far, and what advice might they have for others?