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Human Restoration Project

Since 2018, the Human Restoration Project Podcast has reimagined education through critical, progressive, human-centered learning.

Across nearly 200 episodes, and counting, we've explored every topic in education: ungrading and alternative assessment, interdisciplinary play-based and project-based learning, SEL, education reforms and systemic school change in society with students, teachers, leaders, researchers, and advocates around the world.

Join us on our mission to restore humanity to education, together!

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#200
October 31 · 34 min
Episode 200 Special: The HRP Mixtape
Today’s episode is a celebration. 8 years ago Chris McNutt launched the HRP podcast, Things Fall Apart, as it was called at the time, to spread the word about progressive education by talking to educators, researchers, writers, and thinkers about these ideas and how to put them into practice. It was how I met Chris in the first place. Since then, as HRP has grown beyond our wildest expectations, from being just a podcast to being an organization and a community, and we’ve turned these hundreds of conversations into a way of practicing education. I’ll be doing a Casey Casem rundown of a selection from our top 10 most listened-to episodes with clips from each, as well as hear favorite episodes from the HRP team and a couple of folks who sent us their top picks. A list of all featured episodes with links can be found here on this doc. Of course it’s because of our listeners and the community that has been built around this podcast that we exist at all and continue to not only release quality conversations, but stay grounded with our work in schools. Thank you so much for everything you’ve done over the years to keep this us going. It’s truly a privilege to listen and learn alongside you all. If you’re new or want to know more about what we do, head over to humanrestorationproject.org
#199
October 3 · 6 min
To Learn is to Be w/ Cassie Nastase
Earlier this summer we released audio narrations of pieces from our upcoming progressive education primer, the opening essay, We Are Worldbuilders, and Teaching in the Wreckage of the Real, that you can find on this podcast feed. But these two upcoming episodes are special. The next episode after this one will be episode 200, and it’ll be a listener guided look back through our archives going way back to the before-times of 2018. If you want to share an episode that was particularly special or important to you, send the name of the episode with a description of what it meant to you to nick@humanrestorationproject.org and I’ll read your name and description on air and play highlights from that episode. Today, we’re presenting original poems written and read by Cassie Nastase, HRP’s Third Coast Learning Collaborative Coordinator, for that primer, and for which Cassie also created the incredible cover art collage. This first one is titled, To Learn is to Be, and you can find a link to it in the show notes. You can find all of our writing, podcasts, and school-based work at Humanrestorationproject.org, and with that, I’ll let Cassie have the last word. To Learn is to Be - poem by Cassie Nastase on HRP website 10 Piano Tracks (vol. 1) by Ethereal 88 | https://ethereal88.bandcamp.com Royalty Free Music by https://www.free-stock-music.com Creative Commons / Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
#198
September 19 · 27 min
Building the Appalachia of the Future w/ Appalachian Futurism Project
"Appalachia has a history and culture worth preserving, and a future worth pursuing," reads The Big Idea on AFP's homepage. The Appalachian Futurism Project’s mission is to leverage educational, cultural, and economic resources to develop an ecosystem across the region where young people are part of imagining and co-designing the Appalachia of the future. And joining me to talk about are two of the people doing this work, Dustin Hensley and Hannah Askew of the Appalachian Futurism Project, based out of Elizabethton High School in Elizabethton, Tennessee. Appalachianfuturismproject.org AFP on Facebook AFP on Instagram
#197
September 5 · 58 min
People-Based Learning w/ Dr. Jane Shore
In case you’re not familiar at all with the Katamari video game series. As the player, you navigate this ball that starts off small at first until everything in the environment sticks to you, and by the end of a level you have entire buildings, trees, cars, and all manner of flora and fauna stuck to you. I have the sense that my guest today is a human katamari. Every experience and interaction sticks, and she’s made it the mission of her life to make sense of it all. Dr. Jane Shore is an author, artist, former education researcher, co-founder of Revolution School, and founder of School of Thought. But before any of those titles, Jane is first and foremost a meaning-maker, and her most recent book, People Based Learning: The Future of Learning is Human, braids together decades of experience, conversations, models, and research to bear on a new way of organizing learning and schooling: “People-Based Learning is all about the interplay between connecting, reflecting, and affecting, a dynamic spiral or open-end loop that helps us engage meaningfully with new people, ideas, and experiences,” she writes, “At its core, this approach encourages both exploration and introspection, ultimately leading to deeper understanding, deeper personal meaning, deeper memory, and collective growth.” peoplebasedlearning.com People Based Learning by Jane Shore
#196
August 22 · 47 min
The Myth of the Unmotivated Student w/ Dr. Erika Patall
At some point every exasperated teacher has thrown up their hands and repeated some version of "these kids just aren't motivated." Yet schools respond to unmotivated kids with the same toolkit every single time — carrots and sticks, points and prizes, lunch detentions, indoor recess, and on and on. Viewed through the lens of autonomy, competence, and relatedness, we start to see how the daily experience of school conspires to frustrate and thwart almost everything we understand about motivation. And when that results in disengagement, we tend to blame the student instead of the environment. However, when these needs are met, achievement and well-being improves, and behavioral and emotional disengagement decreases. And it’s not just for students, teachers whose needs for autonomy are supported report greater self-efficacy, job satisfaction, vitality, and less exhaustion. It seems like a no-brainer: if you want your students to do better, feel better, and be more engaged, and if you want to be less exhausted, you’ll want to hear what my guest today has to say about self-determination theory and agentic engagement. Dr. Erika Patall is an award-winning researcher and Professor of Education and Psychology and Associate Dean of Research in the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California. Her areas of expertise include the nature and determinants and development of motivation, education practices that support motivation and achievement, and research synthesis methods. I had the privilege of attending a workshop led by Dr. Patall at the Student Power Summit this past spring on Student Motivation and Engagement in Culturally Diverse Classrooms, and I immediately knew we would need to bring that conversation to our listeners. Dr. Erika Patall @ USC
#195
August 1 · 56 min
Pedagogies of Collapse: A Hopeful Education for the End of the World As We Know It w/ Dr. GInie Servant-Miklos
On Friday, July 31st, we hosted Dr. Ginie Servant-Miklos for a Q&A about her book Pedagogies of Collapse: A Hopeful Education for the End of the World As We Know It. This was the conclusion of our Pedagogies of Collapse book club, where we met biweekly to discuss the book and its implication for education. Here is the full unedited Q&A. I wanted to give you a heads up that this conversation gets heavy pretty quickly, includes explicit language, and remind you that HRP is a nonpartisan 501(c)(3), and the views expressed by our guests are their own and do not constitute an endorsement.
#194
July 18 · 52 min
The Power of Critical Play w/ Dr. Mary Flanagan
We all grew up playing games — I fondly remember playing Go Fish with my grandma and her next door neighbor, as a 90s kid who grew up with an NES, it felt like every console generation was a leap forward in graphics and game quality, and, regardless of who you’re cheering for, tomorrow’s World Cup final will be watched by an estimated 2 billion people. But even though at some point many of us stop playing games—even if we don’t stop paying attention to them—we hold onto the experiences, the feelings, and the lessons: what they taught us about ourselves, each other, and the world around us. And it’s because games play an important role in human development and tell us so much about societies and cultures at large, the relationship between play, games, and learning has always been a focus of our work. It’s also been the lifelong interest of my guest today, game designer, artist, author, and researcher, Dr. Mary Flanagan. Mary Flanagan is the founder of Tiltfactor game studio, whose tabletop and digital games intentionally tackle a number of social issues. The tagline on the Tiltfactor homepage reads “Game design for social change” with the challenge, “Can you make a more just and equitable world with games? At Tiltfactor, we believe we can.” Mary has also authored several incredible books, including the pivotal Critical Play about radical game design, and coauthored, Playing Oppression: The Legacy of Conquest and Empire in Colonialist Board Games. Given Mary Flanagan’s unique and consequential focus, I wanted to sit down with her to see what we can learn at the intersection of play and critical pedagogy. Playing Oppression : The Legacy of Conquest and Empire in Colonialist Board Games Critical Play: Radical Game Design Critical.play on Instagram http://tiltfactor.org/ https://resonym.com/
#193
July 4 · 1 hr 8 min
Restoring Humanity to "Special Education": Global Perspectives on Inclusion w/ Dr. Sarah K Benson
Hey there, Nick here at Human Restoration Project. We took the longest break in our podcast’s history last month, and I hope you were able to take a break, too. We’re back for biweekly releases through the summer starting today with Dr. Sarah Benson. Sarah is Associate Professor in Inclusion and Disabilities at the University of Birmingham campus in Dubai where she teaches students from around the world as Head of Subject group for the School of education and lecturer for inclusion and special needs programs. "Inclusion" has become a word everyone nods along to but almost no one defines the same way, And since so much of special education has historically been about sorting and labeling kids in relation to an imaginary average. I was so curious to ask Sarah, what does genuine inclusion require of us, and of schools, and what would it mean to restore the humanity of a special education system that was built to put kids into buckets? Sarah and I also talked a bit about HRP Australia, which is a real thing you can check out at humanrestorationproject.au. HRP Australia is headed by Vaughan Cleary, former Learning and Teaching Head and Senior Deputy Principal at Assumption College in Kilmore, Victoria, and I’ll be headed down there at the end of this month to visit schools and experience Australian education firsthand. Also a quick reminder that we’re reading Pedagogies of Collapse: A Hopeful Education for the End of the World as We Know it for our HRP Summer Book Club, and there’s still time to join us. You can learn more at humanrestorationproject.org/book-club. Episode notes: HRP Australia HRP Summer Book Club - Pedagogies of Collapse ‘I’m Determined’ at James Madison University
May 30 · 27 min
Teaching in the Wreckage of the Real: A Narration
This summer, HRP is reading Pedagogies of Collapse: A Hopeful Education for the End of the World As We Know It, by Ginie Servant-Miklos, and we’re inviting you to join us. Visit humanrestorationproject.org/book-club to sign up for our summer book club, where we'll meet to discuss the ideas and implications of Pedagogies of Collapse and be joined by the author, for a Q&A on July 31. I’ll include a link to the book in the show notes, which is available on Open Access through Bloomsbury. Hope to see you there! I’m back this week with another narrated piece from our upcoming Progressive Education Primer. If you like this format and want to have more narrated essay content, or if you can’t stand it, leave a comment on YouTube or Discord to let us know. This one is written by our Executive Director, Chris McNutt, titled Teaching in the Wreckage of the Real. HRP Book Club Pedagogies of Collapse, Bloomsbury Open Access Teaching in the Wreckage of the Real, Chris McNutt Additional music credits: Dandelion by | e s c p | https://www.escp.space | https://escp-music.bandcamp.com
May 16 · 14 min
We Are Worldbuilders: A Narration
Progressive education is a world-building project rooted in the radical hope that schools can become something fit for human beings. This summer, HRP is reading Pedagogies of Collapse: A Hopeful Education for the End of the World As We Know It, by Ginie Servant-Miklos, and we’re inviting you to join us. Visit humanrestorationproject.org/book-club to sign up for our summer book club, where we'll meet to discuss the ideas and implications of Pedagogies of Collapse and be joined by the author, for a Q&A on July 31. I’ll include a link to the book in the show notes, which is available on Open Access through Bloomsbury. Hope to see you there! The HRP team has been on the road for 3 of the last 4 weeks. At the end of April, we were on the ground working with Third Coast Learning Collaborative schools in Michigan. Last week, we were in Boston for school visits, meeting with folks at the Boston Museum of Science about an upcoming grant partnership, and I went to prison with Jennifer Berkshire to sit in on her journalism class at MCI-Shirley. At the time of recording, I’m headed to Ohio to present student listening reports to school districts who held focus groups this year based around student agency. This is all to say I don’t have an epic 90 minute conversation or hour-long topical deep dive for you this week, but what I will offer is an audio reading of the opening piece from our revised Progressive Education Primer, it’s called We Are Worldbuilders. See you in two weeks! HRP Book Club Pedagogies of Collapse, Bloomsbury Open Access We Are Worldbuilders, Nick Covington Additional music credits: Dandelion by | e s c p | https://www.escp.space | https://escp-music.bandcamp.com
#192
May 2 · 57 min
The Future of Public Education is a Community School feat. Kelly McMahon, Jitu Brown, Angelia Ebner, and Dave Greenberg
This conversation started 2 years ago, when I ran into Kelly McMahon at a summer conference. Kelly’s a kindergarten teacher at Hoover Community School in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and I was curious about what that label “community school” means in practice for teachers, students, and the community served by this new model for the area. I’ve since learned that just because your kids attend Ames Community School District, for example, that doesn’t mean they attend a “community school.” Kelly put me in touch with Dave Greenberg and Angelia Ebner, senior policy analysts and community schools program specialists at the National Education Association, who have helped build and support thousands of community schools, as Angelia described it, from “coast to coast and border to border.” And no exploration of the community schools model could be complete without including the story of Sustainable Community Schools in Chicago. Just last year, Major Brandon Johnson announced a near doubling of the number of community schools in the city, bringing the number to 36. I spoke with foundational community organizer, advocate, and elected Chicago Public Schools Board Member, Jitu Brown, about how organizing for Sustainable Community Schools defused the push by elected officials for school closures, privatization, and charter-ization of Chicago Public Schools. For Jitu, the title of School Board member may be new, but he is Chicago born and raised, and he’s been organizing around education and all of its related issues since the 90s. While there were just hundreds of community schools in the United States 15 years ago, today there are over 5,000 and growing in nearly every state in the nation. A consistent refrain from every person I spoke with for this episode was that community schools are the future of public education and the alternative to narratives about “failing public schools” that favor privatization as a solution. NEA - What are community schools? NEA - 5 Steps to Kickstarting Community Schools in Your District NEA Community School Measurement Guidance Tool Chicago Sustainable Community Schools Eve Ewing - Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago's South Side You can read out directly to Angelia & Dave @ NEA: aebner@nea.org | DGreenberg@nea.org
#191
April 18 · 1 hr 7 min
The Promise (and Persistent Myths) of Montessori Education w/ Andrew Faulstich, Dr. Ayize Sabater, and Kelly Jonelis
Montessori schools are some of the few that wear their pedagogy on their signage: Cottontail Creek Montessori School. Montessori Children’s House. Acappella Montessori. (just to name a few of the dozen or so in Iowa). While the majority are private schools, there’s a growing number of public Montessori schools and programs as well. I think because of these two factors, being largely private and one of the only public-facing pedagogies around, you don’t necessarily have to be acquainted with the Montessori method to develop an opinion about it. We recorded this in two sessions, one with Andrew Faulstich – Director of Education at Oneness Family School and co-founder of Developing Education – and Dr Ayize Sabater, school founder, co-founder of the Black Montessori Education Fund, and former Executive Director of Association Montessori International-USA. And a second session with Kelly Jonelis, Montessori Adolescent Program Director, Math Specialist, and Co-Founder of Developing Education. In this episode you’ll hear the journeys that brought them to Montessori education, what Montessori is and is not, and what otherwise “mainstream” education can learn from the ideas and practices first developed by Dr. Maria Montessori over 100 years ago. Recommended Reading & Media List: The Montessori Child: A Parent's Guide to Raising Capable Children with Creative Minds and Compassionate Hearts - Simone Davies & Junnifa Uzodike Erica Maretti - The Best Weapon for Peace Montessori - The Child and Adolescence Montessori - Psychogeometry Montessori - Citizen of the World Montessori Potential - Paula Preschlack Diverse Families, Desirable Schools - Mira Debs Montessori - From Childhood to Adolescence Montessori - Education and Peace Breaking the Paradigm Podcast w/ Andrew Faulstitch Breaking the Paradigm: You ARE Good at Math with Kelly Jonelis Dr. Ayize Sabater - WPFW 89.3 DC #YouMustLearn, Thursdays 6pm - wpfwfm.org #YouMustLearn
April 4 · 4 min
Spring Break 2026: HRP Summer Book Club & Montessori Mythbusting
This summer, HRP is reading Pedagogies of Collapse: A Hopeful Education for the End of the World As We Know It, by Ginie Servant-Miklos, and we’re inviting you to join us. Visit humanrestorationproject.org/book-club to sign up for our summer book club, where we'll meet to discuss the ideas and implications of Pedagogies of Collapse and be joined by the author, for a Q&A on July 31. I’ll include a link to the book in the show notes, which is available on Open Access through Bloomsbury. Hope to see you there! Spring Break has officially sprung for so many schools across the country. Whether you’re a teacher, a parent, a student, or a combination of any of the above, we hope you have a well-deserved and restful break. We’ll be taking a break this week too and be back on April 18th with a deep dive into Montessori education with an incredible team of Montessori educators, Andrew Faulstitch, Dr. Ayize Sabater, and Kelly Jonelis. Here’s a quick preview, and see you back here in two weeks for the full episode. HRP Book Club Sign-Up: https://www.humanrestorationproject.org/book-club Read Pedagogies of Collapse for free through Open Access on Bloomsbury
#190
March 21 · 1 hr 28 min
Reanimating the Art of Teaching w/ Gary Stager
There’s a quote from the great conservationist John Muir that goes, "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe." My guest today, Gary Stager, has been working in education since before I was born, and I turn 40 this summer, so the sense that you get talking to Gary about teaching and learning is that when you try to pick out anything by itself, you find it hitched to everything else in the universe. Gary has been prolific as an author and educator, and as the line in his official bio reads, “When Jean Piaget wanted to better understand how children learn mathematics, he hired Seymour Papert. When Dr. Papert wanted to create a high-tech alternative learning environment for incarcerated at-risk teens, he hired Gary Stager.” This work was the basis for Gary’s doctoral dissertation in Science and Mathematics Education. He’s worked across several continents, collaborated on a project that won a Grammy Award, and led seminars and taught students in Reggio Emilia, Italy. In this conversation, Gary shares the defining experiences of his education as a student and how those shaped his values as a teacher, we talk about today’s pedagogical authoritarianism and its contrast to Reggio Emilia, his optimism about the reclaiming the role of technology in education, and, ultimately, reclaiming the art of teaching. If you’ve ever heard Gary speak you know he’s a compelling storyteller, and I found myself in this conversation like a kid at storytime, awed at the wealth of energy, wisdom, and experience he brings to our collective endeavor. This could have easily been a 3 hour episode, and part of keeping the runtime down was editing out a lot of my active listening interjections to keep up the flow of Gary’s stories.
#189
March 7 · 44 min
What Prison Can Teach Us About School w/ Jennifer Berkshire
Tomorrow, I’ll be trading Iowa for a couple days in Los Angeles, where the HRP team will be presenting for the third year at LearningInspirEd’s Student Power Summit. It’s in LA this year in partnership with Homeboy Industries, the largest gang rehabilitation and re-entry program in the world. The founder, Father Greg Boyle, is quoted on the Homeboy homepage saying, “We imagine a world without prisons, and then we try to create that world,”. And I’m really looking forward to meeting and talking with the people there to learn more about how Homeboy works. A bit of a facetious question that sticks in my head is, in the high-stakes data-driven world of schooling, what piece of content or curriculum did these guys miss that would’ve made the difference? And more seriously, what is it about the environment at Homeboy Industries that schools can learn from? I’ll have more on that when I get back. But until we build that world wi thout prisons, there will need to be programs for incarcerated people and people in transition from prison to public life, too. That’s where this conversation with Jennifer Berkshire came about. Of course you know Jennifer from her years of hosting the Have You Heard? Podcast with her co-host Jack Schneider, and their coauthored books The Wolf At The Schoolhouse Door and The Education Wars. But for the past couple of years, Jennifer has also been teaching journalism and education policy in the Boston College Prison Education Program at MCI-Shirley, a medium security prison for men in central Massachusetts. Recording isn’t allowed in the prison facility, but in 2025 Jennifer spoke with some of the men in her program who had been released from MCI-Shirley and were finishing their degrees on the Boston College campus, and she gave me permission to use those clips here. As you can hear, the program was a life-changing experience for these men, and it’s been life-changing for Jennifer too. This conversation with Jennifer was one of the most eye-opening I’ve had in a long time, and it’s always such a pleasure to talk with her. I’ve included links to several pieces of media we talk about in this episode, podcasts and articles created by inmates, books written by prison educators, and more, so check out the show notes for those links as well. John Lennon - The Tragedy of True Crime Ear Hustle Podcast: “The daily realities of life inside prison shared by those living it, and stories from the outside, post-incarceration” Have You Heard #202 - College Inside, College Outside Article - BC Prison Education Program Shatters Stigmas and Builds Better Futures Article - In prison, I embraced the SEL skills I should have learned in grade school
#188
February 21 · 43 min
Making School Meaningful w/ Lauren Porosoff
Whether it was during her nearly two decades as a middle school humanities teacher or as diversity coordinator or grade-level team leader, my guest today kept returning to the same question: why does school so often feel like the opposite of learning? Lauren Porosoff’s answer isn't a new program or a new curriculum, instead she offers a holistic way of thinking about how systems are connected to outcomes. And Lauren joins me today to talk about compensatory programs: the wellness kits, the diversity posters, the one-off professional development workshops that schools layer one on top of the other to signal that they value belonging, creativity, or student wellbeing, without ever changing the underlying framework for how students and teachers actually spend their time. In this episode, we talk about why schools reach for these fixes, why they backfire, and why they may be especially vulnerable to attack precisely because they're so superficial. Lauren's website is theteachernerd.com, and her book (one of many!), Teach for Authentic Engagement, is available from ASCD. Jailbreak Your PD The Trouble with Compensatory Programs The Grammar of Inclusive Instructional Design Teach for Authentic Engagement
#187
February 7 · 41 min
From Meritocracy to Human Interdependence: Redefining the Purpose of Education w/ Yong Zhao
In a 2021 interview, Michael Sandel, author of the book The Tyranny of Merit argues that if merit can be understood as competence, a good thing to be clear, “The principle of meritocracy, simply put, says that if chances are equal, the winners deserve their winnings.” But as we grapple with meritocracy, or systems built around the idea that those who get ahead are deserving, he says, “What makes merit a kind of tyranny is the way it attributes deservingness to the successful.” How are we supposed to understand the great problems of our time: United States’ incredible wealth and income disparities, child poverty, life expectancy gaps, infant mortality, student debt, or even incarceration rates through a lens of meritocracy? Sandel offers, “To rethink meritocracy requires, among other things, rethinking the mission and purpose of higher education.” But what about education inequality and the construction of affluent white suburban public schools as “Good Schools”, where the social and economic advantages of their proximity to wealth compound upward into higher property taxes, more funding, smaller class sizes, more course offerings, higher test scores and higher graduation rates? And that’s a lens my guest today, Yong Zhao, Distinguished Professor of Educational Leadership & Policy Studies & Educational Psychology at the University of Kansas, wants to expand into redefining the purpose of K-12 education more broadly, from meritocracy to human interdependence. He’s co-authored an open-access piece for the ECNU Review of Education by that name that you can search yourself or find in the show notes, and it’s the focus of our conversation today. “[Meritocracy’s] focus on ranking individuals according to flawed metrics fosters unhealthy competition, overlooks diverse human talents, fails to account for unequal starting points, and ultimately hundred both individual fulfillment AND societal progress,” they write, “We propose an alternative framework, the Human Interdependence Paradigm, which….emphasizes cultivating unique individual greatness, realizing [it] through applying it to solve meaningful real world problems for others, [and] fostering a sense of purpose and mutual reliance. The Human Interdependence Paradigm [for education] aims to create learning environments that promote collaboration, social intelligence, and ultimately, a more equitable and flourishing society.” You can email Prof. Zhao @ yongzhao.uo@gmail.com From Meritocracy to Human Interdependence: Redefining the Purpose of Education The Dark Side of Meritocracy, Noema Mag
#186
January 24 · 57 min
Changing My Mind About Schools (and Everything Else) w/ Diane Ravitch
“This is a book about my life, about admitting ‘I was wrong,’ and about how important it is to say it out loud,” is how our guest today, Diane Ravitch, begins her 2025 memoir, An Education: How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else. What follows is her incredible life’s journey spanning nearly nine decades, from learning to write as a left-hander using a quill pen at her Texas public school to becoming one of the most influential leaders of the modern conservative American education reform movement. Having spent the first half of her professional life in education policy advocating for national standards, testing, and accountability reform alongside charter schools and so-called school choice programs; as a founder of Thomas B. Fordham Institute, Assistant Secretary of Education during the George HW Bush administration, and serving on the board of the National Assessment for Educational Progress or NAEP (the “gold standard” of achievement assessments), however, as the opening quote reveals, after seeing this vision of education reform in action, she very publicly changed her mind about all of it. ‍Diane has now spent the last 15 years vigorously challenging the same education reform movement she helped build. Co-founding the Network for Public Education, and writing several best-selling books critical of testing, corporate influence in education policy, and privatization. “We must have a more generous, contemporary vision of public schools and what they can be,” she writes. “I will use whatever time I have to fight for the ideals I believe in, to love the people who mean the most to me, to do whatever I can to strengthen democracy in my beloved country, and to advance the common good.” An Education: How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else (Columbia University Press)
#185
January 10 · 27 min
Why Fascists Fear Teachers w/ Randi Weingarten
HRP is a nonpartisan 501(c)(3), and the views expressed by our guests are their own and do not constitute an endorsement. “Who’s the most dangerous person in the world? Is it Chairman Kim, is it Xi Jinping?” The most dangerous person in the world is Randi Weingarten. It’s not a close call.” At least, that’s what Mike Pompeo, the former CIA Director and former US Secretary of State, told a reporter in 2022. Three years later, Randi Weingarten’s rebuttal takes the form of a book, Why Fascists Fear Teachers: Public Education and the Future of Democracy, in which the long-time President of the American Federation of Teachers, representing nearly 2 million members, mounts a defense of democracy, teachers, and our public schools, arguing that “Public schools are laboratories of civil society and, at their best, embody the multifaith, multiracial coexistence that is our nation’s best future…Fascists fear teachers because education is essential to democracy.” At its core are conjoined and fundamental questions I think we took for granted, until recently, as settled consensus in the United States of America: What is democracy? What is the role of public schools in a pluralistic democratic nation, and why are both worth keeping? To help us answer these questions and understand why fascists fear teachers is none other than AFT President, Randi Weingarten. Why Fascists Fear Teachers (AFT website)
#184
Dec 20, 2025 · 1 hr 39 min
Crash Course Social Studies Education w/ Raoul Meyer
If you’ve taught or attended a high school course in the last decade, you’ve probably watched a Crash Course video. Their dozens of playlists on topics from Biology and Environmental Science to Economics and World History hold hundreds of videos and have collected over 2 billion views. Maybe even just hearing the title conjured John Green’s urgent cadence and the characteristic cartoon aesthetic in your mind, or the show’s outro, if you couldn’t hit the pause button fast enough, where John thanks the producer, the graphics team, and mentions, “The show is written by my high school history teacher, Raoul Meyer…” Today, Mister Meyer not only continues to teach, but earlier this year reached out to me about a new film project he’s working on with his brother Luke, scheduled for 2026 release, tentatively titled THE TEACHERS PROJECT. It’s described as “a compelling, character-driven journey into the lives of American educators as they navigate the intensifying culture war that has enveloped the nation’s schools since 2020. As political battles over sanctioned ideas, books, and lesson plans range from national headlines to local school boards, the film reveals the devastating consequences of this chaos and conflict for teachers, students, communities, and the future of American education.” And Raoul joins me to talk about Crash Course, the state of history teaching and the often untold stories of teachers wrestling with all of it. @mistermeyer on BlueSky

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