The Educate Podcast

The Educate podcast is all about education. We care about equity and opportunity and how people learn. We dig deep into education research. We're curious about how research translates into policy — or not. We think good teaching is hard. We think history has a lot to tell us about why things are the way they are. We believe in vivid storytelling.

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October 20, 2022

Introducing: Sold a Story

There's an idea about how children learn to read that's held sway in schools for more than a generation — even though it was proven wrong by cognitive scientists decades ago. Teaching methods based on this idea can make it harder for children to learn how to read. In this podcast, Hanford investigates the influential authors who promote this idea and the company that sells their work. It's an exposé of how educators came to believe in something that isn't true and are now reckoning with the consequences — children harmed, money wasted, an education system upended.

August 9, 2022

No Excuses: Race and Reckoning at a Chicago Charter School

Producer DJ Cashmere spent seven years teaching Black and brown students at a Noble Street charter high school in Chicago. At the time, Noble followed a popular model called "no excuses." Its schools required strict discipline but promised low-income students a better shot at college. After DJ left the classroom to become a journalist, Noble disavowed its own policies — calling them "assimilationist, patriarchal, white supremacist, and anti-black." In this hour, DJ, who is white, revisits his old school as it tries to reinvent itself as an anti-racist institution. And he seeks out his former students to ask them how they felt about being on the receiving end of all that education reform, and what they think now about the time they spent in his classroom.

August 4, 2022

Standing in Two Worlds BONUS episode

Camille Leihulu Slagle is Native Hawaiian. She always knew she wanted to go away for college. Education would help her afford to stay in her homeland. Life in the islands is expensive. Camille wants to give back to her people through science, studying the volcanoes central to Hawaiʻi's landscape and culture.

August 2, 2022

Standing in Two Worlds: Native American College Diaries

Native American students are just a tiny fraction of all the college students in the United States. They come with different histories, confronting an education system once used to erase their languages and cultures. In this project, four Indigenous college students tell how they are using higher education to strengthen ties to their Native roots and support their people.

August 19, 2021

Under Pressure: The College Mental Health Crisis

Even before the pandemic, campus counselling services were reporting a marked uptick in the number of students with anxiety, clinical depression and other serious psychiatric problems. What is a college’s responsibility for helping students navigate mental health challenges, and how well are colleges rising to the task?

August 3, 2021

Fading Beacon: Why America is Losing International Students

Colleges and universities in the United States attract more than a million international students a year. Higher education is one of America’s top service exports, generating $42 billion in revenue. But the money spigot is closing. The pandemic, visa restrictions, rising tuition and a perception of poor safety in America have driven new international student enrollment down by a jaw-dropping 72%.

July 28, 2021

Who wants to be a teacher? Episode 4: This very leaky pipeline

Today, more Black and Hispanic teachers enter the classroom through alternative pathways than through traditional teacher degree programs. The number of teachers of color in the United States has more than doubled since the 1980s in large part due to the growing number of preparation and certification pathways and recruitment efforts from the federal level down. But there's a catch: Many of these teachers won’t stay for long, further undermining efforts to get diversity in the teacher labor force to reflect the diversity of students in the United States.

July 28, 2021

Who wants to be a teacher? Episode 3: The trouble with grading teachers

Critics of the rise in alternative and for-profit programs will claim teacher quality, and student learning, suffers when people are fast-tracked into the classroom without comprehensive training. But it’s hard to know for certain whether that’s true. The problem is, despite decades of trying, we haven’t agreed on how to measure teacher quality. There’s a lot of research that shows having a good teacher makes a huge difference in the outcomes of students, but it’s much less clear what makes a teacher good.

July 28, 2021

Who wants to be a teacher? Episode 2: The rise of the for-profit teacher training industry

Beginning in the early 1980s, a lot of states began to open up the pathways to becoming a teacher. People who already had a bachelor’s degree in something else didn’t need to go back to college to get trained in teaching. Policymakers hoped this would solve teacher shortages by getting more people into the profession, but it’s also opened up a whole new business model in educator preparation: Online for-profit teacher training programs have proliferated, and they’re growing fast. One program in Texas has become the single largest educator preparation program in the United States by enrollment, and it’s expanding into other states.

July 28, 2021

Who wants to be a teacher? Episode 1: The teacher emergency

Every president since Eisenhower has talked about the need for more teachers, especially in certain rural and urban schools, and in subjects such as math and science. For decades, policies have been made and laws changed in order to recruit and train more and more teachers. But research shows we’ve been looking at the problem wrong, and that these efforts haven’t solved teacher shortages at all, but have created an oversize labor force with less training, less experience and high rates of turnover.

August 14, 2020

Black at Mizzou: Confronting race on campus

"Black Mizzou" is a thriving campus-within-a-campus that Black students have built over decades to make the University of Missouri a more welcoming place.

August 6, 2020

What the Words Say

A false assumption about what it takes to be a skilled reader has created deep inequalities among U.S. children, putting many on a difficult path in life.

July 29, 2020

Covid on Campus

The coronavirus pandemic represents the greatest challenge to American higher education in decades. Some small regional colleges that were already struggling won’t survive. Other schools, large and small, are rethinking how to offer an education while keeping people safe.

May 29, 2020

Same Pandemic, Unequal Education (from Us & Them podcast)

The coronavirus pandemic has left West Virginia schools particularly hard hit. The Us & Them podcast from West Virginia Public Radio brings us stories of teachers grappling with virtual classes for students who don't have access to the internet and how schools are trying, still, to keep kids fed.

May 14, 2020

Facing uncertain futures, high school seniors weigh tough college options and alternate paths

Editor-in-chief of The Hechinger Report, Liz Willen, shares what she's heard from high school seniors who are feeling anxious and overwhelmed as they face pandemic-fueled challenges.

May 7, 2020

Listeners tell us how they're adapting to at-home education

Teachers, students and families talk about how they've adapted while schools and campuses stay closed.

April 30, 2020

Is learning to read a constitutional right?

A federal court recently ruled that underfunded schools in Detroit violated students' right to a basic education. Advocates hope the case is the beginning of a trend.

April 23, 2020

A few silver linings emerge in a dark time of closed schools

Delece Smith-Barrow of The Hechinger Report shares some hopeful stories about education during the pandemic.

April 16, 2020

'Everything has changed': A look at K-12 education under coronavirus

Sarah Garland of The Hechinger Report on how (and whether) education carries on while schools are closed.

April 9, 2020

College in the time of coronavirus

A conversation with Hechinger Report higher education editor Jon Marcus on how learning and the college experience are changing, and what's yet to come.

April 2, 2020

What good is a history major?

As fewer college students opt to major in history, there's an effort by history departments to prove the practical value of their discipline.

March 26, 2020

Graduation rate for Native students surges at the University of Minnesota

The percentage of Native students graduating from the U of M has doubled in the past decade.

March 19, 2020

Black girl, white college

When it was time for me to enroll in a four-year college, I chose North Dakota State, a school that's mostly white, conservative and insular -- everything I wasn't. It was the hardest year of my life.

March 14, 2020

College administrators struggle with whether to close their classrooms in response to COVID-19

Some students say they want campuses to remain open.

March 12, 2020

A conundrum for student advocates: change their school or change society?

Unlike protesters at many universities, activists at Harvard seek social justice reforms beyond campus.

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