Accusations that schools were indoctrinating children via something called Critical Race Theory seemed to come out of nowhere. By the summer of 2021, legislators across the country were rushing to enact bans against something they could barely define. So how did the narrative about CRT take hold so quickly and resonate so deeply? The winners of the 2022 Have You Heard Graduate Research Contest, Annie Gensterblum, Ariell Bertrand, and Sandy Frost Waldron, have some answers that may surprise you.

GOP-dominated states have seen a blitz of legislation targeting trans students. What’s behind these attacks? While this anti-trans hysteria represents just the latest in a long-line of conservative “panics,” today’s furor also signifies an ominous development in the public school culture wars: an effort by the right to roll back the expansion of civil rights. Special guests: parent activist Robert Chevaleau and pediatric psychologist Natasha Poulopoulos.

What if data doesn’t matter? That’s the question that has been weighing on education researcher Josh Cowen. After spending two decades studying school vouchers, Cowen has concluded that the data is too stark to justify spending public dollars on private tuition. And yet school choice advocates are proposing - and increasingly winning - massive expansions of these programs. That seeming contradiction has spurred Cowen to speak out, and he hopes that other academics will join him–before it’s too late.

Will Bunch joins us to talk about his impossibly timely new book: After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It. Discussed in this episode: how college almost became a public good (and could again); how the right fanned the flames of culture war to push higher education privatization; and why we should be so concerned that the GOP is now using the same playbook to target K-12. Also, is Biden’s student debt relief plan a blip or does it mark a move away from the vision of education as human capital development?

Have You Heard heads to New Orleans, home to the first all-charter-school system in the country. In a provocative new book, Tulane University political scientist Celeste Lay argues that New Orleans’ charter school experiment has undermined democracy, disenfranchising the very parents it was meant to empower. With school privatization on the march across the country, Lay’s account offers an urgent and timely warning.

The movement of students and parents to end harsh discipline and dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline in their local schools made major gains. Then came the pandemic. Now, with calls for returning police to schools and “hardening” them in response to shooting threats, the movement’s success may be in jeopardy. Special guests: Mark Warren, author of Willful Defiance, and Jonathan Stith, the national director of the Alliance for Educational Justice.