FreshEd

What are the hard questions in education today? My guest is Pasi Sahlberg. When he was teaching at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, he edited a book with his students on some of the biggest and hardest questions facing education today. In our conversation, Pasi speaks about the class, the book, and the importance of writing op-eds. He even offers some advice for US Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. Many listeners have probably heard of Pasi Sahlberg. Some might even consider him an educational change maker. I ask Pasi if he sees himself as a change maker. Stay tuned to hear his answer! Pasi Sahlberg is a global educational advisor. His latest co-edited book is entitled Hard Questions on Global Educational Change: Policies, practices, and the future of education which was published by Teachers College Press earlier this year.

Textbooks are perhaps the most recognizable part of school systems. You go to school; you learn from a textbook. But what’s inside that textbook your reading? Who wrote it? How are controversial issues dealt with? And how have textbooks changed over time and compare across country? My guest today, Jim Williams, has edited or co-edited three volumes on textbooks. The many chapters across the volumes looked at textbooks around the world. The first volume looked at textbooks and national-governments. The second volume explored the issue of identity. And the last zoomed in on textbooks in post-conflict settings. Jim William is the UNESCO Chair in International Education for Development and Professor of International Education & International Affairs at the George Washington University. While on sabbatical in Tokyo, Jim was kind enough to stop by my office where we recorded this interview.

Today we talk about intercultural competencies. These are the attitudes, skills, and knowledge that enable people to see from different perspectives, helping us get along together as humans. These competencies seem particularly relevant in our current political climate. My guest is Darla Deardorff. She has spent the past decade thinking about intercultural competencies. What are? Can scholars agree on a common framework? And is it possible to measure them? For Darla, intercultural competencies are as vital as math and science for education. Darla Deardorff is the Executive Director of the Association of International Education Administrators at Duke University. Her latest co-edited book, Intercultural Competence in Higher Education: International Approaches, assessment, application, was published by Routledge in June.

Have you ever thought about how polarized some debates in education are? Think about it. Whole language versus phonics. Direct versus indirect instruction. Public versus private schools. My guest today, Professor Yong Zhao, says that these polarized debates result, in part, from research studies that only look at effects – or side effects – of educational interventions. Rarely do studies acknowledge what works and what doesn’t. Yong Zhao, a Foundation Distinguished Professor in the School of Education at the University of Kansas, argues that educational research should learn from medical science.

We hear about educational privatization a lot these days. My Twitter feed is filled with countless stories about how Betsy DeVos is going to privatize education in America or how Bridge International has privatized education in some African countries. Even the first three episodes of FreshEd way back in 2015 looked at how privatization has gone global. But do you really know how it’s happening, how privatization as an educational policy is moving around the world? And what effect is it having on governments? The process of national and local governments enacting policies that advance private interests in education is rather complex and often opaque to the general public. My guest today, Stephen Ball, has written a series of books looking at educational privatization. In his latest book, Edu.net, co-written with Caroline Junemann and Diego Santori, he explores through network ethnography the evolution of the global education policy community that is advancing privatization. Stephen Ball is a Distinguished Service Professor at the Institute of Education, University College London.

How did American universities end up being seen as the best in the world? My guest today, David Labaree, argues it was the very decentralized and autonomous structure of the higher education system that allowed universities to develop an entrepreneurial ethos that drove American higher education to become the best. Today, America’s universities and colleges produce the most scholarship, earn the most Nobel prizes, hold the largest endowments, and attract the most esteemed students and scholars from around the world The messy structure of American higher education was not planned, however. There was no strong state or strong church directing the system from above. Rather higher education developed in a free market where survival was never guaranteed. Such a system produced unintended consequences that would make American higher education the envy of the world. David Labaree is a professor of Education at Stanford University. His new book is A Perfect Mess: The unlikely ascendancy of American Higher Education, which was published by the University of Chicago Press earlier this year.

Today: global citizenship education. What is global citizenship education and how is it practiced? And what is the relationship between national citizenship and global citizenship? Are they compatible? My guest today is Miri Yemini, an Honorary Visiting Lecturer at the Institute of Education at University College London and a Lecturer in the School of Education at Tel Aviv University She has recently published a book entitled Internationalization and Global Citizenship in Education.

We’ve talked a lot about PISA on this show. Today we take a fresh look at the test, digging into the specifics about how the test is created and what the results can tell policy makers and teachers. My guest today is Sam Sellar, a reader in Education Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University and a Director of the Laboratory of International Assessment Studies. He has recently co-written with Greg Thompson and David Rutkowski a short book on PISA titled, The Global Education Race: Taking the measure of PISA and international assessment.

A group of Yale graduate students are protesting their labor conditions as teachers. They are demanding the administration recognize them as a union and negotiate their contract as full employees of the university. After all, graduate students teach many undergraduate classes. But the administration is stalling, waiting for Donald Trump to appoint an anti-union National Labor Relations Board that, they hope, will throw out the union’s right to exist. My guest today is Jennifer Klein, a professor of history at Yale University who has followed the unionization efforts closely. She’s written a recent New York Times op-ed detailing the events at Yale. The fight over graduate student’s right to unionize at Yale is a microcosm of the reliance on precarious work across the American higher education system. You can find the solidarity statement in support of the graduate students here.

Today we look at the globalization of curriculum markets with Professor Catherine Doherty. Catherine uses the example of the International Baccalaureate Diploma in Australia to think about the movement of global curriculum inside local markets. Why do schools choose to include global curricula like the IB? And what impact do these new curricular offerings have on educational choice both locally and globally? By looking at various schools across Australia, Catherine unpacks the social ecology of the IB, highlighting ideas about educational strategy and imagined motilities. She empirically demonstrates how the global-local binary is a historical artifact. Catherine Doherty is a Professor of Pedagogy and Social Justice in the School of Education at the University of Glasgow.