People across the board sense that things are different, and we're looking at an existential threat to public education. People don't go into this profession to make money, they go into it because they like kids and they believe in the idea of education. The role they play makes them especially vulnerable to attacks by people who don't believe in public services, and have a bleak view of the future of the country.

Journalist Jennifer C. Berkshire explains how Democrats bought into school privatization - as a class project of the party's anti-union elite donors, an an anti-teacher platform used by the Clintons to advance their own careers in the absence of anything material to offer voters, and as a problem that will only get worse as attacking public schools continues to be a bi-partisan fixation.

Jennifer wrote the Baffler article How Education Reform Ate the Democratic Party.

Guest

Jennifer Berkshire

@BisforBerkshire

Jennifer Berkshire writes about education and politics for The Nation, The New Republic, The Washington Post, and other publications. The creator and co-host of the education policy podcast “Have You Heard” she teaches aspiring podcasters in the journalism program at Boston College and the Labor Studies program at UMass Amherst. Berkshire discovered her passion for storytelling while covering a series of bitter labor battles that wracked her native Midwest in the early 1990’s. Additionally, she’s the author of A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School (New Press, 2020).