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 [https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20965311251351988]

The Dark Side of Meritocracy, Noema Mag [https://www.noemamag.com/the-dark-side-of-meritocracy/]

From Meritocracy to Human Interdependence: Redefining the Purpose of Education w/ Yong Zhao

“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) [https://cup.columbia.edu/book/an-education/9780231563161/]

Changing My Mind About Schools (and Everything Else) w/ Diane Ravitch

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 [https://www.aft.org/book] (AFT website)



Why Fascists Fear Teachers w/ Randi Weingarten

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 [https://bsky.app/profile/mistermeyer.bsky.social]

Crash Course Social Studies Education w/ Raoul Meyer

How do you define creativity?

Would you be able to spot creativity in the wild?

What about creativity in the classroom?

This endless human quest to define the seemingly undefinable, and somehow make it useful for educators, is what today’s guests Tom Rendon and Zachary Stier set out to do, bringing together philosophy, neuroscience, and site visits, in a years-long collaboration that became Creativity in Young Children: What Science Tells Us and Our Hearts Know [https://www.redleafpress.org/Creativity-in-Young-Children-What-Science-Tells-Us-and-Our-Hearts-Know-P3101.aspx].

In this conversation, Tom and Zach help me understand the counterintuitive ways creativity shows up in the world, in the human condition, and how we can cultivate creativity and connection in the classroom.

Cultivating Creativity and Connection in the Classroom w/ Tom Rendon & Zachary Stier

Most of us probably experienced a homogenous version of literacy in our English classes: read a book, answer a few questions along the way, and compose an essay at the end about how we viewed a key theme. Rinse and repeat. And in our current age of high-stakes testing and high-stakes literacy, some kids are lucky to ever encounter a book at all; however, those same students are also surrounded by the narratives and themes of English class - in the messages they send and receive and the virtual communities they participate in, the media they consume and discuss with their friends, and in the video games they play. The goal of my guests today is to expand our vision of what that English class could be and induct students into something of an animistic perspective of literacy, as you heard from one guest in the opening: that the narratives and themes of English class are everywhere for those equipped to see them as such. Their Reader-Player Interactivity Framework [https://drive.google.com/file/d/13UPvHceKUbhSYlw_1AOfN0moTjacJnhm/view?usp=sharing]aims to give teachers and students the tools and confidence to do just that. Their paper, linked in the show notes, is a collaboration between Karis Jones, Brady Nash, Virginia Killian Lund, Scott Storm, Alex Corbitt, Beth Krone, and Trevor Aleo, of which Karis, Brady, Virginia, and Trevor joined me for this conversation.

Article: The Reader-Player Interactivity Framework: How Do Readers Navigate Diverse Varieties of Narrative Texts? [https://drive.google.com/file/d/13UPvHceKUbhSYlw_1AOfN0moTjacJnhm/view?usp=sharing]

Unsilencing Gratia [https://digthisbird.itch.io/unsilencing-gratia]: a tabletop RPG book designed to be an easy introduction to collaborative storytelling, usable in a classroom setting.

We Know Something You Don’t Know [https://virginialund.itch.io/we-know-something-you-dont-know]: a tabletop RPG that invites you into the lives of students making their way day-by-day through the education system.

You can reach any of our guests by email:

Trevor Aleo: aleotc@gmail.com [<aleotc@gmail.com>]

Karis Jones: karis.michelle.jones@gmail.com [<karis.michelle.jones@gmail.com>]

Virginia Killian Lund: vkillianlund@uri.edu [<vkillianlund@uri.edu>]

Brady Nash: bradylnash@gmail.com [<bradylnash@gmail.com>]

Are we Reader or are we Player? w/ Karis Jones, Virginia Killian Lund, Brady Nash, and Trevor Aleo

We’re recording this episode the week the Iowa DOGE Task Force released their final 136 page report – you heard that right, that’s the state-level version of the Department of Government Efficiency convened by our governor back in February, tasked with maximizing return on investment of Iowa taxpayer dollars.

As you can imagine, among their recommendations are ideas from the Return on Taxpayer Investment Working Group about improving education results “aimed at delivering greater value for taxpayers.”

Fortunately for Iowans, this working group assembled a crack team of experienced education experts for the job, including the CEO of an ethanol plant, the former Chair of the Iowa Racing and Gaming Commission, and the chair of a civil engineering firm. Among their recommendations are to:

"Establish a merit-based compensation framework –including a bonus structure, teacher professional development and incentives for those in high-need schools in order to improve student outcomes and financially reward high-performing teachers.”

Merit-pay is of course a tried, tested, and failed idea. But teacher salaries are just one thread in the complex tapestry of how states pay for public education and the ideological tug of war in our public debates over school funding – how we pay for buildings, pensions, special education, Title 1, school food programs…every cost that goes into making schooling work…or not.

If the Iowa DOGE report and the policy agenda that will inevitably follow could be titled As Privatized as Possible – doubling down on outcome-based school funding and accountability measures and even recommending AI-based bus route optimization to “cut costs and improve service”...what’s the alternative?

My guest today asks, “What would it mean to democratize school resources? What would it mean to have truly public schools, down to the very means of resource creation and distribution that fuels them…what will it take to make school as public as possible.”

It’s also the title of his upcoming book, As Public as Possible: Radical Finance for America’s Public Schools out this December. You can preorder it now from The New Press.

David Backer is the author. He’s an associate professor of education policy at Seton Hall University whose research, teaching, and organizing focus on ideology and school finance. A former high school teacher, his research has appeared in a half dozen scholarly journals like the Harvard Education Review  as well as popular venues like The American Prospect and Jacobin. And you can find him on social media @schooldaves.

As Public As Possible (The New Press) [https://thenewpress.org/books/as-public-as-possible/?v=eb65bcceaa5f]

@SchoolDaves TikTok [https://www.tiktok.com/@schooldaves]

Making School Finance As Public As Possible w/ David I. Backer

When I sat down with James Mannion to talk about the educational polycrisis back in July, his long-time colleague, friend, and collaborator Kate McAllister was right there by his side. After the recording, Kate & I spent a long time catching up about her work and its intersection with our own, and we immediately vowed to remember to hit record the next time we chatted.

Kate McAllister is both a co-founder of The Human Hive and the founder of The Hive in Cabrera, a school for ChangeMakers in the Dominican Republic, where she joined me from for this conversation. Kate has over 20 years' teaching experience and has spent much of that time training and developing teachers and educators all over the world. She is a passionate educator, published author, fellow of the Chartered College of Teachers and The RSA. The Hive, founded back in 2020, is Kate's answer to the question "what if?" What if learning could be different? What if we did education with not for others? What if we can become more self-determined in our learning? What if education can help regenerate the planet?

And as you’ll hear in this episode, Kate’s personal and educational journey is a remarkable reflection of her dedication to the fully human messiness of growing and learning in community with others.

The Human Hive [https://www.thehumanhive.org/]



The Buzz About the Human Hive w/ Kate McAllister

Today’s episode is Dr. Sarah Fine’s keynote, the Quest for Authenticity: Lessons in Powerful Learning from the Fringes, from our Conference to Restore Humanity back in July of this year.

As Dr. Fine argues, the limits of our grammar of schooling and the metaphors we use to think about teaching and learning are constraining, but there is nothing inevitable or inherent about them. This is the throughline in her observation of co-constructed and collaborative humanized learning spaces, where inevitability gives way to possibility predominates.

Not only is it possible to change the grammar of schooling, but that humanizing grammar already exists within even the most traditionally structured school, Sarah argues, in electives, clubs, and extracurriculars, in the periphery. These spaces, she points out, offer “the hallmarks of a learner-centered system: trust, safety, & authentic care, where learners and educators codesign coursework.” As Sarah and her co-author Jal Mehta urge in their 2019 book, In Search of Deeper Learning, “We need to change student learning, so we need to change schools, so we need to change systems.”

Video version on the Human Restoration Project YouTube channel [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3YUbFh5y3k]

Q&A w/ Dr. Sarah Fine [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSsfx0Xoje4]

Lessons in Powerful Learning from the Fringes w/ Dr. Sarah Fine

The reach and impact of our food systems – that is, the complex, interconnected, and globalized web of institutions, resources, and processes that bring food from the farm, to the table, and into the waste stream – is universal: every single one of us has either worked in ourselves, or known people who work growing, raising, producing, processing, packing, transporting, preparing, or serving the food we all eat.

In the food we consume, we become connected to the conditions, the labor, and the people of the food system that produces it. Fully 1 in 10 American workers, over 17 million people, work in paid frontline food system jobs. And millions more work at home to plan, shop, prepare, and in many households, grow the food their children and families eat.

There are massive implications for schools as well, as they participate in the food system directly to bring literally billions of meals to children each year, and as labor in the food system impacts the families, children, and communities our schools serve.

My guests today are Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern and Teresa M. Mares, associate professors and co-authors of Will Work for Food: Labor Across the Food Chain, available from University of California Press in September. Their book captures the grim realities faced by food workers alongside the opportunities for solidarity at every point in the system while amplifying the successes and challenges faced by movements to make food work, good work.

“As long as people are suffering to get food to our plates,” they write, “we need to center food workers in any vision for a just food system.”

Will Work for Food book from UC Press [https://www.ucpress.edu/books/will-work-for-food/paper]

Will Work for Food: Labor Across the Food Chain w/ Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern & Teresa M. Mares

Since 2018, the Human Restoration Project Podcast has reimaged 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!

NickHRP

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