Courageous Conversations About Our Schools

Send us a text

In this second of three episodes about a culture war simmering in Middletown, Ohio, we learn how Superintendent Styles responds to allegations of racism and violations of students’ rights because of health mandates.

Hint: He didn’t fight back. Instead, he listened to his critics. He then asked for help from the community’s “quiet majority,” a group he called “the Positive Gossipers,” and members of the Middletown Area Ministerial Alliance These counterintuitive steps helped to defuse the conflict and ultimately enabled the district to focus on serious challenges affecting student learning. The current administration, the Board recently launched “Middie Minutes Matter,” an initiative designed to reduce the high levels of chronic student absenteeism in the district. And they are receiving assistance from the same group of community leaders that supported the district was faced with a polarizing conflict.

Tune in to the third and final episode to hear from Middletown’s community leaders and several outside observers who reflect on the tangible lessons this story teaches. One of these observers is Amanda Ripley, author of the New York Times bestselling book, High Conflict - Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out, who said, “I love the story because we desperately need examples of how people and communities manage to get out of dysfunctional conflict.”

Send us a text

What role should schools play when it comes to gender and sexuality? What books should students have access to? What topics should teachers and students be able to discuss? What kind of support should LGBTQ students be able to expect from their schools? These questions have become the focus of intense debate among parents, educators, students, and policy makers. Not surprisingly, conversations among those who disagree are seldom civil or productive. Board meetings have devolved into war zones, and battle lines are being drawn as parents are being told their rights are being violated. As the culture wars rage on, it is hard to imagine how anyone (save the few who simply relish conflict) would think the toxic conflicts playing out in our schools are a good thing for our students or our country. I wanted to find out if the use of some depolarizing strategies might make it possible to host a civil conversation about schools, gender, and sexuality with political opposites and even to find some common ground. My first guest, Willie Carver, is an openly gay, veteran high school teacher who was selected as Teacher of the Year for the state of Kentucky in 2021. Mr. Carver (whom I interviewed in October 2022) quit because of the harassment he and some of his colleagues received from a small group of parents. My second guest, Dov Fischer, is a law professor, an orthodox Jewish rabbi, and a political conservative. In a 2022 editorial in California’s Orange County Register, Fischer spoke out against policies that allow students to designate their gender identities. In Fischer’s view, this is yet another effort by the government to divide families, and he thinks parents, not educators, should be the ones to mentor children on matters of gender. Tune in to find out what happens.

Send us a text

This podcast usually focuses on how adults can have less contentious, more fruitful conversations about schools, but my two guests on this episode have plenty to say about the need to strengthen communication and relationships among young people. In fact, Nina Murphy and Kellie Dromboski (along with Maurice Elias) have written a book on the subject called, Morning Classroom Conversations. They show how devoting just 15 minutes each day for genuine conversation can have significant social, emotional, and academic benefits. By creating “brave spaces” for student conversation, students learn how limiting, even damaging, modern day interactions can be. “Without that perspective, many young people’s view of themselves and their future is at the mercy of how their social media communications are made and responded to. As we know all too well, this can take the extreme form of making adolescents hypersensitive to cyberbullying—even to the point of anxiety, depression, of suicidality,” they write.

And to educators who say, “We have so much to cover, especially with the learning loss from the pandemic, that we don’t have time to add one more thing into our day,” Murphy, a school psychologist, says (around the 25:20 mark), “It takes more time when we don’t do it because of the time it takes to recover from all of the other difficulties students are having.” She says high school teachers at her school frequently tell her, “...they’ve had to stop a lesson because so-and-so was crying or because this one would not stop acting out or wouldn’t get off the phone...When you create that classroom community, you’re going to see less and less of those behaviors.”

Their book contains a wealth of resources to help educators integrate morning conversations into their schools and classrooms.

Send us a text

This episode will interest anyone interested in what it takes to successfully lead a politically diverse school board (or any such organization) in these highly polarized times. My guest, Dr. Katy Anthes, did just that as Colorado’s Commissioner of Education from 2016 to 2023 by building trust, getting leaders to agree on norms about how they would disagree, and developing a common vision of education that members of her state board could embrace.

Rather than avoiding sharp disagreements over questions about standardized testing, state standards, and how history should be taught, she leaned into “healthy conflict”— the kind that is productive and allows for progress even among those with opposing perspectives.

Anthes addresses a question, around the 17-minute mark, that she often encounters: When finding a middle ground is needed to move things forward, do we have to compromise our values and beliefs?

A question she’s still pondering: How to navigate complex and contentious issues in the presence of “conflict entrepreneurs”—those who promote conflict for their own financial or political gain. Tune in and learn from one of our country's most effective educational leaders.

Send us a text

Immediately following the fatal shooting of two students and two math teachers at Apalachee High School in Georgia, the predictable debate over gun laws ensued. Less prominent were calls for another remedy for school gun violence that can have an immediate impact and, surprisingly, is not politically polarizing: mental health support.
Colt Gray, the 14-year-old shooter had been “begging for help from everyone around him,” according to his aunt Annie Brown. It appears he was unable to find it.
Unfortunately, students like Gray are not alone. As the need for students’ mental health support has grown, mental health services in schools have declined sharply in recent years. Just 48 percent of the nation’s public schools report that they can meet their students’ mental health needs, according to a recent EdWeek report.

My guest for this episode is Dr. Hayley Watson, a clinical psychologist with deep and personal knowledge of the mental health challenges students face. In this, the first of two episodes with Dr. Watson, she describes some of the factors, including bullying, that contribute to poor mental health, the effects it can have on student well-being and academic performance, and the skills that students can learn to better cope with emotionally challenging situations.

Dr. Watson also shares the harrowing story from her own childhood that led to trauma that she kept secret for many years. This story ultimately instilled a passion for helping young people facing similar experiences.

The school shooting at Apalachee High School occurred just one day after I recorded this interview. Dr. Watson joined me again for a follow-up conversation just a few days later to talk, specifically, about what educators can do to prevent gun violence and how they can help students, families, and their colleagues cope with the fear and the trauma so many across the country are feeling in the wake of this unspeakable tragedy.