Education

The Chicago Model w/ Stacy Davis Gates, Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, and Alex Han

08 May 2023
Featuring Stacy Davis Gates, Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, and Alex Han on how Chicago’s labor left took over City Hall. Brandon Johnson’s mayoral victory, the product of a decade-plus of social movement union struggle, is a model...

Teach the Children Well w/ Jennifer Berkshire & Jack Schneider

23 Apr 2023
Featuring Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider on the politics of public education. The authors of A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: The Dismantling of Education and the Future of School and co-hosts of the education...

Higher Ed Industrial Unionism w/ Donna Murch and Todd Wolfson

17 Feb 2023
Featuring Donna Murch and Todd Wolfson on Rutgers University workers’ industrial unionism strategy. The second in a two-part series on the crisis in American higher education.

Higher Ed Crisis w/ Dennis Hogan

10 Feb 2023
Featuring Dennis Hogan on the crisis in higher education. The first in a two-part series. Next up: Donna Murch and Todd Wolfson on how university workers can fight back through industrial unionism.

Higher Ed in Crisis

12 Sep 2020
Dan interviews Tithi Bhattacharya, Daniel Bessner, Simon Torracinta on the manifold crises engulfing higher ed as covid exposes and exacerbates decades of austerity and neoliberal iniquity.

The Class Politics of Suburban Racism with Matt Lassiter

20 Sep 2019
The history of suburbanite reactions to school integration in Atlanta and Charlotte reveal the class power underpinning both racism and the demolition of the New Deal order. Dan interviews Matt Lassiter, discussing suburbanite resistance to...

Race and Class in the Liberal Suburbs with Lily Geismer

02 Aug 2019
Dan interviews Lily Geismer, the author of Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party. While Boston whites fought school busing in the streets, suburban liberals along Route 128 maintained and...

LA Teachers Strike with Sarah Jaffe

18 Jan 2019
The teacher strike wave continues as more than 30,000 members of United Teachers Los Angeles walk picket lines not only for the higher wages that they deserve but also for the well-funded and great schools...

Resisting the School-to-Prison Pipeline

27 May 2018
The steady pace of school massacres has revived calls to put more cops in school. And so atrocities committed by white students are exploited to make schools more like prisons, and ensure that the former...

Struggle and the State

09 May 2018
Today’s Dig is a very good and somewhat unusual Dig: Dan’s got two interviews with two different people. First, journalist Eric Blanc on the teacher strike wave that he’s been covering for Jacobin. Then comes...

Student-Debt Capitalism

03 Apr 2018
It’s obvious that student debt can be an excruciating financial burden. But anthropologist Caitlin Zaloom explains that it has also done a lot to make American families into plunderable financial mines, part of a larger...

Baltimore’s Crisis Continues with Lester Spence

03 Feb 2018
The uprising following the police killing of Freddie Gray drew national media attention to Baltimore and the abusive law enforcement agents that discipline and control those most exploited and excluded by contemporary American capitalism. As...

Workers' Rights Are Students' Rights

19 Jan 2018
Student workers at Rutgers University are fighting for 15 dollars an hour. Undergraduate history major and dining-hall worker Danny Taylor of @RutgersUSAS talks about their struggle. Thanks to Verso Books for their support. Check out...

"White genocide" with George Ciccariello-Maher

07 Feb 2017
George Cicariello-Maher is professor of political science at Drexel University and author of several books, including Building the Commune: Radical Democracy in Venezuela, published by Verso as part of the Jacobin Series. He recently drew...

Diane Ravitch on Trump, DeVos and the corporate ed reform agenda

29 Jan 2017
Donald Trump has nominated Betsy DeVos, a free-market, far-right Christian billionaire dedicated to privatizing public schools, to be his Secretary of Education. In her confirmation hearing, DeVos made it painfully clear that she has little...