This podcast is about courage - courage to listen to people we don’t agree with, courage to challenge our own friends.
In this episode, host Ken Futernick speaks with two influential education thinkers from opposite sides of the political spectrum about their book A Search for Common Ground: Conversations About the Toughest Questions in K-12 Education. Instead of trying to win arguments on issues like school choice, standardized testing, or how history should be taught, they set out to listen and see what they could learn from one another.
Rick Hess, head of education policy at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, and Pedro Noguera, dean of USC's Rossier School of Education, share what they've learned from years of respectful disagreement.
“It actually was not nearly as hard to find common ground as I think we might have expected,” Hess says. “Writing the book [with Pedro] was the most heartening exercise that I had done in 20-plus years.”
When asked why conversations across political divides have become so rare and difficult, Noguera said, “I think there’s fear. Fear of putting your ideas out there, fear that you'll be attacked by your own side if you appear to be conceding ground, fear that you will look weak because you are even just engaging in the dialogue.”
Hess agreed. “It takes a lot more courage to tell your friends to back the heck off than your enemies. It's easy to insult our enemies.”
Their courageous conversations serve as an important reminder: The search for common ground does not require us to abandon our core principles. But it does require us to listen, suspend judgment, and sometimes push back, even with those closest to us - all in the service of better schools for our children.
Featured Guests:
Rick Hess is director of education policy at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute. He's a prolific writer, the author of numerous books and articles that appear regularly in EdWeek and mainstream publications like The New York Times and Forbes. Hess spent two years teaching high school in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, before becoming a policy scholar.
Notable quotes from this episode:
The debate is more between serious people who want to solve problems and unserious people who enjoy seeing how many clicks they can garner on social media.
What Pedro and I wanted to try to do here was model what it looks like to actually listen to one another carefully, to take in one another's points, and not so that we could agree, but so that we could search for common ground.
Pedro Noguera is the dean of the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California and one of the nation's most respected scholars on public education, educational equity, and school reform. He's authored or co-authored 15 books and more than 250 articles and other publications. Throughout his career, Pedro has focused on improving opportunities for students, especially those in underserved communities, while building bridges between research, policy, and practice.
Notable quotes from this episode:
We do our students a disservice when we prevent them from reckoning with ideas just because we disagree with the ideas.
On anti-bias training, I think it's based on a very naive view that you can teach people out of their bias by making them feel uncomfortable and making them feel unwanted if need be.
