The School Perceptions Podcast

Steve Considine, superintendent of the School District of Baraboo, joins us to talk about how he does what he does.

Steve came up through Baraboo: middle school social studies teacher, then an administrator in Lake Mills, then back as Baraboo High School principal.

What drew our attention was a significant jump in Baraboo's parent survey results over the last couple of years, especially on district-level items, which are some of th...

Derek talks with Damian LaCroix, who became executive director of the Wisconsin Association of School District Administrators (WASDA) on July 1 after 33 years in public education, including nearly 20 as a superintendent in Howard-Suamico.

Derek raises a pattern out of a summer spent in the data: roughly 53 Wisconsin districts that are small and rural, with older communities and fewer households with children in school — and hi...

We're joined today by Harvard's Jal Mehta and Radford's Max Yurkovsky to discuss their new book, A Chance to Solve Their Own Problems: Inside the New Methods to Remake Public Schools.

Their project was motivated by a fascinating question: Why do reforms sometimes work?

The resulting book splits the difference between "improvement is impossible" and "improvement is easy if you just use this one neat trick." It's a fascinating conver...

Dr. Ashley Carey joins us to talk about her recently-published study on students' experience of the Covid years. Tracking student survey data across six years and nearly 100,000 survey responses from Massachusetts schools, Ashley ranges from the specific findings of her paper to broader questions about what schools should be accountable for, what the pandemic did and didn't do to students, and what survey data can tell us that test...

This week, Mia Trippi, Senior Director of Public Affairs at Mueller Communications, joins us to unpack how public institutions build — and lose — the trust that makes hard conversations possible. She talks about why the act of communicating sometimes matters more than what you're actually saying, how a website's ease of navigation predicts public trust more than you might expect, and the many pitfalls public i...

We're not out of the nerd woods yet, folks!

Continuing in our summer deep-dive series into our own survey data, today we're testing candidate predictors of teacher retention.

We have now sorted through literally every response to each staff, student, and parent survey we have run from the fall of 2021 to the present.

Filtering for Wisconsin public school districts in order to compare findings to five years' worth of datasets from the...

Across every kind of district, "Our school's discipline policies and practices are effective" remains one of the lowest-ranked items on our staff surveys. It's been that way for five years (at least). Even as the average rating improves, its place in the pecking order of staff concerns does not. What's going on?

In this episode, Derek takes a deep dive into SP's internal survey data, and puts it in conversation with the research li...

Rob DeMeuse is back for a deep dive into five years of survey data from staff, students, parents, and community members across the districts we work with! No special focus -- just two research nerds talking about what our data has been telling us lately and what it might mean.

For more background on the things we're talking about, see our recent blog posts:

Five Things We Learned, obviously

Middle-to-High School readiness findings, a...

Jeremy Singer, professor at University of Michigan-Flint, talks to us about his exhaustive study of how principals are stemming the tide of absenteeism -- what's proving effective, and what isn't? (It's a big deal! The Hechinger Report wrote it up too!)

A related piece, coming out of the same research project, is going to be the subject of an Annenberg EdWorkingPapers webinar on June 17th, for anyone who'd like to learn more.

See als...

With a host of new school board members taking their seats after April elections, Mike Barry and Danielle Bosanec of WASBO stopped by to talk about what makes school finance difficult to understand, what sorts of questions board members should be asking, and what degree of budgetary flexibility district leaders actually have. See links below for more WASBO resources!

WASBO professional learning catalog

School Business Calendar bookle...

Jack Schneider joins us from UMass-Amherst to talk about what community members have to offer local schools beyond tax dollars, and what schools have to offer community members beyond test scores (to coin a phrase).

You can email him with follow-ups, as he offers in the episode.

We talked about an article ("In Praise of Ordinary Measures") on the show, so here is that resource, and here are a few other pieces we've collaborated on o...

Cara Jackson, recent President of the Association of Education Finance and Policy (AEFP), joins us to talk about her presidential essay and what she's learned over two decades of work in the "evidence-informed education ecosystem" about what it takes for policymakers, school leaders, and classroom teachers to their very best for their students.

Additional links to things we talked about:

• High-dosage tutoring implementation
• Immigra...

Professor Jay Plasman, of Ohio State, joins us to talk about a recent report he published with the Fordham Institute, entitled "College or Career Readiness: Postsecondary and Labor Market Outcomes for Ohio High School Students Earning Industry-Recognized Credentials." The full report is available for download, as well.

It turns out that industry-recognized credentials pay off in some industries more than others, that they pay off bi...