Whether it was during her nearly two decades as a middle school humanities teacher or as diversity coordinator or grade-level team leader, my guest today kept returning to the same question: why does school so often feel like the opposite of learning?

Lauren Porosoff’s answer isn't a new program or a new curriculum, instead she offers a holistic way of thinking about how systems are connected to outcomes. And Lauren joins me today to talk about compensatory programs: the wellness kits, the diversity posters, the one-off professional development workshops that schools layer one on top of the layer to signal that they value belonging, creativity, or student wellbeing, without ever changing the underlying framework for how students and teachers actually spend their time. In this episode, we talk about why schools reach for these fixes, why they backfire, and why they may be especially vulnerable to attack precisely because they're so superficial.

Lauren's website is theteachernerd.com, and her book (one of many!), Teach for Authentic Engagement, is available from ASCD.

Jailbreak Your PD

The Trouble with Compensatory Programs

The Grammar of Inclusive Instructional Design

Teach for Authentic Engagement

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

The Dark Side of Meritocracy, Noema Mag

“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)