Over the last few years, producer Chana Joffe-Walt has been checking in with someone who wears the mantle of being “it” well. She’s a school principal named Teresa Hill.

Reporter Sarah Gibson tells the story of a huge political divide in the tiny town of Croydon, NH –  population 800. She follows local activists as they try to rally everyone to their side in time for a crucial town meeting.

Host Chana Joffe-Walt talks to teachers and principals about the unique challenges the pandemic has created in their daily working lives. (7  minutes)

Protestors came out across Russia after the Ukraine invasion. In this act, that we first broadcast in 2017, we hear from young people who attended anti-government protests that swept through Russia.

Hamza and Brian visit Tahir Alam, the alleged mastermind of a plot to ‘Islamize’ Birmingham’s schools.

As a new high school principal, Dr. Whitfield felt moved by the national renouncement of racism he saw all around him in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.

At Sullivan High School in Chicago, being able to communicate is key. (5 minutes)

Reporter Paul Tough and Host Ira Glass look at the biggest change in admissions this year: colleges no longer requiring the SATs. Paul speaks to a student whose SAT score determined her future.

Producer Chana Joffe-Walt talks to a seventh grader who doesn’t have a seventh grade, or an eighth grade. (11 minutes)

Host Ira talks with a teacher in South Carolina who is just trying to figure out what the first day of school will look like.

In just one year, everything in one ordinary public middle school changed. It went from an incoming class of thirty sixth graders—most of them Black, Latino, and Middle Eastern—to a class of 103 sixth graders.

There’s a lawsuit going on between Harvard and some Asian American students who say the admissions process discriminates against them.

Reporter Steve Kolowich goes to the University of Nebraska where one new recruit to Turning Point goes out on campus to sign people up for her club. And that one act immediately devolves into a political battle of epic proportions.

In 2012, the fever broke, and the Albertville city council stopped targeting Latino residents. The mayor says he and the council are taking a cue from the public schools.

Back in the late 1960s, a wealthy tobacco heiress saw that integration was happening all around the country—except at prep schools in the South. So she set out to find the best Black students in neighborhood public schools—in hopes of teaching the white prep-school students to be less bigoted. Mosi Secret tells the story of how the first two Black students to integrate Virginia Episcopal School succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations.