Our first podcast was recorded on a snowy December morning in a beautiful recording studio operated by an Oscar-winning film production company.
We really had no business being there.
Not knowing where to get started, I put out a request on Facebook and my friend Giulia had put us in contact with her brother. He generously suggested we meet him there. It was a luxury, and a great way to learn how to record together minus the distractions of children, pets, neighbors, and street noise. (After that day, we realized we had better learn to use our apartments to record, and we did.)
Not knowing that it would take nearly a year to release our podcast, for our first episode we agreed to discuss an article that was getting a lot of attention in New York City education circles: “The Charter School Crusader,” by Elizabeth Green in the January/February 2018 issue of The Atlantic, about Eva Moskowitz, founder and CEO of the Success Academy Charter Schools network. Success Academies are one of the most prominent charter school networks in the country and looms large in the ed landscape of NYC, so in the pursuit of an interesting conversation we also dove straight into a proverbial political minefield. A year later, Moskowitz is no less impactful, or controversial.
And our recording, fortunately, still sounds current to me. The article provided a jumping off point for some key questions that we would come back to throughout the season, including: What is a revolutionary? Is efficiency more important than community engagement? How do race and school segregation play into the public education debate?
We hope you enjoy. You can find the episode wherever you listen to podcasts, including SoundCloud, ITunes/Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Play. Please subscribe and give us a review wherever you listen to the podcast; we’re listening, and it helps us spread the word.
We’ll be sharing on Twitter at @radbureau along with the hashtag #WhoIsRevolutionary. Follow along and chime in!
Finally, please give us feedback here on the blog, where we’ve posted the show notes. We’re working on the website and look forward to hosting a vibrant community dialogue there someday.
We’ll be back next week with more!