Thursday, October 1, 2026 7:00pm to 8:30pm EDT
The 2026 Brodie Family Lecture will be delivered by Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider. Through their popular podcast, Have Your Heard, Berkshire and Schneider explore what they describe as “the age-old quest” to finally fix the nation’s public schools, one policy issue at a time.
An investigative journalist, Jennifer Berkshire writes about the intersection of education and politics for the Nation, the New Republic, the Baffler, the New York Times, and other publications. She is the author More Worlds to Negotiate: John Dunlop and the Art of Problem Solving (Hamilton Books, 2021) and teaches in the Boston College Prison Education Program and the Education Studies program at Yale.
Jack Schneider is the Dwight W. Allen Distinguished Professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he leads the Beyond Test Scores Project. His research examines how educators, policymakers, and the public develop particular views about what is true, what is effective, and what is important in education; he is particularly interested in how those views can diverge from ground-level reality inside schools and communities.
Berkshire and Schneider are co-authors of A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School (The New Press, 2020) and The Education Wars: A Citizen’s Guide and Defense Manual (The New Press, 2024).