Latest Episodes2019-10-08T12:35:06-04:00

Latest Episodes

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Whistleblower

February 17th, 2023|Season 2|

This episode of Why Don’t We Know was done in collaboration with the Spencer Education fellowship at Columbia University, where host Sara Ganim was a fellow for the 2021-2022 academic year. Additionally, a companion piece ran in USA Today, elaborating on specific cases, with insight from other experts, lawyers and students who have been presented with these agreements.

Why is data collection so darn difficult?

January 27th, 2023|Season 2|

This episode of Why Don’t We Know was done in collaboration with the Spencer Education fellowship at Columbia University, where host Sara Ganim was a fellow for the 2021-2022 academic year. Additionally, a companion piece ran in USA Today, elaborating on specific cases, with insight from other experts, lawyers and students who have been presented with these agreements.

Who are body cameras really for?

January 20th, 2023|Season 2|

This episode of Why Don’t We Know was done in collaboration with the Spencer Education fellowship at Columbia University, where host Sara Ganim was a fellow for the 2021-2022 academic year. Additionally, a companion piece ran in USA Today, elaborating on specific cases, with insight from other experts, lawyers and students who have been presented with these agreements.

‘Police say,’

January 13th, 2023|Season 2|

This episode of Why Don’t We Know was done in collaboration with the Spencer Education fellowship at Columbia University, where host Sara Ganim was a fellow for the 2021-2022 academic year. Additionally, a companion piece ran in USA Today, elaborating on specific cases, with insight from other experts, lawyers and students who have been presented with these agreements.

Welcome to Season 2

January 13th, 2023|Season 2|

This episode of Why Don’t We Know was done in collaboration with the Spencer Education fellowship at Columbia University, where host Sara Ganim was a fellow for the 2021-2022 academic year. Additionally, a companion piece ran in USA Today, elaborating on specific cases, with insight from other experts, lawyers and students who have been presented with these agreements.

SPECIAL: ‘Gag order’ against sexual assault

June 2nd, 2022|Season 1|

This episode of Why Don’t We Know was done in collaboration with the Spencer Education fellowship at Columbia University, where host Sara Ganim was a fellow for the 2021-2022 academic year. Additionally, a companion piece ran in USA Today, elaborating on specific cases, with insight from other experts, lawyers and students who have been presented with these agreements.

EXTRA: Why don’t we know where all the lead pipes are?

June 2nd, 2021|Season 1|

Lead drinking water pipes go all the way back to the Roman times, and even though we’ve known that lead is harmful for the better part of the century, powerful in the U.S. lobbying kept them around — and in some places, mandated they be installed — until the 1980s. So, millions of Americans in thousands of American towns have them. To mitigate the poison, we rely on a calcium called orthophosphate that coats the pipes and protects the lead from contaminating the water that’s flowing through them. Well, in theory, right? Because we’ve seen how that can fail. In the worst of circumstances, like Flint and Newark and Chicago and Washington D.C., kids are poisoned and communities financially ruined.

EXTRA: The human toll of missing data

April 1st, 2021|Season 1|

Depending on where you look, you can find a statistic that will tell you any number you want to hear about how often students are bullied or harassed in school. In my reporting, I found studies that range from 9% to 98%. The national center for education statistics aggregated the findings of 80 different studies and reported that 35% of students are bullied in school. Another 15% are cyberbullied or bullied online. Why is that? Why are bullying numbers all over the place? And why does it cause students like Anna Aslanian to fall through the cracks?

Episode 13: Any Other Law

February 12th, 2021|Season 1|

If any other federal law were as broken as FERPA it would have been fixed by now. I am confident in making that statement. But FERPA has remained vague, broad and outdated for four and a half decades. I wanted to go to the hill to ask people about it. But when I started reporting for this episode, we were in the height of COVID. So, I went to the virtual hill. Last summer, calling folks on the education committees to see if they would join me for this episode to talk about FERPA.

EXTRA: Why Don’t We Know how many kids are attending virtual learning?

January 26th, 2021|Season 1|

This may not come as a surprise but the Federal Department of Education was woefully unprepared in many different ways but one of the most basic failures is a failure of data. There is no federal tracking program for virtual learning, meaning, no way of knowing what students fell behind or couldn’t attend school during this time. Anecdotally, we could guess that the biggest impact was on the most vulnerable — low-income families that could not afford to deal with the new demands on their internet and parental supervision that accompanies virtual learning.

EXTRA: Attacked

January 20th, 2021|Season 1|

This story might sound like a fluke, maybe it sounds like an abnormality. Because it isn’t the kind of story we often read about in the newspapers or hear about on TV. Certainly not the way that headlines about gun violence and bullying grab our attention. That’s what makes this topic a data desert. There is, in fact, no way of knowing how many other teachers there are out there, with stories like this one and how many of them don’t have the support they need. Our requests for this data, from state departments of education in all 50 states, turned up a broken recording system.

Episode 12: Misplaced Fear

January 12th, 2021|Season 1|

We assumed that since school shootings are such a known public safety concern there would be really detailed data on this. We figured schools would keep a number, report that to the state department of ed, and then when we made our records request, we could see a spreadsheet of that data. But, that’s not a reality.

Episode 11: What the heck FERPA?

November 29th, 2020|Season 1|

To untangle the complex web of FERPA, we really have to start in the United States Capitol, in 1974. A Junior Senator from New York named James Buckley, had an idea to give parents and students better access to school records. He was primarily concerned that schools were keeping secret information about student behavior, and potentially sharing it with law enforcement and other outsiders without the parents’ consent. You know how you see in movies sometimes, big ideas that start with a couple of people making notes on the back of a napkin. Well, in the halls of congress, urban legend is that, that’s pretty much how FERPA was born, too.

Episode 10: Education Records

November 15th, 2020|Season 1|

Two court cases, which have been meandering through the system for more than four years now, are challenging a common claim that universities cannot share the outcomes or punishments given in sexual misconduct investigations because doing so would violate a Federal Student Privacy Law called FERPA.

Episode 9: Secret Outcomes

October 28th, 2020|Season 1|

A big part of the reason “we don’t know” what happens inside schools and universities when it comes to sexual assault and harassment cases is a real and valid concern for the privacy of victims. More than any other crime, victims of sexual assault are given extra protections not just in the educational system, but by the courts, and by the media and general public, who understand that this is an extremely personal crime that warrants privacy. But at the university level, privacy is often used as a weapon against the people it’s supposed to protect.

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Whistleblower

February 17th, 2023|Season 2|

This episode of Why Don’t We Know was done in collaboration with the Spencer Education fellowship at Columbia University, where host Sara Ganim was a fellow for the 2021-2022 academic year. Additionally, a companion piece ran in USA Today, elaborating on specific cases, with insight from other experts, lawyers and students who have been presented with these agreements.

Why is data collection so darn difficult?

January 27th, 2023|Season 2|

This episode of Why Don’t We Know was done in collaboration with the Spencer Education fellowship at Columbia University, where host Sara Ganim was a fellow for the 2021-2022 academic year. Additionally, a companion piece ran in USA Today, elaborating on specific cases, with insight from other experts, lawyers and students who have been presented with these agreements.

Who are body cameras really for?

January 20th, 2023|Season 2|

This episode of Why Don’t We Know was done in collaboration with the Spencer Education fellowship at Columbia University, where host Sara Ganim was a fellow for the 2021-2022 academic year. Additionally, a companion piece ran in USA Today, elaborating on specific cases, with insight from other experts, lawyers and students who have been presented with these agreements.

‘Police say,’

January 13th, 2023|Season 2|

This episode of Why Don’t We Know was done in collaboration with the Spencer Education fellowship at Columbia University, where host Sara Ganim was a fellow for the 2021-2022 academic year. Additionally, a companion piece ran in USA Today, elaborating on specific cases, with insight from other experts, lawyers and students who have been presented with these agreements.

Welcome to Season 2

January 13th, 2023|Season 2|

This episode of Why Don’t We Know was done in collaboration with the Spencer Education fellowship at Columbia University, where host Sara Ganim was a fellow for the 2021-2022 academic year. Additionally, a companion piece ran in USA Today, elaborating on specific cases, with insight from other experts, lawyers and students who have been presented with these agreements.

SPECIAL: ‘Gag order’ against sexual assault

June 2nd, 2022|Season 1|

This episode of Why Don’t We Know was done in collaboration with the Spencer Education fellowship at Columbia University, where host Sara Ganim was a fellow for the 2021-2022 academic year. Additionally, a companion piece ran in USA Today, elaborating on specific cases, with insight from other experts, lawyers and students who have been presented with these agreements.

EXTRA: Why don’t we know where all the lead pipes are?

June 2nd, 2021|Season 1|

Lead drinking water pipes go all the way back to the Roman times, and even though we’ve known that lead is harmful for the better part of the century, powerful in the U.S. lobbying kept them around — and in some places, mandated they be installed — until the 1980s. So, millions of Americans in thousands of American towns have them. To mitigate the poison, we rely on a calcium called orthophosphate that coats the pipes and protects the lead from contaminating the water that’s flowing through them. Well, in theory, right? Because we’ve seen how that can fail. In the worst of circumstances, like Flint and Newark and Chicago and Washington D.C., kids are poisoned and communities financially ruined.

EXTRA: The human toll of missing data

April 1st, 2021|Season 1|

Depending on where you look, you can find a statistic that will tell you any number you want to hear about how often students are bullied or harassed in school. In my reporting, I found studies that range from 9% to 98%. The national center for education statistics aggregated the findings of 80 different studies and reported that 35% of students are bullied in school. Another 15% are cyberbullied or bullied online. Why is that? Why are bullying numbers all over the place? And why does it cause students like Anna Aslanian to fall through the cracks?

Episode 13: Any Other Law

February 12th, 2021|Season 1|

If any other federal law were as broken as FERPA it would have been fixed by now. I am confident in making that statement. But FERPA has remained vague, broad and outdated for four and a half decades. I wanted to go to the hill to ask people about it. But when I started reporting for this episode, we were in the height of COVID. So, I went to the virtual hill. Last summer, calling folks on the education committees to see if they would join me for this episode to talk about FERPA.

EXTRA: Why Don’t We Know how many kids are attending virtual learning?

January 26th, 2021|Season 1|

This may not come as a surprise but the Federal Department of Education was woefully unprepared in many different ways but one of the most basic failures is a failure of data. There is no federal tracking program for virtual learning, meaning, no way of knowing what students fell behind or couldn’t attend school during this time. Anecdotally, we could guess that the biggest impact was on the most vulnerable — low-income families that could not afford to deal with the new demands on their internet and parental supervision that accompanies virtual learning.

EXTRA: Attacked

January 20th, 2021|Season 1|

This story might sound like a fluke, maybe it sounds like an abnormality. Because it isn’t the kind of story we often read about in the newspapers or hear about on TV. Certainly not the way that headlines about gun violence and bullying grab our attention. That’s what makes this topic a data desert. There is, in fact, no way of knowing how many other teachers there are out there, with stories like this one and how many of them don’t have the support they need. Our requests for this data, from state departments of education in all 50 states, turned up a broken recording system.

Episode 12: Misplaced Fear

January 12th, 2021|Season 1|

We assumed that since school shootings are such a known public safety concern there would be really detailed data on this. We figured schools would keep a number, report that to the state department of ed, and then when we made our records request, we could see a spreadsheet of that data. But, that’s not a reality.

Episode 11: What the heck FERPA?

November 29th, 2020|Season 1|

To untangle the complex web of FERPA, we really have to start in the United States Capitol, in 1974. A Junior Senator from New York named James Buckley, had an idea to give parents and students better access to school records. He was primarily concerned that schools were keeping secret information about student behavior, and potentially sharing it with law enforcement and other outsiders without the parents’ consent. You know how you see in movies sometimes, big ideas that start with a couple of people making notes on the back of a napkin. Well, in the halls of congress, urban legend is that, that’s pretty much how FERPA was born, too.

Episode 10: Education Records

November 15th, 2020|Season 1|

Two court cases, which have been meandering through the system for more than four years now, are challenging a common claim that universities cannot share the outcomes or punishments given in sexual misconduct investigations because doing so would violate a Federal Student Privacy Law called FERPA.

Episode 9: Secret Outcomes

October 28th, 2020|Season 1|

A big part of the reason “we don’t know” what happens inside schools and universities when it comes to sexual assault and harassment cases is a real and valid concern for the privacy of victims. More than any other crime, victims of sexual assault are given extra protections not just in the educational system, but by the courts, and by the media and general public, who understand that this is an extremely personal crime that warrants privacy. But at the university level, privacy is often used as a weapon against the people it’s supposed to protect.

The Designer Show

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Whistleblower

February 17th, 2023|Season 2|

This episode of Why Don’t We Know was done in collaboration with the Spencer Education fellowship at Columbia University, where host Sara Ganim was a fellow for the 2021-2022 academic year. Additionally, a companion piece ran in USA Today, elaborating on specific cases, with insight from other experts, lawyers and students who have been presented with these agreements.

Why is data collection so darn difficult?

January 27th, 2023|Season 2|

This episode of Why Don’t We Know was done in collaboration with the Spencer Education fellowship at Columbia University, where host Sara Ganim was a fellow for the 2021-2022 academic year. Additionally, a companion piece ran in USA Today, elaborating on specific cases, with insight from other experts, lawyers and students who have been presented with these agreements.

Who are body cameras really for?

January 20th, 2023|Season 2|

This episode of Why Don’t We Know was done in collaboration with the Spencer Education fellowship at Columbia University, where host Sara Ganim was a fellow for the 2021-2022 academic year. Additionally, a companion piece ran in USA Today, elaborating on specific cases, with insight from other experts, lawyers and students who have been presented with these agreements.

‘Police say,’

January 13th, 2023|Season 2|

This episode of Why Don’t We Know was done in collaboration with the Spencer Education fellowship at Columbia University, where host Sara Ganim was a fellow for the 2021-2022 academic year. Additionally, a companion piece ran in USA Today, elaborating on specific cases, with insight from other experts, lawyers and students who have been presented with these agreements.

Welcome to Season 2

January 13th, 2023|Season 2|

This episode of Why Don’t We Know was done in collaboration with the Spencer Education fellowship at Columbia University, where host Sara Ganim was a fellow for the 2021-2022 academic year. Additionally, a companion piece ran in USA Today, elaborating on specific cases, with insight from other experts, lawyers and students who have been presented with these agreements.

SPECIAL: ‘Gag order’ against sexual assault

June 2nd, 2022|Season 1|

This episode of Why Don’t We Know was done in collaboration with the Spencer Education fellowship at Columbia University, where host Sara Ganim was a fellow for the 2021-2022 academic year. Additionally, a companion piece ran in USA Today, elaborating on specific cases, with insight from other experts, lawyers and students who have been presented with these agreements.

EXTRA: Why don’t we know where all the lead pipes are?

June 2nd, 2021|Season 1|

Lead drinking water pipes go all the way back to the Roman times, and even though we’ve known that lead is harmful for the better part of the century, powerful in the U.S. lobbying kept them around — and in some places, mandated they be installed — until the 1980s. So, millions of Americans in thousands of American towns have them. To mitigate the poison, we rely on a calcium called orthophosphate that coats the pipes and protects the lead from contaminating the water that’s flowing through them. Well, in theory, right? Because we’ve seen how that can fail. In the worst of circumstances, like Flint and Newark and Chicago and Washington D.C., kids are poisoned and communities financially ruined.

EXTRA: The human toll of missing data

April 1st, 2021|Season 1|

Depending on where you look, you can find a statistic that will tell you any number you want to hear about how often students are bullied or harassed in school. In my reporting, I found studies that range from 9% to 98%. The national center for education statistics aggregated the findings of 80 different studies and reported that 35% of students are bullied in school. Another 15% are cyberbullied or bullied online. Why is that? Why are bullying numbers all over the place? And why does it cause students like Anna Aslanian to fall through the cracks?

Episode 13: Any Other Law

February 12th, 2021|Season 1|

If any other federal law were as broken as FERPA it would have been fixed by now. I am confident in making that statement. But FERPA has remained vague, broad and outdated for four and a half decades. I wanted to go to the hill to ask people about it. But when I started reporting for this episode, we were in the height of COVID. So, I went to the virtual hill. Last summer, calling folks on the education committees to see if they would join me for this episode to talk about FERPA.

EXTRA: Why Don’t We Know how many kids are attending virtual learning?

January 26th, 2021|Season 1|

This may not come as a surprise but the Federal Department of Education was woefully unprepared in many different ways but one of the most basic failures is a failure of data. There is no federal tracking program for virtual learning, meaning, no way of knowing what students fell behind or couldn’t attend school during this time. Anecdotally, we could guess that the biggest impact was on the most vulnerable — low-income families that could not afford to deal with the new demands on their internet and parental supervision that accompanies virtual learning.

EXTRA: Attacked

January 20th, 2021|Season 1|

This story might sound like a fluke, maybe it sounds like an abnormality. Because it isn’t the kind of story we often read about in the newspapers or hear about on TV. Certainly not the way that headlines about gun violence and bullying grab our attention. That’s what makes this topic a data desert. There is, in fact, no way of knowing how many other teachers there are out there, with stories like this one and how many of them don’t have the support they need. Our requests for this data, from state departments of education in all 50 states, turned up a broken recording system.

Episode 12: Misplaced Fear

January 12th, 2021|Season 1|

We assumed that since school shootings are such a known public safety concern there would be really detailed data on this. We figured schools would keep a number, report that to the state department of ed, and then when we made our records request, we could see a spreadsheet of that data. But, that’s not a reality.

Episode 11: What the heck FERPA?

November 29th, 2020|Season 1|

To untangle the complex web of FERPA, we really have to start in the United States Capitol, in 1974. A Junior Senator from New York named James Buckley, had an idea to give parents and students better access to school records. He was primarily concerned that schools were keeping secret information about student behavior, and potentially sharing it with law enforcement and other outsiders without the parents’ consent. You know how you see in movies sometimes, big ideas that start with a couple of people making notes on the back of a napkin. Well, in the halls of congress, urban legend is that, that’s pretty much how FERPA was born, too.

Episode 10: Education Records

November 15th, 2020|Season 1|

Two court cases, which have been meandering through the system for more than four years now, are challenging a common claim that universities cannot share the outcomes or punishments given in sexual misconduct investigations because doing so would violate a Federal Student Privacy Law called FERPA.

Episode 9: Secret Outcomes

October 28th, 2020|Season 1|

A big part of the reason “we don’t know” what happens inside schools and universities when it comes to sexual assault and harassment cases is a real and valid concern for the privacy of victims. More than any other crime, victims of sexual assault are given extra protections not just in the educational system, but by the courts, and by the media and general public, who understand that this is an extremely personal crime that warrants privacy. But at the university level, privacy is often used as a weapon against the people it’s supposed to protect.

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