In this episode, we dive headfirst into the mess that is FAPE: Free and Appropriate Public Education.

We unpack how “appropriate” too often means “sit in a class you can’t access,” why canned curriculum is a billion-dollar confidence trick, and how grade levels still haunt us like a bad group project.

From misinterpretations of special education law to the systemic forces pushing students toward frustration or checked-out disengagement, we trace how schools keep setting kids up to feel broken when it’s the system that’s cracked.

We also explore what real inclusion should look like, why research doesn’t back most of what districts insist on doing, and how learning actually works when we’re not torturing children with timelines that exist only on paper.

Resources Mentioned

The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better
By Jenny Anderson & Rebecca Winthrop
Crown, 2025

Adolescents are hardwired to explore and grow, and learning is mainly how they do this. But a shocking majority of teens are disengaged from school, simultaneously bored and overwhelmed. This is feeding an alarming teen mental health crisis. As kids get older and more independent, parents often feel powerless to help. But fear not, there are evidence-backed strategies to guide them from disengagement to drive, in and out of school.

Sold A Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
Hosted by Emily Hanford
American Public Media

There’s an idea about how children learn to read that’s held sway in schools for more than a generation, even though it was proven wrong by cognitive scientists decades ago. Teaching methods based on this idea can make it harder for children to learn how to read. In this podcast, host Emily Hanford investigates the influential authors who promote this idea and the company that sells their work. It’s an exposé of how educators came to believe in something that isn’t true and are now reckoning with the consequences: children harmed, money wasted, an education system upended.

The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books (Web Archive version)
By Rose Horowitch
The Atlantic, 2024

“Anthony Grafton, a Princeton historian, said his students arrive on campus with a narrower vocabulary and less understanding of language than they used to have. There are always students who ‘read insightfully and easily and write beautifully,’ he said, ‘but they are now more exceptions.’ Jack Chen, a Chinese-literature professor at the University of Virginia, finds his students ‘shutting down’ when confronted with ideas they don’t understand; they’re less able to persist through a challenging text than they used to be. Daniel Shore, the chair of Georgetown’s English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet.”

Mind in Society: Development of Higher Psychological Processes
By L.S. Vygotsky
Harvard University Press, 1980

In this episode we talk about how absurd it is to force students to sit through grade-level material that’s miles beyond what they’re ready for. Vygotsky’s Mind in Society introduces the Zone of Proximal Development, the foundational idea that real learning only happens when we meet a student where they actually are and support them just beyond that edge. It’s the exact opposite of the ‘one-size-fits-nobody’ approach we critique so often.