The School Perceptions Podcast

The School Perceptions team

A place to share the inside scoop on the successful things schools are doing to confront their most pressing challenges.

  1. Aug 4

    44. You Can't Walk Up to a Stranger and Ask Them for Money

    This week, Mia Trippi, Senior Director of Public Affairs at Mueller Communications, joins us to unpack how public institutions build — and lose — the trust that makes hard conversations possible. She talks about why the act of communicating sometimes matters more than what you're actually saying, how a website's ease of navigation predicts public trust more than you might expect, and the many pitfalls public institutions encounter as they try to engage their constituents.

  2. Jul 21

    43. If You Want to Predict Teacher Retention, Ask... Parents?

    We're not out of the nerd woods yet, folks! Continuing in our summer deep-dive series into our own survey data, today we're testing candidate predictors of teacher retention. We have now sorted through literally every response to each staff, student, and parent survey we have run from the fall of 2021 to the present. Filtering for Wisconsin public school districts in order to compare findings to five years' worth of datasets from the Wisconsin DPI all-staff report, we asked: 1.) Do our surveys predict teacher "stayers," "movers," and "leavers"? 2.) If so, which stakeholder survey does the most predictive work? 3.) But surely it can't be as predictive as salary or total compensation, right? Short answers, as a headline: 1.) Yes, they do. 2.) Staff surveys are the least predictive of the three, weirdly. Student surveys are robustly predictive of teacher retention two years in advance, but not in the present. Parent surveys are tremendously predictive in the present, and once you know what parents think, student and staff surveys add virtually no explanatory power. 3.) Salary alone is modestly predictive of TEACHER retention in particular, but "total compensation" adds little value; and neither salary nor total compensation is predictive of any other staff category's retention. 4.) Also, if you have ANY climate survey data at all, that dwarfs salary in predictive value -- salary adds very little beyond what even the staff climate survey would predict.

  3. Jul 14

    42. Why Are Staff So Unhappy with Discipline?

    Across every kind of district, "Our school's discipline policies and practices are effective" remains one of the lowest-ranked items on our staff surveys. It's been that way for five years (at least). Even as the average rating improves, its place in the pecking order of staff concerns does not. What's going on? In this episode, Derek takes a deep dive into SP's internal survey data, and puts it in conversation with the research literature to try to answer the question and point the way forward. References

  4. Jun 30

    41. Five Trends We're Seeing in Our Surveys

    Rob DeMeuse is back for a deep dive into five years of survey data from staff, students, parents, and community members across the districts we work with! No special focus -- just two research nerds talking about what our data has been telling us lately and what it might mean. For more background on the things we're talking about, see our recent blog posts: Five Things We Learned, obviously Middle-to-High School readiness findings, and Longer-term trends

  5. Jun 16

    40. The Fish Fry Rule, or Why We Survey Like We Do

    By popular demand (as measured by frequently-asked questions), I invited Rob DeMeuse and Scott Girard to stop by the old podcast studio to talk a little bit about the survey methodology we use, and why we use it rather than other approaches. In a lot of ways, this conversation expands on a blog post we wrote a couple years ago, where you can find even more depth on the topic.

  6. Jun 9

    39. What Works to Address Absenteeism?

    Jeremy Singer, professor at University of Michigan-Flint, talks to us about his exhaustive study of how principals are stemming the tide of absenteeism -- what's proving effective, and what isn't? (It's a big deal! The Hechinger Report wrote it up too!) A related piece, coming out of the same research project, is going to be the subject of an Annenberg EdWorkingPapers webinar on June 17th, for anyone who'd like to learn more. See also the book, Rethinking Chronic Absenteeism, by Lenhoff and Singer, for still more.

  7. Jun 2

    38. What Should New Board Members Know about School Finance?

    With a host of new school board members taking their seats after April elections, Mike Barry and Danielle Bosanec of WASBO stopped by to talk about what makes school finance difficult to understand, what sorts of questions board members should be asking, and what degree of budgetary flexibility district leaders actually have. See links below for more WASBO resources! WASBO professional learning catalog School Business Calendar booklet Conferences and Standards

  8. May 19

    37. Why Involve Your Community At All?

    Jack Schneider joins us from UMass-Amherst to talk about what community members have to offer local schools beyond tax dollars, and what schools have to offer community members beyond test scores (to coin a phrase). You can email him with follow-ups, as he offers in the episode. We talked about an article ("In Praise of Ordinary Measures") on the show, so here is that resource, and here are a few other pieces we've collaborated on over the past several years. "Democracy in Action" (2023) American School Board JournalEducational Accountability 3.0: Beyond ESSA (2023). National Education Policy Center"Are Locally Elected School Boards Really Failing? (2022). Education Next

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About

A place to share the inside scoop on the successful things schools are doing to confront their most pressing challenges.

Information

  • Creator
    The School Perceptions team
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    45
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © The School Perceptions team
  • Show Website
    The School Perceptions Podcast

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