Education Beat is ending after 5 years. Here are the episodes we’ll remember most
Dear listeners,
I am sad to tell you that EdSource’s podcast Education Beat is ending after five years. This week’s episode, released Thursday, Aug. 27, will be our last.
The idea behind Education Beat is in our tagline: Getting to the heart of California schools. For me, the heart of California schools are its people — the students, teachers and parents. They are the ones who walk the halls, play on the playgrounds and live with the consequences — for better or worse — of the education policies decided in Sacramento.
I started my career as a radio reporter. And I love radio, because I know it helps listeners feel like they are right there — in the classroom, on the picket line, or inside a student’s living room. When you hear someone’s voice, you hear more than just words. You hear the emotion in what is said, and the silence in what is left unsaid.
It hits differently, for instance, when you hear teacher Tanya Reyes tell the story of how her family escaped the 2025 Eaton Fire that destroyed their home.
It hits differently when you hear Dr. José Medina, a bilingual education researcher-turned-social-media-star, explain how his traumatic childhood fueled his push for inclusion.
It hits differently when you hear student Miliani Rodríguez discuss why she decided to become the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit alleging vast inequities in how California distributes funding for school facilities.
Or when student Anaya Zenad explains why she lobbied for her school to be named after Betty Reid Soskin, a local civil rights icon and the oldest National Park ranger.
Audio is a predominantly first-person, on-site reporting format. Over the years, I have brought listeners into classrooms, to hear firsthand how teachers work with students. I’ve brought you the sounds of a migrant education summer program, a unique curriculum for newcomer students in Oakland Unified, a class in Compton where English learners become journalists and a school in rural Merced County that’s had an uncommonly high degree of success with teaching English learners to read.
Listeners have also heard tender moments in students’ lives, such as a video call in 2021 between Central Valley siblings and their dad, who was forced to stay in Mexico for almost four years after being denied a green card.
My colleague, Ashley A. Smith, went inside a prison in Chowchilla to report on how incarcerated women worked to rebuild their lives by pursuing college degrees.
Audio can also bring you back in time. One of my favorite historical episodes is about Oral Lee Brown, known as Mama Brown, who adopted a whole class of first graders, and promised to pay for their college educations if they graduated from high school.
This episode about a Fresno teacher strike decades ago, brought in a teacher and a school board member — who were on different sides of the strike — to tell how their paths crossed and what they learned from each other.
I also tracked down the first grade teacher whose student became the lead plaintiff in Lau v. Nichols, the Supreme Court case that declared that students have the right to understand what they are being taught in school, and is the basis for bilingual education and for requiring that schools help students learn English.
This episode unpacks the story of a California State University professor who once smuggled information back from the Soviet Union with a secret code hidden in sheet music.
Education Beat has won multiple awards during its run, including four consecutive Best Podcast awards from the California News Publishers Association and two awards from the Society of Professional Journalists Northern California.
One of the podcast’s award-winning episodes probed what happened to a teacher who was removed from the classroom in Temecula Valley Unified after a parent complained that students were reading the Pulitzer prize-winning play, “Angels in America,” about the 1980s AIDS epidemic in New York.
Other award-winning episodes told the story of a group of rural Kern County students who fought to keep their library open after the local police department threatened to take it over.
In 2025, Education Beat was selected to host a live podcast at SXSW EDU in Austin, Texas about undocumented young people’s history of activism, how they risked deportation decades ago to “come out of the shadows” and advocate to stay in the country. That movement is, in large part, what led to the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
Education Beat has been a beautiful way to bring EdSource stories to life. It would not have been possible without the exquisite editing work of our producer, Coby McDonald, whom it has been an absolute joy to work with over the past five years, or without the EdSource reporters who contributed toward Education Beat’s storytelling.
We hope you continue to visit our archives to listen to our episodes.
Once again, thank you for listening to Education Beat: Getting to the heart of California schools.
Your host,
Zaidee Stavely
This story was originally published by EdSource.