HGSE Revives Public Communication Class for Election Year After 10-Year Pause

Harvard Graduate School of Education Senior Lecturer Joseph H. Blatt ’70 says not enough politicians are talking about American education.

After dropping a public communication class at the Harvard Graduate School of Education a decade ago to work on other projects, Blatt has now revived the course, called “Advancing the Public Understanding of Education,” in a special election-year edition that trains students to engage the public on an issue that has become a “political fire” for local districts over the last few years.

Nationally, Republican leaders have mobilized their constituents over what they claim to be the infiltration of “woke” ideology into K-12 education, leading to controversial policies from Florida to Texas banning books and prohibiting instruction that could lead to students feeling “guilt” because of their race.

The resulting battles have “sharply politicized” education on all sides at the local level, even as parties have largely avoided the issue on a national scale, according to Blatt. “They just hardly ever mention education,” he said.

The seminar-style class aims to equip students to better engage with the public, including by taking a high-level look at theories of communication and analyzing portrayals of education in the media. The class will feature guest speakers including education reporter and former Crimson Managing Editor Hannah Natanson ’19 and local politicians to talk about a ballot question on standardized testing in Massachusetts.

“I felt there was this political fire at the local level, this political ignorance or ignoring of the subject at the national level, and I wanted to use the organizing enthusiasm of an election year to kind of tackle that,” Blatt said.

Students from across several HGSE programs said the course was preparing them well to become better leaders in education.

“This course has been really good at providing kind of a mirror for you to look at yourself and the roles that you think you may or may not have on impacting education after graduation,” according to Débora Menieur Núñez, a master’s student who works in public affairs at the US Department of Education.

Evetty J. Satterfield, a doctoral student who served on a Tennessee school board said the class had helped her gain the practical skills to achieve “larger systematic change.”

The course was first inspired by former education professor Kurt W. Fischer and Blatt’s development of a website called “Usable Knowledge” in 2006 that takes new academic research on topics like standardized tests and turns it into easy-to-read briefs for educators and families. Blatt found that the “key step” of Usable Knowledge’s success was hiring freelance writers.

“So that then led to the idea that maybe educators ourselves need to learn how to do that. And that’s the kind of skill, the kind of perception, that I try to teach some students through the course,” Blatt said.

Ultimately, Blatt wants students to leave his course appreciating the responsibility of educators to take on the job of putting ideas in ways that can be understood by both decision makers and the general public, he said. To do this, Blatt said the “outcome goal is that students leave with some skills to actually execute on that responsibility,” through different forms of media.

“I feel like that has been one of the most powerful tools that I have gained from this course — learning how to analyze not just the work that I’m hoping to do or the impact that I’m hoping to have, but also what it means to actually do that work,” Meunier Núñez said.