MCPS Superintendent Joshua Starr launches education podcast

Montgomery County Public Schools Superintendent Joshua P. Starr has hit the digital airwaves.

Starr has launched a podcast called “What’s the BIG Idea?” a show he hosts with Chris Lloyd, vice president of the Montgomery County Education Association and an eighth-grade teacher.

“Public education is really, really complex,” Starr says in the inaugural podcast. “There are no easy answers, and I feel like part of my job is to try to help people understand that complexity in a multitude of ways.”

The show will bring in people in from around the region “who have big ideas about things going on in education,” Starr said.

On first listen, it sounds like the podcast aims to give people in the education community a chance to think deeply about problems, innovations, systems and policy tied to teaching kids in America.

“We tend to kind of go for the latest fad, the latest reform, the latest kind of quick fix…” Lloyd said. “But we don’t really think about what’s the purpose of education.”

Lloyd is part of the Montgomery County Education Association, the union that represents more than 12,000 teachers, counselors and other educators in the school system.

In the first podcast, Starr and Lloyd talk to Sam Chaltain, a writer and education activist who lives in Washington, D.C. Chaltain was also national director of education advocacy organization the Forum for Education & Democracy.

Starr and Lloyd don’t waste any time in the first episode. Their first question to Chaltain:

“What’s the problem we’re trying to solve in American public education?”

To send questions for future podcasts, find them on Twitter @wtbipodcast or e-mail podcast@mcpsmd.org

“What’s the BIG Idea?” is available through iTunes or here.

Image: Montgomery County Public Schools website.

Editor’s note: This blog post first appeared in The Washington Post’s Maryland Schools Insider.