Miseducation

If you grew up in New York City, chances are you have heard of the Regents. The Regents are standardized exams that students across the State of New York have to pass in order to graduate and earn a diploma that’s recognized by the State Board of Regents. Some words people I spoke to used to describe these exams: “A mess,” “stressful,” “Frankenstein” and “inequitable.” Today, there are Regents tes...

Every year thousands of students fill out the FAFSA, a form designed to help working class families receive financial aid for college. Simple right? Fill out a form, get some money, go to college. Well, not quite. The FAFSA isn’t as easy to complete as it may seem. It encompasses 180 questions ranging from your family dynamics, to how much you and your parents earn, to citizenship and immigration...

Are women more likely to contract STDs? Can HIV be cured by having sex with a virgin? Is using two condoms safer than using one? These are only a handful of the questions about sex that exist in the minds of high schoolers across the city. But because this topic often evokes discomfort and embarrassment, from both adults and young people, questions like these often go unasked. They become misconce...

My classmates are not happy with my school’s 8:20 a.m. start time, and honestly, neither am I. I’ve missed that first bell so many times. I had 12 tardies and 4 detentions in the past quarter alone, just from being late. And I’m not just late, I’m tired. When I get home, I’m physically exhausted, my bones hurt, and I just want to go to bed straight away.  But as a junior, each month is very import...

For the first time ever New Yorkers have the opportunity to vote in a citywide participatory budgeting initiative. It’s not people on the ballot. It’s people’s money — tax dollars – and how to spend them. All New Yorkers age 11 and up can have a say in how $5 million of taxpayer money is spent. On the ballot this year are projects like financial literacy classes for youth in the Bronx, revitalizin...

Mental health, perhaps more than ever, is a topic of conversation for the masses. Clinical terms like “triggered” and “anxiety” crop up in everyday discussion. Tik Tok channels dedicated to self-help and self-care offer tips on living your best life. And when it comes to young people, public leaders, from doctors to principals are trying new preventive approaches, like tele-therapy, to reach stude...

As we kick off our first ever spring fundraising drive, one of our student reporters shares what working with The Bell has meant to him. Donate at give.bellvoices.org . Miseducation is a podcast of The Bell that equips New York City public high school students with the tools to report on inequities in the nation’s largest school system.

Every year The Bell trains a group of high school students from across New York City in audio journalism. These student interns report and produce original stories for the Miseducation podcast. Over the past five months, this year’s reporters have been hard at work on their episodes. The theme of the upcoming season is Questioning the Status Quo.  Each student picked an aspect of the New York City...

Between Clarksdale and Cleveland on a quiet stretch of Highway 61 in the Mississippi Delta lies a town called Mound Bayou. Mound Bayou has more churches than stoplights, more vacant stores than occupied ones — a place that appears forgotten. But locals — folks who grew up here and stayed — wear these special glasses that allow them to see the town as it used to be. Put the glasses on and an overgr...

This episode features “EWA Radio: Student Data Privacy as a Civil Rights Issue,” recorded live on March 9 at the SXSW EDU Conference in Austin, Texas. Panel description Schools collect lots of information about students – health records, attendance, grades and disciplinary actions. Many parents aren't aware the data may be shared with others, including private companies or law enforcement, an...

In this week’s episode, high school senior and Miseducation intern Wesley Almanzar reflects back on his experience growing up in the New York City school system. Want exclusive content from Miseducation? Join us on Patreon . To join the conversation, send us a message and follow us on Twitter and  Instagram . Miseducation is a podcast of The Bell that equips New York City public high school studen...

Coco and Bissiri go to different public high schools, a few miles apart on Manhattan’s west side. One, predominantly white and middle-class. The other predominantly Black and working class. But demographics aside, what about the quality of education? The resources students have or don’t have. The classes. The extracurricular opportunities. This week, as a follow-up to our two-part series on the pe...

Last week, we traveled back in history to learn about Civil Rights-era efforts to integrate New York City’s segregated schools and we featured a speech from Reverend Milton Galamison, the leader of the 1964 NYC school boycott. In the episode, we fast forward to present day to take a look at what has changed (and what hasn’t) in the fight for integration. Ash’aa Khan takes us to Queens to hear a co...

It’s February 3, 1964, in New York City, and time is up. An umbrella of civil rights organizations — the Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE, the New York Urban League and the NAACP — have patiently negotiated and waited… and waited for the Board of Education to submit a thorough plan to integrate the city’s segregated schools. But the plan that comes forward in the 11th hour is weak: no timetabl...

Quiz time. Did a human write this episode intro, or was it AI? So, you may be wondering, what the heck is chatGPT? Well, it's basically a super smart computer program that can understand and respond to human language like a pro. And let me tell you, it's making waves in the education world! We're going to talk about all the cool ways chatGPT is being used in schools, from helping st...

Just before her senior year of high school, Kesar Gaba did something brave. She examined a very difficult period of her life and had a conversation with her mother about it for the first time. She wanted to see if a discussion like this could help her mother open up about her own struggles. Kesar recorded the conversation with her mother for the Summer Youth Podcast Academy in 2021. We’re airing K...

We are marking this year’s Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday with a special P.S. Weekly episode devoted to an aspect of MLK’s legacy that isn’t as regularly studied as his “I Have a Dream” speech or his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” We’re focusing on how MLK and other leaders of the Civil Rights Movement organized — a blueprint called the Six Steps of Nonviolent Social Change. In an education...

For several years in a row, the number of students in New York City schools experiencing homelessness has exceeded 100,000. This year, city schools have the mounting challenge of welcoming a growing number of recent migrants who are entering a youth shelter system that doesn’t have enough beds. To dig into the issue of youth homelessness, Miseducation producer Abe Levine and student reporter Fredl...

Earlier this year we collaborated with WNYC Studios on an in-depth series about a year of reporting from inside a divided Brooklyn school building trying to unite through sports. The series is called Keeping Score . If you missed it, definitely go back and check it out. Today’s episode is an update from two of the Miseducation reporters-turned-characters in the series, Mariah Morgan and Lauren Val...

When the principal emails you about a story you wrote in the student newspaper, it’s usually a sign of trouble. In Denisse Merino’s case, the email she received led to something very different. Denisse is a senior at Leadership and Public Service High School and writes for the school’s news site, Lead News . Her school is part of a small but growing cohort trying to reverse the trends in unequal s...

The New York State constitution promises “a system of free common schools, wherein all the children of this state may be educated." But what happens when that word — all — is tested? Roughly one in five NYC public school students has a learning disability. Some have particularly severe behavioral or mental health challenges requiring accommodations that the average school isn’t equipped to pr...

In a recent episode of his podcast Revisionist History , Malcolm Gladwell revisited one of the key concepts from his hit book Outliers . It deals with privilege in education, just not in the ways you typically hear about it. The story got really got us thinking, and so we thought we’d share it with you. This week, we’re airing parts of “Outliers, Revisited” from Revisionist History. Then, stick ar...

Most of us have had a teacher or teachers who made a huge impact on our lives. They helped shape us, opened our minds to new things, and took time to help us understand the world. Sometimes, it can be hard to show or really say how much you appreciate them and what they’ve done for you. In spite of the difficulties they faced during the pandemic showed up and showed out. So, we at Miseducation cam...

By Jadelyn Camey In late September, I attended a press conference at which schools Chancellor David Banks announced changes to the middle and high school admissions process. The headline was that students whose grades place them in the top 15% of their 7th grade class — or the top 15% citywide — will now receive priority access to about 100 “screened” public high schools. Questions have risen abou...

By Sabrina DuQuesnay In his ten months on the job as schools chancellor, David Banks has not been shy about naming the challenges he faces. Steep enrollment declines. Pandemic recovery. Budget cuts. He’s offered harsh critiques of the NYC school system and the bureaucracy that runs it. On Tuesday, Nov. 1 he sat down with a roundtable of student journalists, including a few Miseducation reporters,...