The Integrated Schools Podcast

FROM 2019:  Beth is a mom of two grappling with race, parenting and her own privilege in America. Looking back over the past year, we follow Beth as she learns how the choices she makes for her daughters’ schooling shapes how she lives in her city… where she belongs, who she calls “WE.” In part 3, we look back at a year that has been transformative for Beth — but not necessarily in the ways she ex...

FROM 2019:  Beth is a mom of two grappling with race, parenting and her own privilege in America. Looking back over the past year, we follow Beth as she learns how the choices she makes for her daughters’ schooling shapes how she lives in her city… where she belongs, who she calls “WE.” In part 2, we find Beth two months into the school year grappling with the differences between the new school an...

FROM 2019:  Beth is a mom of two grappling with race, parenting and her own privilege in America. Looking back over the past year, we follow Beth as she learns how the choices she makes for her daughters’ schooling shapes how she lives in her city… where she belongs, who she calls “WE.” In Part 1 – Something feels very wrong… Beth wonders about her choice to send her two kids to the highly sought...

Largely considered to be one of the most diverse places in the world, Queens is heralded by its residents for the multitudes of ethnicities, languages, cultures and ways of life that exist there. But diversity isn’t the whole story, especially not in District 28. Mark and Max are back with Season 2 of School Colors.  Season 1  was set in Central Brooklyn and focused on gentrification, Black self d...

As Season 7 comes to close, Val and Andrew reflect on 17 episodes and share our most valuable takeaways and thoughts from this season, then we get into some juicy listener questions, as well as some announcements! Spoiler alert! Val has agreed to return for Season 8!! As we reflect on the season, we have to take a moment to say thank you to a bunch of people who have made this season possible. Fir...

When the backlash against “CRT” started, we thought it would blow over. It felt as though the attacks were in such bad faith that they didn’t even deserve a response. With nearly  35 states  at least considering some type of classroom censorship bill, clearly, we were wrong. And yet, the question of what to do about it felt daunting to take on. And then, we found  HEAL Together , an initiative fro...

Some of the most meaningful episodes we record for this show are the conversations we have with parents and caregivers reflecting on the choices they make for their kids and their own learning journeys. Our  last episode  with  Dr. Chantal Hailey  examined the role of anti-Black racism in school preferences across racial identities. One of the themes was the many ways that anti-Blackness shows up...

Dr. Chantal A. Hailey  is an Assistant Professor in the  Department of Sociology  at The University of Texas at Austin. Her research is at the intersections of race and ethnicity, stratification, urban sociology, education, and criminology. She is particularly interested in how micro decision-making contributes to larger macro segregation and stratification patterns and how racism creates, sustain...

Last episode,  Carol Anderson on White Rage , was a lot, so we’re taking today’s episode to discuss. LINKS: White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Nation’s Divide We Are Not Yet Equal  – a young readers version of White Rage One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America. Eye’s Off The Prize  – Dr. Anderson’s 2003 book o...

“Since the days of enslavement, African Americans have fought to gain access to quality education. Education can be transformative. It reshapes the health outcomes of a people; it breaks the cycle of poverty; it improves housing conditions; it raises the standard of living. Perhaps, most meaningfully, educational attainment significantly increases voter participation. In short, education strengthe...

Founded in 2021, the  Center for Antiracist Education’s  (CARE) mission is to equip antiracist educators with the knowledge and curriculum to create schools and classrooms that push back on the destructive legacy of racism. Our co-host Val, serves as their  academic director  in her day job. They recently released a  framework  for antiracist education that provides teachers and school leaders wit...

We keep a running list of ideas for episodes – topics to cover, guests we’d like to interview, conversations with parents we’d like to have – and near the top of that list, for far longer than we’d care to admit, has been a conversation about Native and Indigenous education. Finding the right voices to tell the right stories is always a challenge, but, if we’re being honest, it felt somehow accept...

Heather McGhee has been in  public policy for the past 20 years , largely focused on economics. After nearly 16 years at Demos, a “think-and-do” tank, including four years as president, she realized that despite incredibly compelling economic research, at times, decision makers made decisions counter to what the best evidence showed. She took a leave of absence as president, and embarked on a jour...

Angela Berkfield, a White woman living in Brattleboro, Vermont, was deeply committed to social justice. In 2013, she was a co-founder of The Root Social Justice Center, a hub for social justice organizing in Vermont. From food insecurity, to youth empowerment, they have been focused on racial justice organizing, community advocacy, and relationship building for nearly a decade. In 2014, a friend o...

Listeners regularly reach out with questions – things that they are seeing in their own neighborhoods, things that we haven’t addressed, but should, etc. For the final episode of 2021, we thought we’d answer as many as we could. Thank you to everyone who sent in questions. If we didn’t get to your question, or if there is something else on your mind, let us know so we can include it in a future “m...

Back in April of 2020 we had a conversation with two teachers, Kara in the Minneapolis area, and Zoe in Philadelphia. They shared their struggles with shifting to remote school, trying to reach their students to provide devices, hot spots, and food, and the challenge of supporting the students with the greatest needs through the early days of the COVID crisis. Today, it’s easy for parents to feel...

Dr. Sarah-Soonling Blackburn is an educator, speaker, and professional development specialist. Growing up in a mixed race, Asian and White family, and spending most of her childhood in various countries in Asia, ideas of belonging have always had salience for her. From the classroom to Learning for Justice, her work has focused on the things that help students feel seen and included. She joins us...

If you think about a “segregated school”, what image comes to mind? Quite often, the cultural narrative says that that is a school with almost exclusively students of color. What about a school with 98% White students? Is that a “segregated school”? While we don’t often think of it that way, it is clearly segregated.  Tomás Monarrez  is an economist by training. As he was studying the question of...

In 1954,  Louis Redding , Delaware’s first Black attorney, joined the legal team at the NAACP to argue the Brown v Board case. Having agued two of the lower court cases that were incorporated into the Brown case, he was a key member of the team, along with Thurgood Marshall, who won perhaps the mostly widely known and celebrated court case ever. Sixty years later, his grandson,  Stefan Lallinger ,...

The very  first episode  of the Integrated Schools Podcast featured a conversation between our late founder, Courtney Mykytyn, and two mothers who were early in their journeys toward anti-racist school integration. Since then, Anna and Sarah have continued to be influential members of the Integrated Schools community, and both found themselves moving over the past 18 months. While both of their fa...

In 2016,  Val Brown  recognized a silence in the education community regarding issues of race, and a gap in learning opportunities for educators. In response she founded  #ClearTheAir , a platform for educators to learn about the intersections of history, racism, and education. In 2019, she reached out to Integrated Schools to see if we might walk this road towards anti-racist school integration t...

From the time  Courtney Martin  strapped her daughter, Maya, to her chest for walks around her neighborhood, she was curious about Emerson Elementary, a public school down the street from her Oakland home. She learned that White families in their gentrifying neighborhood largely avoided the majority-Black, poorly-rated school. As she began asking why, a journey of a thousand moral miles began. Cou...

One hundred and twenty five years ago this week, The Supreme Court announced its decision in the case of  Plessy v Ferguson . The case infamously declared that separate but equal was constitutional. The setting for the case was a train car, but the ramifications on society were profound. And while the  Brown v Board  decision 63 years later did away with some of those ramifications, in many ways,...

In the fifth episode in our  Brown v. Board at 67: The Stories We Tell Ourselves  series, we step away from scholarship to take a moment to listen.  I Hope They Hear it in Our Voices  is a conversation with two Black parents who live in different parts of the U.S. and who have had very different — yet very similar — school experiences. Greg and Carol tell us a lot about how far we have come since...

For the fourth episode in our  Brown v. Board at 67: The Stories We Tell Ourselves  series, we talk with Civil Rights attorney  David Hinojosa . School segregation is too often painted as binary issue between Black and White people; learning other histories shows that this is far from true. Complicating the picture of what preceded and came as a result of Brown v. Board, Mr. Hinojosa shares a hist...