The Integrated Schools Podcast

Dr. Amanda Lewis ( Despite the Best Intentions: How Racial Inequality Thrives in Good Schools , co-authored with  John Diamond ) joins us for this third episode of our  Brown v. Board at 67: The Stories We Tell Ourselves  series.  Dr. Lewis’s  research takes her to a school that is desegregated on paper but segregated within the building. It is a school, like many, with “race neutral” policies tha...

For the second episode in our  Brown v. Board at 67: The Stories We Tell Ourselves  series, we talk with  Dr. Noliwe Rooks  (Cornell). Her book,  Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education , as well as some of her more recent research around the pushback to school desegregation from communities of color and the decimation of the Black teaching corps following Brown...

As we approach the 67th anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court case,  Brown v. Board of Education  (1954), we are revisiting our series looking at the stories we tell ourselves about Brown v. Board. The way we understand this case and its legacies do the work of making sense of our past and mapping out our future. In this first episode, we are joined by  Dr. Rucker Johnson  (UC Berkeley). Dr. J...

Aurelio Montemayor  has been organizing parents for decades. His work at the  Intercultural Research Development Association,  or IDRA, as a family engagement coordinator has focused on a specific type of parent engagement, known as parent empowerment. He defines the four ways parents are typically engaged in schools as: As free labor and fundraisers. Through education programs designed to help im...

Our country has, at times, and in fits and starts, worked toward desegregation, but never meaningfully worked toward real integration. Desegregation is about the moving of bodies, the demographic percentages in a school building. Integration is about, in the words of  David Kirkland , “ fundamentally working to organize our society in a different way, where our differences are seen as spaces that...

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...

Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter From a Birmingham Jail is well known for its reflections on justice. Quotes such as “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” and “Justice too long delayed is justice denied”, are well known and celebrated, but there’s another section of the letter focused on King’s disappointment with the White moderate. He says, “I must confess that over the last few...

Season 2 of WPLN’s  The Promise  takes on one of the contentious topics in america, what has been deemed as the “Great Equalizer”, but more and more feels like the Greate Divider: public eductaion. In May of 1963, President Kennedy  addressed  the graduates of Vanderbilt University (a full year before they would admit their first Black student), and said, “I speak to you … not of your rights as Am...

The  Epic NEXT Program  tasks 15-20 high school students with researching, writing, and performing a play about a social issue, usually related to educational justice. The idea, is that those most impacted by the system, are those most likely to come up with meaningful solutions, and that theater can be used as tool for social change. Back in 2018,  New York Appleseed , an advocacy organization fi...

We’re back! Kicking off season 6 with a webinar hosted by  The Black Educators Initiative  (BEI), and a chance to share a bit of our thinking about why we do the work we do at Integrated Schools. BEI, as a project of  Urban Teachers , is working to grow the Black teaching corps. When executive director,  Dr. Robert Simmons , invited us to participate in their speaker series, we were honored, and s...

On November 13th, 2019, we started Season 5 of this podcast. Our definition of “season” has pretty much always just meant as many episodes as we can make before we need a break, and we haven’t really taken a break since last November. This episode, the 23rd of the season is admittedly a bit of self-referential navel gazing, but I wanted to take just a bit of your time to wrap up the season before...

We were just in your feeds a week ago with  Congressman Bobby Scott , but we couldn’t wait to get this episode out. Dr. Ann Ishimaru  is a professor at the  University of Washington in Seattle , where her work focuses on the intersection of leadership, school – community relationships, and education equity. With a focus on both formal power structures, and on the more informal power that can come...

The Strength in Diversity Act passed the House of Representatives on Sept 15th, 2020. Coming out of The Committee on Education and Labor, chaired by Congressman Bobby Scott, the bill aims to assist localities that want to attempt voluntary desegregation plans, do that constitutionally. Since the Supreme Court's decision in the Parents Involved case from 2007, many districts have avoided desegr...

For  Angela Glover Blackwell , a brief stint at the  Rockefeller Foundation  brought to light a fundamental difference in how we think about driving positive change, and fighting for justice abroad versus here at home. The international focus was on equity – what are the outcomes we hope to achieve, and how do we back into the inputs required? The national focus was on equality – how do we make su...

Brooklyn Deep  is the media arm of  The Brooklyn Movement Center , a Black-led, membership-based organization of primarily low-to-moderate income Central Brooklyn residents. They work to build power and pursue self-determination in Bedford-Stuyvesant & Crown Heights by nurturing local leadership, waging campaigns and winning concrete improvements in people’s lives. In 2019, Brooklyn Deep relea...

JPB Gerald  began his career as an English language teacher. Bothered by the inherent racism he saw in the field, and reflecting on his own upbringing in predominantly White, “good” schools, he broadened his academic interests to race and Whiteness. Currently a doctoral student at  CUNY — Hunter College , JPB has been writing and doing interviews for many outlets in the midst of conversations abou...

Dr. Shayla Reese Griffin  is the co-founder of  The Justice Leaders Collaborative , an author, educator, and mother. As the challenges of school for the fall have come into focus, finding solutions based in equity has been a struggle. Dr. Griffin has written about it, calling for space in buildings to be  prioritized to those with the highest needs , for us to consider  where our time and energy m...

July 25th will mark the 46th anniversary of the SCOTUS ruling on the  Milliken v. Bradley  case. Today, we revisit our episode from a year ago about this important and under-appreciated case. Joined by  Michelle Adams , Constitutional Law Professor at  Cardozo School of Law , who is writing  Soul Force: Detroit, The Supreme Court, and the Epic Battle for Racial Justice in America,  we discuss the...

We’re joined by Karla and Jedidah – two high school students in New York City who are leaders at IntegrateNYC. This youth led organization fights for integration and equity in all NYC schools. From protest to policy, they center student voice because students are the ones most directly impacted by the segregation, and the ones with the most at stake. Recognizing that desegregation alone isn’t enou...

White Supremacy and Black Educational Excellence: Hidden Stories of the Integration Movement The National Coalition for School Diversity  serves as the hub of the school integration movement. While their annual conference was postponed due to COVID, the  keynote panel  was held virtually. A conversation conceived in honor of Integrated Schools founder and former podcast co-host, Courtney, it offer...

The Reverend,  Dr. Jennifer Harvey  is a parent, a writer, an educator, and an activist. Her 2018 book  Raising White Kids: Bringing Up Children in a Racially Unjust America  offers age-appropriate insights for teaching children how to address racism when they encounter it and tackles tough questions about how to help white kids be mindful of racial relations while understanding their own identity...

Last year, leading up the 65th anniversary, we put together a 6 part mini-series called  “The Stories We Tell Ourselves – Moving From Desegregation to Integration” . It is in no way a comprehensive history, but hopefully it complicates the stories we tell about Brown v Board. These stories and others about our past desegregation efforts have a huge impact on how we interact with school today, Our...

Matt Gonzales  is an educational justice advocate and Director of the  Integration and Innovation Initiative  at the NYU Metro Center. We are incredibly fortunate to have him as a member of the Integrated Schools  Advisory Board.  We had a chance to sit down with Matt this week and talk to him about the implications of COVID-19, what building equity could look like now and in the future, and why a...

Teaching with an equity mindset is a challenge in the best of times, but this crisis has added another layer of challenge to an already daunting task. We’re joined by two high school teachers – Zoe from Philadelphia, and Kara from Minneapolis. They discuss the challenges of moving to online learning while trying to keep equity at the forefront. We discuss the ways that White and/or privileged pare...

Given the reality of social distancing, how do we reconcile a desire for educational justice, a drive for anti-racist education, with the fact that we’re stuck at home trying, or maybe not, to educate our kids in vastly inequitable circumstances. This is not a How-To guide, but a conversation about trying to live our values in challenging times. Garrett Bucks joins us, along with Anna, to talk thr...