The Integrated Schools Podcast

If you listened to The Impacts of Testing Our Kids and Measuring Our Schools (Parts  1  and  2 ), you heard about some of the issues with using test scores or data aggregators to judge the quality of a school. But if not test scores, then what? Making a choice about school is a privilege, and with that privilege, comes a responsibility. How do you bring your values to that decision, when the infor...

Many local communities are engaged in conversations about how school quality should be determined and how that information should be shared. Those conversations take place in the shadow of GreatSchools.org – who provides a 1-10 rating for nearly every public school in the country. These ratings have a major impact on everything from  curriculum  to  housing prices . Matt Barnum  (Chalkbeat)  wrote...

In the first of two parts looking at how we measure and communicate school quality, and how that impacts our educational system, we’re joined by  Professor Jack Schneider.  He has been thinking about school ratings, and school quality for many years. He started the  Massachusetts Consortium for Innovative Educational Assessment , a coalition of school and district leaders working to reimagine scho...

Howard University Law School is often called the launching pad for Brown v Board. Thurgood Marshall taught there, Charles Hamilton Houston, who was, in many ways, the architect of the multi-year legal strategy that led to BvB, was a dean. Yet here, in 2019, the work that Howard launched is still incomplete. By many measures, our schools are as segregated, if not more, than they were before the una...

It is with the saddest possible hearts that we share the devastating news that our beloved Executive Director and Founder,  Courtney Everts Mykytyn , passed away on Monday afternoon. She was struck by a car in front of her house and was killed instantly. The driver was sober and stayed on the scene. It is being treated as an accident. Courtney started Integrated Schools and was the driving force b...

The work of creating a multiracial democracy – a democracy where power is truly shared, and equity is real – can feel overwhelming, depressing, futile even. But what if the tipping point for creating lasting change is only 3.5%? Dr. Chenoweth (Harvard University) found that no civil resistance campaign across the globe over the last century “failed after they had achieved the active and sustained...

Albert is a Taiwanese American father of three from Oakland, CA. His parents immigrated to the United States to give him “best” education they could. As he came to terms with the school options his privilege afforded him, he found himself in crisis. How to honor his family and all they sacrificed, while also honoring the ways his faith called him to justice – called him to do something about the b...

Intensive Parenting – helicopter, lawnmower, snowplow, free-range – is often pursued by white and privileged parents as a way to protect kids from failure and to ensure that they end up on the “winning” side of the vast economic inequality in our country. However, the ways that white and privileged parenting norms impact entire school communities often end up perpetuating existing disparities. We’...

We’re joined by  Dr. Kfir Mordechay , Assistant Professor at  Pepperdine University  and a research fellow at the  UCLA Civil Rights Project  to talk about gentrification and school segregation. This kick of to season 5 is a return to our usual podcast format of casual conversations, and this is one we’ve been wanting to tackle for quite some time. Gentrification comes up in discussions of school...

If you care about a multiracial democracy and if you believe that public schools are an important piece of this work, we need your support. This has been a volunteer effort and as our podcast is growing, and our desire to tell more stories and tell them better has grown, our costs have gone up. We aren’t interested in trying to sell you toothbrushes in the middle of our episodes, and we’d like to...

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.” Part 5 finds Beth starting her second year at the school across the interstate. Meanwhile, her district, like many across th...

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.” Beth and her daughters reflect back on the year at their new school -- the challenges, the differences, the joys. The transi...

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 expected. From...

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 and the former...

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 after scho...

Today, July 25th, is the 45th anniversary of the SCOTUS ruling on the  Milliken v. Bradley  case. We’re joined by  Michelle Adams , Constitutional Law Professor at  Cardozo School of Law , who is writing a book on this important and under-appreciated case. Based in Detroit, this case functionally halted the promise of Brown v Board of Education at the city limits, allowing all-white suburbs (creat...

We’re joined by  Matt Delmont . He’s the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor of History at Dartmouth College, and he wrote the book on busing – 2016’s  Why Busing Failed: Race, Media, and the National Resistance to School Desegregation . Given the prominence “busing” has had in discussions about school desegregation, particularly in light of the  exchange  between Kamala Harris and Joe Biden...

The Duke  Center for Documentary Studies  produces as podcast called  Scene On Radio . From February to August of 2017, they released a 14 part series called  Seeing White . Many discussions of race focus on anyone who isn’t White, leaving Whiteness as the default, or the norm. This series, as they say, turns the lens around to look at Whiteness directly – what does it mean? where did it come from...

While we are off preparing for a new season starting in the fall, we wanted to share a few of our favorite podcasts, so you don’t forget about us. We regularly hear that we should include student voices, and, while we are working on that for a future episode, in the mean time, we’re thrilled to be able to bring you an episode of  The Miseducation Podcast . This is a student driven podcast from New...

In this final episode of the series  Brown v. Board at 65: The Stories We Tell Ourselves , we take some time to grapple with the stories we have heard. Reflecting on what our guests have shared ( Dr. Rucker Johnson ,  Dr. Noliwe Rooks ,  Dr. Amanda Lewis ,  David Hinojosa , Greg and Carol), we talk with Anna about what we have learned and where we go from here. For the path forward, why does it ma...

In the fifth episode in our Brown v. Board at 65: 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 (not) come si...

For the fourth episode in our  Brown v. Board at 65: 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, David shares a history les...

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 65: 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 that hi...

For the second episode in our  Brown v. Board at 65: 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 65th anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court case,  Brown v. Board of Education  (1954), we are pleased to present a special 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. With the brilliance of some amazing guests, we unpack some of these...