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 Americans, but of your responsibilities… They do not rest with equal weight upon the shoulders of all. For...
Mar 03, 2021•1 hr 3 min•Season 6Ep. 3
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 fighting for integrated schools and communities, commissioned EPIC to create a show about school segregat...
Feb 17, 2021•1 hr 6 min•Season 6Ep. 2
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 slightly terrified. Thinking about presenting the work we do to the BEI audience pushed us to stop and co...
Feb 03, 2021•35 min•Season 6Ep. 1
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, finally, take a break. It is an all-volunteer team that helps put these episodes together. From ...
Oct 22, 2020•10 min•Season 5Ep. 23
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 from community, she believes that leadership can play a vital role in creating equitable learning envir...
Oct 07, 2020•59 min•Season 5Ep. 22
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 desegregation plans for fear of running afoul of that ruling. The Strength in Diversity Act provides grants to...
Sep 30, 2020•26 min•Season 5Ep. 21
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 sure that everyone gets the same inputs to start with. Through the work of her organization, PolicyLink ,...
Sep 16, 2020•58 min•Season 5Ep. 20
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 released an 8-part podcast documentary called School Colors . Spanning 150 years of history, it looks at ra...
Sep 02, 2020•1 hr 3 min•Season 5Ep. 19
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 about school in the fall. While he has great insights into the challenges to equity presented by COVID, he...
Aug 19, 2020•50 min•Season 5Ep. 18
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 might best be spent in this moment of crisis , and for parents to be paid to stay home to take care of th...
Aug 05, 2020•55 min•Season 5Ep. 17
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 case and its implications for today. Based in Detroit, the Milliken decision functionally halted the promi...
Jul 22, 2020•48 min•Season 5Ep. 16
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 enough to solve for equity, IntegrateNYC developed the 5 Rs of real integration. They are: Race and Enro...
Jul 09, 2020•39 min•Season 5Ep. 15
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 offers a chance to better understand the history of desegregation so that we might better conceive of how to...
Jun 10, 2020•1 hr•Season 5Ep. 14
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 and the role they can play for justice. We discuss the book, but also her personal journey from element...
May 21, 2020•59 min•Season 5Ep. 13
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 hope is that a more honest assessment of the history can be a first step towards real integration. LI...
May 17, 2020•4 min
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 anti-racist integration matters now more than ever. LINKS: Grading for Equity Recommendations – inspired b...
May 13, 2020•51 min•Season 5Ep. 12
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 parents can be helpful in this moment, and how we might think about what comes when this is all over. LI...
Apr 22, 2020•55 min•Season 5Ep. 11
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 through how we are thinking about this moment, for ourselves, our kids, and our communities. What do we...
Apr 03, 2020•51 min•Season 5Ep. 10
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 information available is so problematic? We’re joined by two mothers, Dana from Brooklyn and Meredith from M...
Mar 18, 2020•54 min•Season 5Ep. 9
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 about the ways GreatSchools ratings can nudge families towards schools with fewer Black and Brown studen...
Mar 04, 2020•56 min•Season 5Ep. 8
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 school assessment and accountability by including multiple measures of student engagement, student achievem...
Feb 19, 2020•40 min•Season 5Ep. 7
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 unanimous Brown v Board decision. The historical and ongoing segregation is core to educational and rac...
Feb 05, 2020•39 min•Season 5Ep. 6
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 behind it, but always insisted that it be about more than just her. While we will feel this loss every...
Jan 04, 2020•6 min•Season 5Ep. 5
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 participation of just 3.5% of the population.” Now we are at a unique historical moment to harness c...
Dec 18, 2019•22 min•Season 5Ep. 4
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 broken systems we live in. He shares his journey through a broadening definition of family, a convict...
Dec 11, 2019•53 min•Season 5Ep. 3
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’re joined by Dr. Jessica Calarco , Associate Professor of Sociology at Indiana University, who studi...
Nov 27, 2019•53 min•Season 5Ep. 2
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 segregation all the time and we are fortunate to have Dr. Mordechay to help us think about the possibilit...
Nov 13, 2019•45 min•Season 5Ep. 1
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 find new ways to engage with you, our listeners. And so, we hope the Patreon platform will allow us ...
Nov 06, 2019•8 min
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 the country, is in the midst of some upheaval – declining enrollment, school closures, consolidation. ...
Oct 18, 2019•39 min•Season 4Ep. 5
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 transitions may not have been easy, but they all have felt a personal growth… and are learning about diffe...
Oct 17, 2019•34 min•Season 4Ep. 4
