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 after school in her neighborhood. What does it mean for one family to make a different kind of decisi...
Jul 06, 2022•32 min•Season 8Ep. 1
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 determination, and dug deep into the history of Bedford-Stuyvesant. Season 2 finds Mark and Max in Quee...
Jun 24, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Season 7Ep. 18
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. First of all, all of our guests, who have shared their research, their stories, and their personal refl...
May 25, 2022•37 min•Season 7Ep. 17
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 from Race Forward . H.E.A.L. (Honest Education Action & Leadership) Together, is building a movement o...
May 11, 2022•59 min•Season 7Ep. 16
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 in White communities, but also in communities of color. We deeply believe in the power of multiracial di...
Apr 27, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Season 7Ep. 15
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, sustains, and exacerbates racial, educational, and socioeconomic inequality. Her recent paper, Racial Preferen...
Apr 13, 2022•1 hr 8 min•Season 7Ep. 14
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 on the shift from a fight for human rights to civil rights at the NAACP Use these links or start at our ...
Mar 30, 2022•31 min•Season 7Ep. 13
“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 strengthens a democracy.” Dr. Carol Anderson is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Stud...
Mar 16, 2022•1 hr 7 min•Season 7Ep. 12
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 with concrete, actionable steps to take in their journey towards being antiracist. These steps are organized ...
Mar 02, 2022•55 min•Season 7Ep. 11
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 acceptable that we hadn’t gotten to it yet. The conversation we haver to share today completely changed th...
Feb 16, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Season 7Ep. 10
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 journey to try to answer a simple question – Why can’t we have nice things? We, being all Americans, and ...
Feb 08, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Season 7Ep. 9
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 of Angela’s, Annique, asked her if she would be willing to do trainings for parents about how to talk...
Feb 02, 2022•57 min•Season 7Ep. 8
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 “mailbag” episode – hello@integratedschools.org. As we enter the holiday season and folks are thinking...
Dec 15, 2021•54 min•Season 7Ep. 7
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 like things are almost back to normal in schools. However, in many ways, teachers are feeling the co...
Dec 01, 2021•49 min•Season 7Ep. 6
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 to discuss the myth of the Model Minority and helps contextualize the role of Asian American identit...
Nov 17, 2021•56 min•Season 7Ep. 5
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 school and housing segregation at the Urban Institute , he was struck by the ways that the field of ec...
Nov 03, 2021•58 min•Season 7Ep. 4
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 , found himself teaching at school in New Orleans with over 90% students of color. This segregation was...
Oct 20, 2021•59 min•Season 7Ep. 3
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 families had moved in the past, this was the first time they engaged in that process with a deep commitm...
Oct 06, 2021•59 min•Season 7Ep. 2
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 together. However, she had a question – as a Black mom, she asked, “do I belong at Integrated Schools? I...
Sep 22, 2021•32 min•Season 7Ep. 1
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. Courtney journey led her to Integrated Schools and our founder, Courtney Everts Mykytyn , who told her: “...
Aug 04, 2021•1 hr 11 min
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, Plessy remains with us today. Coming in the wake of the civil war, the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments m...
May 26, 2021•54 min•Season 6Ep. 13
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 Brown v. Board, about how much work we still have to do, and the very real costs of “access to resources...
May 14, 2021•54 min•Season 6Ep. 12
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 history lesson on the segregation of Latinx communities across the US since the late 1800s. We discuss the ...
May 13, 2021•44 min•Season 6Ep. 11
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 that hide the very real racialized practices in the building. Add to that a dose of opportunity hoarding, an...
May 12, 2021•45 min•Season 6Ep. 10
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 v. Board, provide context in which to understand the full range of outcomes from the court decision. Whi...
May 11, 2021•38 min•Season 6Ep. 9
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. Johnson shares some of the research and findings in his book, Children of the Dream: Why School Integrati...
May 10, 2021•35 min•Season 6Ep. 8
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 improve parenting Through education programs designed for self improvement Through meaningful parent / ca...
Apr 28, 2021•52 min•Season 6Ep. 7
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 we not only celebrate but LET BE, where this forms the vibrancy of our being as a society .” It is ab...
Apr 14, 2021•48 min•Season 6Ep. 6
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 journey to try to answer a simple question – Why can’t we have nice things? We, being all Americans, and ...
Mar 31, 2021•57 min•Season 6Ep. 5
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 years I have been gravely disappointed with the White moderate. I have almost reached the regrettabl...
Mar 17, 2021•50 min•Season 6Ep. 4
