School Colors

Here’s a preview of another podcast, Some of My Best Friends Are, from Pushkin Industries. Harvard professor Khalil Gibran Muhammad and journalist Ben Austen are friends, one Black and one white, who grew up together on the South Side of Chicago. On Some of My Best Friends Are, Khalil and Ben, along with their guests, have critical conversations that are at once personal, political, and playful, about the absurdities and intricacies of race in America.

In this preview, Khalil and Ben talk with author Saladin Ambar about his new book, Stars and Shadows: The Politics of Interracial Friendship from Jefferson to Obama. Through famous bonds ranging from Ella Fitzgerald and Marilyn Monroe, to Barack Obama and Joe Biden, they explore the dynamics, benefits, and difficulties of cultivating interracial friendships. Hear more from Some of My Best Friends Are at https://podcasts.pushkin.fm/sbfs2?sid=colors.

This is the second of two bonus episodes recorded live at the Queens Public Library on December 15, 2022. After interviewing New York City Schools Chancellor David C. Banks, Mark and Max reflected on the Chancellor’s remarks and took questions about the making of School Colors, why they chose District 28, and what they learned.

This event was co-produced with The CITY and Chalkbeat New York, and moderated by Chalkbeat’s Reema Amin.

This is the first of two bonus episodes recorded live at the Queens Public Library on December 15, 2022. Mark and Max interviewed New York City Schools Chancellor David C. Banks. Banks was appointed by Mayor Eric Adams and is just finishing his first year on the job.

The previous leadership of the NYC DOE had supported diversity planning processes in five school districts across the city, including District 28, the subject of School Colors Season 2. Once Covid-19 hit New York, these diversity plans fizzled out, but they were never officially cancelled. So we started by asking Chancellor Banks if he thought diversity planning would ever come back — and if not, why not?

This event was co-produced with The CITY and Chalkbeat New York, and moderated by Chalkbeat’s Reema Amin.

Over the course of this season, we've explored a rich history and complicated present — but what about the future?

In this episode, we catch up with parents who became activated on both sides of the debate over the diversity plan. Since the diversity plan never came to fruition, what’s to be done about the inequalities that persist in District 28?

"I know this work can take you under if you let it, so I try not to let it take me."

Pat Mitchell is the beloved longtime principal of P.S. 48, an elementary school in South Jamaica. She cares deeply about her students, many of whom struggle with poverty and unstable housing. While school was often a place of stability for her students and their families, COVID-19 changed everything.

In this special episode, we follow the first pandemic school year through the eyes of Ms. Mitchell.

In 2018, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a plan to replace the Specialized High School Admissions Test, or SHSAT. For years, advocates had argued that the test favored white and Asian students while systematically keeping Black and Latinx kids out of the city's most elite and well-resourced high schools. But many Asian American parents felt targeted by the mayor’s plan, and they mobilized to defend the test.

So when the District 28 diversity planning process was rolled out a year later, many Chinese immigrant parents in Queens saw this as “just another attack." This time, however, they were ready to fight back.

The SHSAT is just one example of "merit-based" admissions to advanced or "gifted" education programs. These programs can start as early as kindergarten and they have become a third rail in New York City politics. In this episode, we ask why gifted education gets so much attention, even though it affects relatively few students. How do we even define what it means to be "gifted"? And by focusing on these programs, whose needs do we overlook?

In some ways, this entire season was prompted by the parents who organized against diversity planning in District 28. So in this episode, we let the opposition speak for themselves.

Who are these parents? What do they believe and why? And why were they ready to fight so hard against a plan that didn't exist?

Queens has changed a lot in the last few decades — and so has District 28. New immigrant communities have taken root and the district is, on the whole, pretty diverse. But most Black folks still live on the Southside, and the schools below Liberty Avenue continue to struggle.

A lot of parents and educators agree that there needs to be some change in District 28. But the question remains: what kind of change? When we asked around, more diversity wasn't necessarily at the top of everybody's list. In fact, from the north and south, we heard a lot of the same kind of thing: "leave our kids where they are and give all the schools what they need."

So what do the schools on the Southside really need? And what’s at stake for Southside families when we "leave those kids where they are" and fail to meet their needs for generations?

Until recently, District 28 was characterized by a white Northside, and a Black Southside. For more than a hundred years, we've seen how conflicts around housing, schools, and resources have played out mostly along this racial divide. So how did District 28 go from being defined by this racial binary, to a place where people brag about its diversity?

In this episode, we take a deep dive into two immigrant communities — Indo-Caribbeans and Bukharian Jews — that have settled in Queens: how they got here, what they brought with them, and what they make of their new home's old problems.

So much of the present day conversation about District 28 hinges on the dynamic between the Northside and the Southside. But why were the north and the south wedged into the same school district to begin with? When we asked around, no one seemed to know.

What we do know are the consequences. As soon as the district was created, white and Black folks looked over the Mason-Dixon line and saw each other not as neighbors, but as competitors for scarce resources. And the Southside always seemed to get the short end of the stick.

On this episode: how the first three decades of District 28 baked in many of the conflicts and disparities that persist to this day.