The Integrated Schools Podcast

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 politics of race and language, the importance of shared experiences and the deep fights for educational justice that continue to this day.

LINKS:

–San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez

–Richard Valencia

–The Lemon Grove Incident

–Mendez v. Westminster

–Hernandez v. Texas

–Santamaria v. Dallas ISD

–Patricia Gandara on the triple segregation of Latinx people

Join our Patreon to support this work, and connect with us and other listeners to discuss these issues even further.

Let us know what you think of this episode, suggest future topics, or share your story with us – @integratedschls on twitter, IntegratedSchools on Facebook, or email us [email protected].

The Integrated Schools Podcast was created by Courtney Mykytyn and Andrew Lefkowits.

This episode was produced by Andrew Lefkowits and Courtney Mykytyn. It was edited, and mixed by Andrew Lefkowits.

Music by Kevin Casey.

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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, and equitable policies become very difficult to institute. Brown v. Board focused on desegregating schools rather than integrating classrooms, but the story we tell about it is that it ended our racist school policies. While that may feel good, our “good intentions” do not absolve us from the impact of our actions.

LINKS:

• Amanda Lewis Race In The Schoolyard 
• Karolyn Tyson Integration Interrupted
• Charles Tilley on Opportunity Hoarding

Use these links or start at our Bookshop.org storefront to support local bookstores, and send a portion of the proceeds back to us.

Join our Patreon to support this work, and connect with us and other listeners to discuss these issues even further.

Let us know what you think of this episode, suggest future topics, or share your story with us – @integratedschls on twitter, IntegratedSchools on Facebook, or email us [email protected].

The Integrated Schools Podcast was created by Courtney Mykytyn and Andrew Lefkowits.

This episode was produced by Andrew Lefkowits and Courtney Mykytyn. It was edited, and mixed by Andrew Lefkowits.

Music by Kevin Casey.

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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.

While Dr. Rucker Johnson, in part 1, showed us some of the many benefits of desegregation, Dr. Rooks reminds us of many of the costs, especially to the Black community. She asks us to engage with these stories in order to understand the very real intent behind where we find ourselves today. It is only through changing the stories we tell, that we might envision a different, more equitable future for school integration.

Use these links or start at our Bookshop.org storefront to support local bookstores, and send a portion of the proceeds back to us.

Join our Patreon to support this work, and connect with us and other listeners to discuss these issues even further.

Let us know what you think of this episode, suggest future topics, or share your story with us – @integratedschls on twitter, IntegratedSchools on Facebook, or email us [email protected].

The Integrated Schools Podcast was created by Courtney Mykytyn and Andrew Lefkowits.

This episode was produced by Andrew Lefkowits and Courtney Mykytyn. It was edited, and mixed by Andrew Lefkowits.

Music by Kevin Casey.

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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 Integration Works. Using a longitudinal study of the children and grandchildren of Brown v. Board, Dr. Johnson shows us that desegregation did have profoundly important effects on individuals and communities even while we gave up on it too quickly.

Use these links or start at our Bookshop.org storefront to support local bookstores, and send a portion of the proceeds back to us.

Join our Patreon to support this work, and connect with us and other listeners to discuss these issues even further.

Let us know what you think of this episode, suggest future topics, or share your story with us – @integratedschls on twitter, IntegratedSchools on Facebook, or email us [email protected].

The Integrated Schools Podcast was created by Courtney Mykytyn and Andrew Lefkowits.

This episode was produced by Andrew Lefkowits and Courtney Mykytyn. It was edited, and mixed by Andrew Lefkowits.

Music by Kevin Casey.

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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:

1. As free labor and fundraisers.
2. Through education programs designed to help improve parenting
3. Through education programs designed for self improvement
4. Through meaningful parent / caregiver empowerment

This fourth form of parent engagement – parent empowerment, is the only form that he believes leads to school wide improvement for all kids. When done well, it can serve as an important tool for equity, but it requires that all parents feel empowered.

I’m joined by parent board member, Sarah Becker, to discuss what this looks like in practice, and how people with racial or economic privilege, who often enter schools with outsized empowerment, can act as allies.

LINKS:

• Intercultural Research Development Association
• Chicano Movement
• No Child Left Behind
• When Middle-Class Parents Choose Urban Schools: Class, Race, and the Challenge of Equity in Public Education by Lynn Posey-Maddox
• Despite The Best Intentions: How Racial Inequality Thrives in Good Schools by John B. Diamond and Amanda E. Lewis

Register for the Integrated Schools Book Club in July. We’ll be reading Heather McGhee’s The Sum of Us

Use these links or start at our Bookshop.org storefront to support local bookstores, and send a portion of the proceeds back to us.

Join our Patreon to support this work, and connect with us and other listeners to discuss these issues even further.

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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 about decentering Whiteness, it is about creating new forms of shared power, and it is about recognizing the full humanity of every kid.

Historically, the ways White &/or privileged people talk about “good” vs. “bad” schools, the choices we make, both individually and collectively, about where to educate our children, and the ways we show up when we do enroll in global-majority schools have served to maintain our advantages and in turn, continue to oppress others.

This didn’t happen by accident.

Todays episode is an edit of our first ever webinar- The Integrated Schools Movement: Where We Begin. In it, we explore how our schools got to where they are now, and what role we play in either maintaining or disrupting this system. Members of our all-volunteer crew share personal stories of enrolling our kids in global-majority schools, and the joys and missteps we experience while showing up as parents and community members.

LINKS:

• A video of the webinar
• Slides shared during the webinar
• The original resource list shared after the webinar:
• Native Land Finder
• Episode: White Supremacy and Black Educational Excellence: Hidden Stories of the Integration Movement – Integrated Schools podcast featuring a conversation with Dr. Vanessa Siddle Walker and Dr. Elizabeth McRae facilitated by Dani McClain
• Vanessa Siddle Walker: The Lost Education of Horace Tate
• Elizabeth McRae: Mothers of Massive Resistance
• Episode: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy
• The current levels of segregation in our schools.
• The wealth gap – from Brookings, and The Washington Post
• Richard Rothstein – The Color of Law
• Michelle Alexander – The New Jim Crow
• EdBuild on the $23 billion funding gap between districts serving predominantly students of color vs White students.
• David Kirkland
• Episode: Kirkland on Integration
• Rucker Johnson
• The Children of the Dream
• Episode – Rucker Johnson and the Grandchildren of Desegregation
• Dr Kfir Mordechay
• Episode: Gentrification
• Dr. Amanda Lewis
• Despite the Best Intentions: How Racial Inequality Thrives in Good Schools with John Diamond
• Episode: Desegregation without Integration
• Engage with Integrated Schools
• Find your local chapter
• Sign up for our Parent-to-Parent program
• Listen to the podcast
• Join our Patreon
• Join our Facebook group
• Check out our full resource list
• Sign up for Book Club

Use these links or start at our Bookshop.org storefront to support local bookstores, and send a portion of the proceeds back to us.

Join our Patreon to support this work, and connect with us and other listeners to discuss these issues even further.

Let us know what you think of this episode, suggest future topics, or share your story with us – @integratedschls on twitter, IntegratedSchools on Facebook, or email us [email protected].

We are a proud member of The Connectd Podcast Network.

The Integrated Schools Podcast was created by Courtney Mykytyn and Andrew Lefkowits.

This episode was produced, edited, and mixed by Andrew Lefkowits..

Music by Kevin Casey.

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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 nice things being things that most developed nations have managed to provide for their people – health care, parental leave, a social safety net, and, of course, a good school in every neighborhood.

Her journey took her across the country for conversations with all sorts of people, and led to the new book, The Sum of Us, which has been on the New York Times Bestseller’s list since was released. We are incredibly grateful to Heather McGhee for agreeing to come on the show in the midst of a serious promotional schedule. We are also honored that Integrated Schools makes an appearance in the book.

LINKS:

• The Sum Of Us
• Our Bookshop.org Storefront
• Demos – Public Policy “Think-and-Do” Tank
• Ta-Nehesi Coats – The Case for Reparations
• Dr. Gail Christopher
• HealOurCommunities.org
• Adrian Piper – Conceptual Artist
• Sherrilyn Ifill
• NAACP Legal Defense Fund
• Black Doll Test
• Debra Holoien
• Chase Bellingham and Matthew Hunt
• Kellogg Foundation
• The New Jim Crow – Michelle Alexander
• The Color of Law – Richard Rothstein
• Bryan Stevenson of Equal Justice Initiative

Don’t forget to register for our next webinar: How We Show Up, April 19th 5pm PDT / 8pm EDT. This free, 90 minute webinar will feature parents from Integrated Schools. We’ll be sharing personal stories of how we, as parents and caregivers with racial or economic privilege, work to center anti-racist integration when we arrive in integrating schools.

The Sum of Us is our next Book Club selection. Dates are in July, and you can register here.

Join our Patreon to support this work, and connect with us and other listeners to discuss these issues even further.

Let us know what you think of this episode, suggest future topics, or share your story with us – @integratedschls on twitter, IntegratedSchools on Facebook, or email us at [email protected].

The Integrated Schools Podcast was created by Courtney Mykytyn and Andrew Lefkowits.

This episode was produced, edited, and mixed by Andrew Lefkowits.

Music by Kevin Casey

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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 regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the White moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”

Formerly the director of litigation for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, and currently a law professor at Rutgers Law School, where she runs The Inclusion Project, Elise Boddie combines the expertise of a lawyer with the heart of a community organizer to advance educational justice. Focusing on the original promise of integration, the version hoped for by the Brown family in 1954, laid out in the Green Factors from Green v. School Board of New Kent County in 1968, and updated recently by IntegrateNYC and the 5Rs of Real Integration, her vision of integration aspires to create spaces where children can all live into their full humanity, not ignoring race, not defined by race, but in full view of race.

LINKS:

• Five Myths About School Segregation – Elise Boddie in The Washington Post
• Linda Brown and the Unfinished Work of School Integration – Elise Boddie in The New York Times
• Ordinariness as Equality – Elise Boddie on the harm of “Colorblindness”
• The Inclusion Project
• Green v. School Board of New Kent County
• NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund
• Elizabeth Anderson, U of Michigan
• The Imperative of Integration – Elizabeth Anderson
• Cutting School – Dr. Noliwe Rooks
• Mother’s of Massive Resistance – Dr. Elizabeth McRea
• Birthright Citizens – Dr. Martha Jones

Use these links or start at our Bookshop.org storefront to support local bookstores, and send a portion of the proceeds back to us.

Join our Patreon to support this work, and connect with us and other listeners to discuss these issues even further.

Let us know what you think of this episode, suggest future topics, or share your story with us – @integratedschls on twitter, IntegratedSchools on Facebook, or email us [email protected].

The Integrated Schools Podcast was created by Courtney Mykytyn and Andrew Lefkowits.

This episode was produced, edited, and mixed by Andrew Lefkowits.

Music by Kevin Casey.

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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, of those to whom much is given, much is required.”

More than 55 years later, reporter Meribah Knight, found a community just 3 miles away grappling with this very question with regards to the schools in the neighborhood. In particular, Warner Elementary (90% Black and 96% economically disadvantaged), and Lockeland Elementary (90% White and 3% economicially disadvantaged). These two schools, 1.2 miles apart, were starkly different, yet representatvie of so many schools and communities across the country.

Meribah joins us to discuss the series, why she felt compelled to tell this story, and how it has impacted her of life. Additionally, she shares an edit of the forth episode from the season.

LINKS

• The full series – The Promise
• Meribah Knight
• Bull Connor and the fire hoses
• MLK’s Letter From a Birmingham Jail
• John F. Kennedy’s Vanderbilt Convocation Address
• Nashville’s Desegregation Case – Kelly v. Board of Education
• Denver’s Desegregation Case – Keyes v School District No 1, Denver
• A detailed timeline of the Keyes case

Join our Patreon to support this work, and connect with us and other listeners to discuss these issues even further.

Let us know what you think of this episode, suggest future topics, or share your story with us – @integratedschls on twitter, IntegratedSchools on Facebook, or email us [email protected].

We are a proud member of The Connectd Podcast Network.

The Integrated Schools Podcast was created by Courtney Mykytyn and Andrew Lefkowits.

This episode was produced by Andrew Lefkowits. It was edited, and mixed by Andrew Lefkowits.

Music by Kevin Casey.

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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 segregation. The result was Nothing About Us, a 30 minute stage play written and performed by high school students.

The process begins with interviews of roughly 40 people about the topic. Ranging from researchers, to parents, to administrators, the goal is to hear from a wide range of stake holders. Those interviews are then transcribed and pieced together, along with some original writing, to create the show. Students recite the words spoken in the interviews, sing and rap, and create scenes from the stories told by the interviewees. The final show, featuring 5 students, with one prop and a handful of folding chairs can then be performed just about anywhere to a wide variety of audiences.

We’re incredibly fortunate to be able to share some clips from a film adaptation of that show today, as well as a conversation with one of the artistic directors of EPIC and two of the students who wrote and performed the piece. If you have ever doubted the importance of youth voice, this show declares, unequivicollay, that nothing about students done without their input, will be for them.

You can rent Nothing About Us on demand.

LINKS:

• EPIC Theatre Ensemble
• The Fifty State Conversation – Sign up today!
• Intetgrated Schools Advisory Board
• Matt Gonzales
• Matt Gonzales’s White Lips to White Ears
• IntegrateNYC‘s 5Rs of Real Integration
• The Promise from Nashville Public Radio

Join our Patreon to support this work, and connect with us and other listeners to discuss these issues even further.

Let us know what you think of this episode, suggest future topics, or share your story with us – @integratedschls on twitter, IntegratedSchools on Facebook, or email us [email protected].

We are a proud member of The Connectd Podcast Network.

The Integrated Schools Podcast was created by Courtney Mykytyn and Andrew Lefkowits.

This episode was produced by Andrew Lefkowits. It was edited, and mixed by Andrew Lefkowits.

Music by Kevin Casey.

Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy