Let’s stop pretending we desegregated schools

Family choices in education

0:00What's good? You're listening to Code Switch from NPR. I'm Gene Demby. Thank you for doing this. I'm going to ask you a question that we ask everybody when they come on the show. Tell us who you are and what it is you do. It's going to be weird. My name is Stephanie Demby. I am a teaching artist. I'm a dance educator in the Philadelphia Public School System. I'm also the choreographer for the Philadelphia U.S. Cheerleaders.

0:34Yes, you are. And I teach at several studios, local studios in Philadelphia. And you are my twin sister. Yes. Relevant to this conversation. If you just got to say that up front.

0:53Steph and I grew up in the same house in Philly, obviously. We went to the same public schools. The kind where a lot of kids are poor. And we were some of those poor kids back in the day. We both turned out okay. I mean, I'm biased now, I mean, but of course I'd say that. But today, our own kids are growing up with more resources than we had. And we are making very different choices for the kinds of educations we want for them. Steph's daughter, my niece, is 12 years old, which is wild for me to think about.

1:28But my sister decided really early on that she was going to send her daughter to private school. My son is about to turn five. And my wife and I decided to send him to the Title I school right down the street.

1:43Title I, if you don't know, means a large number of the school students live below the poverty line. These days, that's most public schools in the United States. My sister teaches in one of those Title I schools. The same small selective arts high school that she graduated from and that she loves. And she said the kids there and the school both need so much. So much so that she could see her daughter getting swallowed up by it if she ever went there.

2:14But her daughter, who is a dancer, wants to go to that school. I do get, like, the side eye when, you know, people find out that she wants to come to my school. And I'm like, oh, absolutely not.

Navigating private school options

2:29So, my sister and I talk about family stuff all the time. But somehow, I just never asked her why she sent her daughter to private school. Because we're public school kids, right? I didn't really know that black people really go to private schools until I went to Howard. I'm like, oh, because that's all, you know, like, we didn't really know a lot of kids that went to private schools. Stephanie knew her daughter well enough to know that she probably wasn't going to do well in big classes. This is why I looked at primarily private schools because they have smaller classrooms.

2:59Now, there are some neighborhood schools that are smaller, that are good. But, of course, they're good because there are certain neighborhoods. These neighborhoods are gentrified. Steph, as it happens, was zoned out of those schools nearby with the best reputations. Schools that just happen to be much whiter than the rest of the city's public school system. She couldn't just send her daughter to the local traditional public elementary and middle school we went to growing up because they got closed down because of low attendance.

3:31And so she felt like she didn't really have a public option. So she chose private school. And obviously, she was going to have to figure out the money part of it. But she decided to look at some of the very expensive schools in the old money suburbs right on the edge of the city. And she knew after she went to those schools that those would not be a good fit. I went to the pre-pay class and it was like 12, 15 kids, one Asian girl, everyone else was white. And I was like, absolutely not. Yeah. Absolutely not.

4:03So you'd have been trekking all across the city with your daughter to drop her to a classroom. Right. Where she's the only black child. Right. Steph eventually settled on a private school that wasn't too far away. It was full of upper middle class families, but it was really small, like 15 kids in each grade. They even offer financial aid. And bonus, they actually had some black teachers and some black families. So that's where Steph and her daughter landed.

Reckoning with school integration

4:30And I wanted to get into this with her because, like a lot of people over the last week or so, I've been mulling over Nicole Hannah-Jones' blockbuster story in the New York Times. So if you haven't seen it, in that piece, she very candidly reckons with the choices she and her husband made 10 years ago to send their daughter, Najah, to the poor, underfunded, mostly black school in their Brooklyn neighborhood. Right. But Nicole Hannah-Jones is a MacArthur Genius Grant winner, a star reporter at the New York Times, a journalism professor at Howard University.

5:07People like her, rich or upper middle class, with resources and connections, they don't send their kids to schools like that. And that was kind of the point, right? They hoped that they could bring their influence, their connections, to maybe move the needle for the other black kids at that neglected school who didn't have the things that her daughter had. And of course, a lot of people had feelings about that choice, not the least of whom was their daughter.

5:37Nicole Hannah-Jones and her now 16-year-old daughter argued about that choice on an episode of This American Life. Everyone's not your kid. You can't save everyone who doesn't want to be saved. That's what you think, though? You think, like, other kids don't want better? I'm not saying that I want it better than all the kids in my school that wanted better, wanted better. There's no benefit that came out of you putting me in those schools. There's no benefit at all. Now, Najah is 16, so, you know what I mean, resenting her parents, that's, like, part of the deal, right?

6:11That's to be expected. But my sister Stephanie told me she saw that part of it coming. Five minutes into me reading that piece, I was like, this is going to be a disaster. Like, in my mind, I'm like, how didn't she realize that this was not going to work out? So, yes, I understand your mission. But what happens once your child leaves the school? Is the work still being done? Like, I kind of understood her, but being on the other side of it, knowing what her daughter was experiencing, saying that they're not getting homework, a child saying that, you know, like, the chaos, and, like, I would never want to put my child in that environment.

7:01But, you know, like, I would never do that, because what am I doing for my kids? Like, I understand the work, but what am I doing for my child?

7:11Nicole Hannah-Jones' daughter was asking for a better education at schools that were predominantly white, which is kind of what my sister chose for my niece. Because I'm thinking I'm making a good decision. Like, yeah, she's in this predominantly white school. There's enough Black people for me and for her, what I'm thinking. But I also want to make sure that, you know, she's getting what she needs and doesn't feel any type of way, because her friends go to these, you know, Black schools, and they're doing, they're talking about this, and they're talking about that.

7:42And I'm like, am I doing the right thing? Am I doing the right thing? Like, almost every Black parent I know has asked themselves some version of that question about their child's education at some point. Nicole Hannah-Jones laid out her choice to be scrutinized in the pages of the New York Times. But what our piece underlined to me is that there are no good choices. Like, my sister went private, my child is in a public school, but if you maneuver to send your child to a so-called good school, you will have to help steal them to navigate the skepticism, if not outright hostility they are likely to face there.

8:26Send your child to a neighborhood school, and you do that knowing that their school is going to deal with all the downstream effects of neglect and divestment from Black neighborhoods. There's just no conveyor belt of formal education that you can just plop your Black child onto and assume they're going to turn out okay on the other end. But we are 70 years out from Brown v. Board of Education, and Black parents are still trying to navigate the failures of our public school system.

8:58Because, and let's not get it twisted, we never really desegregated public schools, which is what Brown was supposed to do. And so we're left with a situation where we're all coming up with these individual workarounds for our kids. And we won't even know everything that came with that choice until much later, when our kids are good and grown. I mean, that's 50 years ago, and I'm still mad at my mother about that year. Like, why would you send me to the ghetto school?

Growing up between two worlds

9:22Noliwe Brooks knows all about this. She's a professor at Brown who wrote the book Integrated, How American Schools Failed Black Children. But before Noliwe studied the long tale of failed desegregation, she lived it.

9:41My mother sent me to a high-poverty majority Black school in the sixth grade, in San Francisco. They got divorced when I was five, and the custody arrangement was I would spend one year in Florida with my father and that set of grandparents, and the next year in San Francisco with my mother. So you were toggling back and forth from, like, the West to the South, the—oh, wow. I learned comprehensively all kinds of ways to be a Black American. Because I would tell you, folks will say, like, Black folks in the diaspora war. I'm like, Black people in the U.S. are not all the same.

10:13Absolutely. A thousand percent. A thousand percent. Well, I did not grow up in a static kind of understanding of who Black people were. The year that I was in the fifth grade in Florida, I integrated a predominantly white school. Florida took until the 1970s to actually let Black children in their schools after Brown v. Boer. Florida dragged their feet until into the 70s, so 1972. And that was you? On a bus with Black kids on the bus, yes.

10:43Wow. The Klan was a big mover in Florida for why they wasn't integrated, like, unabashedly. Like, you know, like they were out there saying, you know, good Klan people, you can't let this happen. But by the time, by 1972, the Klan had stood down. So when I—my year in the fifth grade integrating the predominantly white school, public school, was completely uneventful. I was the only Black child, but there were no pickets. Police and National Guard were not necessary. I had that long bus ride that everybody I know, Black in higher education, who's from the U.S., has this experience.

11:17Like, we all got bused to white school, which is what—many of us were in gifted and talented programs. The path looked the same. But yes, I was the Black child. I have my fifth grade picture of me with the Afro and a bunch of little white kids. Sixth grade, back in San Francisco, we lived on Petrero Hill, which at the time was the hood. It is not now. We lived across the street from public housing. They've turned it into fancy condos now at the time. It was just real regular. It was a very regular hood.

11:48And the neighborhood school, because my mother had gone to school in San Francisco. And she just didn't want a bunch of drama about where to send me to school. And she actually thought, it's neighborhood school. I went to public school. What's the big deal? And she in no way understood the disruptions and declines, much of which had to do with the way that out in California they resisted integration. A lot of the methods that in San Francisco they came up with for how we don't actually want to redraw district lines, to do the things we know work.

12:20We just want to figure out how to have them be somewhere. So it seems like you had, in your middle school years, you were having these two parallel experiences of resistance to integration of schools. Yes. I mean, that's 50 years ago. And I'm still mad at my mother about that year. Like, why would you send me to ghetto school? Oh, man. Like, here I was, a big reader. I had never, no one had ever, I had never had a teacher tell me I was dumb. Ever.

12:50That year taught me how to brawl. This is one thing I can tell you. And that is nothing I'm proud of. That was just straight survival. It's the kind of dysfunction I was in. We didn't have teachers, constant substitutes, constant people letting you know they don't think you're good enough. They're all white. We're all black. We didn't have honors, anything. I can tell you we were angry. You knew you weren't getting what you were supposed to have. Did you and your mom ever talk about this? My mother basically believes you are a college professor who has taught at three Ivy League institutions and nothing I did that was that bad.

13:27What do you say to that pushback? That is true, but I'm telling you about my inner world reality. I'm telling you who I had to become. I'm telling you the persona that I had to create that was in no one's best interest, that was leading down a path. I'm telling you what this did to me as a human being, not my intellect. My intellect, you know, they took me out, put me somewhere else, got me some extra academic help. I was only a year. Right. But I was behind.

13:58I mean, what I lost in that year wasn't nothing. We just had the ability to make me catch up. But she really didn't know the school was that bad. Mm-hmm. She did not understand the dysfunction and the aftermath of the—this is right at the beginning when policing and juvenile justice were dealing with community problems in the 1970s, where you start to criminalize schools in education. Mm-hmm. So you're starting to have police in the schools.

14:30You're starting to have these task forces that are keeping lists of children who are doing things. The schools are reporting out infractions to the criminal justice system. She didn't know that. It was just being built. Mm-hmm. But it was being built, like, at the moment that I'm in a school that is targeted by all of these kinds of policies. But, I mean, obviously, I'm fine. Like, obviously, I'm fine. Right. Just a little cranky about it. I mean, it's fascinating you say that because, like you said, at that time, a lot of the things that we're talking about in Nicole's piece, right, that you've written about,

15:07those things are just becoming entrenched, right? This sort of, like, post-Brown failed experiment with equitable, you know, allocation of money to schools, right? I mean, you would have been learning that in real time if that wasn't working out. Now we are, you know, 70 years hence, basically, and dealing with the sort of entrenched inability to reckon with that.

The legacy of Brown v Board

15:29I mean, think about this. You go from Brown v. Board, the nation has said, the Supreme Court has said, this is illegal. This is unconstitutional. It just doesn't get more illegal than that. So, obviously, we're going to prevail. And the story of what happens between 1954 and 1974, like, just to make it a nice 20 years, is a ferocious assault on the access of Black people to public education.

16:07They take the whole thing off the table. It's not even, you can't even go and integrate these schools that you've seen. I mean, a lot of the schools that we know were integrated, they had to call out, you know, military and they had to. But a lot of those schools, the year after those Black children entered, over the next couple of years, those are Black schools now. Because the white people just left and went somewhere else and then commenced from the suburbs or wherever else they met to fighting access for Black children.

16:41So, you go from that, like, we're just sort of like, yes, now we're integrated. But everywhere you look, there are pitched battles going on where folks are like, yeah, not here. Well, let them do it. And then Daniel Patrick Moynihan, mid-60s, says, you know, the issue at the level of policy is Black people and Black families. It's Black families that are dysfunctional. It's cultural dysfunction. Yeah, exactly. And we need to address that. So, this idea of we go from integration, like we're marching, everybody marching with King and we're, you know, yay, Thurgood Marshall.

17:19And we have overcome to the implementation where we're seeing scenes like up in Boston, where people are literally grabbing an American flag and using it to attack people who are standing there saying the Supreme Court has said. That we are now no longer having this unequal education. The response there that you're seeing all over TV is, take this flag, I will beat you. Parents around school saying, absolutely not, screaming, hollering, all over in ways big and small.

17:57It reminds me of my grandfather. My grandfather was a teacher in the segregated South, as was my grandmother. He was a principal, he was a president of the NAACP in Clearwater, Florida, about a decade before Brown v. Borg. And he fought for, he fought for integration, you know, I mean, that feeling of inequality thing. They were kind of like, unlike in Kansas, in Topeka, Kansas, where Brown v. Borg was the namesake, Topeka had separate and equal schools. Black schools were funded exactly the same, to the dollar. The way the white people were there were kind of like, we're going to make them equal, leave us alone.

18:32There'll be no books that are different. The buildings were the same. Like, all of it was completely equal. But in the school that my grandparents taught at, that wasn't the case. What you were getting was just the leftovers, the scrape by, the least of. And so he fought for it for those reasons. But he told my mother once, he said, you know, my mother told me, he said, you know, daughter, I fear they're not going to love our children over there. I'm fighting for this.

19:03I think it might be right, but I fear they're not going to love our children. So even in the midst of his battle for an integrated education, how you will feel and how important it is. He was not at the time kind of like, they should suck it up, let's sacrifice the kids. I've seen people online kind of going, that's what we need. But this is happening outside of a movement. This is happening outside of an organized resistance. So the idea that you just take children and put them in these situations and then things got better, just never happened.

19:43It just never happened. It has to do with the way we tell history, though, that some, I can see online, believe. They're like, yes. I mean, Ruby Bridges was in the exact same situation as was Nyla in PS 307. Yeah, Nicole Hannah-Jones' daughter. Right. One is a part of a movement. One is part of a legal case. One is part of a political discourse that at the highest levels of government is being debated

20:16and that there are Black churches, Black community members, Black organizations. You never see them. You only ever see Ruby Bridges and the federal marshals. This has become the kind of iconic thing. And what we know about Ruby Bridges is white people in New Orleans, instead of even letting the girl come into school, she sat in a classroom for a year by herself with her teacher. It was just her and her teacher because they would not even allow anyone to be with her. But every single day that child came to school and went home from school, her mother was walking

20:51with her. You will work hard to find an image of that. Like they've managed to only shoot her when she's alone with these officers around her. And there's something about that that I think ingrained in us that she was on behalf of the Black community by herself, striking a blow for Black freedom. She was part of an entire political strategy that I think at this point were being asked,

21:24but did it make sense? Was that the strategy that we should have gone with? I mean, it's funny listening to you talk about what your grandfather said about like, I don't think they're going to love our babies over there. And just contrasting that with the response to Nicole's piece, which is like she's sending her child to a Black school in her neighborhood or close to her neighborhood. So much of the response is she has a responsibility to not send her child to that school and that

21:56she should send her child somewhere else. And I think implicitly to that is that they may not love our babies over there, but dot, dot, dot, right. But like she will get a better education over there. And that one of the reactions that I saw a lot that was fascinating to me was how many Black folks were saying things like, I want equal schools, I want better schools too, but I'm not trying to use my child as some sort of social experiment to make some kind of political point. And what jumped out to me about that is that that is almost verbatim the language that white liberal parents have used to resist sending their kids to urban poor schools in the cities

22:32they live in. I mean, you hear like that specific framing all the time. And I wonder, do you feel like that logic is substantively different when it is coming out of a Black parent's mouth than when it is coming out of a Black parent's mouth? You know, what this made me think about, because I was a founding board member of an organization called Integrated Schools. It was at the time, it was really, let's get white parents to get their kids in high poverty schools. With a lot of the rationale that I've heard Nicole talk about and that she writes about.

23:05If you bring people with contacts, with money, connections, who are going to advocate in different ways, who have the social capital, as well as maybe the free time to do blah, blah, blah, blah, you can move the needle on these schools. But when they left, things always went back to the way that they were. I've not heard. This doesn't mean it does not exist. I've not heard of an effort like this actually materially benefit the school long term.

23:38But what's interesting about this to me is, I do wonder if it is the same thing, I don't know the answer here, but if it's the same thing, given the structure of anti-Blackness that kind of pervades the universe, to have racial integration, or is there something different about having wealthy Black people enter a school? And I don't know.

Protecting children in the classroom

24:05I think what happens today around schooling and education is parents, Black parents in particular, really, you have to make choices about what it is you're most interested in. I think the questions are no longer just about your test score. I think that they are about what kind of child you want to have. But I think a bare minimum for most of us is you need teachers who are capable of imparting knowledge to your child sufficiently well that they know the basics of what people think

24:41they're supposed to know at their grade level. And so what you're choosing between is having your child grow up around people in a majority environment where teachers and principals and classmates and the kids above you and below you are majority, something that you consider your community. And the belief, a longstanding belief, a pre-desegregation era belief that schools are in part there to

25:12actually make sure that your child has a sense of self-worth, what MLK calls somebodiness out in the world. And that because so often you understand that the world may not be about the business of your child's, your Black child's emotional, spiritual, and physical health and well-being before two plus two equals four. The other one, the split, unfortunately, is when you're in a predominantly white school, you'll be an only lonely.

25:47My son was an only lonely for most of his life. He's one of the few Black men, certainly in the honors and AP classes, few Black students in Princeton, New Jersey, where he grew up. And he had to navigate a world where people didn't look like him, where he had one teacher in private school, but elementary school, he had a Black teacher. But by the time he got to middle school through high school, he didn't have a Black teacher. He was, again, he was in a higher performing parts of the private school.

26:19There were no other Black kids. So, yeah, it is a constant thing about how do you make sure your kids are whole? How do you make sure that they are fundamentally whole, safe, and happy, primarily? Absolutely.

26:35But, I mean, it's like community is not this little abstract thing, right? It is a thing we do. It is, like, and it's held up by institutions. If our kids aren't going to school together, right? If they're not, like, if they're not walking the same streets and, like, then the stuff we're talking about, this, like, identity stuff is just abstract and it's not real. Like, community is the crossing guard and the teacher and the school down the street and the mosque and the church. It's all those things. And if we, like, just say, I'm opting out of the school down the street because if we just concede that that's, like, not a thing that we...

27:12Because they will destroy my child. Like, people who get there believe. These are my options. I, I, and I, I want to validate that. And also... It's destructive. We got to hold the line, right? Like, it's like, if we, if we concede that, we, we will find ourselves having to rebuild all those things, right? Yes, but this is what's happening, no? Like, we're actually, again, a clear-eyed look at what public education is for, and if nothing else, this is what I think Nicole's,

27:45I think Nicole's essay did a lot of things, so not just, if nothing else, but one of the things that, that, that it does is make clear that our vision of public schools and public education and the reality of their impact are not always the same. Like, that's the, now, what we do about that is, I think, the call for the piece. Like, what, what, now what's supposed to happen? But your idea, yes, that's, that's why my mother sent me to the middle school at Potrero Hill.

28:23This was a community that we lived in, and she wanted me to understand myself as a part of a Black community, and this is the one we lived, and had since I was born. Like, it was not, like, we just moved there at this time. This is where we lived. Like, and if you're not going to be a part of the fabric of the community, then it's not, what is it? Like, what is, what is that? Like, just some place, that's a hotel. That's a, that's part of why she sent me there. But by the time I got to putting my kid in a school, that terrain was different still.

28:55Mm-hmm. Um, and we didn't understand it, and the fact that we, it's not romanticizing, we're trying to hold on to that idea of community. Mm-hmm. But you said that, that middle school is this hinge point, right? It's the time of education, a child's education, where, you know, things can go either way, right? We started off at Public Foods in Princeton, so elementary was fine. I mean, the first grade, he was, like, writing little paper, little essays and stuff. They were having, like, it was all, it was fairyland, fairy tales.

29:27And the reason I started writing about education, I was writing about Black women and popular culture. Like, I was a scholar of Black women before my son went to middle school. And I realized I did not understand the terrain. Huh. So, what happens in middle school, and we didn't know we needed to be on these people before the boy got there. Here are the things we didn't understand. Like, they put him in the remedial class. And he had always scored high, had always been this little A student, always been like, I like me.

29:57And I go to parent-teacher conference, and I was saying to the teacher, you know, to my coming home, he's my son's name, Jelani, he seems to be bored. Like, he's talking about how you do sheets all day, and there's candy, though, and movies. And, you know, he's there with some of his friends. He was thrilled because he was like, I'm in with all the Black kids. I've never had this many Black kids before. And then talking to the teacher, she was like, oh, yeah, he's in the class. That would have made it impossible for him.

30:27Like, because the tracking started then in sixth grade, he would not have been able to take calculus and physics, the math and science courses that are required for the more competitive schools. We didn't know at, you know, 12, if he was going to a competitive school, if he was going to be a janitor. Like, we had no real idea what his, where his life was going to head, but we wanted him to have options. And so we were like, well, you're taking options off the table here. It turned into a big fight.

30:58Then we were in the grocery store, and a teacher he had had in elementary, who ended up moving up to the middle school, said, you know, I couldn't lose my job for telling you this. But I want you to know, you have got to get Jelani out of that school, or you will lose him. And we were like, what are you talking about, crazy lady in the grocery aisle? Like, what do you mean, lose him? They were like, you don't know. I hear how they talk about him.

31:28And then we found there had been some incident where he was accused of plagiarizing a paper. But his college professor parents were accused of having written the paper for the 12-year-old. Wow. And the teacher made him, in class, write another essay. And the second essay he wrote while the teacher was looking at him was better than the first one. And so she had to pass him. We never heard this now. Nobody told us our child is being accused of plagiarism, that there are people.

31:59Like, no one told us any of this. But she said, but the teacher and other teachers now feel like he needs to be brought down a notch. Oh, wow. Like, he's arrogant. That you all think too highly of. She was like, the way that they talk about him. And I hear, and I've known, she had known him since he was in kindergarten. She was like, I don't know how he survives that kind of animosity. You have to get him out of here. So we literally moved heaven and earth. We didn't have a lot of money and figured out how to get him in a private school.

32:31Because somebody who knew him and seemed to care about him was telling us that there was no other option. We were unprepared for the ferocity of the fight we were required to bring to make sure that he was academically and emotionally whole when he graduated from high school. But that fight that we waged meant that he went to a high-performing, he went to Amherst College and actually could handle it.

33:03And came out with, and he came out of high school, even though they weren't in his AP honors classes, all of his friend groups, he had a black friend group. He managed, there were like 10 black kids at that school, eight of them were at our house regularly. And he told us later, he would basically share with his black friends a lot of what we were constantly telling him that he was acting like he wasn't listening to. But he was sharing it with others, like you do this for your future. And so they all would tell us later part of how we were able to understand some of those racial dynamics that were new and harsh,

33:41as much as we talked to him about what it takes when your parents put you in a place where you don't think that people there are going to love you.

The crisis in black literacy

33:52I wanted to talk to you, so I know that in your, the calculus that you use, when you're thinking about, like, you said that literacy is the thing that you would, like, zero in on. It's like, what is, this is the thing that will tell you if a school is good or not, like, this is, like, how the school is performing. And I actually have never looked at, I looked at a lot of stuff around my child's school, my child's school, right near our house, in the neighborhood. Me and my wife are from D.C. originally, so we were like, you're going to be from D.C. You're going to have to.

34:22D.C. has some decent schools, no? It does. It does. And, you know, when we had our, when we had our son, the school down the street had just went through this giant renovation, like, capital investment project. So it was, like, brand new. I mean, the school's been around for a long time, but a brand new school, sparkling new library. So, do you mind if I just, like, I haven't looked at the numbers for my son's school, but I actually want to look them up with you right here as I'm talking to you. I'm looking up the U.S. News, and I won't say the name of the school.

34:51Eight to one student-teacher ratio. The math proficiency is 12%. The reading proficiency is 17%. What I would say is, just as a way for context, is that the school is, according to this, is about 90% black and Latino, and 52% of the students, more than half the students, don't speak English or outside of the house. So, obviously, that's putting some downward pressure on those literacy numbers. But when I say those numbers to you, like, what is your, like, honest first reaction to that?

35:23One of my, I'm on a soapbox about this, so I will try to stay calm here. But the crisis in black education for me is how unaware most black people are of how little we're able to read. There was one time, I was trying to make this argument, I don't think I quite got there, but that literacy levels pre-Brown v. Board were higher than they are today. I couldn't quite get there definitively. With the numbers, the best data we have for enslaved black people during the antebellum period, all in, more than 17% of black people were literate.

36:02That, wow. I do know that. All in. Yes. So, reading, even more than math, I mean, math we talk about, you know, for certain kinds of careers. Democracy, I mean, the assault on reading has been key for keeping black children out of schools since before Brown v. Board. The assault on teaching. As a nation, now reading numbers for just the U.S. are horrendous.

36:35Yeah. But when you start looking at black kids in schools that black kids go to, how is it not a crisis? How is the fact that your child goes to a school where they're only 17% and the proficiency- And my son is, I should say, is very young in the pre-kindergarten classes. You can teach him how to read at that level at home. Mm-hmm. Like, you can teach him cat. But this is what happens overall, it seems to me, in educational spaces for black kids. Early on, we don't get the foundational knowledge.

37:08You can build on, you can do different things if you know the basics. I don't believe that test scores tell you the whole story, much like polling. I think that test scores get it right sometimes. They don't get it right other times. But how far we are from any kind of thing that those pre-Brown v. Board of Education schools would have considered sufficient for the education of black children. How far we are from that.

37:38I know what my grandparents expected of black children. I know it. What we expect and what we are giving and what that means for democracy, for citizenship, for those feelings of self-worth, your somebodiness. I'm not sure that we have done right. I know we have not done right.

Looking at models that work

37:56And that's what I want to ask you. Like, my sister made a choice for her daughter, right? It's different than the choice I'm making for my son, which is different than the choice you made for your son. And I just, it feels like all of us are just trying to cobble together something. You wrote that, like, integration was a cure of a killing kind. And we obviously can't have individuated solutions to these big systemic problems. And there's been massive resistance, no pun intended, to... I actually believe the thing we have not tried, I can't believe I'm going to say this, but I do believe it, is actually separate but equal.

38:27Huh. In this nation. There have been precious few districts that have taken separate but equal seriously. Like, and actually been like, we're going to give you the money that you need to do this. Same dollars. I mean, you would also have to, you would still have all the neighborhood effects, right? You would still have all the effects of, you know, entrenched poverty outside of the schools, you know, and wealth outside of... The models that we have of success, the models that I know of success at scale for teaching Black kids, we have things like the Panther schools, which again, 1970s Oakland is not, you know, 2026, whatever.

39:06But their whole model was take the kids from the projects, get them where they need to go. We want, I mean, there was no class diversity amongst the children who were in that school. And, and graduates write dissertations singing from the rooftops, how they were able to thrive in that all Black environment that was unapologetically Black in that kind of way. And, and radical and teaching them history, like all that.

39:38So for these things that have happened in the past, where you're educating poor Black kids and middle-class kids and, and making them sane and that the kids get out on the other side and say, that is the reason I am sane. The models that, that I know in the, in the school day, it would be, could be different every day, depending on who needed what. They often had older kids teach the younger ones. So you, it wasn't always teacher centric. They were teaching community by your responsibility to others.

40:09That once, if a student masters something, you got your times table on lock, then it is your responsibility to teach these three students. You teach them how to get that as a way of making the, the teacher be able to be freed up some, like, and do some other things. And also like, it makes the response, it makes the learning a collective responsibility, right? Like we're all, like. It's a collective, yes. You're learning next to, you sit next to me in class, you learning your law division or algebra, whatever. That's, you're in this together, it's a collective project.

40:39It's like the one room schoolhouse model, almost, almost, right? Where you're like, we're all in this together. But I also think for too long, we have not looked at what has worked. We've been looking at what works at scale. We have not looked at just what works, what moves the needle. And has kids feel good about going to school and actually gaining knowledge at the end. There are tons of models. Again, granddaughter of Black Southern school teachers.

41:12Tons of models for doing it. They're just not a part of ed schools. They're not a part of ed reform circles. They're not part of policy circles. The people who think about what education is, who it's for, how it should be structured, at least when I'm in rooms with them, which is not like every day, but when I'm in rooms with them, it's clear. They know nothing about what Black educators can tell you work in these situations. Zero. They actually believe that pre-Brown v. Board, there were no Black teachers.

41:45There were no Black schools. There were no accomplished Black people. For the people who I'm around when they want to talk about education, it's so wrongheaded. It's no wonder that they've gotten so much wrong. Noliwe Rooks is a professor of Africana Studies at Brown University, and she's the author of Integrated, How American Schools Failed Black Children.

Credits and closing thoughts

42:09Thank you, Noliwe.

Credits and closing thoughts

42:10Thank you. And y'all, that is our show. You can follow us on Instagram at NPR codeswitch, that's all one word. This episode you're listening to was produced by Christina Kala. It was edited by Courtney Stein. And we'd be remiss if we did not shout out the rest of the codeswitch massive, right? That's Xavier Lopez, Jess Kung, Kayla Lattimore, Leah Dinella, Daya Mortada, B.A. Parker, Barton Girdwood, Yolanda Sanguini, Jasmine Romero, and Maya Dangerfield. As for me, I'm Gene Demby.

42:40Be easy, y'all. Be easy, y'all. Be easy, y'all. Be easy, y'all. Be easy, y'all.