Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Well, after the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions last week, it is now more important than ever to create equity much earlier in the educational careers of today's children. Now we take a closer look at an elementary school here in New York City that's serving as kind of a model for racial and socioeconomic equity or at least integration in an otherwise deeply segregated and unequal school environment. You might call it gentrification meets integration.

Joining us now is Clara Hemphill, founding editor of InsideSchools.org, which so many New York City parents have used as they look at what schools they might send their children to in New York City. She is now the author of a new book called A Brighter Choice: Building a Just School in an Unequal City published by the Teachers College Press. Clara, always great to have you on the show. Welcome back to WNYC.

Clara Hemphill: Thanks for having me, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Can you start off by setting the scene? Your book is largely focused on the Brighter Choice Community School in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. What is it?

Clara Hemphill: A lot of people talk about the specialized high schools and why there's such a low proportion of Black and Hispanic kids at those schools, but the difficulties, the inequalities start much, much earlier. I tried to look at a school in Bedford-Stuyvesant, which is a neighborhood that has had schools that parents are not satisfied with. About two-thirds of the parents opt out of their local schools in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Since it's mostly the best educated, and parents with the most time and resources who opt out, it leaves the local schools with very high proportions of very needy kids. The question is, how can we reverse this trend?

There was a group of parents, mostly Black, some white, who said-- in Bedford-Stuyvesant, there's some who said, "We don't want to leave our neighborhood for schools. We don't want to travel halfway across the borough. We want to have a good local school right in our neighborhood." My book is the story of how these parents built a strong school in an unequal city.

Brian Lehrer: To what degree is it kind of an ironic story of gentrification disrupting historically mostly Black neighborhood and advancing inequality in that respect but also setting up the conditions for integration, which might wind up helping all the kids?

Clara Hemphill: Well, gentrification certainly causes troubles. It does cause disruption, it causes a lot of conflict, but what happened in this school in Bedford-Stuyvesant is the parents of different races and income levels realized that they had common interests, that is they all wanted good schools. With a lot of struggle, they were able to overcome their differences and cross the great divides of race and class to build a community of mutual respect.

Brian Lehrer: Though you quote New York City Schools Chancellor David Banks who says most parents don't care that much about school integration, what they really want, he says, is a good school close to home, elaborate on that. Is integration a goal in and of itself for the Black parents in the neighborhood or is it something that, as David Banks says, is sort of beside the point, if I can take his statement to that extension?

Clara Hemphill: Certainly the Black parents that I spoke to did not have integration as a goal or at least not racial integration. They wanted a school that would nurture their children, and often, majority Black schools do provide a refuge from racism for Black children. They often have more Black teachers, more Black role models, so there is certainly a lot of support for Black majority schools.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, are you a parent or teacher, or administrator at Brighter Choice or another racially and socioeconomically integrated neighborhood public school? What kinds of tensions occur from gentrification in your neighborhoods and therefore your neighborhood schools? Have you noticed any surprising benefits stemming from gentrification as it affects your neighborhood school? Call or text us at 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692 for Clara Hemphill, founding editor of InsideSchools.org and author now of A Brighter Choice: Building a Just School in an Unequal City. What does justice look like within the school day?

Clara Hemphill: Well, gentrification can have bad effects on the schools, of course. Typically, when gentry parents, when well-off parents come into a neighborhood, they either avoid the local schools or they take them over, and they make sure that their children get the best of everything and that the children who were there before do not. What happened at Brighter Choice was the parents of different races and income levels managed to work together to ensure that the lower income families were not pushed aside, that their voices continued to be heard, and were able to establish some kind of equality.

For example, they did not have special gifted classes, which tend to have the upper income or the whiter parents in them. They were very careful to honor Hispanic traditions with Hispanic Heritage Month or African American traditions. They were one of the first schools that had celebrated Juneteenth, for example, before it was a citywide holiday. They worked hard to ensure that no families were marginalized.

Brian Lehrer: Well, what is the definition that you use of integration because, again, you quote Chancellor Banks who says if integration means sending a handful of Black and brown kids to a mostly white school, it doesn't do anything to help the kids left behind?

Clara Hemphill: I agree with him on that. It doesn't do anything to help the kids left behind. In terms of academic achievement, it's not the race of the kids that matters so much as the social class and the level of education. What happens when you have very high concentrations of poverty in a school, if you also tend to have lots of kids with asthma, lots of kids with health problems, lots of homeless kids, and these kids, through no fault of their own, tend to have lower attendance, and lower attendance drags down academic achievement.

One of the beneficial things that happens when you mix kids of different income levels is the whole school has better attendance, and it's easier for teachers to ensure that the kids learn everything they need to learn.

Brian Lehrer: How much was the challenge at Brighter Choice or in Bed-Stuy in general, based on your reporting as it has gentrified, how much has the challenge been keeping the white parents who are new to the neighborhood or having the white parents who are new to the neighborhood send their kids to the local schools instead of using the opportunities that the citywide school choice program gives them to send their kids outside and still remain in the public system?

Clara Hemphill: Well, there are actually very few white parents at Brighter Choice. It's still about maybe 10% white. What has changed, though, over the last five or six years is the number of middle-class parents, so that there's a lot of middle-class Black parents at this school, but yes, one of the things that happens is white parents and more middle-income parents tend to use the public system for pre-kindergarten or free classes for three-year-olds but then they leave as soon as their kids start kindergarten. That has been an ongoing problem. It's becoming less the case as years go by.

Brian Lehrer: You're right, really, interestingly about the long-term effects of the citywide school choice program. I remember in the Bloomberg years when he instituted that the point was supposed to be to help kids, at least the point was said to, supposed to be, to help kids in the low-income communities of color who may have felt trapped in their neighborhood schools, which were underperforming compared to schools in more wealthy parts of the city to help those parents to have choices and fight, if not segregation, at least such a variance in the quality of education the kids from different neighborhoods were getting by being able to send kids elsewhere in the city, but the effect turned out to be just the opposite as you document. Can you talk about the history of that? This is a 20-plus-year history now of, I think, unintended consequences.

Clara Hemphill: Well, it's true that school choice allowed tens of thousands of kids to leave low-performing neighborhood schools and find better options outside their neighborhood. The problem is that it led to a downward spiral in the schools that those kids left. The schools as they had shrinking enrollments, they also had shrinking budgets because you get money according to how many kids are enrolled in your school.

The parents with the most resources tended to leave, which left the schools with higher concentrations of homeless kids, higher concentrations of kids with special needs. It became increasingly difficult to find teachers who were willing to teach in these schools, so it led to more inequality, that is the gap between the haves and the have-nots grew ever larger as a result of school choice.

Brian Lehrer: Writing about the socioeconomic as well as the racial integration at Brighter Choice in Bed-Stuy, one of the things that you wrote is that the school began to attract middle-class and professional Black parents, including some who were new to the neighborhood during gentrification. Many had attended private schools as you say or mostly white public schools themselves and wanted something else for their own children.

I'm looking at your stats, and it looks like the racial breakdown didn't change that much. 94% Black and Latino in 2018, 83% Black and Latino in 2022. Which is more important, the socioeconomic integration or the racial integration?

Clara Hemphill: I think we need both in our country. I think we all need to learn to live together, and the best way to learn to get along is to start an elementary school, but in terms of academic achievement, the race of the kids does not matter. It's the mix of middle-income and lower-income kids that makes a school more successful for low-income children. One of the reasons that low-income white and low-income Asian children tend to do better than low-income Black and Latino children is that low-income white children tend to go to school with middle-class children and low-income Asian children tend to go to school with middle-class Asian children. It's the socioeconomic integration that makes it better for low-income children of whatever race.

Brian Lehrer: Before we run out of time, give us a little bit of the philosophical origin here because in the book you delve into the history of Little Sun People, which was the nursery school that inspired Brighter Choice's philosophy for K and up, and the teaching style, and you look at its founder, Mama Fela. Who was Mama Fela, and how did her own experience as a student in New York City public schools influence her priorities for Little Sun People, that nursery school, which then influenced Brighter Choice?

Clara Hemphill: Mama Fela was part of the great migration of African Americans from the American South to Brooklyn in the 1950s after World War II. She actually had very bad experiences with integration. She went to schools where her brother and sister were bused to Bensonhurst from Bedford-Stuyvesant, and they had rocks thrown at them and bottles thrown at them, and huge hostility. Her own experience with integration was very bad, and she really wanted to establish a school for her own children that protected them from racism and allowed them to learn to be proud Black children.

Curiously, the founder of Brighter Choice Community School herself was a child at Little Sun People. When she created Brighter Choice Community School, she wanted it to be modeled on the Black is Beautiful ethos of Little Sun People. Her goal was not integration. She wasn't hostile because she wasn't angry about the white people coming in. She was happy to have them, but for her, the most important thing was that the school would recognize and nurture Black children.

For the middle-class Black families in Bedford-Stuyvesant, this was a breath of fresh air. They didn't want their children to be the only Black children in schools in mostly white neighborhoods. They didn't want to leave the neighborhood, and they wanted a school that would allow their children to be nurtured as Black children.

Brian Lehrer: Last question, Clara. Really, you've written a book with all you know and with all your experience, understanding, and helping parents understand so many New York City public schools. You've written a book, not so much about the systemic problems, which we talk about most of the time when we talk about public education, but about a success story. I guess my final question is, is Brighter Choice a one-off or is it a model that can help many schools and many kids elsewhere?

Clara Hemphill: I guess it's both. I think we have such inequality in our country. The difference in funding between poor schools and rich schools is really dramatic, and the inequalities in our country are getting worse. They're not getting better. We're going to have to deal with those inequalities if we want to improve schools for everyone. At the same time, there are large swathes of New York City where the kind of integration that we have at Brighter Choice is possible as a result of the changing neighborhoods.

Brian Lehrer: Clara Hemphill, founding editor of InsideSchools.org is now the author of A Brighter Choice: Building a Just School in an Unequal City. Thank you so much.

Clara Hemphill: Thank you for having me, Brian.

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