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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Coming up later this hour, your farewells to the iPod. Is that a source of nostalgia for you? Did you hear that Apple was ceasing to produce the iPod after 22 years? Maybe with smartphones and everything now, from Apple and everybody else, "There's no need for the iPod anymore." We'll do a little iPod nostalgia later on in the hour. Your music on your iPod and what it has meant to you from whatever era of iPod production you want to look back to. That's coming up.

When you hear a story about parents shouting in PTA or school board meetings over the issue of diversity or school desegregation, you might imagine the scene that's been common in the news these past couple of years. Maybe a cacophony of misguided denunciations of critical race theory, or talking about gay parents somewhere down south or in the Midwest, or talking about not being allowed to talk about gay parents.

Would you be surprised to know that in the South, Black students generally go to schools that are less segregated than the schools attended by Black students in the Northeast, or that New York City schools are some of the most segregated in the country? Attempts even in recent years to desegregate or diversify schools in the city are sometimes met with intense resistance?

When in 2019, the city suggested working toward a diversity plan in a school district in Queens District 28, parents protested, but it's a complicated story. Why would an already diverse school district even need a diversity plan in the first place and why were some parents so vehemently opposed? The podcast, School Colors from Brooklyn Deep and NPR's Code Switch, tried to find out answers to these questions and unpack the complexities of this story and with me now are the hosts of School Colors, Mark Winston Griffith, and Max Freedman. Mark, a veteran community organizer who's been here many times, he's also now the editor of Brooklyn Deep. Mark and Max, welcome back to WNYC.

Mark Winston Griffith: Great to be here.

Brian Lehrer: Congratulations on your association with NPR and their Code Switch department for School Colors. By way of background, whichever of you wants to answer this, where is District 28 in Queens, and what drew you to it?

Max Freedman: Sure. District 28 is right in the middle of Queens. It includes the neighborhoods of, basically working north to south, Forest Hills, Rego Park, parts of Richmond Hill and South Ozone Park, Jamaica, Briar woods, South Jamaica, and Westfield Village. It's a big district with about 40,000 kids. What drew us to the district was this controversy over the diversity plan in 2019 which you mentioned.

Brian Lehrer: Who lives in the district? I know its distinct characteristics, demographically?

Max Freedman: The student population of the district is, I believe I'm going to get these numbers right, it's 31% Asian, 29% Hispanic or Latinx, 18% Black, and 15% white, but those numbers don't necessarily reflect what I would call the politics of the district. We do tend to shake out on a north-south white-Black divide that's been baked into the district really, for as long as the district has existed, which is about 50 years. In some ways even longer than that since before there was a District 28. There is very much a north-south divide and what people call a Mason Dixon Line in the district.

Brian Lehrer: The North would be mostly white, Rego Park, the South would be mostly non-white Jamaica?

Max Freedman: Yes. Although, actually the north is not mostly white anymore. People like to say that the north is diverse and they're right. The northern part of the district, those neighborhoods are pretty diverse. They don't have a lot of Black kids.

Mark Winston Griffith: I'll just add that, one of the things that we lean into in this story, and this is Mark, by the way. Is that, you've got what seems to be a contradiction in the sense that there's all this "diversity." All these different people living in the same district, but within the same district, in many ways, people are separated. At least when it comes to the Black community, I think that population, in particular, is pretty much segregated from almost everyone else.

Brian Lehrer: The starting point is the neighborhoods are separate so the most local schools to most people would wind up being pretty segregated?

Mark Winston Griffith: Exactly. A lot of the push-back against any idea of desegregation in the area is premised on this idea that people live where they live, and they go to their local schools. If you try to disrupt or upset that, then you are going against the grain of where people choose to live, how they choose to live, and why they moved into their neighborhoods in the first place.

Max Freedman: In some level, I think what people perceive to be the natural order of things. The part of the story that we're trying to tell is that that isn't natural, that's been constructed, and how.

Brian Lehrer: While housing remains segregated, there's this effort to try to at least integrate schools more, but what's at the heart of that push? Were students in the mostly non-white southern part of the district or I guess you're saying mostly Black southern part of the district compared to the more diverse northern part of the district? Were they not as well served by their neighborhood schools?

Max Freedman: Yes, that's pretty much it. The story is complicated in the sense that no one in the-- I shouldn't say no one but there wasn't like there was a big chorus of people demanding this move to desegregation. It really was prompted by an application that was submitted by the superintendent at the time, who since left by the time they tried to actually start the plan. Start planning the plan, if you will.

The main problem was not only the desegregation within the district, but the fact that the schools on the south side are, statistically speaking, underperforming compared to the schools on the north side.

Mark Winston Griffith: I do think that when the diversity planning process was supposed to kick off at the end of 2019, something that happened during this, our position is that people were saying, "Nobody asked for this. Why are you doing this? Why here? Why us?" I think the diversity planning process for good reasons, what they wanted to do, the bureaucrats and consultants who were behind it, was they wanted to talk to people and find out from them what the problems are that are caused by the segregation of the district, but the process never got started.

We're doing our own research and reporting to find out what those problems are. It never really, at least in public, and in that moment, the officials were not really willing to name really explicitly what the problems were, and that became part of the problem.

Brian Lehrer: Let me play for our listeners a clip from the podcast that I think goes to this point. You talked to Sadye Campoamor, who worked at the Department of Education under then-Mayor de Blasio. Here's a clip of something she said to you about this process.

Sadye Campoamor: How do you balance entering a process around diversity that clearly has some non-neutral goals? That is, we value demographic diversity in our classrooms, we think that they add value to student outcomes and school communities. How do you say that and mean it and then also say, "We're just here to listen and figure it out?" We're not here to just listen and figure it out. We are here to do a community engagement process that will result in fostering more integrated school district.

Brian Lehrer: "The Department of Education wanted to foster a more integrated school district," those words. I wanted to play that clip because one of the things that comes up early on in the podcast is the city's emphasis on diversity and inclusion, rather than school integration, which is different in the early days of the de Blasio administration. Even though it was called the diversity plan, it would have ultimately sought ways to integrate that district. Maybe the distinction between diversity and integration is one that's worth explaining.

Mark Winston Griffith: Right. This is one of the big things that we tackle within the series because diversity becomes this proxy for a much more, I don't know, something that is obvious a more ambitious idea, and packs in a lot of different ideas. Yet, in some ways, it's-- I don't want to say a trojan horse, but it's a way of smoothing over the edges of how people react to words like integration and segregation.

I think the ideas that we go through the history of the emergence of the word diversity, not only in this instance but in larger American history as well. What you see along the line is that it's used to circumvent people's knee-jerk reactions to the ideas of desegregation. Sometimes it misses the mark entirely, but in this case, I think that it's designed to really be a desegregation plan without calling it that. Although I will say that, to the city's credit, there were other diversity plans that were scheduled for other parts of the city, and not all of those plans, I think, were envisioned to really start our end with desegregation. For instance, in District 16, where I live, and I was in the District 16 planning process, desegregation was not necessarily the aim there, particularly when you're talking about a mostly Black district.

Brian Lehrer: That's Central Brooklyn, right?

Mark Winston Griffith: In Central Brooklyn, right.

Brian Lehrer: This story takes place in Queens, your district is Central Brooklyn. Go ahead.

Mark Winston Griffith: Exactly right. Thanks for making that clarification.

Max Freedman: Folks from the DOE and the consultants that they hired to work on this diversity plan said over and over again, and this is the title of our first episode, "There is no plan." To the extent that people believed in District 28 that what was coming was a pre-ordained desegregation plan with kids going this way and that way on school buses or public buses, they had plenty of evidence that they would marshal to say that this was all a foregone conclusion. I don't actually believe that there was a plan as such to have desegregation.

That being said, if the DOE used the word "diversity" so that people would not believe that there would be an old-school integration plan in the works, that failed because people certainly believed that that was what was going to happen.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take a couple of phone calls if we happen to have anybody with connections to School District 28 in Queens, Rego Park, Jamaica, elsewhere around there. I'm sure my guests would be happy to hear how you felt or what you did when the district was chosen for a diversity plan even if there was no plan. If you've listened to any episodes of the podcast or if you have a personal connection to this or if you just have a question after listening to Max Freedman and Mark Winston Griffith here these few minutes, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer.

I guess it's worth saying, as we come to another clip from the podcast, that some of the opposition to the budding plan came from Black parents as well. Here's one, Lorraine Reed, who spoke out against the plan at one of those contentious parent meetings. Here's part of what she said.

Lorraine Reed: Focus on the schools in the South, find out how our students learn. My child does not learn like someone else's child. We're from different cultures. Our children do not learn the same, so taking my son or anybody else's child out of the South Park and shipping them there is doing them a disservice.

[applause]

Brian Lehrer: That applause, you say, at the end of that remark was some of the loudest of the night at that meeting and cathartic for the white parents to hear a Black person say exactly what they had to say. Tell us about that.

Mark Winston Griffith: I'm glad you played that clip. It definitely is a clip that needs some further context because, at the meeting, when Lorraine said that, there indeed was a very enthusiastic reaction by the white parents. When we talked to Lorraine later on, what she revealed is, "Those folks, they see me as an ally, but a point, in fact, I believe that many of those people did not have the best interest of the south side in mind," or that at least what she was really advocating for was. In some ways, we need to focus on making sure that schools on the southside are better, whether they're integrated or not.

What ultimately happens is that people default to a separate-and-equal argument. I think that Lorraine, in that way, was aligned with other folks, but in many ways, she did not consider herself an ally of the very people who were cheering for her.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a couple of phone calls. Interesting phone calls coming in. Desiree in Park Slope, you're on WNYC. Hi, Desiree.

Desiree: It's me again. I've called about this issue before because it is very pressing on my mind. When the vice president talked about her experience of being bussed, I was vehemently disagreeing with her, and I did not see that viewpoint anywhere in the media. I was bussed when I was a child. I was in Jackson, Mississippi, I was bussed to an all-white school. There were about five or six of us who were bussed through the Black neighborhood to a different bus to go to the white school.

That was a terrible experience for us. Yes, we got a better education, but the trauma of the bussing and all of the other things around that still stick with me, and I'm 15 years old now. I also went to high school in the Bronx. The Bronx is segregated, therefore the schools are segregated. What my experience was, is that people focused on 5 or 6 or 12 or 100 students who they would give all the resources to in the theater of high school so that those students could succeed because they couldn't really deal with all of the other students because the school was so big and it didn't have the funding that some of the white kids had at this school. My question is, what happens to the--

Brian Lehrer: Where does-- Go ahead, sorry.

Desiree: My question is, what happens to the kids in the segregated neighborhoods who are not white? What happens to those schools if the goal is to send all of the kids of color to schools that are now predominantly white? What happens to the schools in their own neighborhood? Because it doesn't seem like there's any-- "Separate but equal" is a really easy thing to say. Separate is not equal.

Sometimes people need to be separated. Sometimes it is better emotionally and mentally for students of color to be in an environment where they are not constantly having to be reminded that they are a minority.

Brian Lehrer: Desiree, thank you so much. Mark, Max, want to take that on?

Mark Winston Griffith: We're sitting here pointing to each other about who should take it.

Max Freedman: Desiree, thank you because you're pointing to the complexity that we're trying to get at about this issue in the series. I hope that if you listen, you'll hear that, as it goes along-- In episode two, we talk about how the problem, really, with segregated neighborhoods and segregated schools is that Black people in South Jamaica have always really struggled to get the kind of resources and attention that seem to accrue to white people.

In episode four, we're going to hear the story of somebody from South Jamaica who was bussed in the '70s to Forest Hills and what that was like for her. How she came to oppose those kinds of programs when she became a parent herself.

Episode six, we're going to go into those southside schools and find out what it's really like, like you said, for the kids who are-- As many Black parents in the southside of this district are already doing everything they can to get their kids into middle schools outside of their neighborhoods. What happens in those schools and to those kids who do go to school in the neighborhood schools?

Brian Lehrer: Let's get one more in here from the neighborhood. Lory in Queens, you're on WNYC. Hi.

Lory: Hi. My daughters went to PS 117 in Briarwood, which was a school, at that time, of over 1,300 students. It was larger than the next-door middle school. It was incredibly diverse, but it was on that line between Forest Hills, which is a very wealthy neighborhood, and South Jamaica, which is very poor. I was part of the PTA, I went to the district meetings, and it was always about the haves and have-nots in our district. I'm white, but it was so evident about the difference between one end of the district and the other end of the district.

Brian Lehrer: Did you ever come, for yourself, Lory, to a conclusion about what was the best way to deal, as a matter of policy, with those disparities on the education level?

Lory: Part of it is that the PTA of a school in Forest Gardens could raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for their schools to get computers and whatnot. Also, I'm a retired teacher who taught in South Jamaica. You couldn't do that in South Jamaica.

The parity is, if you could just get resources into the other schools, it would make a difference just as it would've made in my daughters' school was that if they had resources-- The school's 1,300 kids in elementary school, it's ridiculous to begin with,

Brian Lehrer: Lory, I'm going to leave it there because we're about out of time, but thank you very much for that input. Listeners, I just want to say that we barely scratched the surface here. The first two episodes of season two of School Colors are now out from Brooklyn Deep and NPR's Code Switch. We barely scratched the surface even of those two episodes. It is such a complicated story and wonderfully done. Mark Winston Griffith and Max Freedman, co-hosts of the podcast, anything you wanted to say to our listeners to sum up for the moment as you head out the door?

Mark Winston Griffith: Only that they're seven more episodes. A lot of the issues that we've talked about here are obviously packed in, but we go beyond that and we make a connection, Brian, to something you brought up at the top of the episode, which was that we're going to make some connections to what is happening today, and the conversations around race and CRT in the classroom and those kinds of things. While we go back into history to explain things we look at the present, but we also, again, tie in current events.

Max Freedman: I do want to make sure that everybody understands that the second season of School Colors is all exclusively on NPR's Code Switch podcast. If you search for School Colors, you'll find the first season which is great, you should listen to it. We love it. If you want to listen to season two, you've got to go to Code Switch.

Brian Lehrer: Mark and Max, thanks a lot.

Mark Winston Griffith: Thank you, Brian.

Max Freedman: Thank you.

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