Andrew Lefkowits and Val Brown
There is an image indelibly seared into the minds of many Americans. A young Black girl, six years old, in a white dress, schoolbooks in hand, walking down the sidewalk with U.S. Marshalls in front and behind her. The N-word spray-painted on the wall amongst the remains of recently thrown tomatoes. This famous painting by Norman Rockwell from 1966 is called “The Problem We All Live With.” The girl depicted is Ruby Bridges, on her way to desegregate her elementary school in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1960.
Nearly 50 years later, Nikole Hannah-Jones and the team at This American Life released a podcast episode, also called “The Problem We All Live With.” This in-depth look at Normandy, Missouri, a small town on the border of Ferguson, sought to shed light on the school experience of Michael Brown, before he was shot and killed by police in August 2014.
The problem, of course, is school segregation. And in 2024, fully seventy years after the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that separate is inherently unequal and that segregation itself is unconstitutional, it is a problem we all still live with.
Integrated Schools was founded in 2015 by Courtney Mykytyn to ask why.
Today, the majority of parents profess a desire for less segregated schools (Torres & Weissbourd, 2020). In 2020, Eric Torres and Richard Weissbourd from the Harvard School of Graduate Education found that “parents of all backgrounds tend to agree that racial and economic integration is important—at least in principle—and state that they would prefer that their children attend schools that are substantially integrated both racially and economically. This preference is true for men and women, Democrats and Republicans, and people of all races, levels of education, and income levels.” And yet, our schools are, by many measures, more segregated now than during the Civil Rights era.
This disconnect between what we say we want as a country and what we have has no simple explanation. Our housing is segregated, our school funding formulae recreate disparities based on property taxes, the ways we measure school quality are often based on demographics and not educational excellence, and the Supreme Court has severely limited what steps communities can take voluntarily. And still, we know that a less segregated education system is possible if there is the will to create it. Good policies that push our school districts to try to address segregation are important, but we also know that our systems are designed by and cater to those families with the most privilege. In the seven decades since the Brown decision, we have seen white families undermine those policies at every turn (McRae, 2018).
With this in mind, Integrated Schools’ work is focused on creating a heart shift among parents with privilege to change the choices we make about where to send our kids to school, the playground conversations we have about getting the “best” for our kids, and how we talk about and think about “good” and “bad” schools, acknowledging the underlying racism inherent in those conversations. Given that the burden of so much of our country’s past desegregation attempts has been borne by Black and Brown communities, we strive to call in those with privilege to do the work of desegregation, and to be part of achieving real integration.
As a country, we have tried desegregation. We have, often begrudgingly, moved bodies around based on demographic percentages. But we have never truly committed to a vision of real integration rooted in a public school system where power and resources are shared equitably, humanity is valued unconditionally, and all communities reap the benefits. This is the vision that drives our work. To realize that vision, it is not enough to simply change where we send our kids to school—how we show up is equally important. “Saving” a school, or trying to “fix” it, can cause more harm than if we had not shown up at all. We encourage privileged parents who are desegregating their kids to show up humbly, to work to be in community, to follow, to learn, to listen, and to join the efforts of those who are already at the school.
In November 2018, Andrew, a white dad from Denver, joined Integrated Schools founder Courtney Mykytyn, to launch The Integrated Schools Podcast as a place to have nuanced conversations about school integration with caregivers and experts in the field. With a desire to know better, so that we might do better, we set out to learn from those with expertise and personal experience, while telling a new story about our past attempts at desegregation. We also set out to model what it is like to have honest, hard, nuanced conversations about topics that, as a country, we so often avoid. The appetite for these conversations, as evidenced by the hundreds and then thousands of people downloading each episode, surprised us and motivated us to keep making episodes.
Tragically, on December 30, 2019, Courtney was struck by a car outside of her house and killed. This was a devastating loss to her family, to the Integrated Schools community, and to the broader movement for integration. However, a core group of dedicated parents and caregivers that Courtney had brought into the movement over the years stepped up to continue her vision.
In 2024, our organization has 37 chapters around the country, a large online following, a quarterly book club, a caregiver connection program that connects people from around the country who are trying to know better and do better, and the podcast, which recently released its 125th episode and has nearly 600,000 all-time downloads. This all-volunteer work is driven by people across the country asking why segregation is a problem we all still live with.
As our organization has evolved, we have also sought to become more multiracial. Val, a Black mom from North Carolina, joined as co-host of the podcast in September 2021. Broadening the perspectives we share and the types of conversations we have, has allowed us to deepen our own understandings and continue to model what conversations about hard and nuanced topics can look like, now across lines of racial difference.
Seventy years after the Brown decision, in the wake of the backlash to racial justice protests stemming from the murder of George Floyd and so many others, as the divisions in our country become increasingly obvious, we feel this work is more important than ever. We can’t continue to let this be the problem we all live with. The moral arc of the universe does not bend itself towards justice—it is bent by all of us. It requires confronting the past and pushing on, knowing that—without constant effort—we will backslide, but believing that the only way we win—for all of our kids and their kids—is together.
Andrew Lefkowits (andrew@lefkowits.com) and
Val Brown (valeriabrownedu@gmail.com) are co-hosts of The Integrated Schools Podcast (www.integratedschools.org/podcasts).
References
Torres, E. and Weissbourd, R. (2020). Do parents really want school integration? Retrieved from https://mcc.gse.harvard.edu/reports/do-parents-really-want-school-integration
McRae, Elizabeth Gillespie. Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.
