segregation in education it's as bad as ever and no ends in sight so what approaches might make a difference what if segregation per se wasn't the problem this week educators speak out and revisit an afro centric school in brooklyn and it's led mark decision brown v board of ed the supreme court ruled that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional the unanimous decision seem to leave little doubt that separate can never be equal in education sixty five years later however many public schools such as those here in new york city remain deeply if not more segregated although new school chancellor richard crown so has positioned himself as the leading voice for integration some families have begun choosing an alternative afrocentric culturally responsive schools had to discuss how separate afrocentric schools might not only be equal but actually better in some respects daniel favors an activist and attorney with a long standing commitment to racial and social justice that gonzales director of school diversity project at the new school appleseed and rafi are founder and managing partner of one such school the ember charter school for mindful education innovation and transformation so first i just want to begin by thanking you all for doing this work and even just preparing for this show i felt so both furious and frantic and sad about the state of the education and inspired by the kids that come out of it i don't know whether it was in michelle obama's book or somewhere else i and i am a parent and i have been working in the area of culture responsive education for almost twenty years and i have the privilege of coming to the discipline through a program called the freedom schools which is a program for the children defense fund under the leadership of former director marian wright edelman and freedom schools is literally modeled on freedom summer on providing children who are out of african descent with access to materials that look like them that were specifically targeted for them and that counter the social oppression and what about your affect what you do what you do while celeb black people but i mean i think you know i grew up extremely poor from philadelphia in my education was the one way that i was able to change my life and my siblings they changed our lives so substantially so you know to my legal career i had asked myself and i actually making my parents proud by making the way more broad right and i wasn't at a law firm but certainly starting the school i knew i could do that yes so you know i grew up in attending segregated schools in los angeles i taught in segregated schools in los angeles and so  i personally experienced the direct impact of disinvestment and educational spaces that were not specifically designed to serve the needs of my community and then having to go in to be one of those educators who felt like i was like daley violating kind of the rights and the experiences of the humanity of young people i think that really helped shape my thinking about what what educational equity means and what is required  to achieve these these visions and these ideals that brown articulated in the dr king arthur articulated so let's talk about the status quo in new york i mean when they did the anniversary of the fiftieth anniversary i'm thinking of for brown v board they they talk to people in new york is it actually new york schools are more segregated now than they were then the statistics came out recently this spring about how many kids of color are getting into the elite elite schools seven african americans  a city that is seventy percent black and latino it's what are we up against so you want to stop me yeah so i mean i think i want to just i like to lay out very clearly that schools that serve majority black and latino x didn't have zero there's nothing wrong with that at all i think what is wrong with that situation is that institutions governments private actors have again i identified those schools for disinvestment and for kind of you know removing the value of those schools and you know i think the kind of history of new york and up northern cities have been insulated from desegregation efforts and there's this kind of perception that this is all a southern problem but because we've never had to confront these issues in new york city coupled with very strategic disinvestments in school serving young people of color and then very strategic policies that were designed to create segregation to maintain a system of inequality i mean there's you know if you look at some of the history of the city it shouldn't be a surprise that we're here but i think a lot of folks in many aspects of our society have kind of left history behind i mean we certainly have had integration efforts here and they provoked mass so toying with the numbers and the final level of manipulative variables that we can access to get certain people into these schools is a failed policy and when you consider that there are eight hundred other schools that are housing black and latino students that are not getting the attention it's a disservice to them those seven students who got into stuyvesant the one student who got in a staten island tac you know there are a lot of questions now where black families are saying is this a healthy space for my child and having an elite label on a school doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be good or at least for my black child well enter a charter school well you know i didn't start the school by saying you know we're going to do we're going to be separate from everybody else i simply said where is the community with the most need or one of the communities with the most need and that's where i'm going to go to start my school it just so happens that in the neighborhood the vast majority of the children who are there who are low income who suffer from trauma who are suffering from generational poverty there are black and latin x and so i'd start from the premise that i'm looking to serve the highest good and i also want to make big this also clear my school is incredibly diverse we're really talking about is a lack of white students at the school and we can have that conversation i think the level of integration and talk about that is important but there are literally forty plus countries and cultures represented in my school and so we get into conversations about diversity i don't want to obliterate a diaster the diversity  first you have to love black people you have to love brown people you have to actually think that they are worthy of being in the center you have to tell the truth that's right so if you actually told the truth historically you would tell a broader story not just what began with the of millions and millions of people right but people think that that's what it's about you also would think well what do we need to do to help these students become powerful producers and entrepreneurs in our society and that's not again that's not the focus but haven't the statistics over the years since brown v board shown that in fact fighting segregation and integration that period when we actually were focusing on that was the period of greatest greatest advance if people  precise i think during a period in which there was a widespread affirmative action there was the creation of opportunity for black and brown people to enter an economy those things went together those things went together so the idea was about integrating opportunities now for course being proximate to people who are ready had it will come along with that and so i think that's i want to us also the kind of the really precise when we talk about the brown v board of education what they talked about primarily screaming about how much they did not want those students there and we often think about those people on the outside but rarely do we ask what preparation or training if any the educators inside that new get to be able to pull out the academic genius at those children that's right why were they the point of the of the effort and what's the say that they weren't in agreement with the people who were outside but needed to keep their position and so when we talk about we look back at the early scholars like carter g woodson one of the second african american person to graduate from harvard with a p education he spends the rest of his career talking about the dangers for black people if we are not going to provide a religion a culturally responsive education whether they're in a specialized high school whether they're in a black and latino charter school if they're in the suburbs every child should have a an education that is responsive to their culture i mean we should say there are a lot of specialty schools in the you know in new york and in the united states but there's a lot in new york the focus on different things what makes your school and afrocentric culturally response of teaching specific different you name so i mean you know i haven't visited all the other seventeen thousand seven hundred schools i haven't visited so so i don't know i can talk about what we provide that i suspect they do not first again we begin with this idea of how do we most empower our students with self love self esteem which means you have to understand like how did you get here and where were your people before and so this is the truth of history rhodes is just a true in so i think that this is the same kind of education that everyone needs and so we begin with that the building blocks and then we start to think about well how do you means learning develop anyway and we begin by learning based on what we believe we're capable and so we don't begin with their foundation nothing else is possible and so i think that's to different we have a very different center of gravity around what we teach in what we teach but matt i mean i was i grew up in england most of my life and i went to high school there and you would never have said my high school was segregated but it was it was just expensive and it was in a neighborhood that was a specific kind of a neighborhood etc etc and if we have communities that are segregated neighborhoods we call them community but neighborhoods that a segregated you have some kind of have no sky it's got sky's the limit on where they can go and a whole lot of others where the floor is falling out but nathan in the school actually make a difference well we actually have seen  especially new york city that you know most most for many years the mayor had really suggested that because the we're so residentially segregated we can add to the achievements of integration are impossible to you know i think what we know is that there's again th specific public policy designed around schools and housing that facilitate segregation zone this is not done by accident and so part of what we think about for those of us who kind of advocate for integration i think really want to confront this history of the that we're talking about that was traumatizing and that was painful and that was you know these kind of visions of desegregation that were done that harmed communities of color and i think really want to reclaim this language this history in this work so that it's not just about importing black and brown kids into white spaces and it's really about assimilating our spaces to our young people and really you know so the framework we work from around integration is really about building a credible and roman policies dismantling these barriers to access like you know what we've seen around the especially high schools but screens across the city but also really making these deep investments in culturally responsive pedagogy is looking at discipline policies looking at teacher diversity policies looking at resource disparities and i think if we're not having a comprehensive view of what integration can and should be then we're going to commit the same errors that have been made in the past and you know new york is a very mobile city and so kids will for the so called good school or the school that they believe is the good school will travel up to an hour and a half to get to a school i don't think that it should require anyone leaving their neighborhood to access an equitable education but i do think we should support facilitate mobility where and actually like true authentic choice because that's not happening right now but i we should we should on our choice and mobility but also we need to invest reinvest in our communities and really honor these practices that i think what we know are effective for young people though there's a lot of things in what you just said and will get to i hope a lot of them but i did want you to talk a little bit about chancellor korans as planned they talk about something like that they talk about the five are yeah resources received out of justice representation relationship yes so i would i'm i'm hopeful that in the next few weeks or months the chancellor actually comes out and says this is his plan that he wants to honor but that framework called the five hours of real integration was actually designed by students in new york city public school students from the organization called integrate and y c they've been they started in the south bronx and they really this is their analysis of segregation and they say it's it's not just about separating people from each other so it's separating people from resources it's about separating us from our history from our curriculum that is really should be ours it's about you know it's you know so for that for our young people it's really about a comprehensive framework that does include a lot of these pieces i think our young people would say that every single new york city public school that is truly integrated school would offer an afro centric curriculum would offer a conex and latin x curriculum and culturally ethnically responsive approaches and so that framework was used by the school diversity advisory group which i'm a member of and a number of our students are and so we we advocated to adopt that framework as the policy approach to the city we have heard zero from the mayor or the chancellor on that but we do know that at least rhetorically chancellor korans and in some of the initiatives around ansi bias training that they've invested in we do know that responding chand whether you are an ape down at the white specialized high school or put on the asian specialized high school or a black school in east new york the culture of the curriculum the culture for discipline the culture for evaluation of what is an effective teacher versus what is not centers white culture the difference between a school like amber which i probably support i'll be perfectly honest from their inception is that they are centering the needs the educational academic and cultural learning needs of black and brown children and what does that mean white children who are the descendant of those who own people and who are entitled with privilege and power have a very different educational needs base than do black and latino x children who are owned who are property and who have been relegated to the sub sector of society and every scholar who has studied education from an african finance perspective has started with that understanding and so it is wonderful to have a plan that focuses on the redistribution of resources i have often advocated we need equitable resources and all of this other stuff is fluff and give us access to affordable resources or don't prevent getting access to medical resources and we're having a very different congress or you're much more in the don't prevent us well when you have policies that are going to center a specialized high school and ignore a school like say in medgar evers prep which has been producing numbers that have been astronomical for black and brown newtons for decades they don't have a gym the students are playing in the hallways the deal we have promised them facilities for years and for years they have waited and school and been left to squander meanwhile they're producing academic outcomes that rival if not exceed those of the specialized high school the children are graduating high school with an associate's degree they're finishing their high school regents in middle school and yet it is a school that has been largely ignored in brooklyn one of the largest congregations of pan african descent people outside of brazil in the continent of africa so when that's the disparity and want to stuyvesant can get access to what they get access to and when i medgar evers prep is having to deal with the the oppression that they deal with i can still overcome that is a systematic disinvestment choice that if there were not that choice being made we wouldn't have to have a conversation about whether or not we should be integrating because the school would be able to the ability to fund its needs and fund its children's futures and we didn't actually say that white kids won't go to africa centric schools but it's never been any evidence they will well i mean i've had a few students enrol in our school for sure i mean i know you get african center's white children present yeah yeah i mean i think so as we think about kind of like what's next i mean the re kind of mentioned this we have to focus on the people who are the stewards for education and learning there to focus on teachers and right now they are training in the expectations that are courted by the traditional public school system and i would say this is true for charter schools and i would say this is true for private schools it centers whiteness in a way that reinforces white supremacy and we had to move in so until we disrupt that until we say you know we actually need a fundamental shift in the way that we think about difference in the way we think about culture writ large  l i think that for it that's a part of our work that we're looking forward to doing as we kind of stand up in grow our particular school in our particular service but it must begin with that as an idea of diversity can't just be about when the disparity right to spare if you look at schools that serve black and brown kids they are the least invested in it and so then the question is what is the role of government government is supposed to be the intervenors when it comes to these kind of societal problems and so whether it's the federal government or the state government neither seems pretty interested in solving this what i've called the resource gap and look i have a charter school charter school supposedly get all this money we're supposed my schools one of the least funded public schools in the state and oversees a single private dollar i don't receive we the number of public funds that we get are still less than even our traditional counterparts and so i think we have to step back and say are we interested in investing in the future of our society because the future is in the present is black and brown what's the story we will tell the future of this moment around these decisions hopefully it's that we learn the lessons from the past sixty five years and brown and decided to go a different way those of us who are advocating for integration i support that fight it cannot be the fight that sucks all the air out of the real me has for those of us who live in communities that are not going to see schools integrated our children deserve access to the resources and a culturally responsive education that will center them and it will require their educators to master the principles and best practices and cultures bostrom education so that the outcomes are in tandem with what the expectations of the recent scandal around wow shocking cheating include all ages mission there by people  including some hollywood celebrities and has that helped or hurt this conversation has given some attention to i don't know if people are making this connection between these kind of the functions of kind of inequality and privilege operate in kind of these elite educational spaces and what's happening in our kind of public educational spaces for the for k twelve students i'm not i'm i've been thinking a lot about this obviously i attended columbia university after attending hispanic  historic aspects of an institution in los angeles and was completely culture shocked every single day i walked in there to see like the other students of color so i see that connection clearly i'm hopeful other brilliant people will make those connections for a larger society to see but it's very much related i mean the the specialized high school conversation has so much resonance and relevance to this this you know and i'm not suggesting that people are cheating their way in especially high schools but there is a a  game to play to get into these and if you figure out how to play that game you can get that scarce resource that is you know supposedly so amazing the game we're all in is our shared future what we're going to do thank you so much all of you and and i w say that we recently decided to take a look for ourselves and visited the embassy school in bedford stuyvesant a brooklyn neighborhood long known as a center of political black power we wanted to see exactly how operates and hear directly from teachers and students themselves thank today you had opportunity to see family meeting it's really about our family here at amber it's also about the family of the diaspora like our school is two thirds black one third leg next and so part of our approach to be a cultural responses that we speak bring so this is our time once a week where we get to talk about our intersectionality we get to talk about the big ideas the concepts the history the next all of us to this shared experience that we've had all over the world look at their faces you listen to their voices you hear them express the sense of pride and knowledge is beautiful so this is why i do everything that we decorate our school where we aim to really create a culture that kind of reflects the culture that is at home you know so we put things that really make them proud of who they are spent hours kind of like creating all these different flags and not just flags on the wall they are really representative of all the kids that are in our school it's really important that this institution  yes you can make of this you are picture right so if you look at all the social movements where everything from the civil rights movement to the nation of islam to the black panthers it was all about self empowerment so the question was how do we put that at the center of school and you don't this is not a school i know looks like the school this is not a school this is not what this is this is a human development organization in that way we're much more like a consulting firm and people come to us the problem problem is that they aren't bothered to her and slay the trap in generational poverty and their kids are as well and they want us to help them break those chains and we know that that can only be done by them that's why it's about empowerment that's what it's about i'd say and so we have to do that in this place that we call school buildings and we can do that anywhere by helping our staff in and our teachers our human development practitioners start to step into that role into that fully now we're doing some really revolutionary work i think now we're doing some things to kind of challenge what we typically you know we talk about being very tough and we talk about this is the underground railroad right we talk about like this is a pass way to freedom you got to build it you got to operationalize it and i think that's what we've been doing here and that's what we'll continue to do