School Colors

Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn is one of the most iconic historically Black neighborhoods in the United States. But Bed-Stuy is changing. Fifty years ago, schools in Bed-Stuy's District 16 were so overcrowded that students went to school in shifts. Today, they're half-empty. Why?

In trying to answer that question, we discovered that the biggest, oldest questions we have as a country about race, class, and power have been teste...

In the late 1960s, the Central Brooklyn neighborhood of Ocean Hill-Brownsville was at the center of a bold experiment in community control of public schools. But as Black and Puerto Rican parents in Ocean Hill-Brownsville tried to exercise power over their schools, they collided headfirst with the teachers’ union — leading to the longest teachers’ strike in American history, 51 years ago this fall.

What started as a local pilot proj...

In the fall of 1968, New York City teachers went on strike three times, in reaction to an experiment in community control of schools in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, Brooklyn. The third strike was the longest, and the ugliest.

The movement for community control tapped into a powerful desire among Black and brown people across New York City to educate their own. But the backlash was ferocious. The confrontation at Ocean Hill-Brownsville fr...

In the wake of the 1968 teachers’ strikes, Black people in Central Brooklyn continued to fight for self-determination in education -- both inside and outside of the public school system.

Some veterans of the community control movement started an independent school called Uhuru Sasa Shule, or "Freedom Now School," part of a pan-African cultural center called The East. Other Black educators tried to work within the new system ...

Since 2002, the number of students in Bed-Stuy’s District 16 has dropped by more than half. There’s no single reason why this is happening, but the year 2002 is a clue: that’s when Michael Bloomberg became the Mayor, abolished local school boards, and took over the New York City school system.

In this episode, we’ll meet parents trying to reassert collective power and local accountability in District 16 after years of neglect from t...

If you ask most people in Bed-Stuy’s District 16 why they think enrollment is falling, chances are they’ll point to charter schools: privately managed public schools, which have been on the rise in New York City for more than a decade.

Charter schools were originally dreamed up to be laboratories for innovation in public education. Instead, many see them as a threat — competing with neighborhood schools for space, resources, and kid...

Gentrification is reshaping cities all over the country: more affluent people, often but not always white, are moving into historically Black and brown neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant. But even as the population of Bed-Stuy has been growing in numbers and wealth, the schools of District 16 have been starved for students and resources. That’s because a lot of people moving into the neighborhood either don’t have kids, or send ...

Despite New York City's progressive self-image, our dirty secret is that we have one of the most deeply segregated school systems in the country. But with gentrification forcing the issue, school integration is back on the table for the first time in decades. How do we not totally screw it up? And what does this mean for the long struggle for Black self-determination in Central Brooklyn? 
 

We’ve spent a lot of time on the past. ...

In this bonus episode, recorded live at the Brooklyn Public Library, producers Mark Winston Griffith and Max Freedman talk with Christina Veiga, a reporter from Chalkbeat. They are joined by a special guest: NeQuan McLean, president of the Community Education Council for District 16.

Their conversation digs deeper into some of the themes of the show, and pulls back the curtain on how Mark and Max created School Colors -- and where i...

School Colors is back! Season 2 premieres this week, presented by NPR's Code Switch. To listen, hop over to the Code Switch feed.

In Season 1, hosts Mark Winston Griffith and Max Freedman reported from their home turf in Central Brooklyn. Season 2 is all about Queens. Queens is often touted as the most ethnically diverse place in the world. So why would a school district in the middle of Queens need a diversity plan? And why wou...

Queens, New York is often called “the most diverse place on the planet.” So why would a school district in Queens need a diversity plan? And why would so many Queens parents be so fiercely opposed?

Welcome back to School Colors — Season 2.

Click here for a full episode transcript.

Join us at the Queens Public Library on December 15!

Are you using School Colors in your own teaching or organizing? Fill out this audience survey.

School Col...

District 28 is both diverse and segregated. There’s a Northside and a Southside. To put it simply: the Southside is Black, and the further north you go, the fewer Black people you see. But it wasn't always like this.

Once upon a time, Black parents in South Jamaica staged an epic school boycott that led to the first statewide law against school segregation in New York. The Southside hosted two revolutionary experiments in racial...

In the early 1970s, Forest Hills, Queens, became a national symbol of white, middle class resistance to integration. Instead of public schools, this fight was over public housing. It was a fight that got so intense the press called it "The Battle of Forest Hills."

How did a famously liberal neighborhood become a hotbed of reaction and backlash? And how did a small group of angry homeowners change housing policy for the entir...

So much of the present day conversation about District 28 hinges on the dynamic between the Northside and the Southside. But why were the north and the south wedged into the same school district to begin with? When we asked around, no one seemed to know.

What we do know are the consequences. As soon as the district was created, white and Black folks looked over the Mason-Dixon line and saw each other not as neighbors, but as competi...

Until recently, District 28 was characterized by a white Northside, and a Black Southside. For more than a hundred years, we've seen how conflicts around housing, schools, and resources have played out mostly along this racial divide. So how did District 28 go from being defined by this racial binary, to a place where people brag about its diversity?

In this episode, we take a deep dive into two immigrant communities — Indo-Cari...

Queens has changed a lot in the last few decades — and so has District 28. New immigrant communities have taken root and the district is, on the whole, pretty diverse. But most Black folks still live on the Southside, and the schools below Liberty Avenue continue to struggle.

A lot of parents and educators agree that there needs to be some change in District 28. But the question remains: what kind of change? When we asked around, mo...

In some ways, this entire season was prompted by the parents who organized against diversity planning in District 28. So in this episode, we let the opposition speak for themselves.

Who are these parents? What do they believe and why? And why were they ready to fight so hard against a plan that didn't exist?

Click here for a full episode transcript.

Join us at the Queens Public Library on December 15!

Are you using School Colors in...

In 2018, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a plan to replace the Specialized High School Admissions Test, or SHSAT. For years, advocates had argued that the test favored white and Asian students while systematically keeping Black and Latinx kids out of the city's most elite and well-resourced high schools. But many Asian American parents felt targeted by the mayor’s plan, and they mobilized to defend the test.

So when...