Can We Finally End School Segregation?

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 21 May 2021

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

By many accounts, American schools are as segregated today as they were in the nineteen-sixties, in the years after Brown v. Board of Education. WNYC’s podcast “The United States of Anxiety” chronicled the efforts of one small school district, Sausalito Marin City Schools, in California, to desegregate. Fifty years after parents and educators there first attempted integration, the state’s attorney general found that the district “knowingly and intentionally” maintained a segregated system, violating the equal-protection clause of the Constitution. The district’s older public school, which served mostly Black and Latino students, suffered neglect; meanwhile, a new charter school, though racially diverse, enrolled virtually all the white children in the district. The reporter Marianne McCune explored how one community overcame decades of distrust to finally integrate.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:10.5	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:14.0	Here's a sobering fact. By many accounts, schools in America are as segregated now as they were in the 1960s in the years just after
0:23.4	separate but equal was declared unconstitutional. Now that's not true of every school, in every
0:29.0	state, of course, but in cities and towns across the country, white students and black and brown
0:34.3	students are very commonly educated in entirely different worlds,
0:39.2	with different resources and very different outcomes.
0:43.1	Here in New York City, which exudes pride in its diversity and in its political liberalism,
0:49.2	schools are among the most segregated in the nation.
0:52.7	In fact, in a lot of places, schools are more segregated now
0:56.7	than 20 or 30 years ago. How did this happen? And what would it take finally to be together
1:03.0	and equal?
1:09.0	WNYC's program, the United States of Anxiety, has been taking a very close look at how those
1:14.3	questions have played out in one small school district, the Sausalito Marin City Schools
1:20.5	in California.
1:22.5	Reporter Marianne McCune began visiting the district about two years ago. One of the schools is a charter, Willow Creek Academy.
1:31.4	Just picture it.
1:32.7	Foggy slopes, trees, and instead of a big old school building, little bungalows around the field,
1:40.1	classic Bay Area.
1:44.8	The first time I visited the charter school, the board president showed me around.
1:48.9	His name is Kurt Weinzheimer.
1:50.8	Do you want to look into a classroom? I'll see what...
	...

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