Looking back at me even when i was reading back at the reaction for kids in the 70s when they started buzzing, a lot of the kids would say you know, i like it at the school and they didnt think about it and it was the same way for me. As i got older i started to sort of think about not only going to school and being surrounded by poverty that i didnt see in my neighborhood in the suburbs that is definitely eyeopening but at the same time the schools that i attended, there was tracking so you had the regular Program Honors and then you had the advanced program and those were cut very closely of a long race and class lines. So as a kid to absorb that and you start to think about it. I remember being in high school and one of the only classes i took where i was actually mixed between the tracks was the global studies course i think and there was an africanamerican student in the classes said she tried to test and to the advancement at one point and she couldnt get in. She was obviously very intelligent and well spoken woman and that stuck with me. I still remember that in the tenth grade thinking about these tracks and i think reflecting on that, you have to segregation but at the same time within the schools you still had desegregation and you are sending a message to kids when you have classes full of kids that are supposed to be the smart kids and classes full of black kids who are not supposed to be the smart kids. Myself that a lot of my classmates, that hits home and it makes you think about how this has worked out. I have always been really interested in this idea of how do we do diversity well . Host now the dominant narrative in American Life and particularly legal and educational history over the past 50 years or 60 years now has been the brown decision, this idea that if we could desegregate and if we could force the hand of schools and policymakers that we could have greater education and not just equality but equity. Obviously your book pushes against that narrative somewhat. But the brown versus board is brought up in your book this entire time. Talk about what brown has meant for educational equality and access in the country so far . Guest is a hard question because i think we hold up around as this amazing feat that we accomplished, that we roll back segregation and then we look at what happened afterwards and we see how incredibly difficult it was, divisive in some ways but ill see you have incremental progress after that, that was very frustrating to people and so is seen as a great victory but i think also its important doing this research to really look back and see what we didnt accomplish yet. And so when i was looking at desegregation and how it was finally implemented 20 years later after brown actually was handed down, we started busing but the way these programs are set up, still maintained White Privilege in a lot of ways and class privilege so that poor kids in black kids had to be tossed and part of that was logistics but part of it was making it the status quo. So i think the brown decision, its a difficult decision and also one of the most interesting books i have ever read in what brown v. Board of education should have said. Academics looking at if the justices had done it differently how it might change things and its really interesting. He probably wouldnt have had the unanimous decision which was very very important but it is really looking at some of the counterfactual and thinking about what a victory it was but also what it did not accomplish. Host is it difficult to write a book that pushes back against such a celebrated Public Policy . There really was considered one of the greatest victories of the 20 century for america. In highlighting the story of people pushing back . Guest oh yes. If this is not the book that i expected to write. I went into it thinking that you know, in louisville especially that integration was a good thing and it did, it brought people together. It made me think differently about the world that i might have otherwise and a lot of my classmates i think in the same way and i think you know one of the points i make often in the book is that during the heyday of desegregation in busing in the 70s and 80s, you actually saw the black and white achievement gap is shrinking faster than it ever had before so that was a big deal. There were so many accomplishments. Host do you think i mean the gap was so huge in this 60s so getting the consistent teachers may have shrunk the gap and more likely the actual desegregation process was incident. Guest i think its really hard to separate that out. When you talk to people who research how this integration affect kids, its kind of hard to say. Is it because kids are learning from each other or is it because if you are a black child in a classroom with the majority white middleclass, he might have more resources at that school than he would otherwise have. One of the people in the book whose favorite thing was that is why he supported desegregation of the time. So yeah i think its a difficult complicated question and there were also a lot of other things going on at the time when the achievement gap is closing. It wasnt just desegregation i dont think that yeah, i want to make it clear that i think it was a very important thing to do. But i did i was surprised that i ended up writing this book that was looking at what went on. Host you open up the book in and the first mention of us about these letters and i found it compelling that you start tell the story of a girl who dreamed of going to Central High School and dreamed of it all 15 years of her life. What she was a essentially told she couldnt go saying the school couldnt have more than 14 africanamericans and as a result she was being put on a wait list that might derail her dream of getting a good education and becoming a lawyer. That kind of story was compelling and jarring. How much that came up in your research . Are these telling cases or is this just a narrative of the people . Guest yeah i think those stories were what made it really interesting and how people felt about Central High School. Had i seen part of it was she wanted to be a lawyer. No wonder the no other school had a law program but it was also very emotional familial connection. Her dad had gone there and her mom had gone there and you know it was the black school for decades and decades. So people had a very emotional connection to it, and sought is a very good school and it was a very good school at the time in the 80s. Eventually they put in and advance program so you have the elite of the black Community Going to that school. You know, the people that i talk to in the book, there were two things always going on, this concern about educational quality but also about our school and this is our community and its very important that we have some say over our school. Host as people got those letters, and how many letters in the book that people got sent that the engineering of the 1950s was producing outcomes that may have been unintended but nonetheless harmful. How soon did people in the town realize they probably need to make some sort of adjustment . Guest there was a lot of that. They desegregation was negotiated over the years. There were lots of fights and there was this ongoing constant conflict in some ways and so but for activists, profile activists who are really behind this fight and they had gone to predesegregation and felt very connected to the school. They have been watching this and they were very concerned that desegregation was going to close central. They had seen the writing on the wall because so many other black schools have been closed as a result. Host why were they closing as opposed to shifting demographically . Guest you know it happened a lot. It happened all over the south and elsewhere, where, to make busing work, you had more schools then you need it because you split the population. So there is an interesting story in north carolina. There are these two schools, a black high school and a White High School and and when they have to desegregate they close the black school and part of that i think, in louisville they were trying to convince people, white parents not to flee to the suburbs and the private schools and to do that they had to convince them to keep their kids in the Public Schools and in their thinking, think part of it was that they are not going to want to send their kids downtown. And a lot of the schools had been underresourced for the most part. I think in their mind it made sense to close them because well we havent been doing a lot of of putting resources in him for a long time so we mice will shut them down. It was partly just to make it work. I think it was logistical but also there was some, how do we maintain, how do we keep the white middleclass happy . Host they were less concerned with the white middleclass and that mightve been totally okay with them. Part of it was the tradition of the school itself. Guest absolutely. It was the tradition of black empowerment i think and that we built the school ourselves, that we did this largely without a lot of help from the school district, without a lot of resources and we have to fight for every penny. So i think a lot of the people that i talked to saw the way that busing happened or just the attitude of desegregation as saying that black people basically failed in doing education in their community and they need this help. They need to have their kids sit next to a white kid. I heard that lots so i think there was a sense go. Host from the communities or from the outside critics . Guest i heard that from the activists. We shouldnt have to set a black child next to a white child for them to learn. And i think an understandable frustration there that our culture and our community is not being recognized as good as and so i think that was one of the problems with the way desegregation was thought of in the way it was implemented. There was sunday, we are going to share resources. It was day we are kind of healthy kind of thing. Host is there any danger that approach because it seems to me that could return us back to the 1954 mindset of saying you know, we are going to hold on to the Failing School, pre 1964 ,com,com ma hold the Failing School so we have our own stuff so we have our own nationalist kind of posture irrespective of what the outcome is for the kids. Guest yeah, grief. I told the stories of people whose stories havent been told in their prospectus havent been out there. I agree. I think its a really difficult question to say you know, its a question we are dealing with now do you close the school down because its failing or because it doesnt have enough students, because the test scores are low, or do we try and keep it together even though those things are happening for the sake of the community . And i think its a really difficult balance and i dont have the answer. Host none of us do, right . One of the virtues of the book is it was amazingly written and you chronicled this perspective. You highlight this perspective but you also help us track how activists engage in the pushback oftentimes i think these victories are celebrated and people get a sense of the foot trend. Talk to me a little bit about that. These activists who ultimately pushed to advance the legal argument that really shifted the tides of the entire country, not just how did they do it . Guest well, really a bunch of interesting and eclectic people. They came at it from different, very different places although a lot of them had been friends. One of them was this very gregarious football coach and he just had this attitude. He had been a gadfly and written editorials constantly in the newspaper. They were at the edges in activism and new what they were doing when it came to do in community activism. Another had been really part of the black nationalist movement in the 70s and was involved in that and so they had grown up from that. They were of the Civil Rights Movement in some ways and at that time period but also sort of on the outside and critiquing it by learning from it. So they knew what they were doing. She was just a wonderful lady and she got very involved in protesting the first iraq war in the 90s. She was very involved and that is how she sort of got pulled id to save the school she had gone to. So you knew they know what they were doing. They were also very alone i think. They were a minority in their community in a lot of ways. I mean it was an anachronism to be africanamerican activists fighting against which is interesting in which is why read a book about them. Host i can imagine how activists would have an argument and maybe how do you is a black person in a black community convince black people that you know its the best way to make schools better. Guest the thing is there werent they were behind this First Federal case and they didnt end up going up to the Supreme Court because they thought they had won their fight which was Central High School and that was what they cared about. Some white parents took it on but it turns out that in a lot of places you had fights where you had the naacp on one side fighting to maintain decent grip grip desegregation programs or expand them and then he would have a black School Board Member or an urban league person or a group of black terence on the other side saying you know what . Lets get rid of this program. We want our Neighborhood Schools that. So really, they were lonely but they were necessarily completely alone. Host almost like powerbrokers. And i guess i wonder, and maybe you can answer this. I also wonder they think it makes policy sense or because they have been ideological commitment to this approach that desegregation works . Its its own thing in its own virtue or the tradition . That naacp in many ways makes its on brown v. Board. Did you get a sense from the people, were they resentful of the black organizations . Guest in some ways its interesting. I think that it became, you didnt have a huge uprising when they were praying in this case, you didnt have a lot of black leaders in the community. You definitely have a significant you know, some of the leaders, you didnt have a big uprising against them. I think they were people in the community who said yeah, this hasnt really gone our way. But i mean it is an interesting question and i dont know. Host again, i dont think there is an answer. I often wonder and after reading your book, ive been more compelled to question the reasons why these organizations like the naacp is not on a National Level certain glee the local level has solved this symbolic but doesnt play out on the ground for the people who are supposed to be helped. Guest i think in some ways i think there is a need for our schools to be more diverse than they are. Maybe not an academic need but i do think that there is this idea that if our kids are educated together that maybe your country will be less divided than it is politically, economically and maybe we will understand one another better and that kind of thing. So i think there is a reason for it, not just attrition all aspects. Host and the resource question. Guest yeah, how do you you get money to poor minority neighborhoods . One really fast way to do that is [inaudible] is horrible, yeah. But i think that is what they are trying to do now. To say okay now desegregation, its mostly over in most places so how do we deal with that . How do we deal with the fact that in most cities and urban areas, its not even a possibility. Its not even feasible anymore. Host is their popular opinion based on this sort of legal term we have seen now . Guest legally, its very hard. I write about the School Choice movement and i really think that is got into the consciousness of the American Public and people really feel like they deserve the right to have a choice of schools. So i think turning around and saying okay, lets implement this Busing Program and you have to send your kids here, dont know if its politically feasible that way and its a controlled choice. Its a Choice Program but the choices are managed. So i think that has just in terms of where people live i think. You have had cities and some schools are becoming in the suburbs are becoming more diverse and in the inner cities you have the white middleclass moving back in in washington d. C. And new york so there are some opportunities. But i dont think forced busing, its not going to be at. Host im glad you mentioned that. Its sort of the demographic landscape that is shifted so much that it almost makes no sense to even sort of relied on that policy movements of the 50s and 60s. Using new york city is an example, brooklyn or harlem even in the 90s. So i mean, i guess part of what i wonder is im still interested in the parents before we change gears. The parents taking account of those shifts, the policy shifts in the demographic shifts and they are making demands in louisville, are they making demands for new approaches to education reform . Are they kind of locked into a historical moment as well . Guest i think whenever you talk to parents [inaudible] i hear people talk about Parent Involvement in schools and parents are really focused on the kids in whats going to happen to them and getting them into the very best schools that they possibly can. Some parents have more savvy than others and bickering out which school that isnt some people value Different Things about schools. You know being close to my house may be very important or the teachers are nice to me and care about my kid, that kind of thing. I think parents weigh Different Things but i think you know, then all of the people i talk te motivation. They werent thinking about oh, i mean even crystal meredith who took her kids to the Supreme Court. Her motivation was, she wanted her son to get into the school that she wanted him to go to so it wasnt, want to tear the system down. I dont think that is how she started out and i think for the most part we werent really thinking big picture. We were thinking very small picture. My 5yearold. Host but it becomes a big picture right . Guest i think thats whats so difficult about schools reform. You have these clashes so its really hard to think about the larger, the good of the Larger Society when its your chil