Looking at segregation between School Districts in long island and this and that between these issues but the reason i wrote it is i go out to the Public Schools when i was in second grade in the inner city in the housing projects in the poor neighborhoods in the city so it was something i had thought about actively since i was a little kid and so when it came into the Supreme Court i was interested in following that host talking about the personal pieces i like to ask people their personal connection in the story when we get into the meat of it did you have a particularly stance on bus segregation . Guest i think they dont think about it and looking back to when i was looking at the reaction from the kids in the 70s when they started busting a lot of the kids would say i like it at this school. They didnt think about it but as i got older i started to think about not only going to schools and being surrounded by poverty that i didnt see in my neighborhood in the suburbs, but you know, at the same time in the schools that i had attended there was tracking so you have the regular program and in the advanced program they are close race on the class lines and so as a kid you absorb that and start to think about it and i remember being in High School One of the only class is i took was mixed between the tracks in a global studies course there was an africanamerican student in the class who tried to test the program at one point and she couldnt get in and she was very intelligent and soft spoken i was in tenth grade thinking about these tracks and i think reflecting on that you have desegregation but at the same time in the schools you still have segregation and you are sending the message to kids when you have glasses that are supposed to be the smart kids and full of black kids theyre supposed to be the not smart kids and so i think myself and a lot of my classmates hits home and it makes you think about how this has worked out and ive always been interested in this idea of how we do diversity well. Host in the American Life and the educational history over the past 50 years if we could desegregate and forced the hand of schools on the policy makers that we could have a more Diverse School and a greater education not just on the quality that equity. Youre but pushes back against of that but brown v. Board talks a little bit about what brown has meant on the equality and access in the country so far. Guest i think it is a hard question because we hold up brown has this amazing defeated we accomplish this and weve rolled back segregation and look at what happened afterwards on how incredibly difficult it was, divisive in some ways, but we had a ferry in incremental process after the other was very frustrating i think for people and so it is seen as a great victory but also its important with research to look back and see what we didnt accomplish yet and so when i was looking at a desegregation and how it was finally implemented 20 years after and was handed down he started busting but in the way the programs are set up still maintains privilege poor kids and had to be bused for more time and part of it was logistics but its maintaining the status quo so i think the brown decision is a difficult decision and the most interesting books ive read is what brown v the board of education should have said to the academics looking at what the justice is if they had done it differently what might have changed things and its interesting. You probably wouldnt have had the unanimous decision which was very important, but its interesting to look at the counterfactual and think about what our victory was and also what it did not accomplish. Host is a difficult to write a book that pushes back on such a celebrated Public Policy . We want to consider the great victories of the 20th century for america. Did you push back against the or highlight the story of people that pushback . Guest yes but its not a book that i expected to write. I went into it thinking especially that integration was a good thing and it brought people in, it did, it brought people together. It made me think differently about the world than i might have otherwise with a lot of my classmates in the same way and i think what are dhaka other points to make often in the book is that you during the heyday of the desegregation you actually saw the gap shrinking faster than it ever has said that is a big deal and i think that there were accomplishments host but what about the desegregation as such or having a 66 the gap was so huge in the 40s, 50s and 60s and their resources into building sometimes we want to argue the actual desegregation process was infidel. Guest i think thats hard to separate that out. When you talk about people but researched how does the integration affect kids its hard to say is it because kids are learning from each other or is it because if you are a black child in the classroom its majority white middle class so you might have more resources in that school than you would other otherwise. So his favorite saying it was green and white and thats why he supported segregation at the time. So yeah, i think thats a very difficult and complicated question and theres also a lot of other things going on at the time when that achievement gap was closing to the it wasnt just desegregation. I want to make it clear that i think it was a very important thing to do. But i did i was surprised i ended up writing this book looking at what went wrong. Its not what i expected to write about. Host but you open up the book and the first section is about the letters and i found it compelling as you tell the story of this girl that the dreamed of going to high school and she dreamed of it all of her life, 15 years of her life. She essentially was told she couldnt go, saying the school couldnt have more than 42 africanamericans, and as a result, she was being put on a waiting list that might deal her dream of getting a good education having a lawyer. That kind of story was compelling. How much of that came up in your research and are you telling case is or is this a narrative of people . Guest i think those stories to me are what made it interesting. Its how emotionally connected people felt with of the school, Central High School which is what the book really focused on. But how they saw the school in the part of it is no other school in the city had a program but was also an emotional connection. Her dad had gone, her mom had gone. You know, it was the black school for decades and decades and so people had a very emotional connection to it, and the father was a very good School Coming and it was a very good school. At the time and etds eventually they put an advanced program and so we have the elite in the black community and to that school. So, you know, the people i talked to in the book, there are two things going on all this concern about the educational equality but also what about our schools, and this is our community and its important that we have a say in our school. As people got those letters in the metaphorical sense since the engineering of the 1950s was producing outcomes that were unintended but nonetheless harmful, how soon did people in the town realize it probably needed to make some sort of adjustment or policy pushback . Guest theres a lot of that. The desegregation was sort of negotiated over the years. Theres lots of fights. Theres this ongoing constant conflict in some ways. And so, i think that for some people highprofile activists who were really behind this fight and they had gone to central presegregation and felt very connected to the school. So for them they had been watching this and they were very concerned that desegregation was going to close. They had sold their riding on wall because so many others had been closed. Host why were they closed as opposed to shifting demographically . Guest it happened a lot of wear to make the busing work you have a lot more schools in places we need it because we swept the populations of theres an interesting story in north carolina. There are these two schools, theres a black high school and a White High School and when they had to desegregate the closed the black school and part of that, you know, i think they are trying to convince people not to flee to the suburbs in the private schools. To do that they had to convince them to keep their Public Schools and in their thinking i 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 under resources and falling apart. So i think in their mind it made sense to close them because they havent been putting a lot of resources and to them for a long time so they shut them down. Its partly just to make it work is logistical, but how do we maintain and keep the white middle class had been the situation. Host the activists that were pushing back the were less concerned with the class. There was a lot of argument they might have been totally okay with that, not the funding but for the stability in the community. They were fighting for other reasons. Part of it was the tradition of the school itself. Guest absolutely. It was the tradition of was the tradition of black empowerment and that we built the school ourselves. We did this largely without a lot help from the school district, without a lot of resources. We had to fight for every penny. And i think a lot of the people that ive talked to salles the way the busing have been or just the attitude of the desegregation is saying that black people basically failed during education and the community and they need this help. They need to have their kids. I heard that a lot and so i think there is this host from the community or from the outside . Guest iowa heard that from the activist. You know, we shouldnt have to set them next to them for them to learn and i think theres an understandable frustration that it is deficient and our culture and community is being recognized as good as supply think that is one of the problems with the way desegregation was thought of and implemented and we arent going to share resources we are going to help you if that makes sense. Host is there any danger in that approach that could return us back to the 1954 mindset of saying we are going to hold on to the schools just so we can say we have our own stuff and the National List kind of posture irrespective of what the outcome is. Guest i agree. I was telling the story of people who havent been told or whose perspectives are not out there. Its a difficult question to say its a question and we are dealing with now. Can you close the school now because it doesnt have enough students and the test scores are low or to try to keep it together even though those things are happening for the sake of the community, and i think that its a difficult balance and i actually dont have the answer. Host one of the virtues of the book that is amazingly well written is to chronicle the perspective and highlight this perspective but you also help us track of the activists are engaged in the pushback and the victories are celebrated but people get a sense of the footprint, what it takes to get their. These activists were ultimately to advance a legal argument for the entire country, not just how do they do it . Guest a bunch of interesting and a eclectic people to spend time with but they came at it from different very different places to be all the way lot of them had been friends one of them was a very gregarious football coach and he had a coach attitude and hed written editorials constantly said they were sort of at the edges and active as some and kind of knew what they were doing when it came to doing Community Activism and another had been a part of the black nationalist movement in the 70s and so they had grown up from that and they were of the Civil Rights Movement in some ways and that time period but also a sort of on the outside and critiquing and learning from it so they knew what they were doing. At the same time the people i wrote about and she was just a wonderful lady and she got very involved in protesting the first iraq war in the 90s and she was very involved and that is how she sort of got because the school that she had gone into so they knew what they were doing, they were also very alone. They were a minority in a community and a lot of ways. Ascent anachronism to be africanamerican activist fighting against desegregation which makes an interesting book. I can imagine our anchor but activists could have an argument and even get into the Supreme Court. How do you convince people, this is shorthand, right, it is to make schools better . Guest they were alone in bringing this first, they were behind the First Federal case and they didnt end up going on to the Supreme Court because they felt if they win their fight for just central thats what they cared about and some parents to get on but when i went through the research, and a lot of places you have fights or you had the naacp fighting on one side to maintain desegregation programs or expand them and then you would have a black School Board Member or urban league percent or group of parents on the other side saying lets get rid of this program. We want our Neighborhood Schools back. So i mean what they were lonely that they were not necessarily completely alone. Host they were also fighting these power brokers. I wonder, and maybe you can answer this the organizations are holding on to this because they think it makes policy sense or if theyre holding on to the tradition. The naacp makes its bones politically. The black organizations . Guest yes in some ways it is interesting on the board of the naacp. There you didnt have a huge uprising when they were bringing the case he didnt have a lot of black leaders in the community saying this is the wrong thing to do but we dont come in the uprising against them there was people in the community that said yeah this hasnt really gone our way but it is an interesting question and i dont know. Host i dont think there is an answer. I often mondrian after reading your book i became more sort of compelled to question the reasons why these organizations like the naacp or other areas of the National Level and the local level on the Public Policies have all of these symbolic values that dont necessarily played out on the ground for the people that are supposed to be helped. Guest illness of way is there is a need for the schools to be more diverse than they are and its maybe not an academic need, but i do think that there is this idea that if we if our kids are educated together then maybe our country will be less divided and it is economically they will understand when they are better not just in the traditional it was horrible, but i think that is what the education is really trying to do now. Its trying to say okay, you know, desegregation is mostly over in most places, so how do we deal with a bat and with the fact that in most cities and urban areas it is not even a possibility. Its not even feasible anymore. Host based on the popular opinion or the legal terms guest i think legally its very hard to do any more to write about School Choice movement and its really gone into the consciousness of the American Public and people feel like they deserve the right to have a choice in the schools and so they are going to implement a Busing Program and you have to send your kids here the have a huge archive its not politically feasible its a controlled Choice Program that the choices are managed, so that has sort of a underlined in the opportunity to do this. You have the growth of cities and some schools are becoming in the suburbs you have neighborhoods that have become more diverse you have the white middle class living back in and a lot in d. C. And new york host im glad you mentioned that, the demographic landscape has gone so much that it almost makes no sense to even sort of reali on the kind of movement in the 50s and 60s in the urban areas in 1955 or 1975 you use new york city as an example of that and brooklyn and harlem look so different now part of what wonder is if they are taking account of those shifts, the policy shifts is making the demands for the new approaches to education are they in a historical moment as well . Guest i think for parents to care about their kids in a and we hear people talk about Parent Involvement in schools theyre focused on their kids and whats going to be happened they are getting into the very best school they possibly can and some parents have more savvy than others and figuring out of school that is and some people value Different Things about schools and been close to my house may be my kids and that sort of thing so people way out Different Things to and the people i talk to the parents those are the motivations so they were not thinking about even kristol who took her case to the Supreme Court she wanted her son to get into the school she wanted him to go to so it wasnt i want to tear the system down thats not how she started out and for the most part we werent thinking big pictures. Host it becomes a big picture, right . Guest all of those choices and that is what is so difficult about the School Reform is you have these clashes so its really hard to think about the good of the Larger Society when it is your child and in my personal case my parents sent me down to the school and my mother had spent time in the school where i went to Elementary School before bouncing because she was familiar with the school and she was a social worker and it was a rough school and a high poverty area so when she was sending me to that school i would imagine that it must have been difficult, but at the same time it had been i guess they had worked on the school to make its for the middle class families said they had an advanced program and that is what made it okay to go there and stay there and has stayed there for four because of was a good program, so i think that our parents could say we are doing a good thing because, you know, we are taking part investing and sending