Keeping Score: A Year Inside a Divided Brooklyn High School

Keeping Score: A Year Inside a Divided Brooklyn High School

Nearly seventy years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, our public schools effectively remain segregated. And, by some measures, New York City has the most segregated system in the country. For a group of high schools in Brooklyn, change has long seemed impossible. But now those schools are putting their hopes in an unlikely place: sports.

The John Jay Educational Campus in Park Slope, Brooklyn, houses four public high schools. Three of them have a student body with a Black-and-Latino majority; the fourth is disproportionately white and Asian. For a decade, students from all four schools shared a cafeteria and a gym but played on two separate sports teams—sometimes even competing against one other. Last year, the athletics programs merged, and the hope is that this change will break down some of the divisions between students. Angelina Sharifi, a student who plays volleyball, said that a team has to mesh in order to win. “And meshing is, like, the best feeling ever—having a pass, set, swing, that fits perfectly with one another,” she said. “That kind of unspoken connection that comes with volleyball is super-satisfying for me.

This is a story of how students and adults grapple with enduring inequities, and how the merger is playing out on the girls’ varsity volleyball team. “I want this to work. I really do,” the student Mariah Morgan said, “because it has the potential to be incredibly anti-racist.”

This reporting originally aired as part of the podcast “Keeping Score,” a co-production of WNYC Studios and The Bell.

Episoder(1019)

Does Every Marriage Need a Prenup?

Does Every Marriage Need a Prenup?

Prenups have gone from a tool of the ultra-wealthy, carrying a whiff of scandal, to a more widespread request for aspirational young couples with few assets. Wilson spoke with celebrity divorce attorn...

13 Jan 18min

Trump’s New Brand of Imperialism

Trump’s New Brand of Imperialism

U.S. intervention in other countries, whether overt or covert, is by no means new, and Daniel Immerwahr notes that the open embrace of expansionism by the President and associates such as Stephen Mill...

9 Jan 31min

Demi Moore Talks with Jia Tolentino

Demi Moore Talks with Jia Tolentino

Since she reëmerged as a star in the 2024 film “The Substance,” Demi Moore has been very busy. She has a major role in the current season of Taylor Sheridan’s “Landman” series, and she has two highly ...

6 Jan 22min

Salsa Star Rubén Blades on Acting, Politics, and the Power of Music

Salsa Star Rubén Blades on Acting, Politics, and the Power of Music

For roughly half a century, the singer Rubén Blades has been spreading the gospel of salsa music to every corner of the globe. “You could say that Blades did for salsa what Bob Marley did for reggae,”...

2 Jan 28min

Elaine Pagels on “The Historical Mystery of Jesus”

Elaine Pagels on “The Historical Mystery of Jesus”

Thirty years ago, David Remnick published “The Devil Problem,” a Profile of the religion scholar Elaine Pagels—a scholar of early Christianity who had also, improbably, become a best-selling author wi...

30 Des 202526min

The Company Behind the A.I. Boom

The Company Behind the A.I. Boom

Across the country, data centers that run A.I. programs are being constructed at a record pace. A large percentage of them use chips built by the tech colossus Nvidia. The company has nearly cornered ...

26 Des 202524min

Graham Platner Is Staying in the Race

Graham Platner Is Staying in the Race

The Republican Susan Collins has held one of Maine’s Senate seats for nearly thirty years, and Democrats, in trying to take it away from her, have a lot at stake. Graham Platner, a combat veteran, pol...

19 Des 202549min

Poetry as a Cistern for Love and Loss

Poetry as a Cistern for Love and Loss

Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s most recent collection, “The New Economy,” was a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry this year, and one of their poems was included in “A Century of Poetry in The ...

16 Des 202524min

Populært innen Politikk og nyheter

giver-og-gjengen-vg
aftenpodden
aftenpodden-usa
forklart
popradet
stopp-verden
det-store-bildet
dine-penger-pengeradet
rss-gukild-johaug
lydartikler-fra-aftenposten
rss-ness
fotballpodden-2
hanna-de-heldige
nokon-ma-ga
aftenbla-bla
rss-dannet-uten-piano
e24-podden
rss-utenrikskomiteen-med-bogen-og-grasvik
rss-penger-polser-og-politikk
bt-dokumentar-2