School Colors Eps 7: New Kids On The Block

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 […]

School Colors Ep. 6: Mo’ Charters Mo’ Problems

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. […]

School Colors Ep. 5: The Disappearing District

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 […]

School Colors Ep. 1: Old School

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 […]

School Colors

School Colors is a documentary podcast series about race, class, and power in American cities – told through the story of one public school district in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Produced and hosted by Mark Winston Griffith and Max Freedman. School Colors is a co-production of Brooklyn Deep and the NYU Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and […]

Third Rail Eps 45: Nothin’ But a G Thing

On the eve of the NYC elections, the Brooklyn Deep team examines all the local gentrification drama that helped define the political landscape this summer. Joining us is Michael Higgins Jr., the lead organizer for Families United for Racial and Economic Equality (FUREE). Also, Brooklyn Deep’s engineer and co-producer, TK, hooks on a mic and […]

Airbnb as a Racial Gentrification Tool?

A new study by the Airbnb activist project, Inside Airbnb was released today, and is being made exclusively available, on the Brooklyn Deep web-site. The study claims that it has data which shows that Airbnb acts as a racial gentrification tool in New York City’s predominantly Black neighborhoods. “Across all 72 predominantly Black New York City neighborhoods, Airbnb hosts are […]

Third Rail Eps 36: Family Affair, Living a Bed-Stuy Gentrification Story

This month we focus on 17-year-old Corinne Bobb-Semple’s reporting for the Radio Rookie series, not just as an act of journalism, but as something that springs from her family’s legacy of community entrepreneurship and civic action. We explore what it was like to discuss the intricacies of race, class and place in the Bobb-Semple home […]

Learning Curves: A New Generation of Parents and Educators Take on Change in Bed-Stuy’s District 16

Shaila Dewan, a reporter for the New York Times who covers the criminal justice system, moved to Bedford-Stuyvesant with her husband in 2012, when she was “very pregnant” with their first child. “I didn’t really know that much about the schools,” she said, “except that nobody I knew went to any of them. I asked […]

Reporting On Gentrification: Teen POV

In partnership with WNYC’s Radio Rookies, Brooklyn Deep has been working with five Central Brooklyn teens to produce stories about themselves, their communities and their world. And in the process, they’re learning radio journalism: how to conduct an interview, develop a story, and edit audio. One of those young people is 14 year old, Corinne […]