People Like You Do Things Like This

There’s a moment in Courtney Martin‘s memoir Learning in Public where she is wrestling with her decision on where to send her oldest kid to school.

Martin is a writer, a journalist, and a White mother in Oakland who had been circling Emerson Elementary for months — the majority-Black, poorly-rated public school a few blocks from her front door that White families in her gentrifying neighborhood largely avoid. She knows the history. She knows the statistics. She knows, intellectually, that the choices White families make about schools are not neutral. And she is uncertain anyway. 

She finds her way to Integrated Schools, and to our founder, Courtney Everts Mykytyn. And Mykytyn tells her something simple enough to fit on a Post-it note, and profound enough to restructure a life:

“People like you do things like this.”

Not: you’re special. Not: you’re a hero. Not: this will be easy or you’re doing the right thing or any of the things we reach for when we want to make a hard thing feel more comfortable than it is.

Just: people like you do things like this. Because someone like Mykytyn had already done it. And because that — it turns out — can be enough to get your feet firmly planted in the decision.

The Pull of Permission

We don’t usually call it permission. We call it connection, or community, or finding your people. But underneath all of those words is the same thing: the moment when something that felt impossible becomes possible because someone who looks like you, lives like you, worries like you — did it first.

This is not a small thing. It is not a soft thing. It is, actually, one of the most powerful forces in human behavior.

We are social creatures. We take our cues from our communities. We scan our surroundings and ask, often unconsciously: is this what people like me do? And when the answer is yes — when we can see it, name it, touch it — the decision that felt unthinkable becomes thinkable. The school that felt like water flowing uphill becomes the desert in full bloom. 

The Origin Story of our Choices

Let’s think through what makes it feel impossible in the first place. The sense that a global-majority, under-resourced, or “poorly-rated” school is not safe, not right, not for us (meaning folks with racial, economic, or educational privilege)— that feeling has a history. 

It is the residue of decades of deliberate disinvestment, racist narrative-building, and a real estate and school-rating industrial complex that has systematically coded “low-income” and “majority of color” as synonymous with “dangerous” and “failing.” Racism built that association. And racism is what makes it feel like common sense rather than ideology. 

Most White and affluent families don’t experience themselves as making a racially motivated choice when they bypass their neighborhood school. They experience themselves as being reasonable. Doing research. Protecting their child. And so they do something remarkable: they tour three, four, five schools — visiting campuses, reading data packets, attending information nights, asking detailed questions about curriculum and extracurriculars and class sizes — for schools that concentrate Whiteness and wealth, schools where they already feel seen and safe. 

And so often, they never walk through the doors of the school that is, sometimes literally, on their street. Or they construct a story about why they can’t. I remember a family once told me they wouldn’t consider our local neighborhood school because “all the kids are bussed in from different places.” It was stated as fact. It was entirely false. Most of the children at that school lived in our neighborhood — on the less-affluent, less-gentrified, multi-family side, the side that doesn’t get included in block parties or neighborhood meetings. The buses they had seen in front of the school were part of a small program bringing a handful of kids with visual impairments to a specialized facility. That was it. But the story had already done its work. A school full of neighborhood children — children who lived blocks away — had been rendered impossible by a fictional account (also, why is bussing such a bad thing?? Well that has racist roots, too). That is not a parenting failure. That is racism working exactly as designed: making separation feel like discernment, making assumptions feel like research, making a community of children invisible to a family living closest to them.

Courtney Mykytyn understood this intuitively when she founded Integrated Schools. She wasn’t building a policy organization. She wasn’t launching a think tank. She was building a community of people who could say to each other — over and over, in as many cities and neighborhoods and school districts as possible — people like you do things like this.

Because we have seen each other do it.

We Are Not the First

It would be a particular kind of arrogance — the kind we try hard to address and resist — to suggest that Integrated Schools invented this practice.

We did not.

The families who organized the Lemon Grove community in 1931 and won the first successful school desegregation case in American history did this. The parents who walked their children through lines of screaming white adults to integrate schools in places like Virginia, Little Rock, New Orleans, and Boston did this. The Black educators who built extraordinary schools under segregation — and fought to keep them when integration came at the cost of their jobs and their communities — did this. The organizers, the lawyers, the teachers, the mothers and fathers who understood that education is not a private transaction but a collective practice, and who built movements around that understanding for generations before Courtney Mykytyn or Courtney Martin or any of us arrived — they did this first.

We carry a torch that others lit. And that matters.

What Ripples Actually Look Like

Here is what we know about how change moves through communities:

It doesn’t usually move through policy first. It moves through people. Specifically, it moves through networks of people who have decided to do something differently and who are in relationship with each other enough that the decision becomes contagious.

Researchers who study social change call this the “tipping point” of committed minorities — the threshold at which a critical mass of people committed to a new behavior begins to shift the norm for everyone around them. It doesn’t take a majority. It takes a connected, visible, persistent minority.

This is exactly what Integrated Schools chapters are. It is exactly what our network contacts are. It is exactly what every family who has taken the Two Tour Pledge, signed up for Caregiver Connection, shared a podcast episode, or simply told a neighbor actually, we looked at that school and here’s what we found — is doing.

That is not naivety. That is how it has always worked.

Not because one family tells two and two tell four and suddenly a school is “transformed” — that framing has its own problems, and we’ve seen that in stories like those told on Nice White Parents and School Colors. Schools are not pet projects. 

But something quieter and more stubborn happens when a family with some form of privilege of choice simply shows up and stays, without a facebook group, what’s app chat or critical mass. It punctures a story. The story that this is something no one does, or that no one can do without a bunch of safety and control mechanisms. That people like us don’t go to schools like that. That the choice has already been made, collectively, and there’s nothing to reconsider.

There is, we have found, always something to reconsider.

Every family that enrolls in a global-majority neighborhood school and doesn’t make it a performance or a sacrifice — that just goes, and participates, and stays through the ordinary hard parts — is living evidence against the fiction. Not a savior. Not a pioneer. Just a person who did the thing that most everyone said people like them don’t do.

And the family watching from across the street — the one on the fence, the one afraid, the one who has been quietly wondering — sees it. And the story gets a little harder to sustain.

That is the ripple. It is not demographic. It is narrative. And it here’s why that matters

• When enough parents are in relationships across race and class lines in the same school community, the political will to fund and fight for that school grows.
• When enough white and privileged families stop treating public school choice as a private optimization problem and start treating it as a civic act, the landscape of what feels normal shifts — and what feels normal is what shapes the choices of the next family, and the next.
• When a child grows up in a genuinely integrated school — where difference is not tolerated but inhabited, where the history of their country is told honestly, where the kids who don’t look like them are not abstractions — that child becomes a different kind of adult. And that adult, eventually, becomes a different kind of voter, neighbor, parent, colleague, and citizen.

We are not just choosing schools. We are choosing to believe in the promise of democracy. And people like us can do this every single day. 

What We Do

We are not martyrs. We are not saviors. We are not special. We are people who decided that what is good for our children is inseparable from what is good for all children — and who found each other in that decision.

Here is what that looks like, concretely:

We drive new narratives.

• We tell the truth about segregation — that it is active, ongoing, and shaped by the choices families with privilege make every day
• We name “good school” as a phrase that, left uninterrogated, creates and maintains racial and class based segregation, and we ask what it actually means
• We share stories of joy, complexity, and commitment from families living integration — not as propaganda, but as proof that another way is possible
• We show up in the cultural conversation about public education and say: this is what we know, this is what we’ve seen, and it is not what you’ve been told

We integrate our children.

• We tour global-majority schools with open minds and open eyes, before we decide
• We enroll in schools that do not concentrate Whiteness and wealth — and when we stay, through hard parts, we share our stories of how we reframe struggle and joy
• We connect with other families who are doing the same, because doing it alone is harder than it has to be, and because community is what makes the decision feel possible for the next family
• We bring our whole selves to our school communities — not as guests, not as saviors, but as participants accountable to the full community our children are part of
• We listen, we affirm, we ask questions, constantly reminding ourselves we don’t have to be experts in education to be champions for all children including our own

We advocate for justice in our public schools.

• We show up to school board meetings, to elections, to school site council meetings, to parent-teacher nights
• We listen and engage where and when we are asked
• We interrupt for justice 
• We support leaders and initiatives that protect public education while being willing to question practices and principles that maintain inequities, disparities and segregation
• We ask our schools hard questions about discipline disparities, advanced program access, and who is and isn’t being served — and we use whatever access and credibility privilege gives us in service of the answers
• We refuse to let our presence in a school be its own reward, and we ask what the school’s most marginalized families need and whether we are helping build it

“Choosing an integrating school,” Courtney Mykytyn wrote, “is not so much a sacrifice as it is reprioritizing what matters in building the world we want our children to be adults in.”

People like you do things like this.

Because people like us already have.

And because the next family — the one on the fence, the one afraid, the one who has been told this isn’t what people like them do — is watching.

Integrated Schools is a community of families committed to integrated public education. Find your chapter, take the Two Tour Pledge, or connect with a Caregiver at integratedschools.org.