Dear RSF:

Please join us on Wednesday, 11/17 at 11:00 for Visiting Journalist Clara Hemphill’s presentation, “Keesha’s Quest: Building a Multiracial School in a Gentrifying City.”

Clara Hemphill is an independent journalist and the founding editor of insideschools.org, a free online guide to New York City public schools sponsored by the New School. From 2008-2019 she was the Director of Education Policy at the New School’s Center for NYC Affairs, and she’s held a Visiting Fellowship in Economics Journalism at Princeton. Her honors BA in Italian is from the University of Chicago.

At RSF, Hemphill is writing a book that examines why school segregation is so persistent, even in racially integrated neighborhoods. Her research for the book has included spending the 2019-2020 school year following an African American mother who is working to build a multiracial parent-teachers association at her son’s public elementary school in Bedford Stuyvesant, a rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood.