Teach the Babies w/ Dr. David J. Johns

Title IX is one sentence long, and for more than fifty years that sentence has protected students far beyond the playing field. In this solo episode, Dr. David J. Johns traces Title IX from the women who wrote it and the ten-year-old girl in Georgia whose case made schools answerable for harassment, to the deliberate dismantling underway now: the 2020 rules written back into federal regulations, a gutted Office for Civil Rights, and a narrowing of who the law protects. Dr. Johns names what is at stake for Black girls and women, survivors of sexual violence, pregnant and parenting students, and Black LGBTQ+ and trans students, and connects the fight to the State of the People Black Papers.

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Most of the coverage of Nikole Hannah-Jones's New York Times Magazine essay asks whether a mother chose wrong. In this follow-up to What It Cost Us, Dr. David J. Johns asks the questions the coverage keeps skipping: who gets blamed, who gets punished, who designed the choice, and who gets left off the map. He names how the blame for a decision two parents made landed on one, and traces how Black mothers with the least have been criminalized for crossing district lines. He breaks down the new federal voucher program launching January 1, 2027, and why your governor's opt-in decision matters. He widens the map to the rural South and Appalachia, where property-tax funding fails Black and white children alike. And he lifts up what works, from the Rosenwald schools to the Oakland Community School, Marva Collins, and the Department of Defense schools.

Related classesWhat It Cost Us  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/teach-the-babies-w-dr-david-j-johns/id1745797318?i=1000792173861 
How Vouchers Are Destroying Public Schools, with Fred Jones https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/teach-the-babies-w-dr-david-j-johns/id1745797318?i=1000760021242  
The essay and the responseNikole Hannah-Jones, "In fighting for every Black child, did I betray my own?" The New York Times Magazine: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/20/magazine/ny-public-schools-black-students-segregation.html
Mayor Zohran Mamdani's response (Education Week): https://www.edweek.org/leadership/mamdani-says-nyc-public-schools-failed-nikole-hannah-joness-daughter/2026/09
Najya Hannah-Jones and Nikole Hannah-Jones on This American Life (Fox News coverage): https://www.foxnews.com/media/nikole-hannah-jones-daughter-asks-why-her-education-sacrificed-ideology-says-it-makes-no-sense
Ronell Smith on the limited menu of options, including Roland Fryer's Wall Street Journal argument (The Dallas Morning News): https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/article/nikole-hannah-jones-daughter-school-black-families-22458642.php

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Dr. Tiffany Crutcher joins the class ten years after a Tulsa police officer killed her twin brother, Terence. She is a descendant of Black Wall Street and the founder of the Terence Crutcher Foundation. She talks about the mother who taught her quiet strength and about the brother the news never showed. She shares her freedom dreams for the next generation and her plans for Greenwood North, a 65,000-square-foot home for rebuilding Black Wall Street. She also answers the hardest question: who takes care of Tiffany?

NOTES

Terence Crutcher Foundation: terencecrutcherfoundation.org 
Black Wall Street Legacy Festival, held each year around May 31 in Greenwood
The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre and the destruction of Black Wall Street in the Greenwood District
Former officer Betty Shelby was acquitted of manslaughter in 2017.
Terence Crutcher's estate filed its civil suit in June 2017.

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Ten years ago, Nikole Hannah-Jones chose a school for her daughter and called it the just choice. Now she has told the world what that choice cost.

Dr. David J. Johns takes the class past the arguments to the questions underneath them. What did Brown v. Board give us, and what did it cost? What does the Black tax take from us, generation after generation? Why do Black teachers matter so much? And why does a systemic problem need a collective answer? Grace for every parent making constrained choices they did not design, and one rule for all of us: keep the children out of our mouths.

No absolution for any of us. An assignment for all of us.

Let's All Get Free.

SHOW NOTES
In this solo class, Dr. David J. Johns responds to Nikole Hannah-Jones's New York Times Magazine essay with gratitude, grace, and an assignment. He traces the unpaid bill of Brown v. Board and names the Black tax as a set of architected, constrained choices. He shares the story of his former student Nala. And he makes the case that collective action, not one family's sacrifice, is how we win schools worthy of Black children.Historical contextBrown v. Board of Education (1954), and the more than 38,000 Black teachers pushed out of their jobs in the decade after the decision: https://www.chalkbeat.org/2024/05/10/black-teachers-lost-jobs-after-brown-vs-board-ruling
How Black teachers lost when civil rights won in Brown v. Board (The 74): https://www.the74million.org/article/how-black-teachers-lost-when-civil-rights-won-in-brown-v-board/
November 14, 1960, New Orleans: Ruby Bridges integrates William Frantz Elementary. The same morning, Leona Tate, Tessie Prevost, and Gail Etienne integrate McDonogh No. 19.
February 3, 1964, the New York City school boycott: more than 450,000 students stayed out of school to protest segregation. https://crdl.usg.edu/events/ny_school_boycott/ and https://www.brooklyneagle.com/articles/day-history-february-3-new-york-city-school-boycott
Freedom Summer, Mississippi, 1964, and the Freedom Schools tradition it launched.

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In March of 1972, ten thousand Black folks went to Gary, Indiana, and came out with an agenda. Fifty-four years later, we wrote it down again.

Dr. David J. Johns takes the class inside the State of the People Black Papers, the community-driven policy briefs built by more than a hundred Black experts across ten states, and the two companion documents being built on top of them: a Day One list of five asks for the next Congress and the fuller people's platform underneath it.

Then he takes us to Tulsa, to the Terence Crutcher Foundation's tenth anniversary gala, where a decade of work built out of grief is doing in practice what the Papers describe on the page. Honoring Dr. Tiffany Crutcher, celebrating honoree Dreisen Heath, and asking what legacy actually requires of the rest of us.

Preorders open October 9th. Via StateofthePPL.com and routledge.com

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