Nice White Parents
Lately, I’ve been constantly refreshing the “listen now” section of that little purple podcast app. One of the newest productions, produced by Serial and The New York Times, caused a bit of an uproar before the release of its first episode. Nice White Parents. The title may be off-putting, if you’re white. And, like the issue of racial equality in this country, the reviews are extremely divided. It’s mostly one stars and five stars.
Here’s one:
“In the final episode, you talk about how useful “shame” is to getting people to give up their choice. What an ugly, ugly, ugly statement.”
And another:
“There are so many things about this reporting that it’s astounding. So raising money is…bad? Having high expectations for students is…bad? Wanting the best for your child is…bad? Having a diversity of programming is…bad? If white people are involved it’s…bad?
A four star review says, fairly, “This podcast should be called “Nice, Wealthy Parents.”
The last reviewer may have a fair point. However, this would completely whitewash (for lack of a better term) what is actually happening in Brooklyn’s District 12.
Nice White Parents, reported diligently by Chana Joffe-Walt, follows one school in one Brooklyn school district to show, essentially, that when integration or segregation no longer is beneficial, white parents intervene, and they often do more harm than good. Joffe-Walt, in the very first episode, introduces us to the School for International Studies (SIS, for short). When we meet SIS, it is a school populated by mostly, if not all, Black and Brown students. Furthermore, attendance is at an all-time low, and the school is struggling to stay afloat. Everything changes when the Vice Principal decides to take advantage of the constant influx of white families into Brooklyn’s Gowanus neighborhood. After giving many, many tours of the school, one white parent goes directly to the Vice Principal with a deal: you introduce an IB French program, and we will come to your school. And so they do. And within three years, SIS goes from 30 students per grade to 150+ (mostly white) students per grade. This pattern, Joffe-Walt goes on to show, has been going on since SIS’s inception. Segregation, then integration, on white families’ terms.
What’s fascinating to me about this (public!) school system, in particular, is how different it is from the system I grew up in. First, there is such a thing as “school tour preference,” meaning families that tour the school first are prioritized during the admissions process. Second, these public schools also accept letters of recommendation…from students applying to middle school. I would have been royally screwed had I grown up in a system like this. By the time I was a fifth grader, I was still deep in my shell—a crippling introvert incapable of even asking for letters of recommendation. My parents also worked full time and could barely keep up with my school events as it was.
I also went to school in “the south.” Not the deep south, but it was southern enough to have court-ordered integration sent its way in 1971, almost 20 years after Brown v. Board. Out of this court order specifically came magnet schools. The idea behind magnet schools is that no one is zoned to the school. There are usually special requirements, such as auditions, interviews, additional tests, that are required along with the usual admissions application. Among Houston’s public high schools, magnet programs are undoubtedly the best. And most families, if they can afford it, either opt for private school or move districts by the time high school comes along because Houston’s non-magnet public high schools are, arguably, that bad. When I went to NYU and explained my situation to people (I attended a high school specifically dedicated to the performing and visual arts), they usually assumed I went to private school. I’d reply back, saying I have never attended a private school in my life. I would have vehemently opposed such a thing as a teenager, and looking at my brother’s private school experience now, I can safely say I had “seen a lot more” by the time I was 13.
There is, however, a blessing and a curse associated with magnet schools. The biggest blessing? School choice. This was also District 12’s biggest blessing (much to the chagrin of white parents). Students could apply to any school in the district. But, in reality, they all wanted to get into “the big 3,” otherwise known as the 3 best schools out of the 11 middle schools in the district. When parents ask me now about what public school options are the best for high school in HISD, I usually say, “well, there are really only two, in my opinion: Carnegie Vanguard and HSPVA.” School choice is also probably the biggest curse. It’s a performance of what we know as “equality”: everyone has the same opportunity. The trouble with the model is that not everyone is equal. There are other factors at play here: most notably, race and socio-economic status. Say you have a child that is artistically gifted and wants to attend HSPVA, but you don’t have the resources to hire an acting coach, pay for dance classes, piano lessons, etc. If your child went to HSPVA, they would receive these kinds of educational opportunities for free. The first problem, though, is getting in. When I auditioned in 2013, I was told that 2 in 10 kids who auditioned for HSPVA got in. Now that figure is even more selective. And with a new building and world class facilities, a spot at HSPVA, I imagine is more coveted than ever before.
Schools like HSPVA can be a great equalizer, but they can also show the tide of segregation and integration that Joffe-Walt points out. I had no idea how segregated HSPVA was until my senior year. On my first day of that final year, I looked at the freshmen in front of me (one of the loveliest classes I had met thus far), and they were so different from all the other classes I saw around me. My class wasn’t too bad (though we can always do better). The class below me, however, was by far the whitest class out of all those I had seen. And this freshmen class in front of me was, by far, the most diverse class I had ever experienced. Since then, I have watched the theatre department grow to embrace color-conscious casting when it comes to putting together their classes—that group of people that will work together for all four years.
There is a huge double-edged sword when it comes to magnet schools. There is a lot of power available. And we all hope that that power will be used wisely.
There are a lot more questions to consider that are coming up for me in this podcast:
Is eliminating school choice and implementing a lottery eradicating a system of meritocracy?
What does it say about our country that it took a court order to desegregate our Texas schools?
Did Texas desegregate better than New York (New York City has the most segregated school district in the country)?
If we eliminated Texas magnet schools, what would we lose? (the answer is likely a lot, but this has been fiercely debated lately)
How do we limit the power of “white parents” and give all families an equal playing field?
