Review of “Nice White Parents” Podcast: Disjointed and Disillusioned
By: Lydia Kulina
Tags: Equity, Racism, Review, Urbanism, Education

Image Source: New York Times

In six years as an urban educator, I have met exactly two white parents. Two! So I was surprised when I first heard the New York Times podcast “Nice White Parents” claim that white parents are the most powerful force shaping public schools. Created by NPR host Chana Joffe-Walt and Serial Productions, the 5-part series explores the contentious sixty-year relationship between white parents and public schools by observing a neighborhood school in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. However, it quickly becomes apparent that the podcast is more interested in quick soundbites than a thorough investigation into the underlying issues of disparities in urban education.

In the first episode, I.S. 293 goes into upheaval when a group of new, white parents form a separate parent organization to support a language immersion program. Tensions escalate as the seemingly well-intentioned newcomers disregard the existing PTA by diverting funds to the new program. This is not the first time that white families have tried to remake the school. In the second episode, Joffe-Walt interviews families who wanted to integrate 293 in the 60s but never enrolled. The third episode explores a segregated gifted program that develops at the school. In this overlap, the podcast suggests that the problem with urban schools seem to stem from nice white parents’ opposition to desegregation, and not the interplay of issues that the podcast conveniently dismisses, including No Child Left Behind, funding disparities, and for-profit restructuring. Nevertheless, Joffe-Walt claims, “If you want to understand why our schools are not better, that’s where you have to look. You have to look at white parents”. But what if there are simply no white parents to be found? An investigation into the absence of white parents in urban schools highlights the structural racism and neoliberalism embedded in the educational landscape that “Nice White Parents” overlooks.

Problematically, Joffe-Walt’s case-study at I.S. 293 is not reflective of the demographic landscape of large cities. The urban “fringe” in gentrified Cobble Hill, Brooklyn that Joffe-Walt portrays as normative is non-existent for miles and miles in cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, and so on… It’s why I have met two white parents. In “The Color of Law” Richard Rothstein outlines how explicit and de jure government policies segregated the urban landscape. Not only were African Americans barred from many communities due to racial violence but also restrictive covenants as famously portrayed in Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun”. Government policies including urban renewal, red-lining, and targeted public housing also set the stage for contemporary segregation. “Today’s residential segregation in the North, South, Midwest, and West” observes Rothstein, “is not the unintended consequence of individual choices of otherwise well-meaning law or regulation but of unhidden public policy that explicitly segregated every metropolitan area in the United States.” Segregation was strongly reinforced as white, middle-class families sought suburban residence with the emergence of the GI Bill and government-backed loans, both not available to African Americans. Resulting diminished property values from industry zoned in red-lined minority areas, compounded with exclusion in the workforce and universally denied mortgages, would result in a generational wealth gap that would block mobility to these well-resourced, middle-class districts replete with funding from property taxes for years to come. In this framework, it is impossible to place full responsibility on locationally absent “nice white parents” in schools without, at the very least, outlining the practices and policies that created segregation.

In 2020, access to equitable education in terms of dollars and cents is locationally-based, shaped by the racism of institutional place-making practices and property tax. Following the white-flight flight, middle-class property tax contributions lined the purses of suburban districts in outlying communities that were predominantly white. While these locational changes were a national trend, they decidedly hurt urban classrooms due to inequitable funding formulas in places like Philadelphia where Pennsylvania’s funding formula has a low state contribution. The property-based formula is why nearby Lower Merion’s total expenditure, where the median home listing price is $790,000, is almost twice that of Philadelphia. The funding gap reinforces the parallel between race and high poverty schools. Linda Darling-Hammond points out in “The Flat World and Education”, “One might wish that, in this day and time, showing such inadequacy would be sufficient to require a state remedy, but the arguments about whether money makes a difference are still hotly contested. Experts are called upon to show how sizable the effects of key school resources can be, both in relation to race and income and independently from these factors”. While I am not an educational researcher, I am convinced that if you invest in air conditioning in a ninety-degree room of thirty high schoolers in a high-poverty school, reading scores will go through the roof.

Charter schools have further defunded public schools and segregated students. Marked by the ideals of free-market idealism and capitalism, charter schools embody deregulation and often have strict and prohibitive admissions criteria (in one case, a Philadelphia charter school required parents to enroll in a golf club outside the city) that dissuade the most vulnerable students from admission, including students enrolled in special education programs and English language learners. Charters across the city and nation are known for dumping unwanted students back into district schools after pocketing the money. Don’t even get me started on their lack of fiscal transparency while using public funds, employment practices (many teachers are not certified), or punitive and racialized disciplinary measures. Nevertheless, charter schools prevail throughout the urban landscape because they present themselves as a solution to a failing system.“Indifferent to history”, writes educational historian Diane Ravitch in “Reign of Terror”, “today’s corporate reformers insist that the public schools are in an unprecedented crisis. They tell us that the children must be able to ‘escape’ their ‘failing schools’”. However, there is little empirical evidence to suggest high student achievement. Notably, charter schools are largely absent from wealthier districts since there is no need for their solutions to non-existent problems.

Time does not permit me to write about No Child Left Behind, vouchers, fallacious pedagogical shifts, community trauma, urban health disparities, growing income inequality, a neoliberal assault on the professionality of teachers, which have all affected urban schools. That’s the problem with “Nice White Parents” — while trying to prove that white parents are the cause of public school problems, giant pink elephants, giraffes, tigers, and bears (oh my!) linger idly in the background. Sure, there is a small amount of truth to the argument to what Joffe-Walt describes. Scholarship by Maia Cucchiarra in “Marketing Schools, Marketing Cities” describes how white parents similarly sought to remake an elementary school in Philadelphia. Chase Billingham’s research explores white parents in gentrifying urban neighborhoods similar to Cobble Hill. Countless scholars, notably Gary Orfield, have explored how white parents used their agency to segregate schools (though no such scholarship ever seems to frame the podcast). But the issue is larger — a tangle of historical and contemporary individuals and institutions purposefully and inadvertently maintaining racial barriers. It is these glaring gaps that make the pod-cast seem fuzzy and incomplete.

Compounded with these incongruences, there is a lurking naivety that makes “Nice White Parents” unsettling. While insinuating two white parents were opposing integration attempts in episode two, Joffe-Walt leaves a teacher’s comment that white and Asian students were “creme de la creme” unchecked. Really? Repeatedly, the pod-cast fails to make connections to contemporary racial schooling inequalities. This eclipse is seen profoundly in episode two when Joffe-Walt’s describes the physical conditions of African American community schools during the 1960s, forgoing any modern-day parallel. This omission is repeated in episode three when discussing overcrowded urban classrooms. For an urban educator that was exposed to asbestos, had rosters of 39 students, and taught in 90-degree rooms for months at a time, this oversight is infuriating. In a great twist of irony, the series’ commercial sponsor is Better Health virtual counseling. Does Serial Productions and New York Times not know that many urban schools have recently cut guidance counselor positions due to funding issues? The advertisement is another cruel reminder of the educational landscape’s structural inequality. While some commentators have noted that “Nice White Parents” does the hard work of anti-racism, I am convinced that it obscures the larger picture. Contemporary educational issues cannot be blamed on a few “nice white parents” in fringe neighborhoods — but from the multiplicity of structural and individual policies and actions that teachers embody every time they enter the classroom.“Not everything that is faced can be changed,” observed James Baldwin, “But nothing can be changed until it is faced.” Here’s to hoping that the rest of the podcast episodes do not simplify the complexities into oblivion.