Revisiting "Nice White Parents"

Analyzing the podcast that broke American education as a glimpse into Democrats' political implosion

I wanna start off by saying, I’m not the kind of person who thinks racism is… like made up. I live in Cleveland and imo the effects of racism could, frankly, not be more obvious here.

I have been interested in how racism shapes our society for a while. And I think it has a significant impact. A lot of my writing and speaking has focused on the way this manifests itself in traffic safety. Now, also I want get this out of the way: I’m white, in case there’s any confusion about that, which I don’t think there is.

Moving on, like all “good liberals” I listened to “Nice White Parents,” when the New York Times released the education-focused podcast in 2020. This podcast was very much a product of its era. It was released just a few weeks after George Floyd’s killing. At the time, Nikole Hannah-Jones was having a moment at the New York Times with her 1619 project. (I was a fan and I still am.)

Nice White Parents was a smash hit among NPR listener types, esp. college educated parents living in deep blue locales. It was the kind of content a certain kind of person debated over classes of wine at parties. Perhaps having listened signaled their “knowingness.”

Conservatives, at the time, were furiously pushing back against this whole framework at the time as “critical race theory.” I’m not going to sit here, in retrospect and say none of their concerns had any merit, either. This kind of reporting was critical. (I like critical analysis of power relationships.) It did treat race as the most meaningful social divide, fwiw, almost the singular explanation for every problem, and perhaps that was a little too simplistic.

I was receptive to this framework, however, initially and to a certain extent I still am. It’s clear in retrospect, however, I think the conversation kinda went off the rails pretty quickly. And this podcast “Nice White Parents” I think contributed to a lot of discourse that was ultimately extremely corrosive. We saw this type of thinking cooped by powerful groups to assert an agenda that didn’t necessarily benefit poor and minority kids in public school, and contributed to major harmful real world effects and painful political consequences.

There isn’t lot of excitement, in Dem-aligned circles, about revisiting these types of flashpoints from a few years ago, even in the wake of Democrat’s drubbing by their arch nemesis, who is doing a General Sherman march through every single one of their sacred policy priorities right now. However, in light of all this, I think it’s worth looking at.

The basic principle of Nice White Parents was that integration was the key to finally fixing American public education. The big takeaway from the whole thing was that the BIG PROBLEM with public education was that it was segregated. Now this part, at least, holds up to reexamination at least okay imo.

However, secondly, and very attention-grabbing-y, Nice White Parents was willing to point the finger. And who was to blame? White parents (!!), who were oh-so clueless about their own privilege and incurably self interested, NWP told us.

Now, it’s important, I think, to point out: this podcast was not the work of like pissed-off Black public school parents in Chicago. It was sort of an “elite” project (apologies for borrowing a conservative phrase/framing, but in this case I think it’s fair.) “Nice White Parents” was created and developed by a white woman named Chana Joffe-White, whose parents were South African and attended an elite private collage (Oberlin) and spent her career in public broadcasting (though she did collaborate with some Black journalists to a degree. Eve Ewing, a former Chicago public school teacher and popular journalist at the time, consulted on the project, whatever that entails. Her name was attached to it FWIW.)

I also will say: I don’t think there’s zero merit to what Joffe-White was saying here. School in the U.S. are inexcusably segregated, with poor kids and Black and Latino kids much more likely to attend poor quality schools and “drop out factories.”

I was a receptive audience. In fact, at the time, I was pretty much bought in. I had enrolled my own son at a Cleveland public pre school and was trying to kind of host discussions in my neighborhood with other young parents about enrolling kids in the neighborhood public schools, which imo, had been (kind of unfairly) treated as out of bounds, in a way. (There is a wider “social exclusion” of Cleveland public schools — one or two “magnet” schools excepted — that I still believe is profoundly damaging. However, it is just one of many, many problems imo.)

That being said, around that time, all my ideas about this and a lot of the people writing and talking about these issues started to raise questions for me. The podcast, I thought it was a little too pat, tried too hard to arrive at grand, swooping conclusions. It was a little too perfectly calibrated to appeal to a certain kind of Twitter user at that particular moment. By pointing the finger squarely at “white parents,” Jaffe-White totally avoided messier questions about institutional disorder, and how power operates within these enormous government bureaucracies (NPR listeners weren’t primed, I assumed, for those kinds of discussions).

Nice White Parents was framed as a detailed investigation of a single school in New York City, the assumption being this one school (in Brownstone Brooklyn, naturally) and what occurred there was enormously instructive in a broader sense, basically told lessons that were applicable to every school in the country.

I find this kind of shortcut-to-making-a-story-more-meaningful-than-it-maybe-is habit on the part of New York Times reporters pretty irritating, as someone who lives in Ohio, which is basically the diametric opposite of Brownstone Brooklyn on every measurable criteria. NYTs reporters are always doing some deep dive on some internecine controversy in their own neighborhoods (and handful of them in Brooklyn) — a fight at the Park Slope food coop, for eg — and then trying to spin them as supremely meaningful to the ENTIRE COUNTRY. Which 😂. I’m sorry but these guys are living on another planet from average people and a lot of it strikes me as navel gazing in monocle emoji dressing.

Listening to the podcast, I have to say, it didn’t feel super relevant to what I was learning about how CMSD schools worked. At the time, I had my son enrolled in an almost exclusively poor Cleveland public school. And right away, I noticed, the same sort of dynamics didn’t exactly match my experience.

For example, in Nice White Parents, it opens with this big anecdote about the importance of “school tours” in the New York City School System. This is apparently when prospective parents are escorted around various schools. The thrust of this whole section was that NYPS was really rolling out the red carpet for, courting well-off white parents.

My experience in Cleveland schools was totally different. I had heard rumblings, just living in the city, that they offered free all day pre school. But it was honestly very difficult to know where to go for reliable information. I lived RIGHT NEXT TO two public k-8 schools. But if you went in and tried to talk to the receptionist and asked about enrolling a pre-schooler, they honestly did not know what to tell you. When I asked if I could tour these schools, they basically said “no,” because they considered it a safety concern.

I would place calls to the district asking questions and never receive a return call. Some individual teachers were helpful and tried to help me navigate this but it was still very weird and not professionally managed at all.

I would go to my City Council person and say, “can you help me with this,” and they would say, “no” they didn’t know how to help me, or they would say call this person, and that person would end up being a dead end.

Even AFTER I enrolled my kid — and convinced a couple friends to do so — we NEVER received confirmation that we were enrolled (a simple letter would have sufficed), and just spent the weeks before scratching our heads about what was going on, whether we were enrolled or not. True story.

Cleveland is frankly another world from (fancy neighborhood) New York City. There are only 4,000 households in the whole city with a combined income of more than $200,000. Very, very, very few of them enroll their kids in the public school system — certainly not enough to exert enormous political pressure on them, the way apparently happens in New York City.

In fact, my takeaway was the exact opposite. I felt like they didn’t want middle-class white families to enroll at CMSD. That they were pretty satisfied with their niche of serving low-income kids almost exclusively and treated demands for even no-brainers like a letter confirming you are enrolled as an irritation.

At the time, there was this supposed big push among the district to get parents more involved. But all their communication with parents was strictly one-way. The district fed them information and offered them services. Parents were not empowered, I didn’t feel like, to contribute in very many concrete ways. When I finally gave up and pulled my kid out, their attitude was basically “take it or leave it.”

In part thanks to nonsense like this, rich, white parents in Cleveland had long since fled for suburbs or enrolled their kids in private schools with the help, in our case, of vouchers. This is its own kind of segregating political dynamic, admittedly, which might correspond in some ways with Joffe-White’s whole thesis, but honestly, she didn’t go there at all. It’s sorta presumed, in the podcast, that white parents with serious money are there, pushing down the door of the public schoolhouse and exercising tremendous influence in the meantime. Meanwhile, here I am trying to enroll, I couldn’t even get anyone to return my calls or give me the time of day. Or I’m having a very serious problem — my kid isn’t learning anything after a year-plus of “zoom kindergarten” and I’m basically being told to kick rocks.

Anyway, Nice White Parents was focused exclusively on “The School for International Studies,” in Brooklyn. And most of the podcast is sort of about a cultural clash between new white parents who begin to enter the school and exert influence on its operations, and the lower-income more diverse students who originally attended.

At the school — this is so New York City specific its honestly insane that they got away with pretending this was a relatable anecdote, but I digress — some of the new white parents are big-time fundraising professionals, like can make a few calls or whatever and bring in a million dollars or so. The climax of the whole podcast, these parents throw this French-themed gala to raise funding for the (public!) school (of which a large share of students are lower-income and or Latino/Black!). In the meantime, however, these parents sort of make some insensitive remarks, micro aggressions toward Puerto Rican parents. Very cringe whatnot! That was like the big investigative bombshell, I’m not kidding about this.

I remember just thinking, wow wouldn’t it be nice if that were Cleveland public schools’ biggest problem was new rich parents sailing in and raising millions of dollars and also committing some social gaffes? (BTW you would think would be the natural outcome of integration, which had been deemed to be the sort of holy grail in education reform!)

None of this really mattered though. The narrative that was peddled here was very powerful, IMO. Nice White Parents was enormously influential, I think, in the following years contributed significantly to the way education discussions went a little bit off the rails. There is a toxicity that was introduced to discussions that I have never seen before. It became kind of routine, in left leaning circles, to just absolutely flame white parents who raised concerns about anything happening at their school.

Since that time, trust in Democrats on education has plummeted. I myself have done a 180 a little bit in how I feel about the problems and their sources.

In addition, the “achievement gap” the disparity between rich and poor students, and to a certain degree between white and Asian students and Black and Latino students, has exploded. In part, I think the same kind of initiatives that were championed by Nice White Parents, and aligned groups, are to blame.

My friend sent me this article recently about education reform efforts in Newton, Massachusetts. This is one of those liberal enclaves where people — most of them well off white people themselves — were just mainlining Nice White Parents/NPR etc.

The Globe reports, a handful of Newton moms, around about 2022, start having concerns about some major changes taking place. Newton was one of the school districts — this was a major, progressive-backed education reform at the time — that got into doing “detracking.” That meant they weren’t sorting kids into “honors” English and remedial English — because that often ended up being segregated, white and Asian in one group and Black and Latino in another — but putting all students in a combined classroom.

Detracking, again was a big trend in this era, and it was aimed at addressing sort of the segregation concerns raised by Jaffe-White and Hannah-Jones as well. Newton also did something that I think is extremely clowny, but other districts — San Francisco most notably — did around this time: They disallowed kids from taking advanced math courses, on the grounds that they would be too segregated. (In SF, that basically meant that public school students wouldn’t be able to take the kind of calculus they need to enter high-growth, high-paying fields, unless they paid for a private tutor.)

A lot of parents — understandably! correctly! — hated this. But according to this Boston Globe article, they were afraid to say so because they were afraid of “being called racist.” This profile focused on three moms who came together in 2022 to raise concerns about this. One of them — this is perfect — is a Colombian immigrant. Still, when they started raising questions about detracking, they were mercilessly flamed.

The Globe writes:

At that four-hour-plus meeting, one speaker — a professor — compared the petition’s backers to the white women who helped perpetuate segregation and white supremacy.