Introducing: Nice White Parents

“Nice White Parents” is brought to you by Serial Productions, a New York Times Company.

I started reporting this story at the very same moment as I was trying to figure out my own relationship to the subject of this story, white parents in New York City public schools. I was about to be one of them. When my kid was old enough, I started learning about my options. I had many. There was our zoned public school in Brooklyn, or I could apply to a handful of specialty programs — a gifted program, or a magnet school, or a language program. So I started to look around. This was five years ago now, but I vividly remember these tours. I’d show up in the lobby of the school at the time listed on the website, look around, and notice that all or almost all of the other parents who’d shown up for the 11:00 AM, middle-of-the-workday, early-in-the-shopping-season school tour were other white parents. As a group, we’d walk the halls, following a school administrator — almost always a man or woman of color — through a school full of black and brown kids. We’d peer into classroom windows, watch the kids sit in a circle on the rug, ask questions about the lunch menu, homework policy, discipline. Some of us would take notes. And the administrators would sell. The whole thing was essentially a pitch. We offer STEM. We have a partnership with Lincoln Center. We have a dance studio. They were pleading with us to please take part in this public school. I don’t think I’ve ever felt my own consumer power more viscerally than I did shopping for a public school as a white parent. We were entering schools that people like us had ignored for decades. They were not our places, but we were being invited to make them ours. The whole thing was made so much more awkward by the fact that nobody on those tours ever acknowledged the obvious racial difference, that roughly 100% of the parents in this group did not match, say, 90% of the kids in this building. I remember one time being guided into a classroom and being told that this was the class for gifted kids, and noticing, oh, here’s where all the white kids are. Everyone on our tour saw this, all of us parents, but nobody said anything, including me. We walked out into the hallway. A mom raised her hand and said, I do have one question I’ve been meaning to ask. And the group got quiet. I was thinking, OK, here it comes. But then she said, do the kids here play outside every day?

I knew the schools were segregated. I shouldn’t have been surprised. By the time I was touring schools as a parent, I had spent a fair amount of time in schools as a reporter. I’d done stories on the stark inequality in public education. And I’d looked at some of the many programs and reforms we’ve tried to fix our schools. So many ideas. We’ve tried standardized tests and charter schools. We’ve tried smaller classes, longer school days, stricter discipline, looser discipline, tracking, differentiation. We’ve decided the problem is teachers, the problem is parents. What is true about almost all of these reforms is that when we look for what’s broken, for how our schools are failing, we focus on who they’re failing — poor kids, black kids, and brown kids. We ask, why aren’t they performing better? Why aren’t they achieving more? Those are not the right questions. There is a powerful force that is shaping our public schools, arguably the most powerful force. It’s there even when we pretend not to notice it, like on that school tour. If you want to understand why our schools aren’t better, that’s where you have to look. You have to look at white parents. From Serial Productions, I’m Channa Joffe-Walt. This is “Nice White Parents,” a series about the 60-year relationship between white parents and the public school down the block.

[CHILDREN CHATTERING] I’m going to take you inside a public school building, an utterly ordinary, squat, three-story New York City public school building not far from where I live. This isn’t one of the schools I’ve toured. And my own kids don’t go here. They’re too little. This is a middle and high school called the School for International Studies, SIS. The story I want to tell you spans decades in this one school building, but I’m going to begin when I first encountered SIS, in the spring of 2015, right before everything changed. In 2015, the students at SIS were black, Latino, and Middle Eastern kids, mostly from working class and poor families. That year, like the year before and the year before that, the school was shrinking. The principal, Jillian Juman, was worried.

Ms. Juman started to reach out to families from the neighborhood, inviting them to please come take a look. Parents started showing up for tours of SIS, mostly groups of white parents. Ms. Juman was thrilled and relieved. She walked parents through the building, saying, stop me anytime if anyone has any questions. Really, anything; I want you to feel comfortable. And Ms. Juman says they did have questions, mostly about the poor test scores. That was fair. Ms. Juman expected those questions. She did not expect the other set of questions she got a lot from parents.

Excellent principal answer. Principal Juman is black, by the way. She needed these parents. Schools get money per student. A shrinking school means a shrinking budget. Ms. Juman was worried if this continued, the middle school could be in danger of being shut down by the city. SIS is in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. Leafy streets, brownstones, it’s a wealthy, white neighborhood that’s gotten wealthier and whiter in the last decade. But white families were not sending their kids to SIS. Ms. Juman told these parents, choose SIS. We’re turning things around. We’re in the process of bringing in a new, prestigious International Baccalaureate curriculum, renovating the library. Here’s the new, gorgeous yard. It’s an excellent school. The parents seemed interested, but I believe that might have had just as much to do with what was happening outside of the school as what they were seeing inside the building.

Rob lives nearby SAS, but he had never heard of the school.

In his district, Rob could choose from 11 middle schools. The majority of white families sent their kids to the same three schools. Rob’s white. Those were the schools he’d heard of, and those were the schools he toured.

But they were packed. There were too many wealthy, white families in the district to continue cramming into just three schools.

And they’d been running tours all day. Most cities have some amount of school choice like this, tours and options. New York City, though, is an amped-up version of what happens elsewhere. The level of competition, the level of wealth, the diversity of people sorting into different schools, everything is more intense. Rob found this process frustrating, although Rob is very even-tempered even when he’s frustrated. He’s Canadian. When he gets especially hot, he starts calling things “interesting.” And this whole middle school thing was very interesting. He asked other parents on school tours, what are we going to do? Someone said, have you guys heard of SIS, that building down the block? Rob hadn’t. The others hadn’t. They decided to all go check it out together.

As Rob toured SIS, he had an idea. That night, he emailed Principal Juman, and he asked, would she be open to starting a dual-language French program at SIS? They had one at the elementary school Rob’s kids went to, and everyone loved it. Sure, Principal Juman was open. So Rob started spreading the word. SIS is starting a dual-language French program. We should all go. Rob says there was interest, but a lot of people he talked to had this question. Wait, are other people going?

When it came time to choose middle schools, parents are supposed to rank their top choices. Right before they did, before everyone chose their schools, Rob sent a survey out to the families he’d been talking to try to ensure that a group of them would choose SIS together. It was a simple SurveyMonkey. If enough people said Yes, they’d rank SIS as one of their top picks, and they would be able to act as a collective. People said Yes. The numbers were stunning. In 2014, there had been 30 sixth graders at SIS. In 2015, there would be 103. That 200% increase was almost entirely white kids.

Nobody I talked to from SIS characterized what was happening there as “integration.” But here’s why integration was on my mind. The New York City Department of Education was aware their schools were segregated. It was also aware that desegregation is the most effective way to close the gap in achievement between black and white students. But it did not want to mandate racial integration through zoning or school placements. The city was trying to make integration happen through choice, hoping to lure white families into segregated schools. The school tours I went on for my own kids, the sparkly programs and amenities, that was the new approach to integration. But can this work? For white parents to opt in to integration not because we have to, or because it’s the right thing to do, but because it’s a selling point? Because we get a dance studio, and STEM, and a school that was, hopefully, diverse? Integration, without talking about race. [CHILDREN CHATTERING] The kids at SIS, though, they did talk about race — immediately. Fall 2015, the first few weeks of school, a senior named Kristen leans over to her classmate, Chris, and mumbles, there are a lot of white kids in the school. And Chris says, oh, yeah, a teacher warned me about that over the summer.

Kristen nods. Yeah, I guess we were prepared. And then she turns to me to say, I should have been ready for that. We saw the parents on the tours last year.

“Diverse.” This was a word I heard over and over in the first few weeks of school — “diversity.”

“Diversity” seemed to have two different definitions. White families would talk about all the diversity at SIS, and they were talking about Black and Hispanic kids. When kids of color noted the diversity, they were referring to the new white kids. For a lot of kids of color, this looked a lot like something they’d already seen happen in their neighborhoods — white families showing up in large numbers, taking over stores, familiar spots. There’s a word for that. It’s gentrification. But I noticed that no one was using that word about the school. What was happening here was “diversity.” That’s how the adults talked about it. Diversity is a good thing, something you’re supposed to be OK with. For the most part, the kids were. It was different for the parents. Some of them saw specific advantages to the diversity, like Kenya Blount, the co-vice president of the PTA at SIS. He was excited.

Rob Hansen, the dad who started the SurveyMonkey. Rob raises money for nonprofits and foundations for a living. Over the course of the year, I’ll here Rob Hanson referred to as Todd Hanson, Ted Manson, Mr. Handsome. Kenya was the only one who went with “the gentlemen whose profession is fundraising.” The most common was just “the guy who gets the money.” Rob told the PTA he was eager to raise money for the school. To Kenya, this meant more resources at his own kids’ school. His boys and all the kids could benefit.

They were definitely not thinking that big. Because the PTA was run by Imee Hernandez and her co-president, Susan Moesker. Imee is not a gentleman who fundraises. She’s a social worker. The first time I met Imee, she was wearing a T-shirt that said, “I’m not spoiled. My husband just loves me.” She’s Puerto Rican, grew up in Brooklyn. Her husband Maurice is Puerto Rican and Black and really does adore her. He grew up in Brooklyn, too. They have one daughter, one pit bull, one Persian cat, and one school.

For Imee, the new diversity, it gave her pause.

Imee was in her second year at the school. The year before, she put on community events, teacher appreciation, a spring carnival with face painting and hot dogs. They raised some money here and there, but Imee’s vision for the PTA wasn’t really about fundraising. The new parents, though, they wanted to be active in their new school, and they were accustomed to supporting their kids’ schools by fundraising. The two approaches came face-to-face at a PTA meeting in October.

There are about a dozen grownups, sitting on small plastic chairs around a classroom table, the PTA Executive Board. Principal Juman is here, too. Imee’s leading, and the principal jumps in. She says she wants a minute to share how much the new fundraising committee had raised so far. Imee looks confused. Principal Juman goes on to say, the new fundraising committee has had a lot of success.

People seem unclear what to do with their faces. This is good news, right? But also, wait, what’s the Fundraising Committee? Imee turns to her husband, Maurice. A retired cop, Maurice is also the treasurer of the PTA, because when he retired, his wife told him he couldn’t just sit around at home. Maurice shrugs at Imee, doesn’t seem to know anything about this new money. Imee turns back to Principal Juman. So can we use that money?

That’s principal Juman.

Maurice asks, how can that money be accessed for Mr. Negrone, who wants new gym uniforms, or Mr. Lowe, to get his microscopes? Imee nods

Principal Juman nods, repeats that she wishes Rob had been able to make it. She was hoping everyone could be here and get on the same page about money. But Rob is chaperoning a sixth grade overnight trip. They’re late getting back. One mom, a white woman, who came in with a new group of sixth graders, says, look, I know Rob. He means well.

That’s principal Juman. At this point, everyone seems to feel a little weird about how long they’ve spent talking about a fellow parent who is not present. And anyway, it’s money for the school. We’re all for that. We just need better communication. Imee she says, yeah, it’s just usually, money raised by parents goes through the PTA, so we can all talk about where to spend it.

Rob walks into the room. He just got back from the sixth grade trip. He sits down, and they all start to talk. We need to sort out some questions about money. Then, a mom from the fundraising committee says she’s worried about me recording and asks me to stop. So I do.

They let me stay, though, and take notes. Rob apologizes and then explains. A group of them have been meeting to raise money for the school. The new dual-language French program is expensive, and they promised the principal they’d help raise money to cover it. They were just eager to help, Rob says, so they formed a committee. He’s really sorry. He should have communicated and coordinated better with the PTA. But good news is, it’s going great. Someone has a contact with the French embassy, a guy at the Cultural Services Arm in New York, and he says he wants to help cover the costs of new French teachers and books. They’ve already kicked in around 10 grand. At this point in my notes, I wrote, “lots of looks, big money.” Rob says, “The embassy suggested we do a fundraiser, an event. They can help.” Here I wrote, “Looks — confused, mad? Nobody really talking.” Imee says, “This fundraiser will be at the school though, right? And free, for everyone?” Rob says, “Yes.” “Good, good.” She asks one more time, “Free? I just want to make sure everyone can go.” Lots of nods. Rob says, “Totally. This is a community event, for our community.” After about 20 minutes, Imee says, we’re out of time, guys. I can’t tell if this is out of a professional commitment Imee has to stick to the schedule, or a personal commitment to getting out of that room.

Before I came to SIS, I never thought much about the role of PTAs — ever. At SIS, early on, I have this feeling of, oh, a PTA is actually critical to the success of an integrated school. A PTA has a very simple democratic structure. Every parent has an equal vote. Smart — it’s like a built-in system to equalize power, to help them make a budget together, make decisions, set priorities collectively — or not.

It’s another PTA meeting, and the whole collective thing is not really happening. It seems like the new parents are still raising money separate from the PTA, and the communication problems do not seem to be resolved. And some of the new parents have an idea. They propose a formal separation — the PTA and the people doing fundraising. Rob says this way, there’ll be two organizations collecting money for SIS.

That would be the PTA side, the community fund. Then there would be a separate organization that would go after grants and big donors. Up until this point, there seemed to be tension bubbling under the surface between the new parents and the old parents, but it wasn’t really until this moment that the unsaid started to get said — mostly by Imee’s husband, Maurice.

That’s Maureen, a white mom who’s new. There are lots of nods.

Maurice is asking, is this new money you’re talking about, is it just for the new French dual-language program? Which is another way of asking, is this money just for your kids, or is it for everybody? Rob says emphatically, it’s for everybody. Maurice says, really?

Later, talking to Rob, I learned that the new separate fundraising arm he’s talking about is actually a foundation. They want to create a school-based foundation at SIS. The plan is to call it the Brooklyn World Project. I asked Rob, why do you need another way to raise money?

Rob says, because the PTA is a democracy, it makes things complicated. The very thing I saw as a strength of a PTA — one parent, one vote — to Rob, that’s a problem for fundraising. Parents come and go and change their minds about what’s important. A private donor wants stability, and Rob is trying to raise money for the kind of programming that was available at his son’s wealthy elementary school. At that school, Rob was co-president of the PTA, and the previous year, his PTA pulled in close to $800,000. $800,000 — money that paid for after school programming, and ballroom dancing, chess, art, music, a garden. $800,000 for a school that is 75% white and serves a tiny fraction of the poor kids in the district. There aren’t enough wealthy parents at SIS to raise that kind of money. That year, Rob helped raise $800,000, the SIS PTA raised $2,000. So Rob was trying to be creative. A foundation was a way for his new school to catch up. The school leadership, the principal, was behind the idea. . Ms. Juman told me she saw the foundation as a path to equity and access. More resources meant they’d be able to provide all kids with opportunities — like, say, a school trip to France. But the parent leadership, they found it annoying. Imee knew the new parents were trying to help the school. But she already liked the school. She felt like she was being saved against her will. Plus, they’re new, she said. Shouldn’t we be the ones helping them? She was fine with them bringing in ideas, but she didn’t understand why they hadn’t brought them to her first. They hadn’t thought to consult her. She to me, multiple times, why are they coming up with all these private plans and meeting in secret committees?

Rob and the new parents did tell the principal that they wanted to fundraise in a different way, but Imee felt like, what about the rest of us? She felt like the PTA was ignored. At that last meeting, Imee went quiet. She told me she just felt enraged, and then embarrassed for feeling so enraged.

So it was tense, among the parents. But this is a school for children. Did it matter if the adults were not getting along, or who controlled which pot of money? Yes. Yes it did. That’s coming up after the break. The school year went on. Rob’s fundraising committee moved forward with the French Embassy to plan a fundraiser. It was now being called a “gala.” The PTA moved forward with parent volunteers to plan a spring carnival. It was being called “the spring carnival.” Quiet resentments locked in place. On the phone one night, Imee’s co-president on the PTA, Susan Moesker, told me she worried the school was changing in ways that were damaging to the community. Susan is white herself, but she didn’t come in with the new white parents. When she started, her son was one of the only white kids in the school. And now she felt like they were all being written into a narrative that wasn’t true, that SIS was a bad school before, and now that the new white families had arrived, it was being turned around.

This was a long conversation. The upshot? She’s not happy with the way the new parents are behaving. It was true. A new narrative was taking hold at SIS. It’s not like the kids were talking about it all the time, but it was in the air, and the kids were starting to pick up on who was valued and why. In the cafeteria, I’d hear middle schoolers saying, the French kids could kill someone, and they’d get away with it. Upstairs in the high school, I’d hear kids complain, all the attention has shifted to the new middle schoolers. We’re being pushed aside. And down in the library, I met three sixth grade boys, white boys new to SIS. They’re sweaty from playing soccer and looking very small against their huge backpacks. These boys, even at 11 years old, they’ve absorbed the same messages — that SIS wasn’t so good before. It was a bad school.

He and his friends, they’ve turned the school around. That’s what he’s learning.

Nobody calls it “the book on statuses.” They call it a directory of schools, with info like enrollment numbers for different schools, test scores, and special programs. But I love the calls it, “the book on statuses,” because this is what happened at SIS. The school had a bad reputation among white families, and then, suddenly, it was in demand. Its status had changed because of the white kids. A powerful draw for white families into any school is other white families. Once you have a critical mass of white kids, you pass what one city calls “a bliss point.” This is a real thing researchers study — how many white kids are needed at a school to make other white families feel comfortable choosing it. That number, the bliss point, is 26%. That fall, white families were crowding the school tours at SIS, not because the test scores had improved — the new scores hadn’t even come out yet — but because the other white families made them feel blissfully comfortable.

Of course, the thing that made the new white parents comfortable coming to SIS in the first place was the promise of a French program. They wanted French, and they got French. So now, all the sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth graders are learning French. It wasn’t a true dual-language program where kids learned in French for half the day or whatever. That first year, most of the French was happening in the after school program. You’d sign up for regular after school stuff like culinary, or soccer, or drama, and it would be conducted in French.

We’re in the auditorium. And it’s sweet. The kids are onstage rehearsing this play they wrote in French. And it’s like they’re having fun. But I couldn’t help feeling like there’s something off balance about this. Most of the kids doing this drama program seem to be native French speakers, but not all. A sixth grader named Maya is standing to the side of the stage, script in hand, waiting for her line.

Still, she’s excited. She’s grinning, watching the other kids on stage. She’s hanging out with her friend Constance. Maya gets up to deliver her lines.

Constance, a native French speaker, tells Maya, you said the wrong thing. Constance correct her, pronounces it for her.

Maya says, I can’t, and her friend says, I’ll do it for you.

Learning another language is not new to Maya.

When the new white parents asked for a dual-language French program at SIS, Principal Juman said yes. SIS was supposedly an international school, but she told me they didn’t really have a lot of international programming, so it seemed like a good idea to her. But there was no school-wide debate about it, or consensus. The community didn’t decide. What if they had? More than 1/3 of the families at sis are Hispanic. What if the dual-language program was Spanish, or Arabic? 10% of the students speak Arabic. If they had made a different choice, if SIS had a dual-language Arabic program, Maya would be teaching Constance how to read her lines. She’d be the one explaining the cultural references and teasing her friend about her terrible accent. She’d be the one translating the teacher’s stage directions. There was money for a French program, which meant that at SIS, French had value. Arabic didn’t. Spanish didn’t. That’s something Maya is learning at school, along with her French script.

From the very beginning, Imee and the others had insisted on three things from the new parents and the fundraising committee — that the gala fundraiser they were planning with the French Embassy, would, number one, be open to everyone, number two, take place at the school, and number three, be free. Then, four weeks before the gala, the PTA asked for an update, and a parent named Deb showed up — a mom to a new sixth grader, part of Rob’s fundraising committee.

Deb volunteered early on to help organize the party and she tells everyone, I met with our partner, Fabrice, at the French Embassy, and the event can’t be at the school. The embassy won’t be able to draw their supporters to Brooklyn. It’ll be at the Cultural Services Building on the Upper East Side, Manhattan, 45 minutes away.

That’s Susan with the “Oh.” Maurice leans forward, elbows on the table. Imee is not here. She knew the meeting would be almost entirely about fundraising, and she’s sitting this one out. Maurice is now concentrating on Rob, who turns to Deb and says, “In what sense is that their event?” “They make the rules, she says.”

Security. It’s a government building after all.

That’s Rob, asking to give a variant, which is, how about we have a separate invitation for our people that doesn’t ask for any money? Rob seems to be picking up on the instant irritation in this room, and he’s adding many variants to Deb’s report.

Deb hasn’t been able to make previous PTA meetings. So all Deb knows is she got an email from the fundraising committee at her kid’s new school, which she assumed was part of the PTA. She’s volunteering her time, a ton of her time, to organize a huge event. She does not understand that the email list she’s on is for a separate fundraising committee that just became even more unpopular with the official PTA leadership. I think I stopped moving watching Deb. It’s so tense. She’s like a porcupine who’s just wandered into a balloon store.

Deb says at her kid’s elementary school, they got a lot more donated items from parents. She tells the room, you can ask at the restaurants you go to if they do gift certificates. The salon, your employers — you’d be surprised what people can offer. Just ask.

I think about a PTA meeting a few months before where I watched Imee gently explain to one of the new parents why it might be hard for some families to throw in $5 for classroom supplies, that even being asked to donate can feel alienating. Some people in this room seem to be experiencing this whole thing as a routine update about public school volunteering. Others look like someone who’s walked into the wrong room and is now looking around to the friends they came with for affirmation, we’re in the wrong room, right? How do we get out?

I spent a small chunk of that meeting occupied by an admittedly sentimental thought. Just looking around, the room was kind of incredible. People with homes in Sonoma and people who live in public housing, sitting together at a long wooden table in the library of a public school that they all share. That never happens. And I didn’t want them to mess it up. But of course, they are. This is not something we have a lot of practice in. New York City has one of the most segregated school systems in the country. White parents here have very little practice sharing public schools. Maybe this is all to be expected. White parents will charge ahead, will sometimes be careless, secretive, or entitled. In response, parents of color will sometimes be cautious, or distrustful, defensive. These are well-established patterns, repeated over generations. It’s easier for us to continue operating on separate tracks, because it’s what we already know how to do.

The guy from the French embassy apparently has a mailing list of 22,000 people in the New York area. 300 people RSVPed to the gala for SIS. I couldn’t believe it. And I couldn’t believe that one of them was Imee.

Imee, Maurice, and Susan carpooled together to the Upper East Side. It’s winter. Central Park is across the street. It’s cold. Imee told me she decided she needed to be a grown-up and come. They got stuck in traffic, so they’re rushing up the sidewalk.

The Cultural Services Building is ivy-covered with columns. The doors are wrought iron. The entryway is marble.

A huge marble staircase winds up the side of the room. Later, I look up the architectural style — Italian renaissance, Palazzo style. It’s a palace. There are people milling, sampling 17 different cheeses. I don’t recognize anyone else from the school. Who are these people who have chosen to come out on a weekday evening for a fundraising event for a not-prominent or well-known-at-all public school in Brooklyn?

I started asking people how they heard about the event.

A lady named Barbara tells me she’s never heard of SIS, like most people here, but she loves French, and she loves Paris, and it sounded like a fun night with other people who do too. She goes to France every year.

I enjoy a person who likes to talk, where you can just get on the ride and sit back. Barbara is definitely that kind of person.

Oh my god, she hasn’t been to Paris. Barbara’s looking around for her French teacher to tell her the news. Barbara’s teacher, it turns out, heard about this evening the same way most people here did. She was invited by this man, Fabrice.

Fabrice Germain works for the Cultural Services arm of the French Embassy. He tells me he’s fundraising for dual-language programs in public schools because his mission is to promote French language and culture. He called it “soft power,” which I was kind of surprised he said out loud, since I associate that with something we do in developing countries, not something you’re allowed to do in American public schools. After Fabrice and I talked, I walked into the main room and immediately saw Maurice. Maurice was so skeptical of this whole embassy thing, but there he is at a table, selling raffle tickets next to Imee, cheerfully raising money for a program neither of them ever wanted at their school.

Maurice, amiable as ever, is trying — and mostly failing — to convert ticket sales into social connections. He asks everyone, so if you win, when are you thinking of going? Oh, you’re going anyway? For Easter? Oh, nice.

Barbara, from Gramercy Park, the woman who loves fall in Paris, wanders across the marble floor toward the raffle table, beside where Imee is sitting. And I thought, oh, no.

Imee starts looking around. Maurice moves closer and leans in to hear why his wife is doing that nervous laugh, as Barbara explains Imee, a Puerto Rican woman, that being bilingual makes a person more sophisticated. Imee is exceedingly polite.

That entire conversation, Imee never mentioned to Barbara that she does speak another language — Spanish. Later, I ask her why. She shrugs it off.

Imee turns her back to her husband, facing me, and behind her, Maurice is looking right at me, nodding vigorously — yes.

So here we were in our fancy clothes on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, raising money for a French program at an utterly normal Brooklyn public school. That was already weird. But the toasts — the toasts were when the cognitive dissonance of the evening really kicked in for me. Fabrice steps up onto the marble staircase and clinks his glass, announces it’s time to celebrate what we’ve created and raise some money.

Fabrice hands the make to Principal Juman.

One by one, people are talking about equality, and diversity, and community, and the meaning of public education. Here, at the Cultural Services Palatial Palace, full of white people.

Rob gives a toast about that time he went on the overnight trip. It starts off OK, but then veers into strange and sort of cringe-y territory. He’s on a ropes course, 40 feet up, looking down.

I agree with Rob. It’s great to give kids equal access to opportunity. But what they’re being given access to are the opportunities that Rob and the other white parents care about.

Downstairs, I find Susan, Imee’s PTA co-president, on a bench by herself. She’s near the band, drinking wine, looking a little dumbstruck. I ask if she’s OK. This is something else, she says. And then she adds, it’s just hard to explain how this is a public school fundraiser.

When the founder of American public education, Horace Mann, laid out his vision for public schools back in the day, he rode his horse around Massachusetts, podium to podium. And his pitch was common schools would make democracy possible. They would bind us to one another, indoctrinate us, give us the skills and tools we need for democratic living. Public schools, he believed, would be the great equalizer. Rich and poor would come together and develop what he called “fellow-feeling,” and, in doing so, quote, “obliterate factitious distinctions in society.” For that to happen, you need everyone in the same school together. At SIS, they’ve gotten that far. Everyone was in the same school together. But there was no equalizing. We can be in the same school together and not be equal, just like we can be in the same country together. It’s not enough. What do we do about that? After the gala, money poured into SIS, and more white families enrolled their kids at the school. But in the years after that, there was a backlash, and SIS changed in ways that made Rob question himself. He wondered if he’d made mistakes. He told me he thought they all wanted the same thing for the kids. He just didn’t know. Not knowing? That happens a lot with white parents. I looked into the history of this school, and I learned that this wasn’t the first time white parents showed up here. White parents have been involved all along, all the way back to the very beginning of this school half a century ago, doing the same kinds of things I’d just seen. It happens again and again, white parents wielding their power without even noticing, like a guy wandering through a crowded store with a huge backpack, knocking things over every time he turns.

Horace Mann believed public schools would make us equal, but it doesn’t work. I’m not sure how to fix that, but I want to lay out the story, the whole story of this one American public school, because what I am sure of is that in order to address inequality in our public schools, we are going to need a shared sense of reality. At the very least, it’s a place to start. That’s next time on “Nice White Parents.”

“Nice White Parents” is produced by Julie Snyder and me, with editing on this episode from Sarah Koenig, Nancy Updike and Ira Glass. Neil Drumming is our Managing Editor. Eve Ewing and Rachel Lissy are our editorial consultants. Fact-checking and research by Ben Phelan, with additional research from Lilly Sullivan. Music supervision and mixing by Stowe Nelson. Our Director of Operations is Seth Lind. Julie Whitaker is our Digital Manager. Finance management by Cassie Howley, and Production management by Frances Swanson. Original music for Nice White Parents is by The Bad Plus, with additional music written and performed by Matt McGinley and Dan Reitz. Special thanks to Whitney Dangerfield, Rich Orris, Amy Pedulla, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Scott Sargrad, Jackie Carrier, Gene Demby, Charles Jones, Lenny Garcia, and Valero Doval. At The New York Times, thanks to Sam Dolnick, Stephanie Preiss, Nina Lassam and Julia Simon.

“Nice White Parents” is produced by Serial Productions, a New York Times Company.

“Nice White Parents” is brought to you by Serial Productions, a New York Times Company.

The New York City Board of Education has an archive of all of its records. Everything that goes into making thousands of schools run for years and years is sitting in boxes in the municipal building. I love the B.O.E. archive.

First of all, to look through it, you have to go to a century-old municipal building downtown. Arched doorways, lots of marble, an echo, vaulted ceilings really makes a person feel like she’s up to something important. You sit at a table, and then a librarian rolls your boxes up to you on a cart. Inside the boxes are all the dramas of a school system. Big ones, tiny ones, bureaucratic, personal, it’s all in there. There’s a union contract and then a zoning plan and special reports on teacher credentialing, a weird personal note from a bureaucrat to his assistant, a three-page single-spaced plea from Cindy’s grandmother, who would please like for her not to be held back in the second grade. An historian friend once pulled a folder out of the archive and a note fell out, something a teacher clearly made a kid write in the 1950s, that read, quote, “I am a lazy boy. Miss Fitzgerald says, when I go in the army, I will be expendable. Expendable means that the country doesn’t care whether I get killed or not. I do not like to be expendable. I’m going to do my work and improve.”

I came to the Board of Ed archive after I attended the gala thrown by the French embassy, the fundraiser for SIS organized by the new upper-class white families coming into the school. I felt like I’d just watched an unveiling ceremony for a brand-new school, but I didn’t really know what it was replacing. Everyone was talking as if this was the first time white parents were taking an interest in the School for International Studies. But at the archive, I found out it wasn’t the first time. White parents had invested in the school before, way before, at the very beginning of the school. Before the beginning. I found a folder labeled I.S. 293, Intermediate School 293, the original name for SIS. And this folder was filled with personal letters to the president of the New York City Board of Education, a man named Max Rubin, pleading with him to please make I.S. 293 an integrated school. “Dear Mr. Rubin, my husband and I were educated in public schools, and we very much want for our children to have this experience. However, we also want them to attend a school which will give them a good education, and today, that is synonymous with an integrated school.” “Dear Mr. Rubin, as a resident of Cobble Hill, a teacher and a parent, I want my child to attend schools which are desegregated. I do not want her to be in a situation in which she will be a member of a small, white, middle-income clique.” These are letters from parents — largely white parents, as far as I could tell — written in 1963, just a few years before I.S. 293 was built. At issue was where the school was going to be built. The Board of Education was proposing to build the school right next to some housing projects. The school would be almost entirely Black and Puerto Rican. These parents, white parents, came in and said, no, no, no, don’t build it there. Put it closer to the white neighborhood. That way, all our kids can go to school together. These parents wanted the school built in what was known as a fringe zone. This was a popular idea at the time, fringe schools to promote school integration. Comes up in the letters. “Dear Mr. Rubin, this neighborhood is changing with the influx of a middle-class group which is very interested in public education for their children.” “Dear Mr. Rubin, if there is a possibility of achieving some degree of integration, it is more likely if the Board of Education’s theory of fringe schools is applied.” And from another letter, “it is apparent from the opinion of the neighborhood groups involved that the situation is not at all hopeless.” This lobbying effort was so successful that the Board of Education did move the site of the school. This is why SIS is located where it is today, on the fringe, closer to the white side of town, so that it would be integrated.

I tried to imagine who these people were — young, idealistic white parents living in Brooklyn in the 1960s, feeling good about the future. They would have had their children around the time the Supreme Court ruled on Brown versus Board of Education. They probably followed the news of the Civil Rights Movement unfolding down South. Maybe they were supporters or active in the movement themselves. These were white parents saying, we understand we’re at a turning point and we have a choice to make right now, and we choose integration. One of my favorite letters was from a couple who left the suburbs to come to New York City for integration, the opposite of white flight. “Dear Mr. Rubin, we have recently moved into the home we purchased at the above address in Cobble Hill. It was our hope in moving into the neighborhood that our children would enjoy the advantages of mixing freely with children of other classes and races, which we were not able to provide to them when we lived in a Westchester suburb.”

This is Carol Netzer. Most of the letter writers were not that hard to find.

She didn’t like the suburbs. So they moved to Brooklyn and wrote that letter, which I showed her, her 37-year-old self writing about her hopes for her young children, the choices she made back then.

I went through this box of letters and called as many parents as I could. Most of them didn’t remember writing these letters, which isn’t surprising, more than 50 years ago and all. What I did find surprising is that, by the time 293 opened, five years later, none of them, not a one, actually sent their kids to I.S. 293.

From Serial Productions, I’m Chana Joffe-Walt. This is “Nice White Parents,” a series about the 60-year relationship between white parents and the public school down the block, a relationship that began with a commitment to integration. In the 1960s, much like today, white people were surrounded by a movement for the civil rights of Black Americans. White people were forced to contend with systemic racism. And here was a group of white parents who supported the movement for school integration, threw their weight behind it. What happened in those five years between 1963, when these white parents planted an impassioned pro-integration flag on the school, and 1968, when it came time to enroll their children? Why didn’t they show up?

These white parents who wanted an integrated I.S. 293, they didn’t come to that idea on their own. They were part of a bigger story unfolding around them. I want to zoom out to that dramatic story because it takes us right up to the moment these parents wrote their letters, and then made the decision not to send their kids to the school. To begin, I’d like to introduce you to our main character in this historical, tale, the recipient of the parents’ letters, the New York City Board of Education. Back in the 1950s, the New York City Board of Ed was not one of those boring bureaucracies that chugs along in the background, keeping its head down. It had personality. It invested in self-image. For instance, in 1954, when the Supreme Court found school segregation unconstitutional, New York City didn’t just say we support that ruling, it celebrated the Brown v Board decision. And notably, it celebrated itself, calling Brown, quote, “a moral reaffirmation of our fundamental educational principles.” That same year, 1954, the New York City Board of Ed made a film honoring multiculturalism in its schools. [CHILDREN SINGING] The film opens with a multiracial choir of schoolchildren singing “Let Us Break Bread Together.” Like I said, the Board of Ed went the extra mile. The Schools Superintendent was a 66-year-old man named Dr. William Jansen, a man that newspapers described as slow and steady. And he definitely delivers on that promise here.

A teacher addresses her classroom, filled with children of all races and ethnicities.

The camera cuts to a white boy, maybe 9 or 10.

Then a Black girl, around the same age.

This keeps going, kid to kid.

New York City was the biggest city in America, with the largest Black population in America, and it was saying in films, press releases, public speeches, Brown v Board, we agree. Separate but equal has no place in the field of public education. No problem here. It was also saying, you know who does have a problem? The South. New York City loved comparing itself to the backward South. There are plenty of examples of this in the Board archives, New Yorkers bragging about their superiority to places like Georgia or Virginia or Louisiana. This was the story the Board of Ed was telling. The South was ignorant and racist. New York City was enlightened and integrated. But here is what it was actually like to walk into a New York City school in a Black neighborhood at this time.

This is an archival recording of a woman named Mae Mallory. In the 1950s, Mallory’s two Black children were students in Harlem. And when Mallory walked into their school, she did not see children building brotherhood in interracial classrooms. She saw an all-Black and Puerto Rican school with terrible facilities, in disrepair.

Mae Mallory says the school had two bathrooms for 1,600 children. Mallory’s family fled racial violence in the South, like millions of other Black Americans, who headed to places like New York City, where everyone was supposed to be equal. Instead of welcoming these new students and spreading them out, creating interracial classrooms, the Board of Education kept Black and Puerto Rican students segregated in what were sometimes referred to as ghetto schools, schools that were often just blocks away from white schools. White schools in New York City had toilets that flushed. White children had classrooms with experienced teachers and principals, people who lived in their communities and looked like them. In Black and Puerto Rican schools, half the teachers were not certified to teach by the Board of Education. The buildings were in disrepair, and packed, sometimes more than 1,000 kids in a single hallway. The overcrowding got so bad the Board of Education decided to send kids to school in shifts. And mind you, this was not in the middle of a global pandemic. This was normal, non-crisis school for Black and Puerto Rican kids. One group of children would go to school in the morning until noon. The next group of kids would come in at noon, and stay until 3:00. The Board was literally giving Black kids half an education. In some schools in Harlem, they had triple shifts. This made it harder to learn elementary skills. Reading, for instance. Black parents complained that the schools were not teaching their kids basic literacy, that their white teachers didn’t care, that the summer reading programs were only in white communities, that their children were two years behind white children in reading. This at exactly the same time the Board of Education was making a film promoting the virtues of integration. It was effectively running a dual, segregated and unequal school system.

For many Black families, the Board of Education was not to be trusted. It did not care for Black children, and it didn’t respect the voices and concerns of Black parents. Mae Mallory says she visited her kids’ school that day because they’d come home the day before and told her a child had died at school. He was playing in the street at recess. Mallory hardly believed it, but she says when she visited the school, she learned, yes, indeed, this child was playing the street because the schoolyard was closed. He was hit by a beer truck. And she learned the schoolyard was closed because pieces of steel from the side of the building had fallen into the yard.

It was 1957, three years after the Supreme Court declared segregation by law unconstitutional. New York City didn’t have Jim Crow laws on the books, but Mae Mallory would ask, the schools are segregated. What’s the difference? She didn’t care whether that segregation was codified by law or by convention. The harm was just as dire. And she wanted it addressed.

Integration, Mae Mallory would say, was about, quote, demanding a fair share of the pie. She said, our children want to learn, and they certainly have the ability to learn. What they need is the opportunity. The Board of Education had defined integration as a multiracial choir. It was a virtue in and of itself. Mae Mallory saw integration as a remedy, a way to get the same stuff everyone else had — functioning toilets, books, certified teachers, a full school day. Integration was a means to an end.

Mae Mallory won her lawsuit. She and a few other parents were allowed to transfer their kids out of segregated schools. As for the segregation in the entire system, the judge in the lawsuit turned to the Board of Ed and said, this segregation, it’s your responsibility. Fix it.

Now, on the question of responsibility, the Board of Education was cagey. And that caginess set the stage for the I.S. 293 parents when it came time to send their kids to the school. Here’s what happened. The Schools Superintendent, William Jansen, decided school segregation was not his problem. In fact, he rejected the idea that New York City had segregated schools in the first place. After all, New York City was not barring Black children from entering white schools. This wasn’t the South. Segregation, Jansen said, is such an unfortunate word. He preferred the phrase racial imbalance or racial separation. The way he saw it, racial imbalance in the schools was just a matter of housing. Neighborhoods were segregated. Again, unfortunate, but that had nothing to do with the schools. To make this argument, William Jansen had to ignore the many powerful tools available to the Board of Education. The Board of Education was responsible for where kids went to school. It decided where to build new schools. It drew zoning lines. It decided where experienced teachers teach. There were many ways the Board could have made schools less segregated. I know this because of the Board’s own reports. Jansen did very little to break up school segregation, but man, did he study it. He organized commissions that led to reports that led to further study. You see a pattern emerge, starting in the late 1950s, that looks something like this. Black parents and civil rights groups would pressure the Board to act on segregation. The Board would invite its critics to join a commission to investigate the problem. The commission would study the schools, discover extreme segregation, lay out solutions. The Board of Ed would then take a tiny step toward implementing some of the recommendations until white parents started to complain about the changes, at which point the Board would back off and say it needed more evidence. Another commission, another report. For instance, there’s the Report on the Committee on Integration, a Plan for Integration, the City’s Children and the Challenge of Racial Discrimination, Redoubling Efforts on Integration, the Board Commission on Integration, the Status of the Public School Education of Negro and Puerto Rican Children in New York City, and, my favorite, a bound little red book from 1960 called Toward Greater Opportunity, which summarizes the previous investigations with this groundbreaking conclusion. Quote, “we must integrate as much and as quickly as we can.” I want to pause for one second and step out of the past back into the world we all live in, just to point out that, over the last few years in New York City, we’ve been reliving this chapter of history. It’s eerie. New York City schools are segregated. There’s a growing movement to do something about that. And for the first five years of his administration, the city’s mayor, Mayor Bill de Blasio, responded in the following way. He refused to say the word segregation, commissioned a number of reports on school diversity. He’s pointed a finger at housing problems as a way to say this isn’t our fault, and he’s studying the problem deeply, which, again, is not segregation, no matter how many times reporters would ask the mayor at press conferences, why don’t you use that word?

I heard a live call-in show on WNYC, the public radio station. A young integration advocate, an 11th grader named Tiffani Torres, asked the mayor, how much longer until you do something?

Mayor de Blasio likes to point out that this was a problem created by people long before him, which is exactly what people long before him said, too.

In the late 1950s, when Black parents and civil rights activists also asked the Board of Ed, why is it taking so long, board members complained about the, quote, extremists who wanted instant integration. Superintendent Jansen said, “some people want us to build Rome in one day.” While the Board of Education was building Rome in 1956, ‘57, ‘59, and in 1960, 1962, ‘63, Black parents found each other on PTAs, in civil rights organizations, pro-integration groups. They formed new groups, organized sit-ins, boycotts, demanded the Board provide a timetable for citywide integration. They joined forces with Puerto Rican parents, and their numbers grew. These were volunteers, mothers mostly, who left their jobs at the end of a workday and headed directly to a meeting about how to get the Board to give their kids the education white children were already receiving. Finally, in 1964, 10 years after Brown versus Board, Black and Puerto Rican parents said, enough. They were sick of waiting, sick of lawsuits, sick of asking for a remedy, sick of being ignored. So they went big, spectacularly big. They shut down the schools. They organized a civil rights demonstration that was the largest in US history, larger than the March on Washington. It was called Freedom Day, a massive school boycott.

On February 3rd, 1964, parents headed out to schools in the morning before sunrise to spread the word about the boycott. It was freezing cold that day. There’s a brief TV news clip of a group of mothers picketing outside their kids’ school at the start of the school day. They’re holding up signs that say, “we demand a real integration timetable now,” and “integration means better schools for all.” They’re handing out leaflets to other parents about Freedom Day, looking spirited and cold. A white NBC news reporter in a fedora walks up to one of the women.

There were maps and charts and instructions with picket times and picket captains for hundreds of schools. There were volunteer shifts to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, to hand out thousands of leaflets and stencil posters. The boycott wasn’t just effective — it was extraordinarily effective. Half a million kids stayed home from school that day. Half a million, close to half the school system. But the press barely covered it. After searching every major TV network, I found only one kid who was interviewed, a teenage boy, maybe around 16, on the street with some friends, protesting. A white ABC News reporter doesn’t ask him why he’s there. The only thing he asks him about is violence. The kid responds.

He gestures to the police on horseback.

That was it. Every once in a while, I’ll hear a politician or friend or school administrator say, yeah, integration was a good idea, but there was no political will to make it happen. 460,000 kids, half the school system. The will was there. The majority wanted integration.

After Freedom Day, the Board of Education introduced some small-scale integration plans, and white parents protested. [CHILDREN SINGING] We love our children. Oh, yes, we do. We will not transfer —

With their own marches, they put on their own school boycott. The flipside of freedom day, a white boycott. The white parents were far fewer in number. But as far as I can tell, they got a thousand times more press coverage.

This protest worked. The Board of Ed backed off. And in the decades since, the Board of Education has never proposed a city-wide integration plan. The schools have never been integrated. I think the fact of white moms in Queens in the 1960s yelling about zoning changes and busing, it’s not surprising they played a role in killing school integration efforts. But there was another group of white parents who played a quieter, but I’d argue more forceful, role in killing integration. The white parents who said they supported it, parents like the ones who wrote letters asking for an integrated I.S. 293. How did their vocal support for integration turn lethal? That’s after the break. In the American South, schools were desegregated with court orders. Cities and counties mandated desegregation, and the schools desegregated. By the early 1970s, the South was the most integrated region in the country. But New York City did not want to do it that way. No mandates. The New York City Board of Education wanted to appeal to hearts and minds. They wanted to sell white people on the virtues of integration. Have it all happen, quote, “naturally.” Some white people were sold. The white parents who wrote letters about I.S. 293. They believed in integration. So I made a lot of calls to ask, why’d you bail? They had a lot of different reasons. One couple got divorced, and moved. Another guy told me he had political ambitions that pulled him out of the city.

So he sold the house and moved the family to the suburbs, where he thought he’d have a better chance running against Republicans. Many white people moved to the suburbs for jobs, for newly paved roads and subsidized mortgages, leaving Brooklyn behind. I understood what happened there. But some explanations made less sense. Like one guy I called, he did stay in Brooklyn. On the phone, he was telling me why he believed it was important that I.S. 293 be integrated. But then he said his own kids went to Brooklyn Friends, a Quaker private school. I said, oh, they didn’t go to I.S. 293.

But you were a Quaker when you wrote this letter, asking for an integrated 293.

You weren’t planning to send your kid there?

What to make of that? When you get what you say you want and then, given the opportunity, don’t take it. Maybe you never really wanted it in the first place. Then I spoke to Elaine Hencke. Of all the people I spoke with, everything about Elaine indicated someone who did believe in integration, someone who would send her kids to 293. And yet, she didn’t. Elaine was a public school teacher. She taught in an integrated elementary school, until she had her own kids. She was looking forward to sending them to an integrated 293. When her daughter was old enough for junior high school, Elaine visited the school. She was the only letter writer I spoke with who actually went into the building. If this was going to work with anyone, it was going to be Elaine.

Elaine and I talked for a long time I pushed her — not to make her feel bad, but to get to what felt like a more real answer. At the time that you are visiting, was it majority Black and Hispanic kids?

And did that have anything to do with the way that you saw the classroom as disruptive and chaotic?

Well, did you have reason to think that they weren’t well educated?

I’m just — when you say chaos and disruptive, I’m trusting that what you saw was chaotic and disruptive. But I also know that those are words white people use — we use to express our racial fears, to express real racial fears. Do you think that’s what was happening with you?

Elaine told me when she wrote that letter to the Board of Education, she pictured her children becoming friends with Black kids, learning side-by-side, learning that all children are equal. That’s what motivated her to write that letter. She wanted the picture of integration the Board of Ed was promoting — the picture of harmonious integration. But when she visited I.S. 293, that didn’t seem possible. The reading levels were low. The kids were not entering the school on equal grounds. Her white children had received years of high quality teaching at well-resourced schools. The kids coming from segregated elementary schools had not had that experience.

But part of the — part of the vocal complaints of black parents at this period of time was that their kids were not learning how to read because schools were segregated, and their kids were kept in schools that were inferior. And that was part of the argument for integration.

That their kids were not going to get the resources, and quality teaching, and good facilities unless they were in the same buildings with kids like yours.

Did your feelings about integration change? Did you believe in it less?

Yeah. It felt when you guys wrote these letters like, this is — integration is this exciting ideal, and we can be part of it, and it’s going to be a meaningful project that’s also going to be kind of easy.

I think what Elaine actually meant was not that she was innocent, but that she was naive. She was naive about the reality of segregation, the harm of it. And naive about what it would take to undo it. She did not know. And I think she didn’t want to know. When Elaine said the word innocent, I felt a jolt of recognition. I felt like Elaine had walked me right up to the truth about her, and about me.

When my own kids were old enough, I sent them to our zoned public school. It was racially mixed and economically mixed. I was excited about that. And it was nice walking to school with neighbors, people I likely never would have gotten to know otherwise. My kid’s first day of school was another boy’s first week in the country. He’d just moved from China, and his mom asked the neighbor where the school was. When she said goodbye that first morning, I think he thought I was a teacher, and he crawled into my lap. We had no words in common, so I just held him while he screamed and cried. By the holiday show three months later, I watched that same boy belt out “This Pretty Planet” on a stage with his classmates. He was the star. He nailed the hand motions. Every other kid up on stage was just following his lead, just trying to keep up. It was such a sweet picture, all of them up there — Black kids, and Mexican kids, and Colombian, and Asian and white kids. And all of us adults supporting all of them. It’s moving, to me, this picture of integration. It is also, I’m realizing right now, writing these words down, the very same picture the Board of Education put forth in 1954 — a multiracial choir singing together, building brotherhood. And it’s dangerous, I think, this picture of integration. It seems perfectly designed to preserve my innocence, to make me comfortable, not to remedy inequality, but a way to bypass it entirely. I can sit in that assembly and feel good about the gauzy display of integration without ever being asked to think about the fact that much of the time, white kids in the school building are having a different educational experience than kids of color. A large share of the white students at the school are clustered in a gifted program. They have separate classrooms and separate teachers. We all blithely call these white children gifted and talented, G&T, starting at four years old. White children are performing better at the school than black children and Latino children. White families are the loudest and most powerful voices in the building. The advantages white kids had back in the 1950s, they’re still in place. When Elaine said she was innocent, I thought about the things we say, nice, white parents, to each other about why we won’t send our kids to segregated schools — because they’re too strict, or too chaotic, or too disruptive. Because the test scores are bad, because we want more play. We want fewer worksheets. Because we don’t want to ride a bus. We don’t want uniforms. We don’t want tests. We want innocence. We need it, to protect us from the reality that we are the ones creating the segregation, and we’re not sure we’re ready to give it up.

Elaine was not for segregation. But in the end, she wasn’t really for integration, either. All of the choices she made, choices she had the luxury of making, were meant to advantage her own kids. And I understand that. That’s what parents do.

You regretted what?

Elaine’s friend Joan, another white mom who did send her kids to I.S. 293. Elaine still feels bad about her choice. But not everyone felt bad.

Carol is the woman who wrote the letter about how she’d come to New York City from the suburbs for integration. I had a hard time reconciling her lack of piety with her letter, which I read back to her, about wanting her kids to mix freely with children of other classes and races. [READING] — which we were not able to provide for them when we lived in the Westchester suburb.

You remember feeling that way?

As a parent, did you — do you remember feeling like, I hope my kid has experiences outside of just people like them?

I’m not going to tell you a lot about St. Anne’s, except to say this — it’s one of the most prominent private schools in Brooklyn. Upscale neighborhood, prime real estate, lots of heavy-hitters send their kids to St. Anne’s. I had heard of it. What I didn’t know is that St. Anne’s opened at the very same time that Black parents were waging their strongest fight for integration in New York City, in 1965. Right when a lot of the letter writers would have been looking for schools. And it wasn’t just St. Anne’s. New progressive private schools were opening and expanding all over the city. Brooklyn Friends School expanded into a new building, and would double its enrollment. They were opening private schools in the South, too. But down there, it was all very explicit. They became known as quote, unquote, “segregation academies,” schools for white people who were wholeheartedly committed to avoiding integration. In the North, private schools opened as if they were completely disconnected from everything else that was happening at that very moment. St. Anne’s marketed itself as a pioneer, a community of like-minded, gifted kids, no grades. Lots of talk about progressive, child-centered education, the whole child. At one point in my conversation with Carol Netzer I was talking about how integration was happening around his time. And she surprised me by saying, no, not at that time.

No, they were integrating the schools in the ‘60s, though.

That’s how easy it was to walk away from integration in New York City. You could do it without even knowing you’d thrown a bomb over your shoulder on the way out.

Here is what I think happened over those five years between the writing of the letters in 1963 and not sending their kids to the school in 1968. Those five years were a battle between the Board of Education’s definition of integration and the actual integration that black parents wanted. For black parents, integration was about safe schools for their children, with qualified teachers and functioning toilets, a full day of school. For them, integration was a remedy for injustice. The Board of Ed, though, took that definition and retooled it. Integration wasn’t a means to an end. It was about racial harmony and diversity. The Board spun integration into a virtue that white parents could feel good about. And their side triumphed. That’s the definition of integration that stuck, that’s still with us today. It’s the version of integration that was being celebrated 50 years later, at the French Cultural Services Building at the Gala for SAS.

In some of my calls with the white letter writers, a few people mentioned that yes, they wanted integration. But also, they wanted the school closer to them. They weren’t comfortable sending their kids over to the other side of the neighborhood. Which brings me to one final letter from the other side of the neighborhood. One I haven’t told you about, from the I.S. 293 folder in the archives. It’s one of the only letters, as far as I can tell, that is not from a white parent. It’s from the Tenants Association for the Gowanus Houses, a housing project, home to mostly Black and Puerto Rican families. They also wanted a school closer to them. The letter from the Tenants Association is formal and straightforward. It says, please build the school on the original site you proposed, right next to the projects. That way, they explained, our kids won’t have to cross many streets. We’ll get recreational facilities, which we desperately need. And it’ll be close to the people who will actually use it. The letter says they represent over 1,000 families. The white families, they numbered a couple dozen. Still, in the name of integration, the white letter writers got what they wanted — a new building close to where they lived, that they did not attend. Note the Black and Puerto Rican families we’re not asking to share a school with white people. They were not seeking integration. That’s not what their letter was about. They were asking for a school, period. The school they got was three blocks further than they wanted. And from the moment it opened, I.S. 293 was de facto segregated — an overwhelmingly Black and Puerto Rican school. What were those years like, once the white parents pushing their priorities went away? Once there were no more efforts at feel-good integration, and the community was finally left alone? Was that better? That’s next time, on “Nice White Parents.”

“Nice White Parents” is produced by Julie Snyder and me, with editing on this episode from Sarah Koenig, Nancy Updike and Ira Glass. Neil Drumming is our Managing Editor. Eve Ewing and Rachel Lissy are our editorial consultants. Fact-checking and research by Ben Phelan, with additional research from Lilly Sullivan. Archival research by Rebecca Kent. Music supervision and mixing by Stowe Nelson. Our Director of Operations is Seth Lind. Julie Whitaker is our Digital Manager. Finance management by Cassie Howley and production management by Frances Swanson. The original music for Nice White Parents is by The Bad Plus, with additional music written and performed by Matt McGinley. A thank you to all the people and organizations who helped provide archival sound for this episode, including the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Andy Lanset at WNYC, Ruta Abolins and the Walter J. Brown Media Archives at the University of Georgia and David Ment, Dwight Johnson and all the other people at the Board of Education archives. Special thanks to Francine Almash, Jeanne Theoharis, Matt Delmont, Paula Marie Seniors, Ashley Farmer, Sherrilyn Ifill, Monifa Edwards, Charles Isaacs, Noliwe Rooks, Jerald Podair and Judith Kafka.

“Nice White Parents” is produced by Serial Productions, a New York Times Company.

I.S. 293 opened in 1968. Renee Flowers was part of the first generation of students to walk in the door.

And you’re talking about the building on Court Street. I went to school there. It was nice. And it was brand new. It was nice.

The Gowanus neighborhood where Renee grew up, and still lives — the housing project’s three blocks away from the school. Renee went to I.S. 293, graduated. And she kept going back to the building to play handball, to vote, to attend graduations. Renee coaches the neighborhood drill team, and they’d perform at the school. For years, she’d regularly go watch the basketball tournament. Renee is in her 60s. She’s just retired from the post office. The school has been a fixture for most of her life. She knows every part of the building.

As we we’re talking, she closes her eyes. She can see it.

Renee has this stack of old I.S. 293 yearbooks in her apartment — even the years she wasn’t a student there.

She’ll take the yearbooks out for Gowanus Old Timers Day every August. Renee is Black. She has never wondered why I.S. 293 is located on Court Street; why they all had to walk to the edge of the white neighborhood to get to school. She never heard about the battle over where the building would be located or the white parents who wanted a fringe school. Renee just knew the school was theirs. Imani Gayle Gillison told me the same thing — 293 was ours.

Imani was very eager to talk about 293, which I found charming because she didn’t even go there. She says she was one of the only Gowanus kids whose parents entered a Catholic school, and she’s never forgotten it. She was so jealous of her brothers, all her friends at I.S. 293. They called it I.S. or Nathan Hale Junior High School. The kids would all walk home together in a big group. And Imani remembers seeing them in their green Nathan Hale sweaters, hearing them sing the Nathan Hale school song.

From Serial Productions, I’m Chana Joffe-Walt. This is “Nice White Parents.” We’re telling the story of one public school building to see if it’s possible to create a school that is equal and integrated. This episode — what if we dropped the integrated part?

I was talking to an academic recently, a sociologist and writer who studies education, a Black woman named Eve Ewing. I was telling her what I was working on. And at some point in the conversation, she asked me, why are you so obsessed with integration? It threw me. I guess I’m obsessed with integration because it feels like an obvious goal. It’s the best way to equalize schools, empirically in terms of test scores and outcomes. But also, segregation is antithetical to the American promise — life, liberty. Segregation is anathema to all of that. It’s caste. But after seeing what happened at SIS, the year the new white families came in, and after learning about how the school was founded on a false ideal of integration, how unreliable white families were, how they paid no attention to the actual voices and needs of families of color, I don’t know. Why expend energy chasing white people who don’t actually want to participate or don’t even show up? Maybe it’s better to set aside integration entirely and focus instead on the kids who do show up. For decades after it opened, I.S. 293 was largely a segregated school. There weren’t any white parents pushing their wispy ideas of integration. The school was pretty much left alone. I’d seen what happens when nice white parents came inside the building. Was it better when they stayed out?

To start, I should say that I.S. 293 was not an experiment in Black self-governance. There were schools like that opening all over the country — schools founded on the premise that you didn’t need white families to get a good education. Integration was not the answer. These schools focused on Black power. They developed afrocentric curricula and insisted on people of color in leadership positions. I.S. 293 was not that. It was a pretty average 1970s public school. The principal was white. The teachers were almost all white. The local community school board, also white. The kids were Black and brown. There were always some white kids at 293, but they were a small minority. I wanted to know — was I.S. 293 a good school back then? There wasn’t much in the official record — some math and writing scores that weren’t great. But aside from that, there was curiously little written about the school. Most schools show up here and there in the archive or in news reports — not 293. which could mean everything was going just fine. Or it could mean the school was falling apart. I found names of some I.S. 293 alumni in Renee’s yearbooks.

The pants have nothing to do with how the school was. It’s just what she members of this time in her life. She wanted to wear pants. I had a lot of conversations like this. People had fond memories of I.S. 293. People had sad memories. But mostly, they had very specific memories.

I heard about the song that was on repeat the summer before 7th grade, the lighting in the basement, Mr. Barringer, the scary dean, whom everyone called big head Barringer. One I.S. 293 graduate told me what she remembered was a teacher who used her long nails to eat pumpkin seeds in class. I met Sheila Saunders at a barbecue by the Gowanus Houses. She went to 293, so did all of her siblings, friends, nearly everyone else at this barbecue.

Was I.S. 293 a good school during this period of time? The more I asked it, I recognized what a modern-day question that is. This is the way we talk about public schools now — good schools and bad schools. At I.S. 293, there was no school choice. Every neighborhood was zoned to its designated middle school. Apart from the white families, most everyone from the community was there — middle class, working class, poor kids, Black kids, hispanic, dorky, goofy, arty kids. Everyone went. I.S. 293 wasn’t good or bad; it was just school. And then something happened at I.S. 293. When I was looking through the Board of Ed archives, the year 1984 stood out. It’s the year I.S. 293 starts showing up in the records. That year, a few parents from the school began asking the district superintendent for an investigation into the local community school board. One person, writing on behalf of the 293 Parent Association, suggests an investigation is critical because the board is planning in secret to harm the school. The board, this person says, is, quote, “controlled by people who are out for the real estate interest and have little regard for minorities.” Another parent writes, they’re unhappy with the local school board because it has, quote, “ceased to act in the best interest of our children.” I couldn’t really understand from the archive exactly what these parents we’re talking about. The first person I thought to ask was Dolores Hadden Smith. So many 293 alumni mentioned Ms. Smith. Ms. Smith worked at 293 longer than anyone else I talked to — 42 years.

She grew up in the neighborhood. Her mom worked at the school, her sister, her brother.

Ms. Smith told me everything was fine. And then in the ‘80s, they started messing with us, started messing with who they sent to our school.

There’s a local news article from 1987 where the principal of 293 says the same thing. He accuses the district of, quote, “skimming off the high-achieving students from his school,” specifically poaching white students. Ms. Smith says that just started disappearing.

OK. So there was something happening behind closed doors, and the local community school board was part of it. I took these claims to Norm Fruchter. He was on the local school board around this time; although, I figured it was unlikely he’d say, why, yes, we did have a secret plot to steal 293’s high-achievers and white kids. And yet, that is basically what he said.

Norm says white parents had left his district in the 1970s. They left the public schools entirely or moved out of the city. Black families were also leaving in large numbers, but the school board was completely preoccupied by the white flight. Norm says board members saw a decline in white students as a serious threat.

Their solution? A gifted program.

To get into gifted programs, you had to take a test. Gifted kids would be taught in separate classrooms. They opened gifted programs in select elementary schools. And a new gifted program opened in a different middle school, a school called M.S. 51. This is part of what the people at I.S. 293 were seeing. Their strongest students were being siphoned off. White parents, even when they were not inside 293, were beginning to change the school.

Parents who were committed to getting their kids in the gifted program could do it.

Norm says there were kids of color who were clearly qualified, but were not in the gifted program. And he says this was because the questions were biased, and the people administering the tests were sometimes biased. He also says parents were hiring their own psychologists to test their children and paying for test prep. But also, there was another reason Black and Latino kids were not in the gifted program.

Nadine Jackson might have been one of those kids who would have qualified as gifted. She was a student at I.S. 293, a Black kid from the Gowanus Projects.

Nadine was not kept out of the gifted program because of bias or lack of test prep. She simply had never heard of the program. She went to the school everyone else went to. She started seventh grade at I.S. 293 in 1993. And Nadine was eager to jump in — ready to be delivered to importance with hard work which she put in. Nadine studied computer technology. She played first clarinet in the band. She played Whitney Houston, “I Have Nothing” on clarinet over and over. In her first year, the I.S. 293 band went to perform at another middle school nearby — M.S. 51, the school with the gifted program. When Nadine arrived there, she walked right into an experience a lot of kids have when they leave their school and enter a world of wealthier kids.

M.S. 51 and I.S. 293 were in the same school district. They were governed by the same local community school board, and they were a mile and half away from each other. When I asked Nadine the same question I had asked previous graduates of I.S. 293, what was the school like, she described the feeling of being trapped. She told me, it was normal at 293 to have 42 kids in a class. She said teachers came and went frequently in the middle of the school year. She had six or seven social studies teachers in one year. I was skeptical about the numbers, but I looked into it. And all of this seems entirely plausible for those years. There was a recession. School budgets were decimated. In 1991, New York City proposed 250 million dollars in educational spending cuts. In 1992, 600 million. School programs are being cut mid-year; class sizes ballooned; teachers were moved around, a lot. At the same time, Nadine’s district was supporting gifted programs, bussing white kids out of their zoned schools, hiring separate teachers, administering special tests, running an entirely separate educational track. At M.S. 51, the gifted middle school, there were not 40 plus kids in a class; there were 30. The school was written up in a book from the 1990s called “New York City’s Best Public Middle Schools.” It describes the school’s leaders as masters at developing faculty, talent and enthusiasm. The M.S. 51 principal is quoted saying, “when we started the gifted program, we got parents who were more involved, more inquisitive.” He then goes on to say, “the gifted program shifted his whole educational approach. It made him recognize that children in early adolescence need close contact with nurturing adults.” And he began to hire teachers who he saw as, quote, “warm and comforting.” I.S. 293 and M.S. 51 were both public middle schools. But that day she visited M.S. 51, Nadine felt like this school — this is the school that’s preparing kids to be someone of importance.

Regents are state tests kids normally take in high school.

After Nadine’s out at M.S. 51, she says it made her see her own school differently. I.S. 293, to her, looked like a school for chumps.

In the 1980s when the district started grading specialized programs at other schools, I.S. 293 parents fought back. But Norm Fruchter, the school board member, told me once the gifted programs were in place, they were there to stay. The board was serving a constituency of white parents who believed their kids deserved a program to serve their unique needs. And he says, those parents wielded tremendous power.

They argued that the gifted program, designed to serve white families, was actually an integration program, when, in fact, it was a separate track in the school that kept Black and brown kids from resources from special programs, which is what segregation was designed to do — to separate. This was its latest adaptation, and it wasn’t the last. That’s after the break.

1994, about halfway through I.S. 293’s 60-year history, and here’s where things stood — 293 did not have any white parents messing with things inside of the building. But white families in the district were drawing resources away from I.S. 293 by creating specialty gifted programs in other schools. I.S. 293 was separate and increasingly unequal. And that is when Judi Aronson enters the scene — a woman who is not connected to I.S. 293, but was about to be. History is about to repeat itself.

At the same time, Nadine, the nerdy honor roll student was starting junior high school at 293, Judi had a daughter who was finishing elementary school. Judi’s daughter was zoned for M.S. 51, the school with the gifted program, but Judi wasn’t excited about that school.

Judi had been a special ed teacher in a public school. Then she left the classroom and started working at the Teachers Union, the UFT. Later, she became a school principal and a superintendent. So she’d spent a lot of time thinking about schools — what makes a school successful. And she’d begun to imagine what it would look like to build something better.

Judi got a group of parents together, a planning committee.

The planning committee put together a 13-page proposal for a new school called the Brooklyn School for Global Citizenship. The local community school board approve it; although, somewhere in the process they dropped the citizenship part — too controversial — and it became the Brooklyn School for Global Studies. OK. So, why am I telling you about the School for Global Studies? Because this brand new school needed a building — the community school board surveyed its options and chose a spot. The School for Global Studies would be located in the basement of I.S. 293.

Nadine was in eighth grade when this happened, September 1994, and she was not into this idea.

An article in the New York Times proclaimed, a miracle of a school opened its doors this fall in Brooklyn, thanks to determined parents who’ve created with the new principal called, quote, “the Taj Mahal of education.” Global Studies had class sizes as small as 18 kids. The curriculum included trips to museums. The students went outdoors to learn, measured shadows for math. They dug in soil for science experiments. The students at 293 saw all of that, as they went about their days at the not Taj Mahal of education, and they were pissed.

Whenever Nadine or the other 293 kids walked by the global studies classes, they’d make sure to bang on the classroom doors. And the 293 teachers and staff, school security officers, the custodian, the principal, they didn’t welcome the new school for global cities either. I heard stories from this time about the staff from Global Studies asking to put up student work in the hallways and being told by the long-time 293 custodian, you can’t. That’s a fire hazard. Global Studies wanted to use the auditorium for a performance — sorry, it’s occupied. And I heard this story from the Global Studies principal, a guy named Larry Abrams, who’d been hired to lead what, to him, sounded like such an exciting new school, and then he showed up to work.

Remember how I said history repeats itself?

Judi Aronson did not end up sending her daughter to Global because by the time it opened, her daughter was already in middle school. When her younger son was old enough for middle school, a couple of years later, she didn’t send him either.

This is not entirely true. I did speak with one parent from the planning committee who sent her son to Global Studies. Although, she said when they showed up in September, it looked to her like he was the only white boy in the school. She said he had a good experience there. Judi decided what was best for her kids was something else.

In an effort to appease white parents, the school district had once again made a choice that sidelined 293. White parents had said jump, so the district jumped. And now they were left trying to fill the school for Global Studies, a school that had no obvious constituency. Most of the parents who created it didn’t send their kids, and the neighborhood kids already had a school — I.S. 293. This meant, to fill Global Studies, the district had to find kids who weren’t happy at their schools, or kids whose schools weren’t unhappy with them. Or they had to bank on families randomly applying to a school they’d never heard of.

Within six or seven years, most of the original Global Studies staff had left, including the principal. Within a decade, nobody knew why the school was called Global Studies in the first place. Global Studies became a regular segregated public school, which shared a building with another segregated public school.

In my experience, schools are immune to long-term memory. They get new principals, new names, a new generation of parents. And they’re populated by children who have no reason to care about what came before — clean slate every September. This, I believe, is also what makes it possible for us to keep repeating the same story. We constantly reset the clock and move forward. When we look to diagnose the problems of our public schools, we look at what is in front of us right now. We look forward. Nobody looks backwards to history. And so the question is not how do we stop white families from hoarding all the resources. Instead, the question is, what’s going on with the Black kids? This became the question driving the next era at I.S. 293, the latest era of school reform — the mid 1990s right up to today, a time when business people and American presidents and tech company billionaires committed themselves to solving the problem of failing public schools. Basically, it’s everything you’ve heard about schools in the last two decades — charter schools, No Child Left Behind, and accountability, the achievement gap, Race to the Top, these were data-driven initiatives. They assessed the educational landscape and identified schools that were failing — teachers who were not getting results — children who were not performing. At I.S. 293, this meant a flurry of new programs that came and went, sometimes in rapid succession. First, I.S. 293 a grant from RJR Nabisco to break itself up into small academies — smaller schools within the building that would focus on different specialties. A long-time 293 teacher, Carmen Sanchez, told me, after that, everything just started changing. The staff turnover was dizzying.

Ms. Sanchez says one of them came in to run the place, and she opened her staff meeting by promising to fire everyone.

Ms. Smith, Delores Hadden Smith, was in her third decade working at the school when this started changing names. They were The Mathematics Academy, The Academy for Performing and Fine Arts, The School for Integrated Learning Through the Arts. Teachers left. New staff came in, new initiatives. They needed to be smaller, more specialized. They needed more science. They needed a trade. They needed to be a 6 through 12 school, middle and high school. Ms. Smith says this was confusing for the parents, especially the parents in her community, the Gowanus community, parents who went to 293 and knew it as 293. Now, they were asking Ms. Smith, what happened to 293? The School for Integrated Learning Through the Arts, what’s that mean?

By this time, public school admissions allowed more choice about where parents sent their kids. So some of these local parents started choosing other schools. 293 was losing students, which meant they were losing money. A new principal came in — and an assistant principal named Jeff Chetirko. By that point, 293 had been renamed The School for International Studies. But not even assistant principal Chetirko knew why. Prospective parents would ask him, why should I send my kids here? What does international mean?

By 2003, SIS had low enrollment and terrible test scores. The state put it on a failing schools list, the dreaded SURR list, Schools Under Registration Review. Being on a failing schools list made it harder to sell the school to prospective families, but it did mean SIS got a chunk of money to turn things around. They bought new reading programs, an academic intervention program. They doubled periods for reading and math. During this time, the leadership was stable — less teacher turnover. The school was less chaotic. The test scores stabilized. Jeff Chetirko says they were feeling good about where things were headed. Still, they had to compete for students. So he hired a marketing firm to help draw families in.

He says the marketing idea didn’t attract any local families into the school. Instead, it attracted the attention of the New York Post, which found out the school was trying to market itself, as it had been told to, and wrote a snarky article about it. The headline read, “Lousy Brooklyn Public School Wants to Hire a Press Agent to Enhance Appeal.” it goes on to say, quote, “If they build a buzz, the kids will come. That’s the thinking at a mediocre Brooklyn Public school with grandiose aspirations.” The article ends with the list of suggested marketing slogans for the school. It’s mean spirited and racist. Having trouble with English? So is we. The School for International Studies, the best six years of your life. Jaguar pride — where you can go from state champs to state pen. The Jaguars — we score baskets; we just can’t count them. Jeff says everyone at the school read it. He distinctly remembers the feeling.

Here is what happened next.

Six years later, I’m standing in a sweaty school gym at a middle school fair for parents. It’s 2017, two years after that gala thrown by the French Embassy for SIS. A couple dozen schools are here with information tables. The table for the school for International Studies is mobbed. There’s a line of parents waiting to get a chance to talk with someone from the school. A mother named Anissa is near the very back of the school.

After 40 years of being neglected, messed with by the school board, after losing students and losing money, losing the building, being blamed and publicly mocked, SIS was suddenly the hot ticket, as if history had been wiped away. Parents asked the SIS admissions director, can their kids get priority if they have good grades? Extracurriculars? Does attendance count? They want to know if it helps their chances if they show up for a tour.

They want to know, will you have enough space for all these people?

Three years earlier, SIS had 30 sixth graders. What changed? The admissions director is the same. Most of the staff is the same. The building is the same. The test scores are still pretty low. There’s an IB program now in French. But the biggest change between the era of being ignored and punished and the era of being celebrated and oversubscribed is that white kids arrived. That’s what’s different, nine times as many white students.

I.S. 293 was a mostly segregated school for decades. And still, it was subject to the whims of white parents. Nice white parents shape public schools even in our absence because public schools are maniacally loyal to white families even when that loyalty is rarely returned back to the public schools. Just the very idea of us, the threat of our displeasure, warps the whole system. So separate is still not equal because the power sits with white parents no matter where we are in the system. I think the only way you equalize schools is by recognizing this fact and trying wherever possible to suppress the power of white parents. Since no one’s forcing us to give up power. We white parents are going to have to do it voluntarily. Which, yeah, how’s that going to happen? That’s next time on “Nice White Parents.”

“Nice White Parents” is produced by Julie Snyder and me, with editing on this episode from Sarah Koenig and Ira Glass. Neil Drumming is our Managing Editor. Eve Ewing and Rachel Lissy are our editorial consultants. Fact-checking and research by Ben Phelan, with additional research from Lilly Sullivan. Archival research by Rebecca Kent. Music supervision and mixing by Stowe Nelson, with production help from Aviva DeKornfeld. Our Director of Operations is Seth Lind. Julie Whitaker is our Digital Manager. Finance management by Cassie Howley, and Production management by Frances Swanson. Original music for “Nice White Parents” is by The Bad Plus, with additional music written and performed by Matt McGinley. The music you’re hearing right now. is the Nathan Hale trilogy performed by the Nathan Hale middle school 293 Concert Band. I benefited from the memories and expertise of many people for this episode: Special thanks to Charles Jones, Leanna Stiefel, Allison Roda, Ujju Aggarwal, Clara Hemphill, Steven Schneps, Michael Rebell, Jeffrey Henig, Megan Thompkins-Strange, Jeffrey Snyder, Dawn Meconi, Maura Walz, Coleen Mingo, Neil Friedman, Jeff Tripp, Karl Rusnak, Lenny Garcia, Cindy Black, Arthur Bargonetti, Heather Lewis, Theirry Rafuir, Kevin Davidson and Afrah Omar.

“Nice White Parents” is produced by Serial Productions, a New York Times Company.

I want to tell you about another old film I found during my research. It’s from 1951. We see a housewife, a white woman — everyone in this film is white. She’s sitting in her living room with some neighbors. They’re here to solve a problem. [OLD MOVIE PLAYING]

They sit on couches with notepads, deep in discussion. They will solve this problem together. In another scene, a machinist in California approaches his bus, the factory owner, with a request from the workers.

They had. The discussion requires listening, debating and waving your arms a lot, which they do in the film.

Where were they taught the Democratic method, you might ask? Public school, where the housewives taught to problem solve for the safety of the community’s children, public school. This film was made by the National Education Association. It’s a 25-minute promotional film that spends almost no time inside schools. Instead, it’s all about the purpose of public schools, how they prepare us to live together as citizens. We see Americans use their public school training in everyday life, when they sit with their neighbors, debate their bosses, when they go shopping, and drive a car, buy a house. We are all part of a grand play, interdependent — the senator, the homemaker, the factory worker.

Fred the farmer has a nameless wife, whom we see now standing next to him. Fred’s wife is trying to resolve a problem. The neighbors want to build a drainage system into a pond. The lowest land for the pond is an orchard that belongs to Fred and his nameless wife. The wife understands that to prevent further flooding, she and Fred will need to sacrifice for the greater good. Fred is not so sure.

Luckily, Fred has the tools to do it.

And thank goodness, because the stakes are high.

This vision of public schools, the same one laid out 100 years earlier by the founder of American public schools Horace Mann is that America and democracy cannot survive without public education. We need common schools where rich and poor come together to solve problems, generate fellow feeling. Public schools, the great equalizer. But I have made my way through the history of one modern American public school. And from what I can see, white parents are standing in the way of achieving this vision. Our schools are not an equalizing force, because white parents take them over and hoard resources. We’re not learning how to live together as one society because white parents flee or cordon themselves off in special gifted programs. Even when we’re not in the school building, funding and attention still slide our way. So I don’t see how it’s possible to have equal public schools, common schools that serve every child, unless we limit the power of white parents. But how do we do that? In all my reporting around this one school building from 2015 all the way back to the beginning, I’ve never seen that happen. And then I did. From Serial Productions, I’m Chana Joffe-Walt. This is “Nice White Parents,” a series about the most powerful force in public schools: White people.

Recently, I’ve come across two examples of schools that seem to be suppressing the power of white parents, two examples I found in the very last place I expected, in the I.S. 293 building, one upstairs and one downstairs. So today’s episode, what does it look like to limit the power of white parents in schools? And does it work? Does it lead to an equal education for everyone?

I’m going to start downstairs. Eight years ago, the city put a charter school in the basement if I.S. 293. It’s called Success Academy. That year I spent following the new white parents upstairs at the School For International Studies, I would occasionally see Success Academy kids around the building in orange and blue uniforms. It was always a little startling because Success Academy is an elementary school. So they look tiny in a building full of middle and high schoolers. But mostly, the Success kids stood out because of the way they moved through the halls.

Denagee is one of the many students from SIS upstairs, who is eager to tell me about the charter school and its rituals, their silent, controlled lines.

That’s his friend Chris saying Storm Troopers. Sometimes they’ll hear Success teachers say, make a bubble in your mouth. And then a line of six-year-olds will close their lips and fill their cheeks up with air, that way nobody’s talking. Chris and Denagee told me they look like puffer fish.

And they don’t?

The year I was reporting at SIS, The New York Times published a video that showed a particular and alarming moment inside one of the Success classrooms. It was secretly recorded by an assistant teacher, who leaked it, and it went viral. You see a group of first-graders gathered in a circle on a polka-dot rug, sitting legs crossed, hands in their laps. And a teacher is asking one girl to correct a math problem she got wrong.

The girl does not respond. The teacher leans in and repeats.

The girl whimpers, or says something so quiet you can’t hear. The entire class is watching. It’s silent, intense. The teacher is visibly upset, picks up the child’s paper, and rips it in half, points an angry finger to the side of the room.

She goes. The teacher turns to the rest of the circle.

A boy rushes over to do it correctly. But the teacher is not done publicly reprimanding the girl, who’s now sitting to the side of the classroom in the calm down chair.

The teacher is white. The girl whose work she just ripped up is not. The whole thing is hard to watch. When this video came out, the student was living at a homeless shelter with her mom. Success suspended this teacher, but didn’t fire her. Instead, at a press conference, the C.E.O reprimanded The New York Times for not understanding that this teacher was having a bad day. When I asked about this incident, the C.E.O of Success told me the teacher’s behavior was unacceptable. Teachers are not allowed to yell at kids. But it was not a fireable offense. She says the teacher made a mistake.

I have always been skeptical of Success Academy. Success has a reputation for being harsh and punitive. Especially unnerving, to me at least, is that they’re harsh, punitive approach is deployed in schools across the city that are almost entirely BBlack and brown. Success students are generally kids of color from working class or poor families. The intense focus on policing kids’ bodies, on test prep drills, frequent use of suspensions — you don’t see that in majority white schools. I’ve never seen a line of uniformed, white students walking through the halls of a public school building with their mouths in bubbles, or being told to quote show urgency when they dawdle unpacking their book bags or eating lunch, except for here. This particular Success Academy in the basement of I.S. 293 is integrated. A quarter of the student body is white. And it’s the first school I saw putting limits on the power of white parents.

Success Academy is the city’s largest charter school network, 47 schools, elementary, middle, and one high school. They get public funding, like all charter schools. Success Academy also gets private funding. The state oversees charters, like Success. But it isn’t run by the state or the city. It’s run by a private organization. And Success is a choice school. That means families opt in to Success. The C.E.O, a woman named Eva Moskowitz, opened her first 40 something schools in largely working class Black and brown neighborhoods where she imagined families would want a new school option. Then about a decade ago, Moskowitz decided she wanted to open an integrated school, a new Success Academy that was racially integrated and economically diverse. She needed a school building where integration was possible, where perhaps, half a century earlier, a group of white families pushed for a strategically located fringe school building between two racially segregated neighborhoods. And this is how Success Academy wound up here, in the old I.S. 293 building because of yet another plan to integrate. Only this time, it worked. White parents opted in. The way families at this Success Academy — it’s called Success Academy Cobble Hill — tend to come from advantage, just like the white parents upstairs at SIS. They’re upper middle class and rich, doctors and lawyers, corporate accountants, people who walk into most public schools with a lot of power. But the influence I’d seen white parents wield upstairs at SIS, that didn’t seem to be the case downstairs. I found that confusing. Do you have a PTA? We have a parent council so it’s very similar to a PTA this is Alissa Bishop, the principal of Success, Cobble Hill. The parent council is not that similar to a PTA though, because in the very next sentence, Principal Bishop told me that the parent council is not allowed to raise money. This, I assumed, was probably difficult for parents who are accustomed to fundraising for their kids’ schools. Have you had parents who want to raise money, who come to you and are like, I want to — I want this thing to happen, and I want to raise the money for it.

Principal Bishop looks over to the PR person again, as if to say, am I not being clear with this chick? Why isn’t she getting it? But I seem to be unable to stop myself from listing all the things I’ve seen white advantaged parents demand in public schools.

The C.E.O. of Success Academy, Eva Moskowitz, followed up later to tell me, if parents want to give money, they can. But it will be distributed evenly across all of our schools. We can’t have our Cobble Hill families getting more than our families in Harlem.

Here’s what I started to understand about how Success Academy was limiting the power of white parents. Success was limiting the power of white parents by limiting the power of all parents. I met a dad named Travius Sharpe outside the building one day, a Black guy who grew up in Brooklyn. His son Ethan is at Success.

Upstairs, SIS tripped over itself to meet the demands of new, white parents. Downstairs, all parents at Success Academy are being graded. Even day to day, the Success principal and teachers make sure to remind parents when they’re falling down on the job.

One day, in the cafeteria, I met a white mom named Sarah Stanich. Sarah is a financial advisor. Her son’s in fourth grade. And she was telling me she likes the school, even though — and then Sarah lowered her voice, pointed at her boy, and said, he’s been suspended.

Suzanne Gigliotti saw the flyer for Success when her son was in preschool. So she looked into it and every other possible school option she had.

Last year, I went into the Success classrooms.

I didn’t see any teachers reprimanding kids or ripping up work, like the one in the video. What I did see were teachers, who issued a constant wall of verbal directions, where to look, what to do, how to sit, delivered in the same and consistent, neutral tone. When a teacher calls on someone, she gives a direction to the class to track the speaker, look at the person speaking. Meanwhile, a second teacher roams and hovers, issuing reminders.

Shana answers correctly.

Success achieves equality, at least in part, through utter uniformity. Every Success Academy across the city uses identical methods, identical curricula, and identical classrooms. The kids sit on the same polka-dot carpet, hands locked in their lap, same signs on the wall, singing the same chants. Even the teachers look the same. They’re almost all young white women in cotton dresses and ballet flats just out of college, sometimes the same college. I know this because the classrooms are named after teachers alma maters. And there are three Penn State classrooms.

Education people talk a lot about the difference between equality and equity to a point that I believe is tiresome. But I thought about this difference a lot at Success. Equality means everyone gets the same thing. Equity means everyone gets what they need. Success is equal. Everyone is treated the same. But kids are never all the same. Some kids are chatty in the hallway, or need a minute to think before answering a question. Some kids have a million bucks at home, and some kids don’t. A Black girl might respond differently than a white girl to being reprimanded by a white teacher. A single parent with two jobs might have a harder time getting their kid to school on time than, say, a stay-at-home mom with a partner. One of the main criticisms of Success Academy from public education advocates is that Success doesn’t actually serve all students, that it has excellent test scores because it serves a select group of students. Kids who don’t test well, or can’t sit still, they’re weeded out of the school. Success Academy vehemently denies this. They point out that they make special accommodations for kids with special needs, and they note that they don’t get to choose students because kids get spots in their schools by random lottery. And that’s true. But it’s also true that lots of parents don’t apply to the lottery because they know the school’s culture and the demands it makes of families won’t work for them. And plenty of kids who do end up at Success don’t last long. Maybe they get held back a grade or they’re suspended. A civil rights complaint filed on behalf of more than a dozen families alleges their children were regularly removed from class and suspended, seven, 10, 13 times at Success Academy. Most of those families eventually left the school.

I had a thought walking through Success. I suspected that the strict classroom control was partly what made white parents feel comfortable at Success Academy. I’m speculating here. None of the white parents I spoke with told me they chose Success because the school polices Black and brown students so well. And I don’t believe this is a conscious thought for anyone. But I do know that white parents bring plenty of unconscious biases to public schools with Black and brown kids, fears that the classrooms will be chaotic, or not challenging, that the kids will be disorderly or threatening. White parents worry that our kids will be harmed. Success Academy completely controls for these fears. Everyone gets excellent test scores. There’s no room for misbehavior, no risk of disruption because there are no idle moments. If 30 children need to move from their desks to the rug, it sounds like this.

Every kid is on their bottom, hands locked, eyes tracking the teacher, except for one boy. He gets a correction.

Success operates on the principle that with rigor and discipline uniformly applied, all students will achieve equally well. It’s a tempting vision, especially coming from upstairs, where the power of white parents seem to have no bounds. But equality does not necessarily shift the balance of power. White parents aren’t running the show here, but Success is run by a white C.E.O and a board that includes millionaire hedge fund managers — sorry, billionaire hedge fund managers. The board of trustees is listed on the success website. And the bios include Maverick Capital, Redwood Capital, Glenview Capital, Cumulus Media, Morgan Stanley, Facebook, Arnold & Porter. This is not exactly a disruption to the social order, is all I’m saying. You can limit the day-to-day influence of white parents. But still, rich white people control the agenda, the priorities, and the money.

Back in 2015, the year of the white influx and SIS, toward the end of that school year, I was talking to Imee Hernandez one day. She was the PTA co-president of SIS. And Imee told me watching all those white parents come and take over, it was almost like watching tumbleweed move along in the wind. It was so quiet. That’s how they moved through here, she said, picking up power as they went.

Back then, Imee told me there’s no stopping it. She’s worried she couldn’t protect what she loved about her school.

Imee feared that each year, more and more white families come into SIS until it just became like the other segregated middle schools, where all the white parents fought to enroll their kids. Against the repetition of history, Imee was wrong. What happened at SIS was nothing like she or I expected. That’s up next when we go back upstairs.

This past spring, a Black teacher at Success Academy named Fabiola St Hillaire publicly criticized the C.E.O. for not taking a stand after the murder of George Floyd, or acknowledging the effect police violence was having on the families and communities Success serves. After that, more staff, families, and alumni raised alarms about Success, calling some of its practices racist and abusive, its discipline policies, the way white staff and leadership speak to kids and parents of color. In response, the C.E.O. apologized, and Success has released a plan that commits to mandatory bias and sensitivity training for staff. The plan says they will create an Equity Team and review their culture, their relationships with staff, and families, and kids with quote, “an attention and sensitivity to race.” I read this plan and thought, huh, there is a school that’s already doing many of these things, right in the same building, right upstairs.

It’s September, 2019. I’m back at SIS. It’s been four years since the French gala and the drama with the PTA. Rob, the dad, who fundraises, he’s not here anymore. His son finished middle school. Imee is still here. Her daughter is a junior in high school. And a new crop of sixth graders and their families are settling into the auditorium.

The school is no longer called SIS, the School for International Studies. It’s now BHS, the Boerum Hill School for International Studies. They changed the name, again. BHS has a new principal, Nicole Lanzillatto. She gets up on stage, and the staff cheers. Miss Lanzillatto welcomes the new families to BHS.

Miss Lanzillatto lists the ways the school reflects the world, race, ethnicity, language, gender.

Miss Lanzillatto says BHS is going for true equity. She says the word equity three times in this welcome speech. Miss Lanzillatto is white, chatty, well-liked, with black hair that’s styled straight up. The hair is really Miss Lanzillatto’s defining feature. Picture boy band pompadour. She’s worked here most of her professional career. The year white families arrived at SIS, Miss Lanzillatto was the assistant principal. She won’t say anything bad about that year. It was a learning experience. It’s a process her predecessor, Ms. Juman, talks about it the same way. Remember? Principals — diplomatic. They’re careful not to place blame, but both of them said after that year, it was clear they needed to intervene. One of the first things Miss Lanzillatto did as principal was request special permission to reserve 40% of the seats for kids who get free and reduced price lunch. The majority of kids who get free and reduced price lunch are kids of color. And Miss Lanzillatto didn’t want the school to flip. She didn’t want Black and brown kids to get pushed out. The assistant principal told me they wanted to make sure the school did not become colonized. Some things here have changed. They got rid of the foundation, the Brooklyn World Project Rob and the other white parents had created. They scrapped some of the French programming, hired more teachers and staff of color. And one of the most striking changes I noticed — spend 10 minutes of the school, and you can’t not notice — Miss Lanzillatto is talking directly and constantly about race and equity. She told me everyone here needs to be on alert for racist habits and ideas. They need to aggressively address them, whenever they pop up, in the cafeteria, in the classroom.

Coming back to equity. I could not get over how much time and energy the school puts into ensuring equity, not equality, equity. It’s almost like the obsessive focus Success puts on making sure everything is the same is exactly matched by the obsessive focus BHS just puts on recognizing everyone is not the same. BHS formed an Equity Committee of staff and students a few years ago. They looked for bias in the curriculum, in the signs on their walls and the books on their shelves. They analyzed achievement data, discipline data, where they could clearly see that the school punished Black boys more harshly than other students. So they revamped their entire approach to discipline, created a restorative Justice Department. They applied for grants to help pay for this to train their teachers on implicit bias and then train them again. They brought in experts.

Last fall, I watched two equity consultants, Cornelius and Kass Minor, show a group of BHS teachers how to observe racial dynamics in their school. This involved teachers walking around in a huddle with clipboards, taking diligent notes as kids walk through the hallways.

Mr. Minor is full of fun things the teachers should look for.

They all take turns peering through the small window of a classroom door. They take more notes. Later, the teachers meet as a group. And one teacher, Stacy Ann Manswell, explains her observations from a math class.

The teachers talked about this moment in depth, what it might mean, what messages the kids were picking up in their school about race, about who’s important, who’s bad, who’s smart. And it’s not just the staff. The administration is telling white parents that their mere presence in the school does not make it integrated. They have to work at making this place fair.

One Saturday morning, a group of two dozen parents gathered in the BHS library for something called Family Academy. This event was open to everyone, but mostly white parents showed up. And many of them shared that they had never really talked about race very much when they were growing up.

Assistant Principal Meghan Casey walks went through a workshop on race and racism in America and child development. I think about how just a few years ago, the buzzword in this very school was diversity. Everyone is all about celebrating diversity. But now, Meghan Casey tells this room of parents diversity is not the goal. Having a diverse school does not mean we have an integrated school. We need to work on that to get to an integrated school. She says they surveyed BHS students last year, asking them about their experiences.

It’s a little jarring to hear school leaders telling parents, even though everything looks OK, it’s not. Principal Lanzillatto says she knows it can be hard to hear some of this stuff.

Is that the point of a school? When Miss Lanzillatto said this, I got stuck on the phrase. What is the point of a public school? We don’t seem to have any kind of unified vision. Maybe there was one back when they made that old film about public schools teaching us about democracy and how to live together. But we don’t have a shared vision now. What we have is choice. You can choose your vision for a public school. You can go to the test score school, like Success Academy, or the racial justice school, like BHS. There is no city policy that says every school needs to be integrated and equitable. It’s up to us. If we want that, we can choose it. For families with the most power, the most choices, that means we get to choose. Do we want to play fair or not? At BHS, families were choosing equity, white advantaged families. I didn’t see anyone leave the room at that parents workshop, or seem upset, or blamed at all. The parents I met at BHS of all races were pretty happy with the school. They seemed bought in. Meanwhile, the test scores at be adjust have improved dramatically. There’s still an achievement gap, but it seems to be closing. Black boys are no longer being disciplined at much higher rates than everyone else. And the kids seem happy, warm, and confident, and adept at talking about things like race and power. One day though, I heard a rumor. It was going around the high school. Kids were saying the PTA was stealing money from the high school and giving it to the middle school. I heard it first in the library from a group of 10th graders. They said the PTA had taken $1,500 to create a garden, and they were pissed. Later, I heard it again from a tenth grader named Farzana. And it wasn’t $1,500 anymore.

This was meaningful because the BHS middle school is much whiter and larger than the high school. And despite all the focus on racial equity for the past few years, the PTA leadership at BHS is now almost all white, a lot of middle school parents, which has not escaped the notice of students, who have been encouraged by their school to notice such things and call them out. A girl named Paola told me we have to keep watching them because there’s no one there representing us. My mom works. She can’t go to PTA meetings.

That’s Jeremiah jumping in. Jeremiah is a kid who jumps in. He’s the guy you go to if you’re feeling angry about something unjust, and what you want more than anything is someone who will feel just as angry as you do. Jeremiah tells Paola this is ridiculous. I’m going to go to the PTA and just tell them straight up.

I wasn’t sure they had the details exactly right. But I did think, yeah, here we go again. The mostly white PTA probably is manipulating where money goes. So I looked into it, and it wasn’t true. The PTA did not steal money from the high school. It did get money for a garden, but it was grant money, not regular PTA money. Plus, the garden is mostly for the culinary program, which mostly serves the high school. Jeremiah texted me a few days after we spoke to say, sorry to bother you, but I think I might have been a little too critical of the school. Is it possible to do a follow-up interview? He was mad at himself and his friends for believing the rumor. He was mad that he said it to me and looked stupid.

What do you mean by leftover feelings?

It’s always been that. It took me a while to get Jeremiah to say more about what he meant by that. Jeremiah is 15 years old. When he was in third grade, the city closed his mostly Black school — called it failing. His mom, a Black woman, fought the school closing as hard as she could — went to every meeting. It happened anyway. The city put a charter school in the building. And it also opened a new small school designed to appeal to the newly gentrified neighborhood. It had a global studies curriculum and a dual language Spanish program. Jeremiah went there third through fifth grade. Then he went to SIS for middle school, the year the white kids came in. Suddenly, his science class was sometimes taught in French. The after school programs he wanted to go to, also French, which he didn’t love, for obvious reasons.

Right, Jeremiah, a Black kid, believed a rumor that white parents in the PTA were stealing from him and his classmates because he understands that this is how schools work. He has leftover feelings. Jeremiah likes the new BHS, and he says it does feel more integrated and more equal. I told him about some of the white parents I had been meeting at the school, who seemed truly committed to integration.

That’s probably true. White parents are opting in to be at BHS right now. But they can just as easily opt out. Historically, they have.

When this school building first opened its doors years ago, Black and Puerto Rican parents were demanding integrated equal schools city wide for everybody. They weren’t asking for one curated school or a small network of schools where people could integrate, if they wanted to. They were asking the Board of Education to have a plan for all schools. They were asking for things to go differently than they have for all of history. Next time, on “Nice White Parents,” things go differently.

“Nice White Parents” is produced by Julie Snyder and me, with editing on this episode from Sarah Koenig and Ira Glass. Neil Drumming is our managing editor. Eve L. Ewing is our editorial consultant. Fact checking and research by Ben Phelan. Additional reporting from Emmanuel Dzotsi, Jessica Lussenhop and Alvin Melathe. Music supervision and mixing by Stowe Nelson with production help from Aviva DeKornfeld. Our director of operations is Seth Lind. Julie Whitaker is our digital manager. Finance management by Cassie Howley, and production management by Frances Swanson. Original music for “Nice White Parents” is by The Bad Plus with additional music written and performed by Matt McGinley. Film clips, courtesy of the National Education Association and C-span Video Library. Special thanks to Tina Priceman, Johanna Miller, Leonie Haimson, Jill Cysner, Clayton Harding, Kate Taylor and Ana Espada. At The New York Times, thank you to Kelly Doe and Jason Fujikuni. And at Studio Rodrigo, thanks to Khoi Uong, Becki Choe, Nick Emrich and Christina No.

“Nice White Parents” is produced by Serial Productions, a New York Times Company.

“Nice White Parents” is brought to you by Serial Productions, a New York Times Company.

From Serial Productions, I’m Chana Joffe-Walt. This is “Nice White Parents,” a series about the 60-year relationship between white parents and the public school down the block — a series that was meant to be told in four episodes. And yet, I’m still talking.

I never expected to make a fifth episode. I’d already gone back to the beginning of the school and all the way through the present day, 60 years in one building. I felt like I’d seen all the various ways nice white parents will participate in public education and the limits of that participation. I understood that nice white parents might opt into certain integrated schools under certain circumstances.

But they — we were not going to make way for a fully integrated, equitable school system. Because an equitable school system would likely mean the schools our kids go to would get less money, not more. Our kids might get less access to the most experienced teachers and the best facilities. So, of course, we were not going to make way for that. And nobody was going to force us.

White parents will stand in the way of truly equal schools, the end. That’s how I planned to end this. I mean, let’s keep trying. But basically, the end. Have a nice day.

But then, something big happened in the very same school system I’d been looking at for years. New York City is broken up into a bunch of school districts. The school I’ve been focusing on — IS 293, Nathan Hale, SIS, BHS, whatever you want to call it — that school is in District 15.

And just recently, after I finished my reporting, District 15 rolled out a diversity plan to integrate its schools. And it was a real plan — not just for a few curated schools, but every single middle school in this one district that on its own is larger than the entire school system of St. Louis. This new diversity plan upended middle school admissions, replace the old system with one that would break up racial segregation and concentrations of wealth and poverty, would commit all the schools to the kind of anti-racism initiatives they had in place at BHS, and actually integrate the schools — all of them.

I confess, I completely missed this when it happened. Two years ago, in 2018, when I started to see flyers from meetings to talk about a new diversity plan, I waved it off. Such were the depths of my own cynicism. Over the years I was reporting this story, a growing number of white people in the district and across the city were starting to talk about school segregation, school inequality, forming discussion groups and book groups. But I was skeptical any of that would turn into action.

So then flyers, meetings, a diversity plan — I just thought more people talking about diversity. I never expected an overhaul, a large-scale plan that would address the problems I’d seen persist in this district for half a century, one that seemed to go through without any huge raucous battle or protests or boycotts. How’d they pull this off? Could this be a model for school systems across the country?

Because they ignored the District 15 Diversity Plan as it unfolded, I was left having to backtrack to understand how this came about. I didn’t even know who started it. Miriam Nunberg — that was the name I kept hearing. Talk to Miriam.

When I did, Miriam started telling me how she got involved in all this. And I began to hear a very familiar story. Miriam is white. When her kids were little, people on the playground started warning Miriam about middle school, telling her you think choosing an elementary school is difficult? Just wait until you get to middle school.

And it was funny how it — it was like it became a thing. It was people were so anxious about it that it was like all you had to do was say I’m looking for a school for my kid, and it was like oh my god, just wait.

There are only three good middle schools — that’s what everyone would say — what white people would say. That’s who Miriam was talking to. People called them the Big Three. District 15 actually had 15 middle schools. But, white parents —

If there aren’t enough middle schools — because that’s what everybody said, was there are only three good middle schools. And so I thought oh, well, we need another middle school. Let’s start one. Because at that point —

What, did you create another?

I did, yeah.

Before her older child even entered kindergarten, Miriam began making plans for a new middle school — exactly what Judi Aronson had done 20 years earlier, when she dreamed up the School for Global Studies. In 2007, Miriam would be at the park or in the coffee shop.

I just would start talking to people, like hey, let’s start a school. Do you want to help me?

People threw out ideas — what about an urban gardening school? Project-based? Camping? The outdoors? We could call it the School of Natural Literacy.

And I was like oh my god, that’s perfect. Let’s do it.

They put together a planning committee, just as Judi Aronson had, developed a vision for the school.

We were really committed to it being as diverse as possible.

Was the planning committee diverse?

Not very — a little bit. Definitely predominately white, for sure.

They wrote up a proposal, decided to make it a charter school so they’d have more control. They asked the city for approval.

It happened with — it happened — once we put in the application, it happened the first time around, which we were just astonished by.

Not me — not astonished. The city opened a new school because a group of white parents wanted it — not astonished by any of this.

But then, Miriam went through a change that none of the white parents before her ever did, best as I can tell. What happened was Miriam’s view of the entire school system started to change. First, she started attending middle school fairs and information sessions in District 15. She was trying to drum up parent interest in her new school.

Miriam is a lawyer by profession. Not just a lawyer — she was a lawyer for the U.S. Department of Education in the Office for Civil Rights. She says everything she saw at these middle school events, how the school selected students, sounded her civil rights alarm bells.

There was a principal of one of the middle schools, one of the selective ones, who said we’ll screen for nice. We look for nice kids. You know, and I’m like oh my god, this is — this is so discriminatory. How do you define nice? How could you possibly not have some sort of cultural bias in your brain when you were deciding that one kid is nice and another kid isn’t?

There was another time when for one of the schools that interviewed, the parent coordinator was asked well, what are you looking for in these interviews? And she said, I can’t tell you, but we know it when we see it.

We know it when we see it — these were public schools. Miriam couldn’t believe this is how it worked. Every school had its own complex and ever-changing criteria for admission. Some looked at attendance. Some required auditions, interviews, portfolios for 10-year-olds. It seemed outrageous and, she thought, likely violated students’ civil rights.

Then, in 2014, Miriam’s son didn’t get into the Big Three. He also didn’t win a spot in the school his mom created. But he didn’t want to go there anyway. Miriam’s son wanted to go where all his friends were going. When he didn’t get in, he was devastated. Miriam was devastated, too.

Miriam began connecting with the many other white parents who found themselves in the same situation — left out of the Big Three. One of them was Amelia Costigan. Her twin sons were rejected from the Big Three, the same year as Miriam. And Amelia told me as soon as it happened, we all went online.

Did anyone else not get your choice? Or was anybody else going to that school or that school? Or is there any way to appeal? I mean, people were slowly coming out and we sort of all connected, a group of us.

A group of mostly white parents who had not gotten their choice of mostly white schools meeting in private Google Groups and listservs. I do believe Google Groups are the most underappreciated tool for maintaining school segregation. Anyway, Miriam and Amelia found each other and some other parents and began doing all the things white advantage parents do — making phone calls to principals, sharing tips on how to appeal, who to talk to you.

And somewhere in that process, both of them began having doubts. Miriam told me it seemed like her efforts to circumvent her school assignment were probably going to work. Like maybe she could get her son into the most sought-after school. That made her question herself and the power she had.

I was told that different people could pull strings for me. And it was —

Who said that to you?

People who were high level at my kid’s school and other high-level people in our district had said to me I could probably get you in. It’s like, well, how’s that OK?

Again, she thought, this is how it works. Amelia had a similar experience. The summer before sixth grade, her twins got off the waiting list for one of the Big Three, just by luck. Initially, Amelia was thrilled. She says her first thought was we won. And then she stopped herself.

And I started to think about why I had been so self-absorbed about my own family. And I didn’t think about the bigger picture. Like what does that mean for all the kids of color?

Wait, what made you — that seems like a really big leap. How did you make that transition?

Well, it’s almost like — you know when you just kind of lose your path in life? And I think I just lost what was important to me. And then once I won, I started to realize this is really fucked up, you know? Like this is what I got. I mean, and it is a wonderful school. I’m glad that my children were able to have that. But then it was like, what does that mean?

Amelia got stuck on that word — winning. “She won.” Disturbed her. If her kids won, someone else’s children lost.

— somebody else. Is that really the — you know, I won.

For Miriam, it was another word. In 2014, the year her son and Amelia’s son started middle school, a report came out from the UCLA Civil Rights Project and it made huge news. It looked at segregation in American schools 60 years after Brown vs. Board of Education. It found public school students are increasingly isolated by race and class.

This trend was particularly pronounced in liberal states, the very worst being New York. New York state, the report declared, had the most segregated school system in the country. Segregation — that’s what Miriam was a part of.

It was like oh my god, this is exactly the issue. It was really like a light bulb went off. Like well, why is New York City so segregated? And, well, look at our district. This is system-wide.

Why do you think it took you until then to think about segregation?

I don’t know. But I — it’s just when you — literally day one of fifth grade, on the playground, people are just going crazy. Like have you started touring schools? Where are you going to rank? Are you going to look at anything other than the Big Three schools, and all of this buzz, right?

And then inevitably, it comes up that well, that school — you know, I went and looked at Brooklyn Collaborative. And then somebody would say “but there aren’t any white kids there.”

People talked blatantly in explicit racial terms about schools. But to Miriam, this hadn’t felt like segregation until it was attached to the word segregation.

In my experience, part of being a white parent is rarely being asked to account for what we have or how we got it, rarely being treated as a demographic.

So no one questions our investment in our children’s education. No one blames our culture, who we are as people for our educational shortcomings. No one writes research papers that call us a, quote, “hard to reach population” or “lacking in college-bound mindset.”

White parents get to be individuals, making rational, thoughtful choices. We aren’t forced to consider all the ways we act as a group. So for a long time, Miriam didn’t. Even though Miriam is a civil rights lawyer, even though she created a school and knew the way middle school admissions work better than most people do, even though she was part of the public school system, she couldn’t see what was right in front of her until the word segregation was lifted out of 1950s Alabama and stamped onto her life. And then she could.

Amelia and Miriam joined forces with a few other advantaged moms from majority white schools to create an organization called the District 15 Parents for Middle School Equity, PMSE, PMS — it was unintentional, but they embraced it. PMS demanded the district deal with two problems — the stress of middle school admissions and the segregation it created. PMS wanted a new admissions process.

In 2014, 2015, PMA wielded their power. They took their complaints directly to the most powerful people in the school system. They got meetings with the District 15 superintendent, the city council person, and the deputy schools chancellor for all of New York City.

And then, quite unexpectedly, to me, at least, they were shut down. The PMS moms were told most people like the system as it is. They like having school choice.

So the women presented results from a survey they’d sent around showing parents did oppose the current system. The district superintendent looked at it and said “how do I know these aren’t all parents from the same neighborhood? There are no zip codes or addresses.” So Amelia, the mom who felt weird about winning a spot for her twin boys, said we did the survey again.

We had two social scientists review it to make sure OK, we’re going to do this right so that we can’t be told that we don’t — we didn’t do it right. And so we got over 450 signatures. And we made sure that we got every part of the district.

They presented it again to Department of Ed officials.

We got very lukewarm response and some eye rolls. They asked if we had done it in Spanish, which we had. And they asked if we had done it in Mandarin, which we had not. And then they kind of pooh poohed it and we thought — they thought that was the end of it. But it wasn’t.

At this point, your kid is in one of the winning schools, right? Like what do you care at this point?

Yeah, I know. Well, as I said, I felt a responsibility, because at this point, I didn’t have any younger kids coming up. I mean, I was done with the whole middle school thing. So I was just kind of like, what the hell are you people doing? Why are you doing anything?

Why do you think they weren’t doing anything?

I think it’s because — you know, I think a bureaucracy. You just get comfortable. It was going to be a big headache to make a change. I think fear, I think people were close to retirement ages. And I do believe — it was obviously set up to keep white families in Brooklyn.

Anita Skop, you’re the superintendent. Why weren’t you doing anything?

But we were doing things.

District 15 superintendent Anita Skop told me they were not ignoring this problem. She says from the moment she started the job 11 years ago, she understood that the way they sorted kids into middle school was, quote, “morally wrong.” She told me she was making changes. For instance, she told her principals that they needed to stop considering letters of recommendation, the kind parents would solicit from scout leaders and pastors on behalf of their 10-year-olds. Superintendent Skop told their principals you can’t look at those when choosing who to admit.

That doesn’t mean parents didn’t send them anyway. But we chipped away at that. We did away with the tour preference, because we said —

Meaning if you go on a tour, you get preference for admission. And you said you can’t do that anymore.

You can’t do that anymore.

Why didn’t you just get rid of the process?

So first of all, it’s not my decision to get rid of the process. This has to be approved by the chancellor. And —

Did you ask to get rid of the process?

We went through to chancellors in this. And we have a lot of parents who vehemently did not want to get rid of the process.

I have been reading the words of New York City Schools chancellors and Board of Education officials in speeches and quotes and reports going all the way back to the 1950s. But this is the first time I’d actually sat with one and finally got to ask, why not act on segregation? Anita Skop opposes segregation. Board officials half a century ago opposed segregation. And yet segregation persists. But Anita Skop did say something I hadn’t heard from a New York City education official before. She said she recognized these women.

It is a piece of privilege to think that because you have a plan and you have an idea that that’s what should be implemented immediately, if not sooner, and saying, well, we think this is a good idea, and therefore, do it. And that was kind of my response to that.

She wasn’t going to jump because they said so. She wasn’t sure there was widespread support for a major overhaul of the middle schools.

When you come to a district that has 31,000 kids and you say you’ve surveyed 475 people or something like that, yeah, I don’t think it’s a really great survey. And I also didn’t know how the survey was done. And so it isn’t that I pooh poohed it. I just did not see it as credible, as valid and reliable. It’s the same thing when you deal with gifted and talented. It’s the same thing when you deal with specialized high schools. There are parents who adamantly for this and there are parents who are adamantly against it.

But you were against it. You thought it was morally wrong.

I thought it was morally wrong, and I still do. And it wasn’t about me making a decision and putting it on people. It wasn’t about a small group making a decision, putting it on people. It was about canvassing as many people as humanly possible within our district to hear what the district wanted. That’s what I see my role as.

I think this is where I’m getting hung up. You thought it was morally wrong. And if you’re in charge of a district — I mean, if kids start bringing some new weapon you’ve never heard of to school and you think it’s harming kids, you just ban the weapon. You don’t canvas the community and —

It doesn’t work like that in New York City. In New York City, we are under the chancellor. And the chancellor would be the one banning the weapon. And I would reach out to the safety office, this is a concern. And they would make a decision.

So did you do that on this issue?

We talked a lot with the enrollment office about what we can do. We talked a lot about how can we change this process, so that ultimately, we would do something with the approval of the Central Office.

But in 2015, the Central Office of the Department of Education was not interested in putting forward desegregation plans. Word from Central was any diversity plans would have to arise, quote, “organically from local communities.” This was especially frustrating to the PMS women who felt like here we are. We’re organic.

They told me they saw Anita Skop as the main obstacle to change. They didn’t believe she was pushing this agenda with the higher ups. I understood being frustrated at a passive Department of Education, especially given the history of the D.O.E. But I was also curious about Anita Skop’s frustration with these women.

PMS was a group of mostly white moms, white moms who were saying they wanted to undo segregation. But did they actually care about segregation? Or were they just saying they did because they couldn’t cram all their white kids into the same three schools anymore? I asked Miriam Nunberg about this. And she said it came up all the time when they’d talk.

The question of how much do we focus on actually integrating the schools was really a huge part of sort of our own internal debates. Who are we? What’s our motivation? What are we looking for? So is this about segregation? Or is this about a bad process that happens to cause segregation? When you look at the —

And, actually, are we going to use the segregation to kind of motivate change in something when we’re actually motivated by changing the process and segregation is just sort of a cover to get the thing that we want?

That’s cynical.

I mean, I think I come to my cynicism from history, but —

Point of — yeah, well, people would be like so you’re a bunch of white women sort of arguing for school desegregation? Who are you and why? And so we kept — sort of that was our debate all the time. Should we stop until we can diversify our group?

Yes. They decided yes. They should try to diversify their group.

And it was just a catastrophe.

That’s coming up after the break. Something I’ve noticed about white parents who want to create change in schools is often they only talk to other white parents, because that’s who they know. Even if they live in New York City, where the vast majority of public school families are not white, white parents talk to white parents.

It was true in 2015 with Rob Hansen and the parents at SIS who created the Dual Language French Program. It was true with Judi Aronson in 1994 when she came up with the School for Global Studies, all the way back to the white parents in 1963, who decided where I.S. 293 was built, supposedly so it could be integrated. White parents talk to other white parents and come up with improvement plans for schools populated by mostly Black and brown students.

But PMS? They actually recognized that this was a problem. And they wanted to fix it. They wanted to be working with parents of color. So they started showing up at majority Black and Latino schools with stacks of fliers at school meetings and at school drop off.

This didn’t go well. Amelia says they got either disinterest or vague interest from a distance.

People are oh, yeah, I believe in everything you do, but — oh, I really believe that you guys do such great work. Keep at it. No, I don’t have time.

They sent out invitations to meetings, but their communication was all by email and in English, in a district where 41% of the people speak a language other than English at home. A white mom named Carrie McLaren got connected to PMS. Carrie had her own Google Group of white parents trying to push for equity in the schools. And she was running into similar problems.

She’d reached out to parents of color at her school. She’d held meetings in Black and brown neighborhoods in the district. But mostly, her meetings were not well attended, except one time, one meeting, Carrie says they got strong turnout. People of all different backgrounds showed up and sat in a room together.

And it was like oh gosh.

The three of us, the three white women who planned this had literally no idea what we were doing. We thought to have translated fliers, but we didn’t have actual translators at the meeting. We didn’t have a plan for making sure that it wasn’t just people sitting next to each other, grouping together, so that — we didn’t have a plan, really, for having facilitated conversations. And we really had no — we didn’t know how to move forward without being a group of white people, which is not what we wanted to do.

It was easy to understand why Black and Latino parents would be lukewarm to Carrie and PMS or put off by their clumsy efforts. But there was another reason. For a lot of parents of color, diversity was not their issue. One Latina mom, Laura Espinoza, told me for her, the most important problem was overcrowding in her neighborhood’s elementary schools. Packed classrooms and school buildings — that is what mattered to her.

She showed up at a meeting about creating more equity in District 15 schools. But she says the room was full of white people, professionals. And they spent the whole time talking about diversity.

They just are saying oh, they wanted to give opportunity for other kids, more equity, more diversity. So I don’t understand that. That’s what’s a little confused for me.

Laura was confused because she was hearing white parents say they wanted their kids in schools that were diverse. But the schools in her neighborhood had almost no white students. The vast majority were Latino and Asian. And every morning, she’d watched Latino kids leave her neighborhood to go to the white schools on the other side of the district. But Laura never saw white kids come to her neighborhood.

So that’s why a little — I didn’t understand that, because some of them speak that — speaking but they are not looking.

I see. So you’re hearing white parents say we care about diversity. But then they don’t actually seem to be doing the thing that they say they care about.

Yes. Just saying, but it’s not acting. And I was sitting there and I said what I’m doing here?

One of the main organizers for PMS, alongside Amelia and Miriam, was a woman named Reyhan Mehran. Reyhan said after months of lobbying parents of color about diversity and changing the middle schools, the PMS leaders were starting to question that they knew what most parents wanted.

We thought we knew. We had no idea. And even at that point, we had no idea.

Do you actually think that the district superintendent was right? That you didn’t know what you were talking about?

Yeah. She was right that we didn’t know what we were talking about. But she was wrong that she knew anything. We didn’t know anything and she didn’t know anything. So half of what she told us was right on the money.

PMS determined actually, it was not their job to speak for everyone, to know what everyone wanted. But it was somebody’s job. It was the job of the school district. Where were they in these neighborhoods? Why weren’t they out surveying everyone or listening to the priorities of all families? Here’s Miriam.

We started to feel like, well, we were a small group. So what gives us the right to say this is what you should do? So I think we finally came to the decision that if we weren’t speaking for the whole district, and we couldn’t, then we didn’t have — we didn’t see ourselves as kind of having the authority to ask for a specific solution any more than what was currently in place. So we really felt like, well, you have to ask the community.

You, the school district, have to do your job. Miriam and the other PMS leaders finally realized they didn’t have the moral authority, or the actual authority, to represent everyone in District 15. That authority rests with one institution only — the Department of Education. So PMS stopped trying to draw parents of color into their meetings with their agendas. They didn’t forge ahead with misplaced confidence.

Nor did they disengage. They pivoted. They focused all of their attention on shaming the Department of Education. PMS stopped acting like pissed off customers and started acting like outraged citizens.

They settled on a multi-pronged political strategy. They pulled in supporters wherever they could. They connected to other groups that were pushing for integration citywide, redefined themselves as part of a larger movement.

They weaponized a little-known voting body in the district called the Community Education Council that had the power to approve zoning changes. They stacked it with allies. They thought about going the legal route — remember, Miriam’s a lawyer — but that would take too long.

Instead, they went to the media again and again. And they stayed on message. Hey, D.O.E., this is a problem and it’s your job to fix it — the very same thing a judge said to the very same school system in 1958 when Mae Mallory saw the conditions in her kids’ school in Harlem and sued.

By now, it was 2017. And suddenly, Mayor Bill de Blasio found himself under tremendous pressure from advocates across the city, from the UCLA report calling the schools segregated, from journalists asking about it, from well-organized students of color all pushing the mayor to do something about segregation. De Blasio was still saying that top-down desegregation mandates were not feasible because of white resistance. At one point, he referenced angry white mobs protesting busing in his hometown of Boston in the 1970s. “I’m telling you,” he said, “history is on my side here. You do not want to create a series of conflicts.”

But now, here was his opportunity — District 15, right there in Brooklyn, where a bunch of white parents were saying they wanted this. Superintendent Anita Skop got word from Central — the city was ready to create a new middle school admissions system in District 15. Anita Skop conceded in our interview this never would have happened without white advantaged parents lobbying for it, which is not how it should be. But I appreciated her honesty.

So there was political will, finally. Now what? If District 15 was going to scrap its current system, what was going to replace it? What did people want? Tracey Pinkard remembers hearing that the D.O.E. wanted to address the urgent problem of segregation.

I’m 51 years old. And I’m like, are you kidding me? This is nothing new.

Tracy grew up in the Gowanus Houses. She’s Black, an I.S. 293 graduate.

So people are now deciding that they need to do something about this? Why now?

It wasn’t hard to figure out that this all started with white parents. Tracey was skeptical about that. But more importantly, she didn’t trust the D.O.E. Remember, this is the school district that undermined and neglected I.S. 293 for years, at the same time as it built a special gifted program for white kids, the same district that had allowed white parents to dominate school board meetings and public meetings and policy decisions. This stuff has gone on for as long as Tracey could remember.

Because many of the players that have been in place have been in place for a long time. So I just began to kind of question what’s happening now? Are we going to actually publicly acknowledge the fact that this has been an issue for how many years? And how many — how many families have suffered from this type of lack of diversity or resources in schools?

No, the Department of Education was not going to be acknowledging the harm that had been done for generations. It was simply saying we want you involved. We want to hear your voices, without having demonstrated a history of ever listening to those voices.

The D.O.E. had no credibility. And it seemed to know this. The we had outsourced the whole District 15 community engagement process to a consulting firm, an urban planning firm called WXY, which told me when it went to do outreach, it went out of its way to emphasize that it was not the D.O.E. The firm would be doing things differently than the Department of Education.

WXY put together a working group from across the district. PMS had one seat on the working group. The D.O.E. got two seats. And the other 13 seats went to teachers, principals, community advocates, parents, and students — almost all people of color.

Then there was the problem of how to make sure advantaged white parents still didn’t dominate the conversation. They had a solution for this, which basically boiled down to don’t let them speak. The working group decided instead of public meetings where you put a mic in the aisle and people come up and yell or get booed or cheered by a crowd, they’d run workshops, control the conversation.

Parents came to these workshops, sat at small tables, and shared their experiences in district schools. They talked about sending their kids to school sick so they wouldn’t get a mark against their attendance that might hurt their chances at a good middle school. They talked about preparing for auditions, emailing principals, calling in favors, private sessions with guidance counselors, tours in the middle of a workday. While other parents said they had no idea people were doing any of these things.

I wasn’t at these workshops. Christina Veiga, an excellent reporter who writes for an education news site called Chalkbeat, went to many of them. And she told me they were unlike anything she’d seen in city government before. These were actual conversations.

At one table, a white dad said but isn’t it good that the system rewards working hard and merit? A Latina mom responded, but does it reward merit? Doesn’t it just reward access to resources? If you audition for the Performing Arts school and your kid has been getting dance programming since she was three — my kid never had that at her elementary school.

Christina, the reporter, says the workshops were thoughtful. It was the first time she heard the word integration spoken in Spanish at a public meeting. Everyone wore simultaneous translation earpieces. And it really didn’t feel like English was the default language. People learned things. Everyone got a chance to speak. They are sandwiches.

She felt like, wow, democracy.

White parents did not entirely dominate or derail these conversations. There was no angry opposition, no protesting. And that was thanks to careful planning and facilitation — maybe. Or I heard another theory from a few people about why there wasn’t more resistance from white parents at these workshops.

Right in the middle of the public meetings for District 15, a video of an angry white mom at a school meeting in Manhattan went viral. The video is of a parent at one of the city’s whitest schools on the Upper West Side. And she’s angry about a proposal that would have made more space for Black and Latino kids at some of the most sought-after middle schools in her neighborhood. She was captured on local TV, New York 1, standing up and shouting at a city official, you’re punishing 11-year-olds for working hard.

Antonia Ferraro, a white member of the Parent Council in District 15, says she watched the video. Everyone she knew watched it.

When it came out, I said to my council, I said we’re not going to have any problem, because nobody wants to be the white lady on Twitter.

Do you think that actually did help —

Yeah, I do.

— keep that at bay?

Yeah, absolutely.

Maybe that was it? Liberal white fear of being seen as racists kept people in check? I mentioned this theory to a Black member of the District 15 Working Group and Parent Council, a dad named Neal Zephryn.

Well, I don’t think it checked people enough.

You don’t?

No, I mean, you still had parents that were, well, we know my kid’s going to suffer in a classroom. And behavioral issues are going to occur. And the school academic standards is going to go down. And to me, I look at that as code word, code language. People were basically scared that their white kids were going to be in classrooms with other Black kids, maybe more than one Black kid. There’s going to be like eight Black kids as opposed to one Black kid. But one Black kid in a class of 20, 25 white students is palatable. But you got eight? Wait, wait a second.

So yeah, Neal said some of the white people were still fully themselves. It’s just that they weren’t the only ones talking or being listened to.

June 2018, after 10 months of meetings, the District Working Group came up with a plan to desegregate middle schools — or rather, should I say, four years after Miriam and PMS first asked for a district-wide plan to address segregation, 54 years after thousands of Black and Puerto Rican parents demanded a citywide plan to address segregation, and 64 years after Brown versus Board of Education ruled that school segregation across the entire country was unconstitutional. There was a plan in one New York City school district for 11 middle schools.

The District 15 Integration Plan scrapped the current system — no more screening kids for test scores or attendance or for being nice. Middle school admission would proceed by lottery. Every parent would still get to rank their top choices, but every school would be required to offer 52% of its seats to kids who are poor, speak English as a second language, or live in temporary housing. As part of the new plan, the district would expand anti-racism and anti-bias training for administrators, staff, parents, and students, create equity teams in schools, create more culturally responsive curriculum, and hire more teachers of color — all things that parents of color had pushed for during the workshop process.

As soon as the new plan was approved, there was pushback. Parents who hadn’t been paying attention before began paying attention. And some of them were mad.

They demanded a slower timetable for rolling this out. They said this all happened too fast. They hadn’t been consulted. And they needed more time to understand this new system.

It was a lottery. The whole point was no gaming required. But parents found that hard to believe.

The most consistent argument people made against the new lottery system was that it wasn’t meritocratic. The old system was preferable because it rewarded kids for working hard. And isn’t that what schools are supposed to do? Christina Veiga, the education reporter for Chalkbeat, told me her news site got emails from parents, many of them anonymous, warning that the lottery sent the wrong message to students.

One letter says just use the example of two white students, one of whom sacrificed to get to school on time every day, even while sick, the other who took vacations on school time — one who’s well behaved and works hard in school, the other who starts fights and bullies other students — one who studied hours more to get good grades, and the other didn’t bother. Should they really both have the same shot at a seat in the school?

For what it’s worth, I believe the answer to this question is yes. I do believe that a nine year old who messed around in third grade is still entitled to the same opportunity in a public school as the nine year old who stayed in her seat. I think this is what it means when we say each child is entitled to an equal public education.

Last fall, September 2019, 2,200 children began sixth grade in District 15 middle schools. White families did not leave the school system. There was no mass exodus. The target for the new admissions plan in District 15 was for every middle school to serve a mix of vulnerable and advantaged students within five years.

There are 11 middle schools. That first year, eight of them hit the city’s target. The new system will be in place this fall, but as for what it will actually look like, who knows? Who knows anything? Will well-off parents stick with the city’s public schools through a global pandemic, a budget crisis, through half school, remote school, or whatever is actually going to happen? I don’t know.

But some time, there will be real school again. And when there is, this will be the system for middle school admissions in the district. It’s not a fad. It’s not easy to undo. It’s enshrined policy — a system that is more fair and more equal.

Something actually changed here. Instead of trying to solve their individual problems, the women from PMS focused all of their attention on the system that created those problems and on solutions that would benefit all kids. These women surprised me.

Miriam surprised me. By the time I got to the end of my interview with her, I was listing other places where attempts at desegregation had failed, scrolling through my pessimism. But here is Miriam, sitting across from me. And her efforts hadn’t failed, at least not yet.

Let’s get back to you, though, because you, I feel like you are meeting my deep cynicism with a lot of optimistic —

Oh, good.

— stories.

This what I do with my free time.

I floated the notion with Miriam that maybe she’d created a model other white parents could follow in other districts, other cities. But Miriam, bubbly, can-do Miriam Nunberg, was suddenly all, well, this was a unique set of circumstances. And I don’t know if it’s that easy to replicate. She said it really helped that in this case, the system was clearly no longer working for advantaged parents either. So had it not become so competitive to get into the Big Three, do you think there would be an integration process?

I don’t know. I don’t — I mean, I don’t think — just in sort of telling my own story for how I came to it, I don’t think I would have seen an opening because there isn’t also that problem that everybody faces.

Poor families, families of color were shut out of the top schools in District 15 for decades. But this was not a problem for advantaged parents. Miriam is saying it’s only when white and privileged families began to be shut out, too, that they became open to change.

A legal scholar and civil rights advocate named Derrick Bell came up with this term “interest convergence.” He believed that the only times we ever see an expansion of rights for Black Americans is when white Americans benefit, when interests converge. If white Americans don’t see something in it for themselves, nothing changes.

I’d wanted so badly to find something instructive in this one example where things actually changed, something. But Miriam kept saying this just might not work in other situations. So there’s no larger takeaway about the possibility of integration?

I mean, I like to think there is. I would love it if we started this tidal wave. And I think that we’ve made it acceptable. We’ve brought it — this into the consciousness of this district, for sure.

But will it necessarily — will people who’ve bought into school zones, are they going to give that up willingly? I don’t know. I like to think that people are —

when you present the story to them in a powerful enough way that they’re going to be responsive. But I do think you have to — they have to — if they’re giving something up, they have to benefit from something.

I like to think that if you present the story to them in powerful enough way that has an effect as well.

Yeah, yeah.

I think I was wanting something from Miriam that, depending on who you are, you may be wanting from me right now — a how-to guide. But what Miriam is saying is the only reason white parents supported the change in District 15 is because things had gotten so intense and so competitive that even the most advantaged people were losing. How do you replicate that?

White children are the minority in District 15 and in New York City public schools and in American public schools. What about the interests of all the other parents who are not white or not advantaged? What about parents like Laura Espinoza, who did not especially care about diversity, but cared deeply about smaller class sizes? How does that happen? What about parents whose primary concern is better reading instruction or better special ed services or sports programs or functioning air conditioning in their kids’ classrooms? How can we have equitable schools if our public institutions will only respond to these demands if they happen to align with the interests of white parents?

When Derrick Bell coined the term interest convergence, what’s interesting to me is he pointed to Brown vs. Board of Education. He argued the unanimous ruling was possible because the government saw segregation as harming America’s interests abroad. The country was trying to fight communism and sell democracy, liberty, and justice for all. But the whole segregation thing was making us look bad.

In some ways, I think this is what happened with Miriam. Miriam began with a material interest in getting her kid into a good school. But then she developed a new self-interest. She didn’t want to be complicit in segregation. She felt compromised by a system that made her into someone she did not want to be.

I recognize that feeling. It’s shame. I think we should listen to that shame, because what it’s telling us is that we can’t have it both ways. Nice white parents can’t grab every advantage for our own children and also maintain our identities as good citizens who believe in equitable schools.

The shame is telling us we have a choice.

We can choose to hoard resources and segregate ourselves and flee the moment things feel uncomfortable. Or we can choose to be the people we say we are. But we can’t have both. We can choose to remember the goal of public schools is not to cater only to us, to keep us happy, but to serve every child. We’ve never had that school system. But we could. We could demand it. We might not. But we should know it’s within our power to help create it.

“Nice White Parents” is produced by Julie Snyder and me, with editing on this episode from Sarah Koenig, and Ira Glass. Neil Drumming is our managing editor. Eve Ewing and Rachel Lissy are our editorial consultants. Fact checking and research by Ben Phelan. Music supervision and mixing by Stowe Nelson, with production help from Aviva DeKornfeld and music clearance by Anthony Roman. Our director of operations is Seth Lind. Julie Whitaker is our digital manager. Finance management by Cassie Howley, and production management by Frances Swanson.

Original music for “Nice White Parents” is by The Bad Plus, with additional music written and performed by Matt McGinley.

Special thanks to all of the fantastic education reporters at Chalkbeat. Also thanks to: Katie Fuchs, Alexia Webster, Maddy Fox, Brad Lander, Michael J. Steudeman, Nava EtShalom, Kristina Barrett, Rick Kahlenberg, David Kirkland, Benjamin Justice, Mohammed Bouchiki, Tameka Nurse Carter, Andrea Juma, Kim Jawana, Makeasha Richards, Shwana Hansford, Matt Gonzales, Javier Salamanca, David Raphael, Rebecca Vitale Decola and Lincoln Ritter.

And a huge thank you to my incredibly talented and generous colleagues at This American Life.

“Nice White Parents” is produced by Serial Productions, a New York Times company.