From Serial and the New York Times, this is the fifth and final episode of Nice White Parents. From Serial Productions, I'm Kana Jopie Waltz, 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 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 plan 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've been looking at for years. New York City has broken up into a bunch of school districts.
The school I've been focusing on, IS-293, Nathan Hale, SIS, VHS, 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, replaced 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 VHS, and actually integrate the schools, all of them. I confess, I completely miss this when it happened. Two years ago, in 2018, when I started to see flyers for 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, farming discussion groups, and book groups, but I was skeptical any of that would turn into action. So then flyers, meetings, a diversity plan, and just that. 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 rock-as-battle or protests or boycotts. How'd they pull this off? Would this be a model for school systems across the country?
Because I ignored the district's 50th diversity plan as it unfolded, I was left having a back track to understand how this came about. I didn't even know who started it. Miriam Nunberg, that was the name I kept hearing, talked 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 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 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 only three good middle schools. And so I thought, oh, well, we need another middle school. Let's start one.
Because at that point, it was Joel Klein. Did you create another? I did. Yeah.
I mean, he played a machine. I was like. Just like all the things. And it was like, I'm not about to use it.
I love the kids. I knew it. Cause I, and I, like the kids. I just, I got to help because there were some kids who just went up there and said, oh, this is my big friend.
He was like, I'm not going to say that. Oh, my gosh. He said, I brought you. And it was fun.
And I was like, I'm sorry. I just tried. Oh, my God. I didn't go back and forth.
I was like, I'll give you a second. I don't want to go back. But it's like, I just got to go back again. And then I told that I didn't go in the classroom.
A little bit, definitely predominantly 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 once we put in the application that 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 US 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. Like there was a principle of one of the middle schools, one of the selected ones who said, we'll screen for nice. We look for nice kids. You know, and I'm like, oh my God, this is so discriminatory.
How do you define nice? How could you possibly not have some sort of, you know, 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 student civil rights. Then in 2014, Miriam's son didn't get into the Big Three.
He also didn't want to 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.
Like 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. And somewhere in that process, both of them began having doubts. Miriam told me, it seems like her efforts to circumvent her school assignment were probably going to work. Like maybe she could get her son into the most thought 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 about you. People who were high level at my kid's school and other high level people in our district had said to me, like, I could probably get you in.
If you know it was 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 absorbed about my own family.
And I didn't think about the bigger picture. Like, what did that mean for all the kids of color? What made you do that seems like a really big leap. How did you make that transition?
Well, it's almost like 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. This is what I got.
I mean, it is a wonderful school. I was 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. Is that really the, you know, like I won.
From 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 versus 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. Like 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 it's just like when you literally day one of fifth grade on the playground, people are just going crazy. Like, have you started touring schools? You know, 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, I went and looked at Brooklyn collaborative. And then somebody would say, but there are 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. A million Miriam joined forces with a few other advantage 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, PMS 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 that had sent around showing parents who did oppose the current system. The District Superintendent looked at it and said, how do we know these aren't all parents from the same neighborhood? They're 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, like, okay, we're gonna do this right so that we can't be told that 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 pooped it, and then we 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. I realize 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 aren't you doing anything? Why do you think they weren't doing anything? I think it's because, you know, I think if you're awkward, that you just get comfortable, you know, it was gonna be a big headache to make a change. I think fear, I think people were close to retirement ages.
And I do believe, you know, it was obviously set up to keep white families in Brooklyn. And Eda Scott, you're the superintendent, why weren't you doing anything? But we were doing things. District 15 Superintendent, Amita Scott, 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 started 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 Scott told her principals, you can't look at those when she was in 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 preferences 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 we asked to get rid of the process? We went through two 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 was the first time I'd actually sat with one and finally got to ask, why not act on segregation?
Anita Scott opposes segregation. Board officials half a century ago opposed segregation. And yet, segregation persists. But Anita Scott 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'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 pooped it.
I just did not see it as credible, as valid and reliable. It's the same thing when you deal with get-down talented. It's the same thing when you deal with specialized high schools. There were parents who were adamantly for this and there were parents who were adamantly against it.
And 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 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. 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. 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 Scott 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 DOE. But I was also curious about Anita Scott'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 Numburg about this, and she said it came up all the time when they talk. The question of how much do we focus on actually integrating with schools was really a huge part of our own internal debates. 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 them, actually, are we going to use the segregation to motivate change in something when we're actually motivated by changing the process? And segregation is just a cover to get the thing that we want us to go.
I think I come to my cynicism from history. But yeah, well, people would be like, so you're a bunch of white women, you know, sort of arguing for school desegregation, like, who are you and why? And so we kept sort of that was our debate all the time, like, should we stop until we can diversify our group? Yes.
They decided? Yes. They should have tried to diversify their group. 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 Hanson and the parents at S who created the dual language French program. It was true with Judy 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 IS-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 a majority black in the team of schools with stacks of flyers 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 like, oh, yeah, I believe everything you do, but oh, I really believe it. 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 Kerry McLaren got connected to PMS.
Kerry 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.
Kerry says they got strong turnout. People of all different backgrounds showed up and sat in a room together. No, the white women who planned this literally no idea what we were doing. We decided to have translated flyers, 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. We didn't have a plan really. We really 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 Kerry 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 Latino mom, Laura Espinosa, 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 was 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 watch 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 I don't understand that because some of them speak that. They're speaking but they are not doing it. 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 like acting. And I was sitting there and I said, what am I doing here? One of the main organizers for PMS alongside Amelia and Miriam was a woman named Ray-Hahn Mirren.
Ray-Hahn 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 serving 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, you know, this is what you should do? So I think we finally came to the decision that like, 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, you know, 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, redefining them. They realized that they were going to be a 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'd take too long. Instead, they went to the media again and again.
And they stayed on message. Hey, DOE, 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 May 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 school 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 Scott got word from Central. The city was ready to create a new middle school admissions system in District 15.
Anita Scott 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? Tracy Pinkard remembers hearing that the DOE wanted to address the urgent problem of segregation. I'm 51 years old, and I'm like, oh, you kidding me?
This is nothing new. Tracy grew up in the Guwanis houses. She's black and IS-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. Tracy was skeptical about that. But more importantly, she didn't trust the DOE.
Remember, this is the school district that undermined and neglected IS-293 for years, at the same time as a 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 had gone on for as long as Tracy 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, you know, like, 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 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 DOE had no credibility.
And it seemed to know this. The DOE 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 DOE. 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 DOE 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 a problem of how to make sure advantage 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 six 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 Vega, 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 auditioned 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 ate 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 whiteest 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 One, standing up and shouting at a city official, you're punishing 11 year olds for working hard.
You're telling them, you're going to go to school, it's not going to educate you in the same way you've been educated. You've like, suck. Antonio 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? Like keep that at bay? Absolutely.
Maybe that was it. Liberal white fear being seen as racist kept people in check. I mentioned this theory to a black member of the District 15 working group and parent council, a dad named Neil Zefrin. Well, I don't think it's check people.
No. You don't. No, I mean, you still had parents that worked while we don't like my kids going to suffer in the 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 white kids were going to be in class with other black kids, maybe more than one black kid.
It's going to be like eight black kids. One black kid in the class of 2025 white students is palatable, but you got eight. Wait a second. So yeah, Neil 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 city-wide 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-biased 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 it 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, so 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 Vega, the education reporter for Chuck Beat, told me her news I 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 worse, 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 a 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 and 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 sometime, 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 was 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 stories.
This is what I do with my free time. I floated the notion with Miriam that maybe she 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 worth it.
It was not working for advantage 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 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 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 advantage 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 Derek 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 had 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 like no larger takeaway about the possibility of integration. I mean, I'd 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 brought 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, 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 a powerful enough way that has an effect as well. Yeah. Yeah.
I think I was wanting something from Miriam, but 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-of-team is because things had gotten so intense and so competitive that even the most advantage people were losing. How do you replicate that?
White children are the minority in district-15, and the 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 Espinosa, 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 versus 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 that goal of public schools is not a 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. You might not, but we should know it's within our power to help create it.
Nice White Parents is produced by Julie Snyder and Meade, with editing on this episode from Sarah Canick and Ira Glass. Neil Drumming is our managing editor. Evuing and Rachel Lissy are editorial consultants. Fact-checking and research by Ben Phalen.
Music supervision and mixing by Stone Nelson with production help from Aviva de Cornfeld and music clearance from Anthony Roman. Our director of operations is Seth Linden. Julie Whitaker is our digital manager, finance management by Cassie Halle and production management by Francis Swanson. Original music for Nice White Parents is by the Bad Plus, but additional music written and performed by Matt McKinley.
Special thanks to all the fantastic education reporters at Chalk Beat. Also thanks to Katie Fuchs, Alexia Webster, Maddie Fox, Brad Lander, Michael J. Studeman, Nava Edchelum, Kristina Barrett, Rick Colenberg, David Kirkland, Benjamin Justice, Mohammad Bocheke, Tamika Nurse Carter, Andrea Juma, Kim Jiwanda, Makisha Richards, Shwanna Hansford, Matt Gonzalez, Javier Salamanca, David Rafael, Rebecca Vittali-Dakola, 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.