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As a professional-class white parent whose children attended predominantly African-American public schools, I was surprised how angry I became listening to the brilliant “Nice White Parents” podcasts--And how I was angry in all directions, including at the podcast itself. (1/12)
I know these Nice White Parents (not all White) pretty well from my own life. They are people like me—educationally driven, positioned to make choices about where their kids attend school, positioned to master+exploit complex bureaucratic processes to our advantage. (2/12)
These parents are fashionably liberal—with no small dose of class hypocrisy. For pressing practical reasons, municipalities and school districts including oura are desperate to keep them. So Nice White Parents wield disproportionate influence, often misused. (3/12)
Host Chana Joffe-Walt hammers home that Nice White Parents certainly have too much power in settings such as Cobble Hill Brooklyn. Many of these parents are ambivalent or guilt-ridden about this reality. Joffe-Walt skewers more than a few of them. (4/12)
N.W.P.'s use their power in ways sometimes tragi-comic. Some cringe-worthy scenes could have been lifted from Tom Wolfe. E.G., when a wealthy booster of French-English teaching mansplains the value of bilingual proficiency to a native-Spanish-speaking Latinx parent (5/12)
Sometimes the effects are less funny. The podcast describes the incredibly toxic practice of using gifted and talented programs as a mechanism to retain affluent white families in the district and within the school building. (6/12)
Other aspects of the podcasts seem NY/NPR parochial. The N.W.P. category apparently excludes the bottom 80% of white families in NY+America. Nor does it include Asian-Americans, whose children so statistically dominate the meritocratic structures of NY's school system (7/12).
The category doesn't say much about affluent Black+Latinx parents w/their own complicated+diverse views. Or explore less-affluent parents of color, who sometimes prefer more-structured+strict school models for reasons of their own+whose order+safety concerns are elemental (8/12)
The category does not say much about nice white or non-white parents whose children have special educational needs, and are looking for excellent individualized instruction that is not allocated on the basis of auditions or test scores (9/12).
This is a podcast made about, made by--and largely for--Nice White Parents drawn from a narrow slice of professional-class America. It’s as if the N.W.P.'s of wealthy bicoastal urban America, or for that matter the community surrounding our own UC Lab School (10/12).
are core to the problem of educational segregation. These parents are one aspect of the problem. I wish this brilliant podcast had paid more attention to others, too. (11/12)
These nice white parents live in their own bubble--a bubble whose moral blind spots+hypocrisy was brilliantly depicted here. When I finished listening to "Nice White Parents," I couldn’t help thinking that this podcast was a bit of a product of that same bubble, too (12/12)
Tweet 8/12 is probably unfair in its last part. Episode 3 had nice material there. (13/12)
