What men want parents guide
- #What men want parents guide serial
- #What men want parents guide full
- #What men want parents guide series
This is a middle and high school called the School for International Studies, SIS. This isn’t one of the schools I’ve toured. 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.
#What men want parents guide series
This is “Nice White Parents,” a series about the 60-year relationship between white parents and the public school down the block.
#What men want parents guide serial
From Serial Productions, I’m Channa Joffe-Walt. If you want to understand why our schools aren’t better, that’s where you have to look. It’s there even when we pretend not to notice it, like on that school tour. There is a powerful force that is shaping our public schools, arguably the most powerful force. We ask, why aren’t they performing better? Why aren’t they achieving more? Those are not the right questions. 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’ve decided the problem is teachers, the problem is parents. We’ve tried smaller classes, longer school days, stricter discipline, looser discipline, tracking, differentiation. We’ve tried standardized tests and charter schools. And I’d looked at some of the many programs and reforms we’ve tried to fix our schools. I’d done stories on the stark inequality in public education. By the time I was touring schools as a parent, I had spent a fair amount of time in schools as a reporter.
But then she said, do the kids here play outside every day? A mom raised her hand and said, I do have one question I’ve been meaning to ask. Everyone on our tour saw this, all of us parents, but nobody said anything, including me. 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. 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. They were not our places, but we were being invited to make them ours. We were entering schools that people like us had ignored for decades. 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. They were pleading with us to please take part in this public school.
We have a partnership with Lincoln Center. 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.
#What men want parents guide full
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. 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. This was five years ago now, but I vividly remember these tours. 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.
When my kid was old enough, I started learning about my options. 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. “Nice White Parents” is brought to you by Serial Productions, a New York Times Company. Ewing and Rachel Lissy and sound mix by Stowe Nelson A group of parents takes one big step together. Transcript Episode One: The Book of Statuses Reported by Chana Joffe-Walt produced by Julie Snyder edited by Sarah Koenig, Neil Drumming and Ira Glass editorial consulting by Eve L.