"Nice White Parents" - Ep. 3 Podcast Review

Episode 3 - “This is Our School, How Dare You?”

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In this episode, we are taken through more of the history behind the school and its previous attempt at integration. SIS opened in 1968 and was considered a “fringe school”, located on the edge of a wealthy neighborhood it continued to serve primarily students of color living in the local housing projects. These students didn't have a choice but to go to the local neighborhood school. They noticed the white kids were attending a school that was different than their designated elementary school, their parents didn't want them to go to a school that was "on the edge of town", implying negative connotations and racial stereotypes. The white students had the privilege of their parents deciding to send them to a "better" school, one that had better test scores, where the kids acted better, one with more qualified teachers. A white school.

Why do we have to specify diversity? I heard an ad the other day on the radio a request for "diverse applicants". I can only assume that this is a result of the social changes that we have gone through as a society within the last year of the pandemic. Why is it that we have to proclaim to the world when we are in supportive community with our fellow human beings? Currently there are a lot of companies and brands that are promoting this idea of diversity in the form of pledging solidarity with Black Lives Matter. If these companies don't have "Black Lives Matter" or "Celebrating Black History" posted on their social media or website, we assume that they are racist and that they don't care about these social justice topics. Why is this normal?

9:05 - “We were like one big family” and then the fear set in among families and produced the white flight, making SIS look less attractive to prospective students and donors. The year 1984 kept coming up in Board of Ed archives. At the time, the PTA was asking for an investigation against school board because of racist remarks and disputes over housing interests. This sparked further outrage for the families whose children did attend the school because for them, they don’t have the choice to choose their neighborhood or the school their children attended. The parents at the time noticed these white investors coming in to try and solve the problem. The local news cast stereotypes on the school making it out to be a place of great difficultly among staff and parents. The school was viewed as not up to standard and as a result, the white families started leaving because of the negative opinion of their white peers.

I kept thinking about this concept of homogeny while listening to the beginning part of this podcast and made me think about how this example of SIS in 1984 related to the book written by George Orwell entitled 1984. In this book we read about a dystopian, future society that is based in extreme totalitarianism. This book shows a society where individuality doesn't exist and is considered unnatural, basically extreme segregation and control.

Whose knowledge and culture is being celebrated and reproduced through the education system?

Throughout this podcast I heard the term “gifted programs” which were designed to separate the smarter and privileged students from those who appear to do worse in school. It is at this moment that we have to remind ourselves who public schools were originally designed for and what those biases say about the students who are considered "at risk". (If you would like to learn more about the history of schooling please read chapter 1 of this article Teaching To Change the World - Oakes & Lipton). What does this term even mean and why do we use it to encompass students of color and those experiencing poverty. Whose knowledge is considered "gifted" and why? The idea around "gifted programs" or "advanced placement" is to make sure that students are held accountable for the learning that they are doing and for the future job opportunities that the district is trying to recreate. Accountability finds the children and schools that aren’t performing and tags them. This academic tracking starts as early as kindergarten. When we are talking about tracking in a non-academic sense, this happens before you are born. Whose standards are we using and why do we hold everyone to the same standard when we know that everyone is different?

Within our society, we have constructed this industrialized version of education where the societal goals are for individualistic competition and against creative community building. This has huge impacts when it comes to resources and funding in any given school district. Second class hand-me-down resources are a huge barrier to success for many students as the connotation that comes with being given used materials is that "we aren't worthy of being given new materials like everyone else". In SIS at the time, there were 42 kids per class and within the physical school building, there were 2 separate schools. The fact that the school district allowed a the Global Studies program (for affluent students) to function within the walls of an already overcrowded school. The woman who created Global Studies sent her kids to a different school because of the negative racial stereotypes against the school, the one they took over, the one that was already overcrowded. It became a school where they sent the “bad kids” because the rest of the school was considered "bad" from racial stereotypes.

33:38- “Schools are immune to long term memory”

Read that again. Why are schools immune to long term memory and what causes that? There are a lot of reasons, high turn over rate in staffing and the pool of students changes year to year. For example, if a group of students advocated for healthier lunch options such as apples to be served at lunch rather than chocolate bars, the school district would only have to comply or say they would comply for the remaining time that those students are involved in the school. This is only a few years and allows districts to feel that they can get away with not implementing long-term, structural changes. They are constantly resetting and moving forward and this causes many issues. Nobody looks to the past to see the root of the issues, rather they consider how to temporarily fix the problem until the next batch of students come in and they don't have to keep up the facade anymore. These band-aid solutions don't result in change, instead there is further discrimination and displacement. This is also a huge issue if there is any change of the principal or directors within a school, new people will come in and without an understanding of what has previously been on the minds of students and their parents, continue to make the same mistakes.

There was a question in this podcast that I found to encompass this industrial, capitalistic version of education. The question was how can we get more people enrolled instead of how can we focus on teaching the kids we have? In this sense, the district and donors are just trying to sell the school. They are essentially asking, how can we market this school so that we can get more white people and their money?

What is being supported here, money or education? The answer....competition and white power.

Continued in part 4....