712: Nice White Parents

Ira Glass

From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. So one of our producers, Chana Joffe-Walt, has spent a few years reporting on the history of one school-- it's a public school in a big city-- and at the beginning, we kind of thought the story was about segregation and inequality in public schools. But the more she spoke to people and researched what had happened at this one school, the more she realized it was actually about the inordinate amount of power that white parents had at this one school. And she found so many stories there that we realized we couldn't fit it all into one episode of our program and that we would need to release it as its own little mini-series podcast.

So last week, a little three-minute trailer was released. The name of the show is Nice White Parents. And even before the first episodes appeared, it became this war-- thousands of ratings and comments online at Apple Podcasts, people saying it's divisive, that it's racist to talk about white parents, giving the show one-star reviews, other people giving it five-star reviews to cancel out the one-star reviews.

Remember, nobody had heard the show yet. The comments were about some imagined thing that people thought that the show would be, rather than the actual story that Chana tells, which is kind of funny. I think it also speaks to how the entire subject freaks people out so much. White parent-- how rarely that is explicitly named as the subject of reporting.

There is so much reporting on people of color as people of color, and so little reporting on white people as white people, even when they're at the heart of a story, as they are with this one. And when you listen to what Chana found, you feel how rare it is. I personally found it illuminating. You can listen and judge for yourself.

Today, we're presenting right here one of the stories that Chana tells in her series about one of the big turning points in the school's recent history. Before we start, I want to note everything you're going to hear this hour was recorded before coronavirus arrived, so it is a world where people get together in person with no masks or anything. Don't be shocked. All right, here's Chana.

Chana Joffe-Walt

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 had 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'd 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. That's what this story is about.

I'm going to take you inside a public school building, an utterly ordinary, squat, three-story New York City public school building not too far from where I live. This isn't one of the schools I 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 of this school and its relationship with white parents down the block span 60 years, but the part I want to tell you begins at SIS in the spring of 2015, right before everything at the school 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.

Chana Joffe-Walt

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.

Chana Joffe-Walt

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.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Rob lives nearby SIS, 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 are 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.

Chana Joffe-Walt

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.

Chana Joffe-Walt

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?

Chana Joffe-Walt

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, 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.

Chana Joffe-Walt

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, those 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.

[KIDS CHATTERING]

The kids at SIS, though, they did talk about race immediately. Fall 2015, the first few weeks of school, a senior named Kristen leaned 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.

Chana Joffe-Walt

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.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Diverse, this was a word I heard over and over in the first few weeks of school-- diversity.

Chana Joffe-Walt

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.

Chana Joffe-Walt

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 hear Rob Hansen referred to as Todd Hansen, 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.

Chana Joffe-Walt

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.

Chana Joffe-Walt

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

Chana Joffe-Walt

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. There is 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.

Chana Joffe-Walt

There are about a dozen grown-ups 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.

Chana Joffe-Walt

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?

Chana Joffe-Walt

That's Principal Juman.

Chana Joffe-Walt

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

Chana Joffe-Walt

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 the new group of sixth graders, says, look, I know Rob. He means well.

Chana Joffe-Walt

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 says, yeah, it's just usually money raised by parents goes through the PTA so we can all talk about where to spend it.

Chana Joffe-Walt

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 asked me to stop, so I do.

Chana Joffe-Walt

They let me stay though. I 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 $10,000.

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 had 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.

Chana Joffe-Walt

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.

Chana Joffe-Walt

That would be the PTA side, the community funds. 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.

Chana Joffe-Walt

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?

Chana Joffe-Walt

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?

Chana Joffe-Walt

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. In 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 said to me multiple times, why are they coming up with all these private plans and meeting in secret committees?

Chana Joffe-Walt

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.

Chana Joffe-Walt

I asked, was there another time?

Chana Joffe-Walt

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.

Ira Glass

That's coming up after the break from WBEZ Chicago when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's program, Nice White Parents. Chana Joffe-Walt is telling the story of parents and their influence over the workings of one public school, a public school in Brooklyn called SIS, the School for International Studies.

Chana picks up now where she left off. The school year moved forward. Rob's fundraising committee moved forward with the French embassy to plan the 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. Here's Chana.

Chana Joffe-Walt

I was talking on the phone one night to Imee's co-president on the PTA, Susan Moesker. She told me she was 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 parents. When she started, her son was one of the only white kids in the school. Now Susan 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.

Chana Joffe-Walt

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.

Chana Joffe-Walt

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

Chana Joffe-Walt

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 that he 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 a day or whatever. That first year, most of the French was happening in the after-school program. You sign up for regular after-school stuff like culinary, or soccer, or drama, and it would be conducted in French.

Chana Joffe-Walt

We're in the auditorium. And it's sweet. The kids are on stage, rehearsing this play they wrote in French. And it looked 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.

Chana Joffe-Walt

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.

Chana Joffe-Walt

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

Ira Glass

Maya says, I can't. And her friend says, I'll do it for you.

Chana Joffe-Walt

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 schoolwide debate about it or consensus. The community didn't decide. What if they had?

More than a third 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.

Chana Joffe-Walt

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.

Chana Joffe-Walt

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 it their event? They make the rules, she says.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Security-- it's a government building, after all.

Chana Joffe-Walt

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.

Chana Joffe-Walt

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.

Chana Joffe-Walt

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.

Chana Joffe-Walt

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?

Chana Joffe-Walt

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 RSVP to the gala for SIS. I couldn't believe it. And I couldn't believe that one of them was Imee.

Chana Joffe-Walt

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.

Chana Joffe-Walt

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

Chana Joffe-Walt

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?

Chana Joffe-Walt

I started asking people how they heard about the event.

Chana Joffe-Walt

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.

Chana Joffe-Walt

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

Chana Joffe-Walt

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.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Fabrice Jaumont 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.

Chana Joffe-Walt

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.

Chana Joffe-Walt

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

Chana Joffe-Walt

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

Chana Joffe-Walt

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

Chana Joffe-Walt

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.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Fabrice hands the mic to Principal Juman.

Chana Joffe-Walt

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.

Chana Joffe-Walt

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 cringey territory. He's on a ropes course 40 feet up, looking down.

Chana Joffe-Walt

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.

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. Most of us, we don't understand the buildings we walk into. We don't know what came before.

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.

Ira Glass

Chana Joffe-Walt. That mission is what Chana takes up in the other episodes in her series, Nice White Parents. It's produced by our colleagues who we made the Serial Podcast with and distributed by The New York Times. Episodes one and two are out right now. And can I say, episode two is a completely different kind of story about a different and very idealistic group of white parents right when the school was founded. You can find Nice White Parents wherever you get your podcasts.

Ira Glass

Our episode today was produced by Julie Snyder, with editing by Sarah Koenig, Neil Drumming, and me. Editorial consulting from Rachel Lissy and Eve Ewing. Fact checking by Ben Phelan. Stowe Nelson makes the show. Special thanks today to Nikole Hannah-Jones, Scott Sargrad, Jackie Carrier, and Lenny Garcia. Lilly Sullivan figured out how to fit their show into an episode of our show, with production help from Matt Tierney and Catherine Raimondo.

This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks as always to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. You know, on his vacation he spotted some dolphins, but, dude, don't get him started on dolphins. He is not into them.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life.