My View
The Paradox of ‘Nice White Parents’
BY SUZETTE LOVELY/School Administrator, May 2021

ALL PARENTS WANT what’s best for their children. But who gets to decide what’s best? At AASA’s 2021 National Conference on Education, a pair of public radio journalists masterfully unraveled this hard question for those of us watching and listening.

Chana Joffe-Walt is the reporter and Rachel Lissy an assistant producer of an acclaimed five-part podcast “Nice White Parents.”

The journalists originally set out to examine pervasive segregation in the New York City public schools. But as Joffe-Walt chronicled her journey examining options for her own school-bound child, a deeper narrative emerged. It wasn’t higher test scores or shiny new objects that mattered most in these predominately poor schools. Instead, the influence of white parents drove the reputation of a “good” versus “bad” school.

On the dozens of school tours Joffe-Walt took, she noticed 100 percent of the visiting parents did not match 90 percent of the students in the building. In episode 1, she admits, “I don’t think I ever felt my own consumer power more viscerally than I did shop-ping for a public school as a white parent. …The whole thing was made more awkward by the fact that nobody on those tours ever acknowledged the obvious racial difference.”

Before the podcast was about to air last year on WBEZ Chicago’s “This American Life,” the station was besieged by comments about the show’s divisiveness. Ironically, no one had yet heard the episode. Host Ira Glass posited, “There’s 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.”

The Power of Normal

Hearing Joffe-Walt’s experiences at the AASA conference conjured up my own memories as a white educator. As principal of a Title 1 school in southern California, it was not unusual to encounter “nice white parents” vying to win the lottery to chaperone a field trip or lobbying teachers for the coveted job of room mom. Despite teachers’ complaints about ulterior motives, they relied on these parents to provide time and resources to enhance classroom programs.

Generalizing the behavior of a group of white parents to all white parents is as dangerous as generalizing the individual faults of people of color to entire races, a theme in Ibram Kendi’s best-seller How to Be an Antiracist. Yet white families have built-in advantages that people of color in the same situation lack.

Consider a few school rituals that play to these advantages: Kindergarten roundup scheduled at 10 a.m. on a weekday; teacher conferences at times when less-advantaged parents can’t leave work; elaborate fundraisers organized by families with enough social capital to send the varsity football team to Hawaii for an exhibition game. When schools cater to one parent group over another, this behavior becomes normalized.

Troubling Dichotomy

Decades of education reform have focused on turning around underperforming schools. Ironically, these schools often sit in black and brown neighborhoods. While white parents say they value integrated schools, their actions tend to speak differently.

Last summer, this dichotomy played out on San Diego’s Coronado Island after 4,500 community members signed a Change.org petition demanding the local school board denounce solidarity with Black Lives Matter. Trustees were implored by white parents to reject curricular changes that “encouraged students to learn about and acknowledge their own ignorance and biases” or were “designed to re-educate students through a racial justice lens.” Parents insisted there was no need to modify curriculum because their children had never witnessed racism in school, despite students of color sharing stories to the contrary.

As society contemplates the uneven playing field in public education, huge sums of money continue to be raised in predominately white neighborhoods to ensure students have access to anything and everything. Time and again, our underestimated youth pay the greatest price for austerity with larger class sizes, less experienced teachers and fewer opportunities.

These opportunity gaps represent a failure that belies the ideal of the American dream. People of color don’t need more allies. They need school leaders to notice and act upon misguided impulses. Board resolutions and public proclamations about our commitment to equity mean little without true connections to the lives of families who need us most.

SUZETTE LOVELY, a retired superintendent, is an education consultant in San Clemente, Calif., and author of Ready for Anything: Four Touchstones for Future-Focused Learning. Twitter: @SuzetteLovely