Nice White Parents · Serial Productions & The New York Times

3: ‘This Is Our School, How Dare You?’

August 6, 2020·45 min·3 clips

After 40 years of neglect, IS-293 became a 'hot ticket' school as soon as white students arrived — nine times as many — even though test scores and staff were nearly unchanged.

1. Reporter Chana Jafi-Walt from Serial Productions examines whether IS-293 in Brooklyn's Gowanus neighborhood was better off during the decades when white families were largely absent from the school. 2. Jafi-Walt conducts all interviews solo and narrates the episode herself; key voices include former students, long-time staff, a school board member, and the founder of a school placed in IS-293's basement. 3. The episode's central question is whether integration is worth pursuing when white parents repeatedly prove unreliable partners — or whether a segregated school, left alone, can still serve its students. 4. Renee Flowers, a Black IS-293 graduate from the first class of 1968, describes the school as a neighborhood fixture she visited for decades and knew room by room, without ever knowing it had been built at the edge of the white neighborhood as a result of white parents lobbying for a fringe site. 5. Sociologist and writer Eve Ewing asks Jafi-Walt why she is 'so obsessed with integration,' prompting her to interrogate her own assumptions about whether integrated schools are always the goal. 6. For roughly two decades after opening, IS-293 was a zoned neighborhood school with no selective admissions, attended by a mixture of working-class and poor Black and Latino students, and Jafi-Walt finds the historical record mostly silent — no major news stories, little documentation. 7. In the 1980s, long-time teacher Dolores Haddon Smith noticed the district began quietly redirecting higher-achieving students and white students away from IS-293; a 1987 article quoted the 293 principal directly accusing the district of 'skimming off the high-achieving students.' 8. School board member Norm Fruchter confirms that the district opened gifted programs at other schools — including MS-51 a mile and a half away — with the explicit stated goal of preventing white flight from the district. 9. Black honor student Nadine Jackson, who was on the math honor roll and never absent, had simply never heard of the gifted program; she went to the school everyone in her neighborhood attended and only learned what she had missed when IS-293's band visited MS-51 and found better instruments, smaller classes, and students taking Regents exams years early. 10. Nadine describes leaving MS-51 feeling 'dumb in a sense,' wondering 'do we even have a chance?' — a direct consequence of attending a school that received less funding, had 42-student classrooms, and lost multiple teachers mid-year. 11. Norm Fruchter says that when the board tried to change the gifted programs, 'gifted parents' — his term for the parents of gifted-program students — could fill an elementary school auditorium with 500 people, and they argued that their predominantly white program was itself a form of integration. 12. In 1994, white parent and educator Judy Aronson assembled a planning committee — mostly white and not very diverse by her own description — to petition for a new school focused on global education, diversity, and progressive curriculum, which the board placed in IS-293's basement. 13. IS-293 students and staff were furious: Nadine Jackson described the feeling as 'this is our school, this is our neighborhood, how dare you?' while teachers and custodians repeatedly blocked Global Studies from using hallways, the auditorium, and common spaces. 14. Global Studies principal Larry Abrams was jokingly handcuffed by school security in his first week as a symbol of how unwelcome the new school was. 15. Judy Aronson did not send her daughter to Global Studies — she was already in middle school by the time it opened — and her younger son she sent to a different small school in Sheepshead Bay; most other planning committee parents also did not enroll their children. 16. Without its intended constituency, Global Studies filled with students placed there by the district who found a school whose vision had nothing to do with them; within a decade, most original staff including the principal had left and nobody knew why it was called Global Studies. 17. From the mid-1990s onward, IS-293 underwent a rapid succession of reform-era programs — RJR Nabisco academies, name changes, specialist directors — that confused local parents and led to enrollment losses, until by 2003 it was placed on the state's failing Schools Under Registration Review list. 18. The episode uses dry, accumulative narrative delivery with long pauses; the emotional weight builds through specificity — Nadine Jackson's Whitney Houston clarinet solo, the custodian's fire-hazard excuse, the New York Post's racist 'Jaguar Pride' slogans. 19. Listeners interested in the history of school segregation, urban education policy, and how systemic inequalities are reproduced across generations in a single public school building. 20. Listeners expecting to hear about current integration efforts or student success stories; this episode focuses on a long history of institutional failure.

As heard by us

A sharp, personal look at how gifted programs can make two public schools feel like separate futures.

IS 293 emerges here as more than a school building. For Renee Flowers, it is part of Gowanus life: a new middle school she attended, then kept returning to for voting, graduations, basketball, handball, and neighborhood performances.

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Why you'd press play

When one school visit makes the whole district look different.

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