Nice White Parents · Serial Productions & The New York Times

4: 'Here’s Another Fun Thing You Can Do'

August 13, 2020·49 min·4 clips

A 1951 film shows public schools teaching democracy, but white parents today are blocking that vision by hoarding resources.

The frame is a 1951 film. A white housewife sits with white neighbors, notepads ready, treating a broken playground swing as everyone's problem. It feels almost quaint. Then a machinist approaches a factory owner, and civic participation starts to look less like pure virtue than a habit people have learned how to use. In the present, Success Academy takes over the story. Parents describe touring public, private, and parochial schools before choosing it because the reputation for excellence seemed hard to beat. The scores carry the pitch. The host says nearly every parent she spoke with brought up test results first, and the numbers in the excerpt are hard to ignore. Twice as well, she says. Ninety-five and ninety-seven percent of Success students pass state tests, while average city public schools land below half. That is the pull. The school seems integrated and equal, the achievement-gap answer reformers kept chasing. Then the room tightens. In classrooms, the host does not see the viral clips of teachers reprimanding kids or ripping up work, but she hears a steady stream of neutral commands. Look, sit, track. Teachers tell children where to look, how to sit, when to follow a speaker, and how to listen. Another teacher hovers nearby. The choreography matters. The same system producing those scores also asks for minute-by-minute control of children's bodies. The episode leaves that tension intact: achievement, integration, parental desire, and classroom control all sit in the same uncomfortable frame.

As heard by us

A measured look at Success Academy's test-score promise and the classroom control surrounding it.

Nice White Parents frames public-school participation as a question of who gets heard, what counts as success, and what is traded away when a school looks excellent on paper.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

If you want to hear how an "excellent" school can still raise hard questions, start here.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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