Nice White Parents · Serial Productions & The New York Times

5: ‘We Know It When We See It’

August 20, 2020·52 min·3 clips

A Latina mom named Laura Espinoza watched white parents say they cared about diversity while no white kids ever crossed to her neighborhood: 'They are not doing. Just saying.'

1. Reporter Chana Jafi-Walt from Serial Productions makes an unplanned fifth episode of Nice White Parents after District 15 in Brooklyn passes a real integration plan for all 11 of its middle schools. 2. Jafi-Walt hosts the series solo, narrating and conducting all interviews; she is the only voice guiding the listener through five years of reported history in this one district. 3. The episode asks whether a school integration plan can actually work when it requires white parents to give up the advantages they currently hold, and whether that is what happened in District 15. 4. Miriam Nunberg, a former US Department of Education civil rights attorney, began planning a new charter middle school in District 15 before her oldest child entered kindergarten because white parents said only three of the district's 15 middle schools were worth attending. 5. While attending middle school information sessions, Miriam heard a principal say 'we screen for nice' and a parent coordinator say 'we know it when we see it' to describe how public schools were selecting students — language she immediately recognized as discriminatory. 6. In 2014, Miriam's son did not get into any of the 'big three' schools, which forced her to confront her own position in a system that she now recognized as segregated. 7. Amelia Costigan's twin sons also failed to get into the big three in 2014; when they later got off the waiting list, Amelia's first thought was 'we won' — and then she stopped herself, asking what her children winning meant for the children of color who lost a seat. 8. A 2014 UCLA Civil Rights Project report declaring New York State the most segregated school system in the country was the moment Miriam attached the word 'segregation' to what she had been observing, telling Jafi-Walt 'it was really like a light bulb went off.' 9. Miriam and Amelia formed PMS — District 15 Parents for Middle School Equity — and got meetings with the district superintendent, city councilmember, and deputy schools chancellor, but were shut down when officials said most parents liked the existing system. 10. Outreach attempts to parents of color by PMS and ally white mom Carrie McLaren mostly failed; Latina mom Laura Espinoza attended a meeting and found it full of white professionals talking only about diversity while her neighborhood's schools were already nearly 100% non-white. 11. Espinoza told Jafi-Walt she watched Latino children leave her neighborhood daily for the predominantly white schools across the district and never saw white children come the other way: 'Just saying, but it's not like acting.' 12. PMS leaders including Rehan Marin eventually concluded they did not know what most families in the district wanted and had no moral authority to demand solutions on behalf of a majority-non-white community. 13. They pivoted from outreach to political pressure — stacking the Community Education Council with allies, going repeatedly to the media, and framing the DOE's inaction as a failure of its legal duty, echoing demands made by Black and Puerto Rican families in 1958. 14. Superintendent Anita Scopp told Jafi-Walt she had considered the existing admissions system 'morally wrong' from her first day 11 years earlier but said the decision to scrap it rested with the chancellor, and that she needed broader community support before acting. 15. Mayor Bill de Blasio's reluctance to mandate top-down desegregation — citing memories of white mob protests against busing in 1970s Boston — cracked when the PMS pressure campaign gave him a district where white parents were publicly asking for integration. 16. The DOE outsourced the community engagement process to urban planning firm WXY, which explicitly distanced itself from the DOE's brand and ran workshops at small tables where all participants wore simultaneous translation earpieces and Spanish was treated as a co-equal language for the first time at a New York City education meeting. 17. When a viral video of an angry white Upper West Side mom shouting 'you're punishing 11-year-olds for working hard' at a Manhattan school meeting circulated, white parents in District 15 reportedly kept quiet at the workshops partly out of fear of being seen as 'the white lady on Twitter,' according to white parent council member Antonia Ferraro. 18. Black working group member Neil Zephyrin disputed that white parents were fully checked: he said some still used coded language about 'behavioral issues' and 'academic standards going down' when what they meant was fear of their children being in classrooms with more than one or two Black students. 19. Parents interested in education equity, school integration, and how race and class shape public school access in American cities. 20. Parents who want a single district success story without hearing the preceding decades of failures and the complicated internal debates among white advocates.

As heard by us

An unsettled, precise return that asks what white parents mean when they say they want integration.

Nice White Parents adds an unexpected fifth chapter to a series that had seemed finished, and uses it to press on a more uncomfortable question: when mostly white parents say they want to undo segregation, are they fighting for integration or for a school process that works…

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Why you'd press play

When segregation stops sounding abstract, this episode gets much sharper.

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