(“I’d rather have a dinner where people of different cultures bring their food and we share together than have somebody else cater it,” she tells Joffe-Walt. A PTA co-president, Imee Hernandez, an even-tempered social worker, is rattled but polite the PTA, which allocates school funds, knew nothing about the campaign. At a PTA meeting, we learn that new parents have launched an aggressive fund-raising campaign, and that the French Embassy has already pledged ten thousand dollars. The episode then reveals what happens when a group of white families, en masse, decide to send their kids to S.I.S.-and, as a kind of bargaining chip, persuade the school to start a French dual-language program. Most of the children they see are Black and brown, except for a “gifted” class, which is mostly white. As the series opens, Joffe-Walt and some other white parents are being shown around local schools by administrators, usually people of color. The district was rapidly gentrifying, and white families tended to send their kids to the same three middle schools, which were becoming “packed.” S.I.S., like many of the underattended schools, was actively recruiting. in 2015, when the students there-middle schoolers and high schoolers-were mostly Black, Latino, and Middle Eastern, and from working-class and poor families. The public school in question is the School for International Studies, in Cobble Hill, where Joffe-Walt lives. The innocence we hear about, you may not be surprised to learn, comes from those parents describing themselves. In the series, Joffe-Walt, who is white, homes in on the insidious, sometimes unwitting role of white parents in perpetuating an unjust system that benefits their kids. It’s hosted and reported by Chana Joffe-Walt, a producer for “This American Life.” In New York City, as with many places in the U.S., school segregation has long been de facto, and differences in school resources correspond closely with race the city, in lieu of an integration plan, has focussed on “school reform,” along with an elaborate, choice-based system that involves testing, wait lists, and parental strategizing. The word “innocent” comes up early in the new podcast “Nice White Parents,” about separate and unequal education at a public school in Brooklyn.
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