The racial achievement gap in schools is not a new topic, but the podcast, Nice White Parents, sheds light on it in a new way by looking into the cases of two Upper Manhattan schools.

Nice White Parents hosted by Chana Joffe-Walt, A radio journalist and producer working on This American Life, an NYT podcast, tells the story of race discrimination at two schools in an upper Manhattan school district. She goes through the process of finding ways to raise money and increase diversity and inclusion at these specific schools and notes the key features of these schools’ transformation. One school focuses on growing and they try to get more white people to their school, they end up going from 30% white people to 60% in one year. This is good except for the school starts to change for the worse. Chana Joffe-Walt shares her opinion on this and gives advice to the people at the school. In the end, she gives a closing statement about the schools and explains how these schools are good examples to learn off of.

The second school is trying less to be diverse and culturally fair but more to get minority test scores higher, right now minorities have a lower average test score compared to white kids, mostly due to the lack of attention they get. Chana Joffe-Walt sheds light on this issue and talks more about how these schools cope with certain issues.

In each episode, Joffe-Walt describes the issues at hand and gives the perspective of all the people involved by giving an in-depth explanation of what certain people did and how they got replaced or why they stayed in that spot. This podcast gives a better understanding of the issue presented in the beginning and builds a foundation to change in our community.

Recommendation:

Chana Joffe-Walt’s podcast Nice White Parents is a necessity to create change. If people want change in their lives for the better they need to get the perspective of the people that need help the most, looking at a successful instance in which a school was able to do all this without any issue shows that it is possible and gives people insight on what they should do.

Search Nice White Parents on Spotify or Apple Podcast App

Rating:★★★★★