The New York Times (NYT) will debut a podcast entitled “Nice White Parents” that seeks to blame the racial student achievement gap on them. The initial trailer for “Nice White Parents” recalls a story from back in 1963 when a school was slated to be built right next to a housing project in New York City.
Let’s Go Back Fifty Years
The student body of the school was going to be mostly black and Puerto-Rican. According to the podcast, a large number of white parents wrote letters to the school board, pleading that the school not get built directly next to the project but closer to their mostly-white neighborhood instead. And the reasoning behind the move was to promote integration since the move was petitioned for one year after Brown V Board of Education.
According to the podcast, none of the white parents who wrote letters to the school board to convince the school to move actually send their children to the school. Now, of course, the New York Times is not able to contact every single parent but they did contact some of them. The podcast “Nice White Parents” will feature phone calls and/or written interviews and letters from the parents to find out why they didn’t send their children to the school that they petitioned for.
When In Doubt, Blame White People
In a strange stretch of the imagination, “Nice White Parents” seeks to tie the story of white parents not sending their children to a mostly black school in 1963 to the current student achievement gap between blacks/Hispanics and whites/Asians. To put it simply, the New York Times is attempting to blame white people for the underperformance of blacks and Hispanics in K-12 public schools.
Instead of assigning blame to the white nuclear family for the shortcomings of others, some simple solutions should be proposed. First of all, the actual problem must be diagnosed. Yes, there is a racial achievement gap between blacks/Hispanics and whites/Asians. But why? The first and most obvious answer is early education.
Teach Them Early
A large portion of black and Hispanic students don’t have any education at all before they reach kindergarten. Their parents have no books in the house, the mothers are at work and/or simply engaged in attempting to teach their children. Children from the aforementioned types of households reach age five or six with no ability to read and no ability to count. They are already behind. And experts say that if a child is not on grade-level reading by the third grade, they generally never get back on track. They’re toast.
Children from white or Asian households generally have someone at home teaching them basic skills long before they reach grade school. They speak better due to being around people with higher vocabularies. They know how to write their own name, how to count to ten, one hundred or more, they can color within lines, and much more. And the reason why white and Asian kids have this advantage over black and Hispanic kids is because of their family structures. Whites and Asians are more likely to be born into a nuclear family than blacks and Hispanics.
Decisions, decisions
None of the solutions to the racial achievement gap among young students has anything to do with “Nice White Parents.” It’s all about the decisions that parents make or don’t make. Kids are sponges and soak up everything around them. But when kids have nothing to soak up, their sponge-like nature will simply fade away as they get older and it will never return.
SOURCES:
Introducing: Nice White Parents – The New York Times
Introducing: Nice White Parents – Serial | Breaker
NY Times has found the REAL culprit in the racial achievement gap: ‘NICE WHITE PARENTS’ — RT USA News
President Donald J. Trump Is Working to Give Students and Parents Flexibility and Schools the Support They Need to Reopen This Fall | The White House
Trump Pushes ‘School Choice’ Solution for Parents in School Reopening Debate: ‘The Funding Should Go to Parents’ | CBN News
NYT to Release Series Blaming White Parents for Achievement Gap
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