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Of all the days over the five years that Chana Joffe-Walt spent reporting on a podcast that centered on a Brooklyn middle school, one afternoon stands out: In early January 2016, a librarian wheeled in 20 boxes from the archives of New York City’s Department of Education.
In a folder labeled “IS-293” — the original name of what’s known today as the Boerum Hill School for International Studies — Ms. Joffe-Walt found a pile of letters written by white parents pushing for a new integrated school in their neighborhood in 1963.
Those letters helped readjust Ms. Joffe-Walt’s thinking about enduring racial inequalities within the education system. Julie Snyder, who produced the podcast, said they wanted to shift away from the conventional education reporting loop: covering which schools are failing as opposed to who they are systematically built to serve.
“We hadn’t looked at arguably the most powerful force in the school system, which are white parents,” Ms. Snyder said.
The resulting five-episode podcast, “Nice White Parents,” premiering on Thursday, pulls listeners across the Brooklyn school’s six-decade history, which is entwined with city and national education trends and reforms. With a focus on the influential role of white parents in public education, the series examines divisions within the school — both those held over from forestalled integration and those created by overnight diversity — and turns up the volume on disparities that echo in hallways today.
The show is the first to be produced under the banner of The Times and Serial Productions, the studio best known for the podcast “Serial” that’s often credited with igniting the podcast craze. The Times announced last week that it was buying the company.
During her reporting, Ms. Joffe-Walt reached out to many of the white parents who had written those letters to get the school in their neighborhood. None of those contacted had ended up sending their children to the school when it opened in 1968.
But in 2015, after decades of persisting segregation, the racial dynamics of the classroom radically changed when the sixth-grade class alone, which had consisted mostly of children of color, saw an influx of some 70 children, many of whom were white with wealthy parents.
That year, Ms. Joffe-Walt, a producer for “This American Life” who has won a Peabody Award with the Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones for their stories on education and segregated schools, began shadowing parents at the middle school, known then as the School for International Studies.
“It wasn’t until I saw what was happening that year that it made me question what was getting in the way of successful integration,” Ms. Joffe-Walt, who is white, recalled. “It helped me see that there was a missing piece in talking about inequality.”
The podcast quickly became one of the most challenging projects of her career, she said. While working on it, she began the school-searching process for her own son. “I was starting to see things about myself and my own relationship to schools and the legacy of people like me in the schools that I hadn’t seen at first, and that felt deeply personal,” she said.
As her own perspective changed during the reporting, so too did those of some of the people featured, which she examines in the final episode.
For Ms. Snyder, the executive editor of Serial Productions, a company for which she is a co-founder, the podcast’s narrative hinged on capturing Ms. Joffe-Walt’s internal struggles and overlaying them with larger historical themes.
“The argument that we’re making is that in order to move forward, we need a more shared sense of reality about where we’ve been and how we’ve been operating,” Ms. Snyder said. “It’s a very common feeling that parents have but don’t talk about,” she added, “and it’s something that we should be talking about more, not pretending like it’s not happening.”
Such a conversation-starting podcast intrigued editors at The Times, who began discussing the acquisition of Serial Productions more than a year ago, said Jordan Cohen, executive director of communications. As work continued on the project, the Serial team and The Times decided together that this would be the best one to launch the partnership, Mr. Cohen said, adding, “It powerfully spoke to the moment.”
The timeline of the series stops at the pandemic. But Ms. Joffe-Walt said the nation’s education system is at a pivotal juncture, noting the future could be indelibly shaped by white parents.
“We’re at the beginning of a huge shift,” she said, before adding that the move will be “either away from the public school system we have now and privatizing access to resources, or doubling down on the mission of public schools, with white families coming to a reckoning about our role in this public institution. It feels that both are just as likely to happen.”
Listen to the first two episodes now and keep an eye out for new episodes each Thursday, available here and on your mobile device: Via Apple Podcasts | Via Spotify | Via Google
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