So just for a sense of scale, one private school I know in NYC routinely raises over $1 million at their flagship fundraising event. The wealthiest public schools in nyc raise less than half that much in an entire year. I would be surprised to learn that more than a teeny tiny percentage of public schools raise more than $500/student. The average cost of funding the DOE in NYC is between 30K-50K/student depending on whether you consider the physical facilities a cost of education. I’m having trouble believing that a 1-3% difference in funding is the source of such a difference in results.
Why would the French Consulate donate money to nyc public schools? AFAIK most diplomats send their kids to private schools with tuition paid for or highly subsidized by their government. Is there some mention of how much some of these schools might be raising? I only have anecdotal evidence for a few public high schools where the annual fundraising is less than 500K.
Yes there are some wealthy parents sending their kids to public school out of principle. I don’t think there are enough of those to make a dent. The linked article above mentions 200K. that’s a pittance.
I would as well, and the DC numbers I found support this notion. However, neither “Parents with the sort of money” nor “Why would the French Consulate” is a strong basis for such an argument.
They have a discretionary budget that can be used for all kinds of things related to promoting French culture and awareness of France abroad and building good relationships between the French government and ordinary U.S. citizens.
But that’s irrelevant to the issue. There are also corporations of all kinds that have charitable budgets, and individual philanthropists, and private foundations, and all kinds of sources.
The point is that some people–mostly white people–have the kinds of connections that give them access to soliciting such funding. And they can direct those funds in a way (for example, a French language immersion program) that doesn’t meet critical concerns of the buik of the other students in the school. They get to hijack the agenda because of their access.
Money is definitely a problem with respect to a lot of public school matters. But I don’t even need to say that, because nobody here said that this is the only or even the main problem here. I brought it up as one thing that was mentioned as being a consideration in the podcast.
The general problem is that white parents have power that other parents don’t and that school administrators and politicians will do things to please white parents that they won’t do for non-white parents, even (or especially) when white students are a minority in a particular school or district.
For example, when it came to a lot of matters (say busing to force integration), politicians and administrators would often say things like “there’s no political will to do that.” What they mean is that there aren’t enough white parents who support it, regardless of how much support or need there might be overall.
Yeah, nobody here is going to thoroughly outline and summarize the entire podcast for people who haven’t listened to it, and I don’t believe anyone should be expected to do that. If there’s something someone truly doesn’t understand, I agree with Monstro, try listening to the podcast.
It reminds me of two annecdotes from decades back. One sibling, in 9th grade, wants to sign up for only honors classes, and gets told “three honors classes, maximum.”
Over the phone, our parents get told “three honors classes, maximum.”
But when white guy dad in a suit shows up at the school to ask about registration, suddenly it’s not a problem to sign up for only honors classes.
(FWIW the school district is currently 84% hispanic, and the zip code for that school is 97%. These numbers may have been a touch different 20+ years ago.)
Fast forward a bit, I’m taking a class in college. The professor tells me how when she moved there, she went to the school to help get her kids all set up. She asks about G&T or honors or something like that. “Sorry, that’s based on how the kids did here last year, so they’ll have wait a year.” Black mom got told no.
But when Prof. D from S. College called the next day, they signed those kids up right away.
I know, I know, plural of annecdotes, etc. But those both stuck with me.
@damuriajashi, if you listen to the podcast, the theme that will hit you in the face is that the fundraising and advocacy that “nice white people” do isn’t for the benefit of the school’s student body. It’s always for their children, so that their children will enjoy the “best”. The best, of course, is inherently exclusive. It’s almost always built on fluff, not substance.
Like the case of the French immersion program. The nice white parents pushed for that program. They tapped the French Consulate to help fund it, bypassing the PTA altogether. Why was this important to them? What is it about French that makes it so special?
Well, having a program like that would obviously not be attractive to the average student served by that school (many of those students are already bilingual). It would only be attractive to people who value the prestige of the French language–the nice white people who had been sending their kids to pricey private schools to ensure they get the “best”. So a nice white parent could enroll their kid in this “enhanced” public school knowing that their kid will be in a special, exclusive high-falutin program completely isolated from the brown and black riffraff that comprise the majority of the student body. Their kids will receive a private school experience but at zero cost to their parents. And they can tell themselves that the black and brown kids benefit from this because the school now has “statuses” (to use a term used by one of the little white boys who was interviewed) that it didn’t have before. The “statuses”, rather than a solid education, seems to be what the nice white people really want.
The French consulate was hit up for donations not from the school’s PTA. It was from a rogue group of nice white parents who didn’t want to be controlled by the PTA (run primarily by black and brown parents). So looking at PTA donations across NYC schools isn’t going to tell you much about the influence of nice white parents. They don’t work through PTA’s. They form their own groups.
I agree about the influence of nice white parents and their motives and i agree that “nice white parents” are frequently just “police white parents” but I think it’s more than just that.
How much of this is SES rather than race?
There are several affluent black suburbs in the DC area and i wonder how things work in those neighborhoods.
Well, the nice white people are getting the solid education and the statuses, they don’t have to give anything up.
This highlights for me where “good white people” fall down on the job. We lose our nerve. We know our children have privileges and we want all children of all colors and all backgrounds to have the same privileges.
This is a wonderful idea and that makes us wonderful for thinking it.
But when you tell us that not everyone is going to have those privileges, we’ll fight, and fight dirty, to make sure our kids aren’t the ones losing their privileges.