In the late 1830s, the secretary of the Massachusetts board of education, Horace Mann, introduced a new type of schooling founded on these six core principles:
1) The public should no longer remain ignorant.
2) The education should be paid for, controlled, and sustained by an interested public.
3) The education would be best provided in schools that embrace children from a variety of backgrounds.
4) The education must hold no religious affiliation.
5) The education must be taught using the tenets of a free society.
6) The education should be provided by well-trained, professional teachers
While Mann’s principles are admirable and inspiring, to me, they seem idealistic at best. Public education in today’s political and social climate is all but private. Funds for public schools are based on tax collection and donations—meaning wealthy districts foster well-funded schools and poor districts… well, they don’t.
In preparation for a class I am taking this spring called Democracy and Education, and in the long process of educating myself on racism in America, I decided to listen to a podcast about the New York public school system called “Nice White Parents” hosted by Chana Joffe-Walt. As I suspected, public schools are yet another area where racial inequality is horrifically apparent, but what makes “Nice White Parents” so eye-opening is the specific story she tells about The School for International Studies (IS-239) in Brooklyn, NY, and the obvious negative impacts of white parents with money.
The impact of white parents at The School for International Studies started before the building was even built. In 1963, New York City was planned to build a new school next to a housing project that was home to mostly Black and Puerto Rican families. However, a group of white parents, optimistic about a less segregated future of America, wrote to the New York Board of Education (the BOE) urging them to move the school into a fringe neighborhood somewhere in between wealthy white neighborhoods and the housing projects. These parents desired to be a part of a new wave of integration, and eventually, the BOE granted the wishes of white families and moved the location of soon-to-be-built IS-293. However, when the school opened several years later, very few white parents actually enrolled their kids at the School for International Studies, including those who had implied they would just years before.
Joffe-Walt’s story continues in 2015 when a group of white families actually did attend IS-293, but my mind was stuck on the ironic, and ultimately untruthful, letters written by white families. It makes me wonder if their desire to integrate was performative—if they ever intended to leave their mainly white schools at all.
These thoughts on irony bring me back to Horace Mann. The revolutionary educator paved the way for people of all races and socioeconomic backgrounds to benefit from the same education, however, Horace Mann is now the name of one of the most elite private schools in New York City where tuition alone is over $55,000. How ironic is that? While Horace Mann (the school) offers many scholarships, a strong majority of families pay full tuition.
While I still have a few more episodes of the “Nice White Parents” podcast left, I already have so many questions about the unchecked power of white people and the true intentions of public-school integration. I’ve thought a lot about who public schools are meant to serve and the true intentions of Horace Mann and those white parents who preached integrating schools but never followed through. My research has brought me to further understand the danger of performative activism and how important it is, specifically for white people, to turn talk into real action.