The Daily Signal - Are ‘Nice White Parents’ to Blame for Failures in the Education System?

Episode Date: September 10, 2020

A new podcast from The New York Times suggests that “Nice White Parents” are the reason for failures in the education system. The podcast, according to The Heritage Foundation's Mary Clare Amselem, cites “examples of parents getting involved in the day-to-day operation of the school, and paints this involvement as an affront to public schooling," implying parental involvement is somehow detrimental.  Amselem joins the podcast to discuss it. We also cover these stories: About 2,000 American troops are coming home from Iraq this month.  Attorney General Bill Barr said Wednesday during a press conference that a federal program called Operation Legend is cracking down on Chicago’s surging crime, making more than 500 arrests and charging 124 people with federal criminal counts since the beginning of the program.  The Department of Justice announced Tuesday that it will represent President Donald Trump in a defamation case filed by E. Jean Carroll, a woman who claims to have been raped by Trump in the 1990s.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Thursday, September 10th. I'm Virginia Allen. And I'm Rachel Del Judas. Our nice white parents to blame for failures in the education system, as a podcast from the New York Times alleges, Mary Claire Anselm, a policy analyst in the Heritage Foundation's Center for Education Policy, joins me on the podcast to discuss. Don't forget, if you're enjoying this podcast, please be sure to leave a review

or a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts and encourage others to subscribe. Now onto our top news. About 2,000 American troops are coming home from Iraq this month. General Frank McKenzie, the commander of the U.S. Central Command, announced that American troops in Iraq will be reduced from about 5,200 to 3,000. During a speech in Iraq on Tuesday, McKenzie said, This reduced footprint allows us to continue advising and assisting our Iraqi partners in rooting out the final remnants of ISIS in Iraq and ensuring its enduring defeat.

This decision is due to our confidence in the Iraqi security forces increased ability to operate independently. The U.S. decision is a clear demonstration of our continued commitment to the ultimate goal, which is an Iraqi security force that is capable of preventing an ISIS resurgence and of securing Iraqi sovereignty without external assistance. White House Press Secretary Kaylee McAney told the press that the withdrawal of some of America's troops was discussed during President Trump's August 20th Oval Office meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kazemi. Attorney General Bill Barr said Wednesday during a press conference that a federal program called Operation Legend is cracking down on Chicago's crime, making over 500 arrests and charging 1124 people with federal criminal charges since the beginning of the program. Here's what Barr had to say via Arthur Schwartz. Over the first five weeks of Operation Legend in Chicago, murders dropped by 50% over the previous five weeks.

August ultimately saw a 45% decrease in murders compared to July and a 35% decrease compared to June. In fact, Chicago and August saw the lowest number of murders at any time since April. The bottom line is that Operation Legend has played a critical role in cutting Chicago's murder rate roughly in half since before the operation. The Department of Justice announced Tuesday that they will represent President Trump in a defamation case filed by E. Jean Carroll, a woman who claims to have been raped by Trump in the 1990s. Carol is a former columnist for Elle magazine and says Trump raped her in a department store dressing room. in Manhattan in either 1995 or 1996. During a press conference Wednesday, Attorney General William Barr said it is within the bounds of the law for the DOJ to assume representation for the president.

Barr pointed to the Federal Tort Claims Act or the Westfall Act explaining that it allows for the case to move to the federal level and for the U.S. government to become the responsible party in place of the president. Barr said the case law is crystal clear that the Westfall Act applies to claims against the president, the vice president, as well as other federal employees and members of Congress. And he added this per CBS News. The court said that elected officials in our democracy, representative democracy, when they're answering questions in office, even about personal affairs, any defamation claim. is subject to Westfall. So this was a normal application of the law. The law is clear. It is done frequently and the little tempest that's going on is largely because of the bizarre political

environment in which we live and the, you know, the, well, I'll just leave it at that. Carol responded to the DOJ's announcement on Twitter, writing, To Donald J. Trump, sir, I and my attorney, Robbie Kaplan, are ready. So is every American citizen who has been trampled by Bill Barr and the DOJ. Bring it. The Norwegian has nominated President Donald Trump's at the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, citing Trump's Israel-UA-E peace agreement. Christian Tigring Getty, who has been a member of the Norwegian Parliament, for four terms told Fox News in an exclusive interview,

for his merit, I think he has done more trying to create peace between nations than most other peace prize nominees. The agreement announced by Trump on August 13th, ushered in a full normalization of relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Fox News reported. In his letter to the Nobel Committee, Tybring Getty praised Trump's key role in facilitating contact between conflicting parties and creating new dynamics and other protractors. conflicts such as the Kashmir border dispute between Indian Pakistan and the conflict between North and South Korea, as well as dealing with the nuclear capabilities of North Korea.

160 different human rights advocacy groups have signed a letter asking the International Olympic Committee to reconsider hosting the 2022 Winter Games in China due to the nation's human rights abuses. The letter was released on Tuesday and reads the IOC must recognize that the Olympic spirit and the reputation of the Olympic Games will suffer further damage if the worsening human rights crisis across all areas under China's control is simply ignored. China's foreign minister, Cha Li Zhang, spoke out against the letter saying, this is against the spirit of the Olympic charter and China firmly opposes it. The International Olympic Committee responded to Reuters inquiry about the letter, saying that the committee is neutral on political matters.

and the choice of where the games are hosted does not mean that the IOC agrees with the political structure, social circumstances, or human rights standards in its country. The Oscars have announced that they are implementing new representation and inclusion requirements to be eligible for best picture. The aperture must widen to reflect our diverse global population in both the creation of motion pictures and in the audiences who connect with them. The Academy is committed to playing a vital role in helping make this a reality. Academy President David Rubin and Academy CEO, Dawn Hudson, said in a statement on the Oscars website. We believe these inclusion standards will be a catalyst for long-lasting essential change in our industry. In order to be eligible, on movie must show diversity in two of four areas, ranging from the movie's themes to its staffers. Gender, racial, and sexual orientation diversity are among the type of

of diversity the Academy says it's looking for. Are nice white parents to blame for failures in the education system? The Heritage Foundation's Mary Claire Anthem joins me next on the Daily Signal podcast to discuss. This is Virginia Allen, host of the Daily Signal podcast. I don't know about you, but YouTube is certainly one of my guilty pleasures. I really enjoy watching short videos on a variety of topics, so I'm always looking for videos that are actually educational and beneficial to me in some way. And the Daily Signal YouTube channel never disappoints.

There is so much binge-worthy content, from policy and news explainers to documentaries. If you're not driving, go ahead and pull out your phone and subscribe to the Daily Signal YouTube channel so you can be in the know on the issues you care about most. You can also search for the channel by going to YouTube.com slash Daily Signal. I'm joined today on the Daily Signal podcast by Mary Claire Anselm.

She's a policy analyst in the Heritage Foundation Center for Education Policy. Mary Claire, it's great to have you with us on the Daily Signal podcast. Thanks so much for having me. We have recently had a really popular piece on the Daily Signal called Nice White Parents, responsible for failing public schools New York Times says. Can you start off Mary Claire by telling us about your piece? Sure. So I decided to write the piece because I was listening to the latest New York Times podcast.

And, you know, I'm sure many listeners out there know that the New York Times comes out with a lot of pretty popular podcasts, 16-19 project, one of them. This is also from the makers of cereal, which is, of course, I think, you know, the most popular podcast ever sort of kicked off this sort of podcast revolution that we have. So, you know, I was definitely interested in the podcast, given that those were its makers. And the title is quite catching. It's called Nice White Parents. And it's an education-themed podcast, so that was definitely interesting to me as an education podcast. policy analysts and listening to it, it was pretty shocking what I heard. There's a lot of debate over why the public school system continues to fail America's children. It's a very complicated

question. People have solutions. Us at the Heritage Foundation, think we have some pretty good solutions, and we've been trying to get those solutions out there for quite a long time now. But this podcast said, you know, the problem is pretty simple, and it's that white parents are making decisions that are hurting the overall integrity of public education, which is quite a shocking claim. And it's something that we should be talking about. We shouldn't really let them just sort of make such a claim and then not do a little bit of our own fact checking. It's important to point out that the podcast chronicles the experience of a single school and then sort of extrapolates the experience of this school into sort of the broader issues plaguing all of public education. But

What what bothered me as someone who studies these types of issues for a living is that the underlying premise, you know, setting aside that they single out parents of a specific race, but they single out parents. They say that the parental choices are sort of getting in the way of this plan that the public education system has for America's children, which is such a nefarious way of posing the problem. And it's something that people who, people like myself who believe that parents should be the sole deciders over what and how their children learn. Parents should have autonomy in this space. For people who come to this issue from that approach, hearing something like, you know, the choices that parents make makes the public

school system a worse place is really troublesome and it's something that we should be talking about and fighting back against. Well, yeah, that was actually one of my questions. Something that you wrote about is how you said that there were examples of parents getting involved in day-to-day operation of the school and that this podcast painted this involvement as an affront to public schooling. So can you talk about that statement that they alleged or that they said in your response to that? Sure. So, you know, again, this podcast talks about a single school. So the, I guess you could say author, the host of the podcast doesn't give a ton of examples. So she gives, you know, a couple examples and then sort of says, now you see the problem.

So the problem that she gave an example of was that when a bunch of new parents came into the school system, they decided they wanted a French program. And so they got a lot of parents together. They did a little bit of fundraising. They were able to hire a French teacher. And then boom, they offered French classes at the school. Me as a school choice advocate, I look at this and I go, wow, what a great example of parental involvement of parents. advocating for the type of education that they want. However, the host of the Nice White Parents podcast said,

well, these parents sort of pushed in what they want to see in the curriculum onto the school that doesn't necessarily represent, like not all parents wanted a French course. And again, the solution to that isn't, will take decision-making power away from all parents. The solution is give every parent, in America choice over where they send their children to schools so that when they're shopping around for schools, they say, hey, I really want my kid to learn French. And they are able to

pick between the public schools, the private schools, the charter schools, whatever they want. They're able to choose the school that offers the types of things that they want their children to learn and that they have the financial power to do so. School choice programs enable that to happen. But this podcast from the New York Times, Nice Wide Parents, says that the solution is, well, we can't have some parents advocating for their children and this leaves behind students that you can have sort of a tyranny of a majority type thing. So we should just take away all decision-making power from parents and leave all decision-making to education bureaucrats.

And that takes decisions out of the hands of parents. And quite frankly, it's kind of scary to think that we have these unelected people who are making such important decisions over how and what our children learn. Well, another point made by the New York Times in this podcast, nice white parents that you responded to, is that parents choosing to exit the public school system leads to underfunded schools. Can you explain the thinking behind a perspective like this and what your response to this is? Yeah, so this is a common criticism that anti-school choice advocates have is that they say, well, if you have people exiting the public school system, they're taking those education dollars with them and they're going elsewhere. elsewhere. First of all, if the public school system is serving America's children so wonderfully, then they shouldn't have to be worried about people exiting if given the choice.

If the only way your school survives is by people being forced to be there, then maybe you have a bad product that you've got going on there. And that's certainly not a situation that we want America's families to be in. But it's a giant myth that is constantly peddled that schools are underfunded. We spent a massive amount of money on education in America since the creation of the Department of Education. Education spending has only gone one direction up and it's gone up quite steadily. And so test scores, on the other hand, have remained entirely stagnant. By pretty much any measure, we have not improved education outcomes largely since the creation of the Department of Education, which has come along with billions and billions and billions of dollars in education spending.

Looking at that, you can't argue that more money will somehow solve the problem if more money has not solved the problem for the last 40 years. Something else is going on here, and we need to come up with more innovative ways of addressing the deeply rooted problems in the public schooling system besides simply saying, well, let's try throwing more money at it because that's the only thing we've been doing. for, like I said, 40 years, and that hasn't yielded the outcomes that we want to see. Well, on that note, something else you talked about in your piece is that there's a disproportionate growth in the number of teachers compared to the growth in the student population. What's going on here and why do you think that's the case? As I mentioned, there's a massive amount of money going into the public school system,

but teachers are right when they say, you know, hey, we're not getting paid a ton. Or if you look at school buildings and, you know, some of them are not up to date and you see students learning from outdated textbooks. All of those things are true, but it doesn't mean that the schools are underfunded. It just means that the money is not going to the right places. And so I believe in the piece, I quoted Dr. Ben Scafety at Kennesaw State University. He's done a lot of really great work looking at, well, where is the money in public schooling actually going? And what he found was between 1950 and 2015, administrative staff has grown over 709 percent. in that time period compared to about a 100% increase in the student population.

So that's a massively disproportionate increase in the number of administrators versus the number of students. And so when I look at those numbers, I say, okay, that's very clear to me. That's very clear exactly where the money is going. I mean, if you look at Washington, D.C., we're spending about $30,000 per student per year in the public school system far and away higher than any private school tuition. $30,000 per student per year. And D.C. has some of the poorest schools in the country.

I mean, we have consistently low test scores, low graduation rates. I mean, D.C. schools, by and large, are not doing well despite that massive investment. And so, you know, I implore people who are really concerned about these issues to take a look at, well, where is the money going? We have a massive education bureaucracy going on in our country, and it's this huge untold story that podcasts like the Nice White Parents' podcasts are completely glazing over. So that's why I mentioned at the beginning, that they say that the problem with the public schooling system is quite simple.

And as the choices of parents, I would argue that it's a massive bureaucracy problem that's deeply rooted in the entire system. And it's going to be quite complicated to simplify that. And in the meantime, we have students stuck in schools that are not serving them well, which is exactly why we need to pass legislation that would enable students to move around, schools if it's not working for them. Well, Mary Claire, we had talked pretty briefly about that one

example that was used in this nice white parents podcast where they were talking about these parents that wanted to have this French class and they formed a committee and they tried to bring this in and that was kind of looked down upon. And so my question to you is if you were talking to this host of this podcast or talking to people who felt threatened by that, what would you tell them in that situation? I would say that squashing the voices of parents in this conversation about how to improve our schools is a really, is a dangerous road to go down and it's not going to yield the kind of school system that anyone wants their kids to go to. The reason we have a public schooling system is to serve America's children. And the people who know their children best and can advocate for them

the best are their parents. You can have the most well-intentioned school administrator who believes in public education and loves what they do, but they don't know your kid. They don't know how your kid studies math. They don't know that your kid, you know, doesn't have an ear for languages and might need a special attention. But you know that about your child. And so that is why the system needs to be set up so that the people who know and can advocate for their children the best are the ones who have a voice. I think that it's really troublesome to hear people advocate for completely removing the role of parents altogether because then we have a system where we have teachers deciding how your children are going to be raised. And we have a very diverse country when it comes

to culture, when it comes to religion, values, and there's never going to be a one-size-fits-all system that meets the needs of this very diverse country. countries, different values, you know, religions, cultures, et cetera. And that's why we need people, we need to have many options that fits in schooling needs of children. And we need to give parents a voice. I think that that squashing the role of parents in public education is exactly the opposite direction that we need to go. Mary Clear, you also talked about how the podcast not only attack the autonomy of parents, but also their race. What's the problem here? That was definitely a very troubling, you know, aspect completely underlying the entire podcast. And to be honest, it's,

it's hard to know what to say. I mean, they singled out a group of parents based on their race, assumed that they all act the same, that they're making the same decisions, and that those decisions are where the entire system's problems lie. If that, that makes me uncomfortable, that I think that makes, you know, pretty much anyone listening uncomfortable to hear that. And I think that there's a reason for that is that it's simply wrong that's un-American. You know, here in America, we treat people as individuals. That's something that I very firmly believe. And I think that treating people as individuals is how we should walk into all policy conversations.

And so I definitely found it troubling and something that we should be fighting against. Well, you also highlighted that this podcast from New York Times, did not offer any policy solutions in their whole discussion. And I know we've talked briefly about school choice and how important that is. But in addition to that and maybe even in more depth, what sort of policy solutions would you suggest? Absolutely.

So school choice, it cannot be overstated how important it is, especially at a time right now, for every child in America to have access to a school choice program. If you're in a school that offers French, you want to take Spanish. I mean, you should be able to shop around and pick what classes fit the needs of your family. I'm using language, but there are, you know, far more controversial, you know, issues that might drive people away from a school system, like, you know, sexual education or the way that they

approach religion. I mean, these are deeply personal questions that every family grapples with and approaches differently. And to have an assignment by zip code system where we're saying, you must go to the school. And if they're teaching something that undermines your value, you know, you're out of luck. I think that that's wrong and we shouldn't be asking parents to make to make sacrifices like that. So definitely empowering parents through school choice programs. But we're at an interesting moment where a lot of these public schools that people are assigned to

are not reopening in the fall. And so at the Heritage Foundation, we've been talking a lot about how more parents are looking towards homeschooling. They're looking towards pandemic pods. These have always been fantastic options for families, but we're at such a unique moment right now. where families who had never really considered that before are suddenly saying, you know, maybe I will consider homeschooling. You know, maybe I will consider starting a pandemic pod in my neighborhood with the neighborhood kids because the public school system has been falling short

of meeting the education needs of many of these families. So it's definitely an interesting time. There's definitely never been a stronger need for school choice. Well, we talked about various aspects of this podcast from the New York Times Nice White Parents, But if there's like one overall message that you'd like to share with the New York Times to respond to them and to their listeners and even to our listeners, like, what would that overall top line response be? I would say that that singling out parents is the wrong thing to do, that we should be lifting up the voices of parents, not squashing them. I think that if we gave parents more of a voice when it comes to what happens inside the classroom, we would see a much better school system.

based on unique knowledge of individual children. We have the technology now. We have the resources to be able to customize education to the needs of a child through things like education savings accounts, through things like vouchers. We have that ability, and we get there through empowering parents, not squashing their voices. Well, finally, on somewhat overbladed note, Mary Claire, you're working on starting a new podcast. Can you give us a little sneak peek on what will be. about? Sure. So yes, I am starting a new Heritage Foundation podcast called COVID and the classroom. So if you're

interested in what we've been talking about, you know, here today, this podcast will definitely be for you. It's talking about this unique moment that we are in education about how a lot of families are considering homeschooling. They're considering pandemic pods. How are the public schools failing to meet the needs of a lot of America's children? And what options do parents have? Where should parents turn? So if you're a parent and you're really struggling with distance learning, you will definitely be interested in our new podcast, COVID in the classroom. Well, Mary Claire, thank you so much for joining us today on the Daily Signal podcast. We appreciate having me.

Thanks for having me. Anytime. And that will do it for today's episode. Thank you for listening to the Daily Signal podcast. You can find the Daily Signal podcast on Google Play, Apple Podcast, Spotify, and now on IHeartRadio. Please be sure to leave us a review and a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts and encourage others to subscribe. Thanks again

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