Hey Lydia! Love this piece and I listened to this podcast in the midst of a 22 mile run. I am also an urban educator who is going into my third year in a Title I school in Baltimore. I have never met a white parent but I respected this podcast for its rigorous reporting, but wondered what solutions are.

You and I are both non-Black teachers, and I wondered what I would do for my own kids. It's really easy to think of ourselves as part of the solution but when push comes to shove, 99.9% of parents are going to do what they think is best for their kids. It's not like I'm going to completely sell out and send my kids to suburban white schools, but to me, the podcast casts the "nice white parents" as the villains of this story, who gentrify the community, and the parents in the 1950s and 1960s as the cowards that didn't follow through on their promise to send their kids to I.S. 293.

I couldn't help but think this of the reporter, Chana Joffe-Walt: aren't you also a nice white parent? What are you doing differently that's going to fix the equity gap? What makes you different from the white parents who are cast here in a negative light?

Anyway, I think the fact that we don't have forced integration is a big part of the problem. The fact that forced school integration was never politically feasible in places like the North reinforces systemic inequities. When parents have these choices of where to send their kids to public school, de facto segregation is unfortunately what has happened.

I also feel like the podcast oversimplifies things, as a teacher myself. It's too easy to blame these "nice white parents" when millions of other white parents simply don't care about integration at all and moved out ot the suburbs.