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Earlier this week, in response to the outcry over a white Starbucks manager calling the police on two black customers who were waiting for a friend to arrive in one of its Philadelphia stores, the coffee behemoth closed 8,000 of its locations across the United States to conduct a four hour “implicit bias” training program encouraging employees to examine their unacknowledged, fears, stereotypes and biases.

Some commentators hailed the effort as a productive step forward; others labeled the mandatory training as a publicity stunt given its focus on individual actions and behaviors, with less emphasis on larger systemic issues of institutionalized racism and white supremacy.

While it remains to be seen if the workshops will have a positive impact on the company’s goal of creating a culture of inclusion for all its customers going forward, it is past time that we who are concerned about the intractable problem of economic and racial segregation in New York City’s public schools borrow the company’s strategy of seeking positive change — by urging parents, and specifically white and more affluent parents, to examine their previously unexamined fears, stereotypes and biases about integration.

This could help them, and the rest of us, understand why it is that all too frequently, they cite their fear and discomfort as a reason for fighting policy initiatives, such as rezoning and set-asides for certain demographic groups, aimed at increasing integration in public schools.

This is important because New York City is widely acknowledged to have one of the most segregated school systems in the country. The problem is persistent and pernicious. What we have done in the past is not working.

We may, however, begin to find success if we attempt a two-track strategy: encouraging parents to put away their fear and to open their hearts and minds as we simultaneously move large policy levers. Proposing systemic interventions without inviting parents to examine their worries and biases has not served city schools well in the past. It isn’t doing so now.

I’m not talking about a campaign to hound or shame integration-resistant white parents into submission, but an open, honest conversation that surfaces angst that now often lingers just beneath the surface so we can deal with it together.

That is one of the educational lessons from the fall of 2015, when we learned about a plan to rezone the catchment area for two schools in Brooklyn, one serving more affluent students in Dumbo and Brooklyn Heights, and the other serving students drawn from a public housing complex in Vinegar Hill. The zoning shifts were proposed as a way to ease overcrowding in one of the schools zoned for the more affluent students, Public School 8.

As far as city officials were concerned, the solution for the overcrowding at P.S. 8 seemed obvious, move two neighborhoods from P.S. 8’s zone into that of another school P.S. 307, which was nearby and had the extra room to accommodate additional children. Logic aside, the move sparked ugly racial debates pitting white, wealthier parents against lesswell-off blacks and Latinos. P.S. 307’s population is 90% black and Latino, and 90% of the students’ families receive some form of public assistance. At P.S. 8, the population is 59% white, with only 15% receiving public assistance.

As is typical in many NYC public schools, segregation matters. Test scores are considerably above city averages at the predominately white school, and below city averages at the one serving children of color.

Affluent residents of the P.S. 8 zone complained bitterly about the proposed changes, arguing without evidence that their children would be educationally disadvantaged by the proposed integration plans. District officials, after months of conversation and little compromise, had to institute their plans over the continued objections of parents. It isn’t yet clear if white parents will actually send their children to the less affluent school.

Though the fears of wealthy parents toward efforts to integrate New York City schools are much in evidence in our recent past, such sentiments are not new. As far back as February 1964, a multi-racial coalition of more than 460,000 students and teachers stayed out of school to protest the New York City Board of Education’s refusal to even contemplate a plan to comprehensively desegregate public schools.

Despite such a robust turnout on the part of students and teachers, a group of white parents remained firmly opposed to any such efforts, saying that they had to protect their children’s educational futures. In response to the march in support of integration, they formed a group calling themselves “Parents and Taxpayers.” They marched a few weeks later in opposition to even modest integration plans. This second march featured more than 10,000 white New Yorkers, an estimated 70% of whom were women.

During the same period, the superintendent of schools, William Jansen, warned his staff against even using the word “segregation” to describe city schools and told them to instead use euphemisms such as “separate,” or “racially imbalanced.” He also frequently reported in the press that whatever segregation existed in city schools was the result of housing segregation, and could not really be addressed without “forced busing,” which he described as an undesirable solution in the view of white parents.

Neither he nor a particular demographic of affluent parents in the district were willing to consider policy interventions to promote integration. It is no wonder our district schools look the way they do.

If we imagine that much has changed in the thinking of white parents, politicians and educational officials in New York City in the 50-plus years between 1964 and today, consider the fact that, in