New York Times Magazine writer and 1619 Project mastermind Nikole Hannah-Jones set the internet ablaze this week with her piece on the consequences of a decision she made a decade ago to send her daughter to a poorly-rated neighborhood school rather than a better-ranked one, a decision made in line with Hannah-Jones’s values and her career-long effort to fight school segregation. It’s a searing, captivating piece, one of those that keeps the reader hanging on every word. I would highly recommend you read it.
One of the reasons the piece is so engaging is that it’s fairly damning of Hannah-Jones’s educational decisions for her daughter, the early stages of which were documented in a different New York Times Magazine piece, which is also worth a read. Hannah-Jones is principled and thoughtful, and she uses her latest story to grapple with choices she still believes are the right ones given her politics and her ideals, but that her daughter believes were badly damaging — and that I think it’s fair to say objectively put her daughter at a disadvantage.
(A note: I’ve organized this newsletter into sections so that if you’ve already read both pieces, you can scroll past the story summary).
The Story
Hannah-Jones has spent much of her career writing about inequality and racism in America, and about the segregation of America’s public schools in particular. When her daughter was school-age, she was faced with a problem that hits most New York City parents: There are a handful of highly-rated public schools which are disproportionately white, and then many lower-rated ones that are largely Black and Latino. “Schools with large numbers of black and Latino kids are less likely to have experienced teachers, advanced courses, instructional materials and adequate facilities,” Hannah-Jones writes. “Most black and Latino students today are segregated by both race and class, a combination that wreaks havoc on the learning environment. Research stretching back 50 years shows that the socioeconomic makeup of a school can play a larger role in achievement than the poverty of an individual student’s family.”
And so, Hannah-Jones decided, her own daughter should go to one of the “bad” schools. She explains her decision like this:
I told [my husband] Faraji that I wanted to enroll Najya in a segregated, low-income school. Faraji’s eyes widened as I explained that if we removed Najya, whose name we chose because it means “liberated” and “free” in Swahili, from the experience of most black and Latino children, we would be part of the problem. Saying my child deserved access to “good” public schools felt like implying that children in “bad” schools deserved the schools they got, too. I understood that so much of school segregation is structural — a result of decades of housing discrimination, of political calculations and the machinations of policy makers, of simple inertia. But I also believed that it is the choices of individual parents that uphold the system, and I was determined not to do what I’d seen so many others do when their values about integration collided with the reality of where to send their own children to school.
One family, or even a few families, cannot transform a segregated school, but if none of us were willing to go into them, nothing would change. Putting our child into a segregated school would not integrate it racially, but we are middle-class and would, at least, help to integrate it economically. As a reporter, I’d witnessed how the presence of even a handful of middle-class families made it less likely that a school would be neglected. I also knew that we would be able to make up for Najya anything the school was lacking.
It turns out that Hannah-Jones and her husband were not actually able to make up for what the school was lacking. Their daughter loved math and was getting As, but it turned out no one was actually grading her coursework and she didn’t know how basic algebra. The school was chaotic — in the lunchroom, “Children were running wild, chasing, hitting and pushing each other while the teacher’s aides and cafeteria workers stood by looking bored.” Teachers were chronically absent, and the principal was largely MIA. Because Najya was bright and engaged, teachers stopped calling on her in class, apparently focusing on kids who were struggling — but leaving Najya languishing.
When middle school rolled around, they again had a choice. In New York City, middle schools are chosen rather than simply assigned by neighborhood (elementary school offers a modicum of choice, too, but there are assigned neighborhood schools). Hannah-Jones and her husband “chose the Urban Assembly Unison School, which is part of a cohort of themed public schools created to advance the economic and social mobility of low-income students and students of color through rigorous instruction and a focus on social-emotional learning.” And aspects were good — there were a bunch of great clubs, and she got high grades. But there was no homework; kids acted out in class and that took the teacher’s attention, and so the rest of the class didn’t progress. "
“Schools like hers tend to rely on a zero-tolerance disciplinary playbook and often simply remove misbehaving students from classrooms, depriving them of precious educational time they cannot afford to miss,” Hannah-Jones writes. “But at Unison, teachers constantly worked to refocus students and mitigate conflict. This is good educational practice, but kids like Najya, who were just trying to do their work, saw this treatment as deeply unfair.”
Toward the end of second grade, Najya and her friends decided to enroll in a tutoring program to prepare them for the exam that New York City students take to determine high school admissions. This test is controversial, to put it mildly, and the results of it are what slot New York City students into high schools — and determine which of them go to the city’s very top schools, which are reserved for the highest achievers. This test-based approach has meant that the city’s tippy-top schools are overwhelmingly white and Asian. Hannah-Jones opposes these tests so much that she had never once discussed them with her daughter. Najya didn’t test into one of the top schools. But for high school, Hannah-Jones allowed her to select her own school, and Najya chose one of the best ones, much to Hannah-Jones chagrin.
It was a tough road. Najya went from a majority-Black school to being a minority in a mostly white and Asian one, where kids tossed around racial slurs and racist comments. But it was the academics that were really startling: Despite getting good grades at her previous school, Najya was really, really behind. It turned out “that Najya knew very little algebra and had huge gaps in many of the building blocks of math that she should have learned in elementary school, like mastery of long division and fractions.” There had been signs: She had failed the statewide exam, but Hannah-Jones waved that away. “At the time, I was somewhat concerned, but as Najya had earned A’s in the class I assumed she didn’t pass because, like many children, she has trouble sometimes on standardized tests,” she writes. She was behind in just about everything. And as she now looks at her future — college and so on — she’s wondering why her parents didn’t set her up for more success, and why her education was sacrificed to a greater good that it’s not even clear it really benefited.
The Discourse
I haven’t seen a (non-AI-related) piece this discussed on social media and in in-person gatherings in a very long time.
Much of the discussion focused on Hannah-Jones’s personal parenting decisions. Why didn’t she notice that her kid was so behind that she couldn’t do long division? Why didn’t she do more than just email?
Some on the reactionary right have used this story as fodder for their own racist and reactionary views, arguing that some kids are just smarter than others, and society has basically shaken out along the lines of IQ and ability. Others suggest that it’s a “cultural” problem with Black families, or that this all ends and begins with the parents. Some have used this as fodder to argue that integration — racial or economic — is a pipe dream.
Some on the far left have dismissed any of this as a problem, arguing specifically that Hannah-Jones’s daughter still has many privileges and will be fine (true, perhaps, but we each only get one shot at this life — winding up fine when you believe you could have made your life into something great is a tough pill to swallow).
Still others, including many with less-reactionary views, have argued that it’s evidence that every parent should simply do whatever maximizes their child’s future potential. Many people have used the article to hammer their own pet issues: It’s IQ! It’s parents! It’s ending standardized testing! It’s ending tracking! It’s a lack of discipline! It’s screens!
It’s all been a mess. And it’s obvious to me that American education, especially in a diverse city like New York, is an everything problem. But here are a few things I’ve been thinking about since reading it, and the dialogue around it.
Liberals need to rebuild trust on the education issue.
Over the past decade, liberals and progressives have pushed hard for big changes to the educational system. Many elite colleges have stopped requiring standardized tests for admissions (some stopped and then returned). Tracking and putting higher-achieving children into “gifted and talented” programs have been deemed inequitable and possibly racist and those, too, have been challenged in many progressive areas. Harsh disciplinary measures have (rightly) been curbed in many liberal enclaves (some conservative states still allow teachers to physically abuse children, which is insane), and the presence of police officers in schools has been rightly scaled back in an effort to disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline; but some schools have gone far in the other direction, forcing teachers to keep highly disruptive and even violent students in the classroom, to the detriment of every other kid. Covid school closures dragged on the longest in some of the most liberal school districts, which infuriated even many liberal parents. Teachers unions, which do the important work of advocating for under-paid and under-appreciated educators, hav also protected bad and even abusive teachers, and not always used their power in the service of the children they are supposed to serve.
Parents and students see the results of all of this, and it’s not good.
