The Tragedy of Nikole Hannah-Jones
Nikole Hannah-Jones famously sent her child to a predominantly black/lower-income public school in New York City. Now her child says she shouldn’t have been used as political fodder.
The essay makes for hard reading and I acknowledge NHJ’s courage in writing about her mistakes and the cost to her child. The piece is raw and true when talking about her personal choices, but the larger story in which NHJ embeds her personal history is mostly false. The problem isn’t funding. The failures she documents are failures of management and accountability, not lack of resources. NYC spends upwards of $40k per pupil on average, the highest of any large district in the country. Moreover, schools in NYC with lower-income students get more than the average. PS 307, where NHJ initially sent her child, is currently funded at just over 52k per student, far above the national average.
Nationally, there haven’t been big gaps in funding within states by race or income for decades. NHJ has reckoned with her failing her own child but she has not yet reckoned with the failure of her entire educational philosophy.
The role of ideology in blinding NHJ is dramatic. NHJ’s daughter earns high grades in her math classes but she fails standardized tests. Most parents, especially conservatives, know what that means. The classes are a lie. But NHJ is blinded by ideology and assumes it’s the standardized tests that are biased. It’s only when her daughter demands to go to a better school that she and her daughter confront the truth:
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.
The confrontation is almost disastrous:
My child’s confidence wilted like an unwatered plant. She started to develop an almost debilitating anxiety around taking tests. She became sullen at school and began to act out. For the first time ever, I got messages from teachers about Najya’s behavior.
Fortunately, Najya battles back and recovers but much more could be said here about the costs of social promotion, DEI and mismatch on the so-called beneficiaries.
Ironically, NHJ invokes the heroic history of Black Americans integrating schools to justify keeping her own child in a segregated one. Painful.
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“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked.
