“we made academic preparation our top priority”
My heart sank. Aggregate scores couldn’t tell me whether her daughter was learning. But I knew it wasn’t a good school. One of the hardest things I did on the board was explain that we—the system—had lied to her. She had done everything we asked: monitored her daughter’s progress, saved the report cards, trusted the school. Yet those cards said her daughter was thriving, while state assessments said nearly every child in her school was behind.
I thought about that mother as I read Nikole Hannah-Jones’s New York Times essay about her decision to send her daughter, Najya, to segregated, high-poverty public schools in Brooklyn. Najya earned strong grades, took honors classes and believed she knew algebra. At a selective high school, she failed an algebra exam she expected to ace. A tutoring assessment revealed gaps in fractions and long division. Her grades said she was succeeding. She wasn’t.
I pass no judgment on Ms. Hannah-Jones’s choice. She faced an excruciating decision familiar to many minority families: how to balance the cultural and social education they want for their children against the academic preparation they need. My wife and I faced our own version. I am black and she is an Austrian immigrant. Our daughters spoke German before English, so we considered a German school in Boston. We also considered public schools with more racial and economic diversity. But the schools that best matched our cultural and social preferences weren’t necessarily those that would best prepare our daughters academically.
In the end, we made academic preparation our top priority. Our decision rested on robust social science. An additional year of schooling raises earnings about 10% on average, and quality matters. Raj Chetty, John Friedman and Jonah Rockoff found that students assigned more-effective teachers were likelier to attend college and earned more as adults. Replacing a bottom 5% teacher with an average one for a year, they estimated, increases one classroom’s combined lifetime earnings by $250,000 in present value. Education also improves health and civic participation.
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“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked.
