Parents, Outcomes and School Choice Commentary
How could someone who has written so forcefully about the very real problems facing low-income schools really believe that she can solve them with a transfer of privilege? Class and racial segregation are harms in themselves, and it is simply a fact of American society that, when you have a school for rich kids and a school for poor kids, the rich kids will fare better at just about everything. The project to ameliorate these harms has consumed much of the education sector for the past forty or so years, and very little progress has been made. Hannah-Jones has spent much of her career writing about how racially imbalanced outcomes, especially in education, were the product of segregation, yet, when it came to her own daughter’s academic career, it seems as though she didn’t give segregation enough credit.
But what I found most confounding was whom Hannah-Jones repeatedly blames for the failed experiment: Najya’s teachers. Hannah-Jones gets so mad at Najya’s fourth-grade teachers that she writes them an e-mail and copies the school’s principal. As the son of Korean immigrants, I can recognize this as tiger-parent behavior—exactly the sort of thing that a frustrated, upwardly mobile immigrant mother would do right before she pulled her kid out of the public-school system and enrolled them at the local Catholic school. “Our experience at P.S. 307 exposed the fallacy that caring families are more important than competent teachers,” Hannah-Jones concludes—a line that could have come out of any school-choice, charter-school, or even right-wing education-reform pamphlet from the past three decades.
When Najya struggles with math during her freshman year at the predominantly white and Asian, academically screened high school that she chooses, Hannah-Jones does what countless bourgeois parents have done before her: she pays for math tutoring, and presses her class privileges in service of her child. Within this framing, she is the outraged mother bending the public system to fit her child’s needs. Hannah-Jones, who in the past has written forcefully against tutoring, has determined that these parents might have had a point.
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“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked.
