‘We must learn what went wrong,’ says the head of the teachers union. She needs to look in the mirror.
But Ms. Hannah-Jones’s article makes clear “what went wrong.” Her daughter, Najya, and her classmates “were languishing in classrooms with educators who did not take their academic potential seriously and largely refused to teach.” And the failure to educate “poor Black children” isn’t limited to Najya’s school or even to the Hannah-Joneses’ city: “There was nothing exceptional about what I witnessed at P.S. 307. I had observed and reported on similar educational malfeasance in Detroit, in Durham, in St. Louis, in Tuscaloosa, in Birmingham.” Ms. Hannah-Jones writes.
If Ms. Weingarten wants to “learn what went wrong,” she should start by looking in the mirror. Her union is the primary reason New York’s public schools fail to educate so many children, especially poor black children.
Ms. Hannah-Jones chronicles a wide range of unprofessional practices at Najya’s school. Teachers refused to check homework or administer mandatory assessments. They were contemptuous of their students, thinking they had no ability to learn. They made up grades. They stopped calling on Najya in class, making her “so frustrated that, waving her hand furiously, she began to blurt out the answers.” They repeatedly ignored Ms. Hannah-Jones’s efforts to find out how her daughter was doing. Some were absent for long periods. Kids were left without substitute teachers and allowed to run wild and assault one another.
A debacle of this scope can’t be explained away by a lack of money or overwhelmed teachers—the usual excuses rolled out to defend failing schools by shifting blame to “the system.” Najya’s school is extremely well-resourced, spending more than $50,000 per pupil each year, and it has a low student-teacher ratio. More important, the transgressions Ms. Hannah-Jones documents had nothing to do with resources. They were intentionally harmful acts by uncaring teachers, who disrespected their students and refused to do the most basic and undemanding parts of their jobs. They didn’t even try.
This kind of persistent, comprehensive and unchecked behavior can persist only in the absence of accountability. These teachers knew there would be no consequences because their jobs are protected by policies and practices artfully designed by their union.
