Why Is the Left So Bad at Education?
Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Pulitzer-winning reporter on race and inequality, has written an extraordinary essay for her employer, the New York Times. In it, she reflects on her decision to send her daughter to bad schools, out of principle. Despite having access to high-performing schools in her area of Brooklyn – schools with largely white, middle-class intakes – Hannah-Jones and her husband decided to send their daughter to largely black, largely low-income schools.
They did so out of solidarity with poor black families. It seemed unfair to them that their daughter should be set apart from and above other black kids in a selective school system that, in her view, discriminates against them. Hannah-Jones and her husband believed they would be able to improve their daughter’s schools by virtue of their middle-class connections, money and advocacy, and that they could compensate for any shortcomings in their daughter’s education with private tuition.
It did not turn out well. The essay opens with a dramatic scene in which her daughter, Najya, then 13 and at middle school, confronts her mother in the car home from school. Najya and her trio of “black girl nerds” had been plotting their futures in higher education. When they looked up how their school did in the academic rankings they discovered the unpleasant truth. Now, Najya wanted to know why her mother sent her there despite the better local options.
Hannah-Jones answered her with arguments that she had made many times in public (ten years ago, she wrote a piece for the same paper about taking this decision for Najya’s elementary school). She talked about standing in solidarity with other black families. She said that schools should not be judged solely on test scores, anyway. But in the face of her daughter’s uncomprehending fury, her conviction wavered:
“Because other kids are disadvantaged, you didn’t want to put me in a great school?”
Najya was asking what I’d accomplished by not choosing the “best” school for her. And the honest answer is, I don’t know. When it comes to the choices my husband and I have made about public education, these days I feel that I failed both my values and my child.
The essay then goes back in time to recount all the problems that Hannah-Jones and her daughter had faced – first at Najya’s elementary school, and then at her middle school. Both schools were terrible. At the elementary school, the school cafeteria was chaotic, kids running wild and fighting with virtually no adult supervision. The school’s principal proved very difficult to engage and its teachers seemed to take an awful lot of time off. On doing her own investigation of Najya’s reading and maths scores, Hannah-Jones discovered that nobody had been checking her error-riddled work.
