“Schools for the poor are not poor schools”
HE “WOKE”, race-and-gender-focused ideology that peaked in 2020 had no leader, but Nikole Hannah-Jones has a strong claim to be its defining intellectual. A journalist for the New York Times Magazine, she wrote “The 1619 Project”, a revisionist history of America centred on slavery, and won plaudits for a story in 2016 about sending her daughter to a school with mostly poor, non-white pupils. Her latest article, published on September 20th, is a partial mea culpa that has triggered a torrent of anti-woke schadenfreude. It recounts her daughter’s subsequent ordeal of absent or neglectful teachers and rowdy classmates, and rage at the sacrifice of her education in the vain hope of fixing a broken system one child at a time.
Yet even as Ms Hannah-Jones takes personal responsibility for this “betrayal” of her child, she says little about the progressive-backed education policies that arguably contributed to the dysfunction of the schools her daughter attended. Moreover, the main explanation she provides for the schools’ failings is decades out of date.
Ms Hannah-Jones cites a study from 2019 by EdBuild, an advocacy group, reporting that “nationally, schools in predominantly non-white districts receive $23 billion less in annual funding than their heavily white counterparts”. From this she concludes that such schools’ poor test scores merely “reflect” this financial “disadvantage”. She could hardly have picked a worse example to support this claim than her daughter’s own Public School (PS) 307 in New York, which spent $52,349 per pupil in 2024-25, making it one of the best-funded schools in one of America’s highest-spending districts. And PS 307 is no exception, but rather an extreme example of the national pattern: state schools with the lowest shares of white pupils actually receive the most funding.
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“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked.
