Competence: The Lessons We’re Not Learning From Nikole Hannah-Jones
I’m going to be impatient and blunt: Nikole Hannah-Jones’s daughter did not fail to learn fractions because she and her classmates were black. Her teacher did not repeatedly fail to show up to work because the school was segregated. Neither did her assignments go ungraded because affluent children attended school elsewhere. The report cards and grades she received that concealed her elementary-level deficiencies were not caused by insufficient funding. These failures—all of them—were evidence of incompetence.
The injustice in Najya’s story is not that her school enrolled mostly poor minority children. It is that a school serving these children—an astonishingly well-fundedschool—was permitted to function this poorly.
A competently managed school puts a qualified teacher in front of children every day. When that teacher is absent, it has a plan for maintaining instruction. Teachers are expected to assign work, examine it, and provide feedback to students. They assess what children know and can do. Grades and report cards convey meaningful information to students and parents. When a child falls behind, someone notices and intervenes. Principals are responsible for making sure those things happen.
All of this should be obvious, yet has gone almost entirely unremarked upon in the voluminous response to Hannah-Jones’s recent essay about her daughter’s education. The piece has renewed arguments about integration, school choice, hypocrisy, parenting, and whether Hannah-Jones deserves credit for admitting that the decision she defended so passionately and aggressively harmed her daughter. But we should make sure not to lose sight of two more important lessons. The first concerns the stunning degree to which debates about education take institutional competence for granted. The second concerns a generation of education reformers who, whatever their overconfident mistakes, would have recognized instantly the failures Hannah-Jones describes and refused to excuse them.
The response to Hannah-Jones’s essay has been remarkably generous. She has been praised effusivelyfor the candor and courage required to admit that the choice she made for her daughter was a mistake. The praise is undeserved. Bravery requires more than confessing error after its consequences become impossible to ignore. Hannah-Jones did not merely make a private decision about her own child. She used her considerable influence to turn that decision into a moral argument. For years, she mocked, condescended to, or condemned parents and education reformers who believed disadvantaged children should not have to wait for some larger social transformation before receiving a decent education. She treated parents who sought out better schools for their own children as not merely making a different choice, but perpetuating inequities.
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More.
“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked.
Madison’s district, despite an elite university pipeline, hypereducated leadership, and a shiny, new strategic plan, suffers the same frailties as Milwaukee’s: basement performance, backbreaking spending. But while Milwaukee is pulling out of its tailspin due to courageouschoices from the top, Madison is ponderously ambling to nowhere. Just ask the locals. “You need the marketing, and you need the product,” as a parent told a reporter. “I’m missing the product.”
2025-2026 Madison 4k-3rd grade Early Literacy Screener report: The bar moves faster than the kids.
Joe Gothard, Becky Kundert and Sonia Spencer Remarks on Madison’s K-12 Literacy Crisis.
2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues to grow, fueled by a 9.7% (!) property tax increase. Total spending will be at least $706,000,000 for 25,003 students, or $28,236 per student.
May 2026 Madison School District Presentation: 7,095 adults for 25,003 students (3.52 students per adult!)
2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.
Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024
Where have all the students gone?
3,887 Madison 4 year old to third grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.
Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students; $pending > $26k per student!
Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability
The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic.
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
China’s PhD Glut Drives Top Graduates to High School Teaching Jobs
