Did a New York Times writer ‘betray’ her child?

Nikole Hannah-Jones’ school experiment reads like “an Aesop’s fable for progressives,” said Coleman Hughes in The Free Press. Ten years ago, the New York Times journalist wrote a viral essay explaining why she’d enrolled her 6-year-old daughter, Najya, in an underperforming, majority-Black public school. Better public schools were available near her Brooklyn home, and she and her husband could afford to go private. But Hannah-Jones—best known as creator of the Times’ “1619 Project”—felt an “obligation to be part of the struggle” against racial and class stratification, and believed that her daughter’s presence would help improve the failing school. Ten years on, Hannah-Jones has written a viral follow-up, headlined “In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?” Far from lifting up the school, we discover, Najya was “dragged down” by it. Hannah-Jones recounts how assignments went ungraded and disruptive students monopolized the attention of teachers—on the rare occasions those teachers weren’t absent. At Najya’s middle school, there was “no homework whatsoever.” When Najya eventually chose and tested into a majority white and Asian high school, she was woefully unprepared. Now 16, Najya feels cheated by her mother’s choices. “Sometimes I wish instead of always thinking about other kids,” she told Nikole, “you would have thought about me.”

Hannah-Jones should feel no guilt, said Jenice Armstrong in The Philadelphia Inquirer. Unlike most of us, she found the courage to “practice her principles,” but faced the same “no-win choice” as many “socially conscious Black parents.” Do we send our kids to neighborhood schools, struggling after decades of “systemic” neglect? Or do we pull strings and write checks to access schools in whiter, more affluent zip codes, condemning our kids to “social isolation and subtle discrimination?” Najya is now getting A’s and B’s, Hannah-Jones writes, but in classrooms where kids toss around “racial slurs as if it were cool.”

Those trade-offs are real and agonizing, said Elizabeth Grace Matthew in USA Today. But Hannah-Jones is “evading the truth” about why her daughter’s schools were so bad. She handwaves at “racism” and “segregation” in progressive New York City, and at funding disparities between heavily white and nonwhite districts. But the worst of Najya’s schools spends $52,349 a student annually, far above the national average. Not mentioned by Hannah-Jones are the teachers’ unions that have built a system where their members can “do nothing and get paid.” Neither are the progressive “education professors” who decided tests, discipline, and academic rigor were all oppressive structures to be dismantled. Hannah-Jones helped promote this “faux-enlightened ideology,” even as her own daughter suffered its ravages.

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Let’s not overdramatize, said Noah Smith in his Substack newsletter. Judging by international test results, Americans are getting “pretty good value” from the money we spend on public education. If we want better value still, we should abandon our “obsession with shrinking class sizes” through hiring more teachers, and start paying higher salaries to better teachers who can make “a big difference in disadvantaged kids’ lives.” With the right policies, all our children can receive a high-quality education in classrooms filled with kids of all backgrounds, said Jill Filipovic in Slate. But we won’t get there if progressives demand “individual parents make intolerable sacrifices that set back the people they love most,” or if they insist “the only way to even the scales is by setting both sides to zero.”