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Coleman Hughes,"Lessons from Nikole Hannah-Jones’ School Experiment"

The creator of the 1619 Project sent her young daughter to a struggling public school, convinced that upper-middle-class parents could lift it up. A decade later, the results are in.

It is a sad reality of the modern era that when an ideological opponent admits they made a terrible mistake, most people are tempted to kick them while they’re down. This exact situation has arisen with Nikole Hannah-Jones’ latest essay in The New York Times Magazine, which returns to a decision she wrote about a decade ago in a viral piece called “Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City.” In it, she explained why she was sending her black, 4-year-old daughter Najya to a bad public school when she could have sent her to a good one, or even to a private school. Now she’s telling a different story about how that choice played out.

At the time, Hannah-Jones’ rationale was that bad schools are caused by a lack of upper-middle-class parents. Those parents, she argued, have the resources and connections to lobby on behalf of the entire student body (including poorer students from dysfunctional families), raise additional funding, and generally improve the quality of the education for all. As an upper-middle-class parent herself, Hannah-Jones—best known as the face of the Times’ 1619 Project—felt she had an obligation to be part of the solution, which meant sending Najya to a bad school. On the progressive left, her experiment read as noble. To everyone else, it was madness.

Ten years later the results are in, and the skeptics have run the table. By Hannah-Jones’ own account, her presence didn’t lift up the Brooklyn school; the school dragged down her daughter, and barely seemed to notice she was there.

When Najya was in third grade, Hannah-Jones decided to visit her school at lunchtime and found that kids were sitting there with “no lunch and no adult supervision.” Other kids were “running wild, chasing, hitting, and pushing each other while the teacher’s aides and cafeteria workers stood by looking bored.” At a private school this would be an emergency that led to immediate firings. At a dysfunctional public school, it’s just another day. Hannah-Jones was left trying to lobby an absentee principal who “regularly wouldn’t engage with [her] or wasn’t in the building at all.”

One of Najya’s third-grade teachers was frequently absent, and the substitute teacher either wasn’t teaching anything or wasn’t there at all. On another occasion, Hannah-Jones discovered that Najya’s math homework wasn’t being graded, so she had assumed Najya was good at math when in fact she was failing. Her writing assignments, meanwhile, “were rife with uncorrected punctuation, capitalization, and grammar errors.” By middle school, Najya was receiving no homework whatsoever and was upset about it. Think about how tragic that is. She wanted homework, but her public school teachers were too incompetent to give her any.

The right response to someone who publicly admits a painful mistake is not to gloat—it is to take the admission seriously enough to learn from it.

I could fill this entire piece with similar anecdotes from her essay, but you get the gist. It’s not that kids like Najya get a subpar education; they get no education, period. What we call “underperforming public schools” are not schools; they’re government-funded daycare centers, and not very good ones at that. When Najya finally left her failing school for a selective, mostly white public high school she chose herself, she struggled mightily with the adjustment.

I know something about adjustments like that, though my version was far milder than hers. I went from a very good public school in which black students constituted maybe 30 percent of my class to a private school where I was one of four black kids in a class of 50 or so. By ninth grade, I was the only black boy in the class.

Two things from that transition stand out. The first was academic shock. At public school, I was effortlessly at the top of every class. I thought I had been working hard, but the truth is I had no idea what hard work even meant. I had never been forced to work the muscles of my mind to failure, and so I had never seen the growth that lives on the other side of that pain. Public school and private school were on two different levels entirely, and that’s when the public schools were good.

The second was a degree of alienation. As I described in my book The End of Race Politics, white kids would simply not stop touching my Afro at the private school. They never did it with malice and they were never laughing at me. They were just fascinated by it, endlessly so. Eventually I just cut it off because it became so annoying. That wouldn’t have ever happened at my public school, where Afros were hardly a novelty.

Progressives like Hannah-Jones are taught to process this kind of experience as “racist.” But it genuinely wasn’t, and the leap to frame it that way helps no one, least of all the kid experiencing it. It is those kinds of experiences that a black kid in a mostly white environment will have to negotiate. It’s a small price to pay for a better education. But the transition only gets harder with age, which is why it’s better to get one’s kids into the best educational settings as young as possible. If my experience is any guide, had Najya switched from a failing “segregated school” to a better school when she was much younger, it’s possible that she would have learned to negotiate those alienating situations with greater ease.

But my story is a footnote to hers, and hers carries far more weight. Read carefully, Hannah-Jones’ essay works like an Aesop’s fable for progressives, except that instead of teaching one moral, it teaches several.

The first lesson is this: All policy solutions have to accommodate the brute facts of human nature. Nothing is more ingrained in human nature than the desire of parents to seek the absolute best for their kids. Yet for decades, when parents who happen to be white make these defensible choices, they’ve been accused of “white flight” (which is academese for “racism”), because the best schools tend to be majority white and Asian. But it’s not racist or classist or any other “-ist” to pick the best school for your child. And any policy solution that requires parents to deliberately harm their kids’ prospects is not a solution at all.

The second lesson is that the teachers unions, by making bad teachers unfireable, are the primary obstacle to improving schools. Consider who the villains in Najya’s story are. They are the teachers who did not assign homework; the teachers who didn’t show up to class; and the teachers who “often rewarded. . . the ‘problem’ students for doing the littlest things right” (meanwhile, the students who always did what they were supposed to went unrecognized); the teachers who “stopped calling on her” in class; the staff who sat by idly as kids tore each other apart in the cafeteria; the absentee principal who couldn’t be bothered to respond to emails. All of these people are protected by the union, unfireable except for the gravest of offenses. Yet it is Democrats, who generally consider themselves to be on the side of the kids at schools like Najya’s, who doggedly protect (and take money from) the teachers union.

What keeps this arrangement intact is a myth, one Hannah-Jones still seems to believe: that the problem is a lack of funding. This hasn’t been true for a very long time. PS 307, where Najya experienced most of this dysfunction, spends over $50K per pupil—far above the national average, and even New York City’s average. The myth of underfunded schools lets progressives avoid a harder conclusion: that their pro-union politics are fundamentally incompatible with their stated desire to close educational gaps for low-income black and Hispanic kids. As long as that myth persists, no progress will be made.

The third lesson concerns the strange moral status of privilege on the left. In the progressive prestige economy, you’re supposed to feel squeamish about sending your kid to the mostly white and Asian public school, but not about sending the same kid to Harvard at 18. Why? The best explanation I’ve found is an old Louis C.K. joke about drugs: “If you want to enjoy drugs, never do them. Never. Because then when you do, they’re actually fun.” Left-wing American culture runs on a similar logic. Stay as non-elite as possible through childhood and adolescence, so that when you finally become an elite as an adult, you can enjoy it with a clear conscience. You can have the top one-percent lifestyle and egalitarian ideals at the same time. The corollary of this mindset is that there’s something morally suspect about having a great childhood, the best education money can buy, and a straight shot to success. But shouldn’t we hold that up as the standard, and try to bring others up to meet it?

This habit of fetishizing the downtrodden would be merely ironic if it stayed in the realm of personal morality. But it infects school reform too, and that is the fourth lesson. When Najya complains about the few disruptive kids in class who are preventing everyone else from learning, the progressive instinct is to immediately defend those troublemakers rather than the rest of the class. Even Hannah-Jones, conveying this complaint directly from her own daughter, has to couch it in sympathy for the very kids whose presence in the classroom her daughter was lamenting, and takes a swipe at schools that “rely on a zero-tolerance disciplinary playbook and often simply remove misbehaving students from classrooms, depriving them of precious educational time they cannot afford to miss.” Her own daughter is the one being deprived of that precious educational time, but Hannah-Jones still worries more about the troublemakers than about her. In the progressive worldview, whoever is behaving the worst is by definition the person we’re most obliged to coddle, to understand, to excuse.

It’s not that kids like Najya get a subpar education; they get no education, period.

Although most of the lessons to be drawn from Hannah-Jones’ essay apply to progressives, the political right does not get off scot-free either. Consider the argument of the hereditarians. The lesson that many people draw from the work of scholars like Charles Murray and Nathan Cofnas is essentially, “We’ve tried everything to raise the test scores (including IQ) of blacks and Hispanics, and nothing works.” As Murray wrote about the black-white IQ gap in a Commentary essay from 2005:

The conventional environmental explanation of the black-white difference is inadequate. Poverty, bad schools, and racism, which seem such obvious culprits, do not explain it. Insofar as the environment is the cause, it is not the sort of environment we know how to change, and we have tried every practical remedy that anyone has been able to think of.

In light of accounts like Najya’s, how confident are we that we’ve tried everything? Have we tried a nationwide dose of schools that actually assign homework, where teachers show up to class every day, where disruptive kids are removed, where lunch is actually served, where principals who don’t respond to emails get fired and replaced? Have we ever tried a nationwide dose of what wealthier kids would consider a basic education? And if we haven’t, then how can the hereditarians be so confident?

There is good reason to think we haven’t, because when someone has tried, it has worked. Roland Fryer, for instance, took over some of the lowest-performing public schools in Houston, imported commonsense policies from the most successful charter schools, and produced real, measurable test score gains. If every poor student in America got this kind of education K–12, it’s hard to imagine our country would not be in significantly better shape on every question of racial inequality.

Which brings me back to where I started. It would be easy to treat Hannah-Jones’ essay as a gotcha, and plenty of people will. But the right response to someone who publicly admits a painful mistake is not to gloat—it is to take the admission seriously enough to learn from it. The lesson of Najya’s story is not that some children can’t be educated. It is that we’ve been running an experiment on millions of kids like her, in schools where homework goes ungraded, teachers don’t show up, and no one can be fired, and then blaming the results on everything except the experiment itself. Hannah-Jones had the means to pull her daughter out. Most parents in those schools don’t. The least the rest of us can do is stop calling what those kids are getting an education, and start giving them one.

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