I’m an NYC dad — here’s what Nikole Hannah-Jones – Latest News
Superstar New York Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones confessed to the world this week how she sacrificed her daughter Najya to her own political project.
She despatched her solely little one to low-income, low-performing, predominantly black Brooklyn faculties “based on the collective good” — not on Najya’s wants.
Almost from the start, Hannah-Jones writes in a now-viral essay, her daughter hated the chaos at lunch and the laxity in her lecture rooms.
And she was proper to object: When Hannah-Jones lastly allowed Najya to attend a screened high college, it turned out she had “huge gaps” in math fundamentals and examine expertise “that she should have learned in elementary school.”
Najya’s own phrases are heartbreaking: “Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she requested her mother.
As a New York City public-school mother or father myself, what strikes me about Hannah-Jones’ narrative is how deeply she appears to attach racial and income demographics with college high quality.
She writes as if whiter and wealthier faculties are essentially higher ones.
But that’s merely not the case.
My own children are growing up in Title I, majority-Latino faculties the place their training has been good to wonderful.
Their expertise exhibits it’s not demographics that drive instructional failure.
Their academics are passionate and dedicated.
Their elementary-school principal moved heaven and earth to reopen for in-person instruction during COVID as early as attainable.
Their middle-school principal, now retiring, remodeled the borough-wide college into a Regents powerhouse.
Now, as we navigate high-school purposes, our oldest is looking for out exactly the identical rigor and problem that Najya herself longed for.
But I may also say that one facet of Hannah-Jones’ critique is brilliantly appropriate.
The rich liberals who spent a decade beating their breasts about their own alleged complicity in “white supremacy” will bear any burden and pay any price to keep away from educating their youngsters in the identical faculties as lower-income black and Latino children — no matter how high-quality these faculties could also be.
My children’ bilingual elementary training has provoked any quantity of obliquely racist feedback from numerous “progressive” dad and mom in my neighborhood.
One acquaintance was horrified that we’d ask our non-Spanish-speaking children to (as she put it) “compete” in such a setup.
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A fellow dad merely requested, with a pause drawn out to spectacular size, “So . . . what’s that like?”
Combine such racial and sophistication biases with an utter lack of accountability for failing faculties and ever-eroding tutorial requirements, and also you’ve acquired the recipe for a perverse system through which the chief exponents of inclusion turn out to be exclusionists par excellence.
Yet the reply will not be, as Hannah-Jones suggests, to toss apart what remaining tutorial requirements stay.
After all, she will be able to’t truthfully blame nebulous racists for the underperformance of black and Latino children in NYC’s conventional public-school system: Mississippi, that former training backwater the place the KKK murdered civil-rights activists within dwelling reminiscence, has now raised its black college students’ 4th-grade studying and math NAEP scores to 3rd amongst friends within the nation.
Even within New York, constitution faculties show that lower-income black and Latino college students can close the hole.
Recall, too, that New York spends more than every other jurisdiction per scholar in America.
The elementary college Najya attended, PS 307, notches more than $52,000 in per-student funding, larger than the median US particular person income.
This will not be a useful resource disaster.
So: what to do?
New York should vastly increase the quantity of screened faculties, an important aspect in reaching the sort of outcomes Hannah-Jones (and each different loving mother or father) desires for his or her little one.
It should raise and harden tutorial requirements from the earliest years, with actual penalties for failure to realize mastery.
It should create faculties the place children who are usually not academically gifted will flourish.
It should break the back of the unions and the DOE paperwork — chief patrons of academics who don’t educate and directors who don’t administer.
Addressing these true drivers of inequity gained’t be simple.
But take a look at Najya’s tragedy, which occurred though she had a well-off, well-connected, highly effective mom to advocate for her.
Imagine what the numerous others who lack entry to that energy and privilege undergo.
Hannah-Jones locates the trigger of this disaster in macrosocial components.
She ends her essay with a memorable assertion that she — and her reader, and everybody else — are all contaminated with a common guilt.
That’s psychologically comprehensible: To be a mother or father is to undergo never-ending doubts about your parenting selections.
Yet close to the story’s starting, she lands on a reality that unusually doesn’t resurface: “Students respond to the high or low expectations of institutions and the grown-ups who operate them.”
That is the motto of a actually simply public training system.
Sam Munson’s most up-to-date novel is “The Sofa” (2025).
