I have a new all-time favorite article dealing with education. Until last week, that title was held by a story in The Nation back in 2011 about a New York City elementary school drama teacher (who knew that 1st graders need to learn about drama) who quit his full-time position to return to college. He enrolled at the University of Connecticut, borrowing 35-thousand dollars to earn a Masters degree in…..puppetry. Needless to say, after graduating with that amount of student loan debt, the guy immediately found out that there is literally no demand for puppeteers–and that he was NOT going to be able to afford to pay back his student loans. To add insult to injury, he couldn’t even get his old job back, probably because someone in the New York Public School system realized the money spent on drama instruction for 7-year olds might be better spent on teaching those kids how to read. The only reason this guy was featured in the story is because he had so much spare time on his hands that he became a regular in the “Occupy Wall Street” protests in the fall of 2011–blaming the “1%” for not being able to pursue his dream of “puppeting”.
But now that article has been usurped from its position at the top of my favorite education stories by one published in the New York Times last week by Nikole Hannah-Jones. If that name sounds somewhat familiar, it’s because Hannah-Jones is also the author of the “1619 Project”, wherein she tries to make an argument that the true “founding of America” took place when the first African slaves were brought to North America. She goes on to claim that everything that has happened in American history since that day needs to be viewed through the lens of slavery and anti-Black racism–even the Union’s intentions in the Civil War. Given the timing of its publication in the wake of the George Floyd murder, it was promoted so heavily that a school curriculum based on its flimsy research was developed and sold to many districts across the country. (Editors note: Even some of the historians cited in the “1619 Project” have since distanced themselves from it.)
But before the “1619 Project”, Hannah-Jones gained prominence by writing an opinion piece ten years ago declaring to the entire world that despite the income and social standing that she and her husband enjoyed, they would not take part in the highly-competitive open-enrollment system used by the New York City public schools. After ranting on about inequal funding for majority-minority schools in the city, and chastising white parents for choosing private schools, or getting tutors for their children to ace entrance exams for high-ranking public schools (but never directly calling out Black parents for doing the same thing), Hannah-Jones openly admitted that she was going to use her only child as a social experiment by keeping her in the low-performing neighborhood elementary school by choice.
At the time, Hannah-Jones defended the decision by saying that taking her child–with all of the advantages afforded her by her parents–out of the neighborhood school would only make things “worse” for the kids left behind. And if more Black (and maybe white) parents saw that her child could succeed in a low-performing school, they would be inspired to do the same with their kids–and magically, things would eventually get better (all thanks to her).
So for ten years, Hannah-Jones’ daughter went on her public education journey, and I can’t seem to find any updates from her mother about her progress–until last week. That’s when the article entitled “In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?” hit the Times website. And based on the content of that article, I can see why Hannah-Jones wasn’t sharing a lot of details on the social experiment. In a nutshell, it didn’t go that well–and more importantly, the now-16-year old daughter resents the decisions made by her parents.
First off, Hannah-Jones does deserve credit for finally giving us a follow-up, even it paints her in a somewhat-negative light. It would have been easy to suddenly decide “privacy” was more important that making public statements, or sugar-coating the past decade in an article slanted toward the “bravery” of a little girl “overcoming the forces of racism to become a rising star”. Instead, Hannah-Jones paints an accurate picture of the urban public school experience that can easily overwhelm and crush even the most gifted of learners.
In describing her daughter’s elementary school experience, Hannah-Jones details a day where she visited the building during the lunch hour, describing an out-of-control environment where kids are running wild in the cafeteria, few of them are actually eating the meals provided, and none of the adults “supervising” are doing anything. There is another experience where Hannah-Jones spends weeks asking for the math work her daughter has been doing in class to check on her progress, only to find that none of the worksheets were even graded by the teacher–and that her daughter, who “loved math because she was good at it”, actually was getting most of the problems wrong. And Hannah-Jones expresses her frustration in getting teachers and administrators to even interact with her and listen to her concerns.
Despite all of those struggles, when it came time to decide where their daughter would attend middle school, Hannah-Jones and her husband stuck with their plan, and kept the child in a low-performing neighborhood school again–hoping that a very optimistic principal there would produce better results. Spoiler alert, it did not. Hannah-Jones continued to express an inability to get in contact with administrators, a lack of homework assigned to students, and grading systems that did not reflect actual learning. More on that in a moment.
It is in 8th grade that the daughter starts to question her parents about the decisions they had made for her. She and her friends start searching on the internet for test scores and ratings of schools and find out they are going to one of the “worst” schools in the city. She directly confronts her mother asking “why did you make me go to a terrible school?” It’s not clear if Hannah-Jones’ daughter read an on-line copy of the original story–but even after getting the explanation from her mom, the girl remains bitter. Perhaps to placate her, Hannah-Jones and her husband allowed the daughter to apply for the most-competitive high schools in the city outside of her attendance district–and she is accepted to her first choice, which has a predominantly white student body. But that is where the reality of her situation really hits home.
New York City requires all kids to learn algebra in 8th grade, because studies show that kids who take algebra prior to going to high school have a higher rate of success in getting into college. Hannah-Jones daughter got an “A” in 8th grade algebra–but as she would learn at the more-competitive high school–she didn’t actually know how to do algebra. You see, her middle school had graded on a curve–and she had performed the best in a classroom full of students that didn’t really understand algebra either. The more-competitive high school gave kids homework. The girl struggled to do it without the help of a teacher by her side. The “honor roll” middle school student was at risk of failing her classes. And that is when Hannah-Jones and her husband had to make more concessions, paying for a tutor to teach their child what she should have known years ago.
I do not have children of my own, so I don’t read this article through the lens of personal experience with public schools. But I can read the article through the lens of someone who has sat through hundreds, if not thousands, of public school board meetings–where the policies, curricula, and expectations for students have been set. And I can tell you that in an ironic twist, what Hannah-Jones saw as a failure in the system is actually the result of the “equity” and “anti-racism” efforts that she strongly supports.
A lack of discipline for out-of-control kids causing chaos in the cafeteria? Let me play back hours of school board discussions about “trauma-informed discipline” where all effort goes into not punishing kids for bad behavior that makes it harder for their classmates to learn. Or we can listen to complaints from activists and board members about higher rates of discipline against students of color than for white students, causing administrators to pay closer attention to numbers and ratios than dealing with individual incidents as warranted, regardless of the race of the offender.
Can’t understand why teachers don’t assign homework anymore? Let me play back some tape of administrators and teachers telling school boards that “not all children have the support systems at home to do homework”, so to expect them to complete assignments outside the classroom or study hall is “unfair”. Therefore, in the effort to achieve “equity”, every other child that could use the learning reinforcement provided by homework loses that opportunity.
Upset teachers and administrators don’t want to meet with you as a parent? Plow through thousands of hours of videos of administrators, teachers, and school board members talking about education and never once mentioning the role of parents in the process. Go to schools that make it harder for parents to gain access to the building than food delivery service drivers. Review debates by school boards to do away with public comment at their meetings because the people that come say stuff board members don’t want to hear.
Don’t know how kids that can’t grasp the basic concepts of things like math and reading can not only move on to the next grade but also be “honor roll students”? Try to have a discussion with a teacher or administrator about the failure of “social promotion”. Prepare to be lectured on how its far more important for a child to “feel good about themselves” by continuing to move up in grades with their friends than it is for them to reach the basic proficiency of every grade. You’ve likely heard of the “Mississippi Miracle”–where one of the poorest states in the country has seen the biggest increases in reading scores in recent years. While much of that is due to returning to phonetic reading instruction, Mississippi also “holds back” kids that are not at the required proficiency levels by the end of third grade–because testing for that starts in 4th grade. Or you can read countless articles about grade inflation, or changes to strictly “pass/fail” grading in core classes just to keep kids moving along with transcripts that can get them into a college where they are all but set up to fail.
While Nikole Hannah-Jones applauds herself for taking an active role in her child’s education (well, outside of actually making sure she was learning what she needed to learn) in her latest article, she fails to question why no other parents at the “failing schools” are doing the same? She never details going to a school board meeting where targets and goals for student achievement are being discussed and demanding that the be more demanding. And while she continued to write articles about “underfunding” of public schools and the damage done by charter schools and school choice programs–Hannah-Jones has never called out her fellow parents failing to make education a priority for their child or for taking that same active role.
In the end, Hannah-Jones issues no apologies for the decisions she and her husband have made. While she continues to claim that New York City schools are underfunded (by the way, they spend 44-thousand dollars per student there–three times the 14-thousand dollars spent per pupil in the Appleton School District), she grudgingly admits that the forces determining the outcomes in many public schools are beyond her control (although, calling out, very publicly with the platform afforded her, the failures of the systems put in place by many who support her own beliefs could go a long way toward improving those outcomes).
Meanwhile, Hannah-Jones daughter will soon be applying for colleges. It would be delicious irony if she choose schools like Hillsdale College, or Liberty University, or Brigham Young–so that her education is no longer just a “social experiment” perpetrated by her mother for content and clout. Plus, at those schools she’s guaranteed not to be subjugated to curriculum based on her mother’s previous atrocious writing.
