Nikole Hannah-Jones Faced Too Much Apathy to Win
Fixing troubled schools requires collective action, and no one should underestimate the difficulty.
Every parent can empathize with the wrenching, humiliating experience of trying to do what’s best while only making things worse. But very few could stomach discussing these failures publicly. One recent exception is the New York Times Magazine writer Nikole Hannah-Jones, who this week published a self-excoriating essay titled: “In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?” In it, Hannah-Jones lays out the consequences of enrolling her daughter in troubled New York City neighborhood schools for the sake of “upending the status quo.”
By the time her daughter, Najya, was ready for high school, she wanted to go to one that tested for admissions and was, despite the city’s demographics, majority white and Asian—“the type of public schools I had spent my career arguing against,” Hannah-Jones writes. Toward the end of the article, her daughter makes a simple plea to her mother: “Sometimes I wish instead of always thinking about other kids, you would have thought about me. I never really got the education I wanted.”
Every parent tries to pass along a sense of right and wrong, of morality and virtue. Just as a religious family might send a child to a parochial school, Hannah-Jones saw education as a way to transmit her social-justice values. Her daughter would be a pioneer for equity in education, like the first Black students who integrated white schools in the civil-rights era. The goal was laudable, but the failure to achieve it suggests that even committed parents cannot, on their own, overcome all of the factors that keep a troubled school from becoming an excellent one—a dearth of leadership, the commitment of its teachers, and the behavior of other students.
The most crucial misjudgment Hannah-Jones and her husband made was underestimating the difficulty of collective action. By sticking to local schools in spite of their failings, Hannah-Jones believed she could help fix them from within. Her perseverance and diligence and status as a celebrated education reporter would spur other parents into action and force administrators to address problems. Almost from the outset, though, the family confronted a level of apathy that they could not overcome. Hannah-Jones writes that in the first grade, her daughter, always bright, said she didn’t like school because of lunchroom chaos, in which students would fight unsupervised. In the third grade, her daughter’s teacher frequently missed class. Hannah-Jones discovered that teachers failed to look at her daughter’s classwork, much less correct it.
The task that Hannah-Jones set for herself was monumental: Transforming schools with high poverty rates and without a track record of excellence is not impossible, but it requires serious, systemic changes—sometimes in ways that large urban school districts, which are generally well funded, are resistant to. Mississippi has, despite its poverty and legacy of segregation, significantly improved its reading scores (by one measure, to the top in the country) by instituting an intensive literacy intervention that changed curricula, provided literacy coaches, and, perhaps most important, held back struggling elementary-school students instead of allowing social promotion.
Some big-city schools have proved capable of cutting through the problems of administrative apathy and parental powerlessness. So-called high-performance charter schools—such as the Promise Academy, part of the Harlem Children’s Zone, a nonprofit anti-poverty initiative—have demonstrated considerable success in raising not just test scores but also college-admissions rates. These results have been validated using the gold standard of social-science evidence: lottery studies that compare students randomly chosen for these schools with those who missed out. Urban charter schools run by experienced school networks, and tightly regulated by watchful districts, have proved again and again to be capable of improving educational outcomes for exactly the kinds of children—poor, minority, those with special needs—that the traditional public-school system struggles with. Advocates for traditional public schools, especially their unionized teaching force, object to charters because dollars follow students out their classroom doors.
Hannah-Jones was one of the most prominent doubters of these attempted education reforms. In a 2018 speech in Philadelphia, she argued that charter schools, standardized testing, and other efforts were all failures. “The one thing that works is integration, and that’s the one thing that’s always off the table,” she said. “We choose not to do it.”
As Najya got older, Hannah-Jones spurned the selective middle schools that require testing for entry, because “in reality the screens are part of a tawdry bargain to keep a dwindling number of white and wealthier parents from exiting the public school system.” Instead Najya went to a middle school that shared her parents’ values, focusing on educating low-income students without harsh disciplinary measures. As with her elementary school, homework was never assigned. According to Hannah-Jones, Najya complained that disruptive students were showered with praise for the barest displays of restraint, while she and other academically inclined students dawdled.
The experiment finally unraveled when Najya overrode her mother’s preferences and decided to attend a challenging high school. Although the presence of one additional Black student there may have marginally increased racial integration, it reinforced segregation by class and parental privilege. This part of the story helps explain why our education system is stratified in the way that it is: not because people are immoral or heartless about oppression, but because they want what is best for their children. Those who want better and have the means to achieve it almost always will do so—whether by moving, enrolling in a charter school, or withdrawing to the private-school system. Asking that parents hold fast to their local public schools, even if the shortcomings are too serious to ignore, is too much to ask.
Fortunately, Hannah-Jones’s daughter has a plucky sense of skepticism. In high school, she learned that she was far behind in algebra—a subject she thought she understood. Her foundational knowledge turned out to have gaping holes, previously papered over by the glowing grades she received in middle school. Hannah-Jones and her husband arranged for private tutoring.
None of this means that Hannah-Jones was wrong to strive against the social processes she has spent her career arguing against. Integration is important, and is beneficial educationally and for social cohesion. Achieving it remains a difficult problem. In no small part because the proportion of American children who are white keeps falling, Black students’ exposure to white peers in schools has been declining for decades. As the Stanford sociologist Sean Reardon has documented, class segregation, between the children of rich and poor families, has increased substantially. Segregation in schools is largely driven by segregation in neighborhoods, a process that cannot be reversed by the actions of a single pioneering family.
Hannah-Jones has given her readers a firsthand illustration of why parents make the decisions that collectively lead to the educational inequalities we observe today. Perhaps in this light, the gifted-and-talented programs and selective schools she dismissed as a “tawdry bargain” to keep white or wealthy parents from fleeing look more forgivable. To have parents willing to pay for private tutoring, even to care deeply about one’s education, is a privilege not afforded to every child. Still, it is perhaps the least shameful privilege I can imagine exercising. Hannah-Jones’s public mea culpa deserves respect. Yet so do the policy makers and reformers whose views do not align with her own, and so do the parents who—just like her—try only to make the best decisions for their children.
