KAROL MARKOWICZ: 1619 Project founder Nikole Hannah-Jones learned the hard truth about schools
Nikole Hannah-Jones, founder of the 1619 Project and winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, has written a blockbuster piece, "In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?" on the reality of sending her daughter Najya to failing schools in New York City.
Hannah-Jones, a domestic correspondent for The New York Times Magazine covering racial injustice and civil rights, had tried to live out her progressive values and sent her child to the local, deficient public school. Writing in 2016 for the magazine, she noted that her neighbors in the quickly gentrifying neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant were opting out of the local school. "I didn’t know any of our middle-class neighbors, black or white, who sent their children to one of these schools," Hannah-Jones shared.
Hannah-Jones did. Now, ten years later, Hannah-Jones’s latest piece shows that her project had been a failure, at the cost of her child’s education.
It’s a difficult read. Hannah-Jones wanted to live out her values, especially the belief that children should go to their local school and that school choice is unacceptable. But those ideas failed when they hit reality, and Hannah-Jones spent nearly a decade coming to accept that.
The column illustrates the struggles her daughter had at her elementary school, where teachers were disinterested and bad behavior went unpunished, and then in middle school, where homework went unchecked and standards were low.
Hannah-Jones believed that through her force of will, and her prominent position, which she mentions several times in the piece, she and her husband could improve these schools. What she’s missing is that it was her own misconceptions and bad ideas that got these schools into a bad position in the first place.
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In 2018, Hannah-Jones gave a keynote address at the Color of Education event, an annual summit in North Carolina "dedicated to achieving racial equity and eliminating racial disparities in the education system." She spoke about how terrible it was that White kids in North Carolina were choosing charter schools instead of public schools in places "like Wake County that for years was a model of integration."
So integration is good? But when a Black student in the audience asked Hannah-Jones for guidance on "navigating the predominantly white colleges and universities to which she has applied," Hannah-Jones was quick to respond that she should go to Howard University, a historically Black college or university (HBCU) because, well, integration is bad.
Hannah-Jones ended that talk with this line: "The future of our children and the nation depends on progressives winning the fight to reclaim public schools."
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Well, progressives reclaimed public schools in New York City. There’s no way to look at New York City schools as anything but the testing ground for the exact policies Hannah-Jones would want. Progressive Mayor Bill de Blasio removed "screens" — competitive benchmarks such as attendance, grades and test scores for middle school admissions — during COVID-19, and the practice was maintained by the next mayor, Eric Adams.
The schools are heavily influenced by teachers’ unions. Hannah-Jones opposes gifted and talented programs, and they have been severely reduced, no longer using entrance tests. New York City public schools also follow the practices that Hannah-Jones would want regarding kids with behavioral issues. And, with New York’s longtime cap on charter schools, most kids are trapped there with no other options.
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But Hannah-Jones never accounts for her own bad ideas and how they fail in real life. When her daughter fails the state algebra test, it’s because standardized tests are unfair. She never once mentions teachers’ unions as the culprits behind why atrocious teachers and administrators remain at these schools, unable to be fired. When school choice is mentioned at all, it’s presented as the reason the middle school that was unsuccessful in teaching her very capable daughter was failing.
When Hannah-Jones confronts her daughter’s middle school principal with the reality that her daughter didn’t get enough from her education, the principal, in tears, responded, "None of this surprises me. This is the reality of a segregated system, and it’s not just segregation by race and class, it’s by ability. This is the reality of school-choice systems."
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Yes, that’s the reality of school-choice systems, or it should be: Children who are capable and want to learn, and whose families make education a top priority, should be able to escape the kids who don’t want to be there and want to slow education down for everyone.
In her article for the New York Times, Hannah-Jones spends a lot of time on demographics and household income, but there is an entire network of charter schools in New York, called Success Academy, that produces far better results than public schools while serving student bodies of similar means.
At one point, Hannah-Jones visted her child’s elementary school lunchroom and found it to be pandemonium. She writes, "It was not the children that horrified me — kids of all incomes are rambunctious at lunchtime. It was the callous disregard of the adults. Students respond to the high or low expectations of institutions and the grown-ups who operate them, and it was clear that these children were getting the message."
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But somehow these expectations are not acceptable to have in the classroom. Hannah-Jones described unruly kids being constantly "redirected" as "good educational practice. … Schools like hers tend to 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. But at Unison, teachers constantly worked to refocus students and mitigate conflict. This is good educational practice, but kids like Najya, who were just trying to do their work, saw this treatment as deeply unfair."
It’s not just unfair; it is actually bad educational practice to let a misbehaving child distract the teacher again and again. It’s bad educational practice to allow one child to set an example that bad behavior will be met with no discipline. It’s bad educational practice to allow the good students to compete for the teacher’s attention with a student who shouldn’t be in the classroom. Most of all, ineffective or disinterested teachers have to be fired, something that the teachers’ unions, which ultimately run New York City schools with the support of people like Hannah-Jones, would never permit.
But none of this is allowed to be said in Hannah-Jones’ far-left world. If the school is failing, it’s because of racism, not because its leaders have embraced bad educational practices and allowed them to continue indefinitely.
The question has become why Hannah-Jones would air these grievances about New York City public schools when she knew what the response might be. The answer, we have to imagine, is that her daughter ultimately attends one of the very few New York City schools that have "screens."
Like progressive politicians such as Bill de Blasio or soon-to-be Congressman Brad Lander, Hannah-Jones had loudly opposed these kinds of schools except for her own child. Therein lies the rub: When progressive policies meet reality, they are almost always failures, and those at the top of the progressive hierarchy always manage to get their kids out.
If only the rest of us could escape those policies as deftly as those who push them.