Nikole Hannah-Jones is the author of the infamous and widely discredited “1619 Project”. Most American historians have repudiated the creative but wildly inaccurate telling of American history. She is very race conscious and she’s a Marxist.
Despite Hannah-Jones and her husband being highly educated, they decided to send their child to a poor, mostly black school with low test scores. A leader of the woke left learned a hard lesson – sort of.
Hannah-Jones wrote in The New York Times, “Faraji and I felt an obligation to make educational decisions based on the collective good and not just our individual advantage.”
She put society’s interests ahead of her daughter’s, and her daughter discovered her school was failing and became furious with her mother.
Betrayal
Her child, Najya, felt betrayed.
“So you had money to send me to one of the best schools, and you chose not to?” she said, hurling her words. “Because other kids are disadvantaged, you didn’t want to put me in a great school?”
Najya was asking what I’d accomplished by not choosing the “best” school for her. And the honest answer is, I don’t know. When it comes to the choices my husband and I have made about public education, I feel like I’ve failed both my values and my child.
Hannah-Jones writes frankly and openly admits her failures in part.
“A New York Times reporter in a high-poverty school f**king changes the school, right?” Joens wrote. “There are just certain things that are not going to happen in that school. I can go to that school and say there’s a problem and it gets fixed immediately.”
She probably didn’t fix it. It’s beyond phone calls from a New York Times writer.
Hannah-Jones and her husband confronted the school and often didn’t get what they wanted; other times, they kind of did, but not really.
The Teachers Weren’t Doing Their Job
She described teachers who didn’t perform mandatory assessments but assumed the black children weren’t performing and wrote evaluations based on feelings and attitudes. Hannah-Jones dealt with checked-out administrators and teachers.
Her child’s teacher didn’t check her work, and it was filled with uncorrected errors.
The middle school was better. Her daughter did well and excelled in math. But by ninth grade, she chose to go to the white school.
She writes about the transition from elementary school to a middle school with an excellent principal who eliminated homework. Her daughter thrived and excelled in math. But in ninth grade, her daughter chose to go to a mostly white school.
She was met with some “casual racism,” as her mother put it.
The High-Poverty Schools Don’t Have What They Need
They came to the conclusion that the white and Asian kids weren’t necessarily smarter; they just had more and better-equipped schools.
In the end, she put her child in a high-poverty school when she could have put her child in a good school. Her child was angry with her because she wanted to stand up for the common good.
She saw it as a problem of wealthy white schools being responsible, and wants integration. We tried that, and it didn’t work. She is ignoring the problem of people with radical agendas, rotten teacher unions, and children with inattentive parents.
She deserves a lot of credit for her honesty, but the children shouldn’t have to go to a white school to get educated. Those schools need better staff, more staff, and they need to do their job.
Instead of school choice, she put her child at risk for the greater good. Some schools are failing, and minority children aren’t being properly educated. She’s absolutely correct, but she talks about teachers who don’t get back to her, don’t do the assessments, but rate the children anyway. That’s poor management, a lack of commitment, or perhaps insufficient support. She could still get involved in that school and push for change.
What a loss of generations of children.