For the second time in a week, The New York Times set everyone chattering with an education article. First, it was the dubious idea that California should turn its elite colleges into diploma mills. Someone actually wrote, in the paper of record, “Students on University of California campuses may struggle with basic math, but they are graduating at record rates.” Here’s Kelsey Piper on that.
This time it was a reflective article from Nikole Hannah-Jones revisiting, and questioning, the school choice she very publicly made for her daughter a decade ago.
In short, in another splashy Times article in 2016 Hannah-Jones announced she was sending her daughter to a regular New York City public school. At the time she wrote,
In my view, given her profile, previous writing and past statements, Hannah-Jones deserves credit for doing this in public rather than sweeping it under the rug one way or another. Few would have noticed if she didn’t revisit her choice this way, or if she quietly used the various carve outs available to people with power to get her kid into a better situation and move on. Much of the criticism coming at her since the article published is just people who don’t like her taking the chance for an easy dunk. It’s about priors, not the case she’s making here.
I get it. Even besides the various internal Times dramas she’s had a hand in, the stealth revisions The Times did to 1619 Project text as well as the walk back of its central claim are a problem. Some aspects of that project are questionable—is there really a direct line from plantation economics to Excel spreadsheets?—even as overall it raises questions people should reckon with. (Sloppy consumption of that work helped fuel the debilitating performative adult politics circle jerks in education non-profits that shoved a focus on improving academic outcomes for underserved kids to the sidelines not to mention actual public policy activity in the same vein). And Hannah-Jones has been no friend of many school improvement efforts anyway. (I don’t have a dog in the, in my view reductionist, 1619 v. 1776 fight because I think America wasn’t truly one country until 1865 when the issues of slavery and secession were settled.) Still, it never hurts to have some grace, and this is a noteworthy article for her to write. You should read it.
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That said, there are problems with it worth exploring. The article is less compelling for what it says than for what it doesn’t. (And on the theme of credit where it’s due, Derrell got there first. In 2017.)
Broadly, yes, this is a first-person testimonial not an analysis of the system, but she does nonetheless implicate the system and its structural issues in ways familiar to anyone with even a passing acquaintance with her work. So it’s odd and fair game that she then fails to discuss reform or the broader context in New York City schools. Successful models in the public system that aren’t simply the result of skimming never come up. Neither do the successful and popular charter schools (some so successful officials are fighting to squelch their data.).
Nor does she show much curiosity about the structural causes of the ineffective teaching she so candidly describes. Here’s a hint: it might be a teachers’ contract that makes it hard to fire a dangerous teacher, and harder still to remove one who is merely ineffective at teaching. Hannah-Jones is strikingly incurious about all of this, perhaps because getting into it contradicts easy narratives about both the causes of the problems and the possible solutions and creates an acute political dilemma for center-left and left-leaning folks many prefer to just avoid.
Likewise, she’s quick to point out the structural and sometimes race-based inequalities in school finance, but fails to mention that, according to Jack Despain Zhao of the Center for Educational Progress, the school she sent her daughter to was spending $52K per student. Even accounting for New York’s high cost of living, most schools in this country would be happy to be on the receiving end of that kind of inequality. When paired with the kind of results Hannah-Jones describes it’s an obscene embarrassment to the cause of public schools. And I worry that without more nuance (far too many schools serving poor Black kids are performing poorly despite having resources), people like Hannah-Jones make it harder to secure equitable funding for poor kids because they fuel easy cynicism. This school has an adult to kid ratio of fewer than 10-1 and Hannah-Jones is complaining that the cafeteria was unstaffed and out of control? C’mon.
Perhaps most problematic, she seems not to realize that millions of poor white students are stuck in similarly ineffective schools. Our education quality problem is not simply race-based; it’s also class-based. It would be naive not to recognize the unique role race plays in all this and how it can be baked into our institutions and policies, but here reducing the problem to race alone minimizes its scale. What’s more, it minimizes the potential for solutions. Building durable solutions will take a broad-based politics and a much wider coalition than Hannah-Jones seems willing to acknowledge or maybe even want. One need not ignore race to also embrace a politics of class around near-term school improvement. In fact, that may be the only way to build a politics that can address the challenges these youngsters face and benefit millions of students who need dramatically better schools. Now.
In all this, Hannah-Jones may not realize it, but she’s giving cover to the very status quo she claims to decry.
Finally, her justification for why this wasn’t all just a big mistake is the idea that being in a lousy school helped give her child an identity around race and the ability to address the casual racism that too often swirls around us. I can’t possibly know, it’s her child and the counterfactual is unknowable. Yet if you get out and move through the world, you’ll encounter many Black young people and adults who didn’t attend crummy schools and nonetheless still have a healthy, developed sense of racial identity, pride, and the ability and willingness to call out casual racism. Sending your kid to a lousy school is certainly not a prerequisite for that. And certainly not if your mom is Nikole Hannah-Jones.
That’s precisely where she has it backwards. Parents can try, but it’s hard to overcome the compounding deficit of an academically lousy school year after year even with out-of-school services and all the rest. It’s easier (not easy, but easier) to push back on problematic aspects of our culture with your kids. Again, that’s probably especially true if you are Nikole Hannah-Jones.
Fish
It’s not Friday but here’s some fish porn: Rithm Project’s Michelle Culver on the Frying Pan in Colorado the other day. How it started, how it’s going.
I post pictures of education people with fish, usually on Fridays. In this one of a kind archive you will find hundreds of pictures of education types with fish. Send me yours!
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