A black mother's choice for her son: It will be private school

I'm sending my black son to private school, writes Jenisha Watts in The Atlantic. Growing up in Lexington, Kentucky, she "received an abysmal education" at the sort of mostly black, low-income public school that failed Nikole Hannah-Jones' daughter. She worked hard to catch up, but is still coping with her educational deficits. She will not put her son at risk.

What's interesting is that Watts considers Hannah-Jones a friend and confidant. She admires her courage. "I’ve always believed that I have a responsibility, especially as a Black woman who comes from a difficult background, to care about all kids in need," she writes. "I fear I am betraying that when I choose what is best for my son and my son alone."

But he's going to private school.

Watts knows "many strong, successful Black women who rose out of difficult backgrounds and eventually got the education they were denied as children," she writes, but that's much rarer for black men. "I watched my brother get himself together and go to college, before going back to the streets."

Watts worried when her son's preschool began admitted more black and brown students who qualified for government aid to pay tuition. Would more kids from troubled homes be in her son's class? "I had been a kid like that," she writes. Her crack-addicted "mother was the one other parents judged at drop-off. And now I wanted my son as far away from the little Jenishas as possible."

She's angry about schools that fail their students, Watts writes. But she doesn't just want a school with high expectations and competent teachers. She wants well-behaved, ready-to-learn classmates from stable families.