Choosing a bad school: 'I failed my values and my child'

“So you had money to send me to one of the best schools, and you chose not to?” Nikole Hannah-Jones' daughter Najya said. “Because other kids are disadvantaged, you didn’t want to put me in a great school?”

"When it comes to the choices my husband and I have made about public education, these days I feel that I failed both my values and my child," writes Hannah-Jones, a New York Times writer who's crusaded against selective schools and school choice.

Ten years ago, in Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City, she wrote about her decision to send her daughter to a a low-scoring elementary school that primarily enrolled low-income black students from the housing project across the street. She explained that she and her husband, who'd gone to integrated schools themselves, thought it was wrong for advantaged people to choose the best schools for their own kids, abandoning the schools used by families with no clout or money. They could push to improve the "bad school" for all the students. Perhaps other advantaged families would choose the school, instead of a whiter public school, a charter or a private school.

It didn't work. The school they chose had a new pre-K that attracted some middle-class families, but few of those students were still there by first grade. Neither was the dynamic principal.

Hannah-Jones visited at lunch and saw "children were running wild, chasing, hitting and pushing each other while the teacher’s aides and cafeteria workers stood by looking bored."

She and her husband "started to become a thorn in the principal’s side," she writes. It did little good.

"In Najya’s third-grade year, her teacher missed a significant number of days, leading Najya to complain about the substitute teachers who rarely taught and how sometimes there was no substitute at all," Hannah-Jones writes. Students would be sent to another class or told to work on their own.

When her daughter was in fourth grade, she demanded to see her daughter's school work. Nothing was graded. Najya liked math and thought she was good at it, but most of her answers were wrong. Her "writing assignments were rife with uncorrected punctuation, capitalization and grammar errors."

They hired a tutor. They got the district superintendent to promise to hire an extra teacher to provide small-group remediation. "With half the academic year over, it all felt like too little, too late," Hannah-Jones writes. (And, though she doesn't mention it explicitly, it was 2020. The school year would end in March.)

In truth, we felt utterly stuck. Our child was suffering, but all these children were — they were languishing in classrooms with educators who did not take their academic potential seriously and largely refused to teach.

For middle school, they chose a school "created to advance the economic and social mobility of low-income students and students of color through rigorous instruction and a focus on social-emotional learning," she writes.

The school had all sorts of perks, thanks to the principal's fund-raising ability. Najya earned good grades and was placed in honors math and science.

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But, "just like at her elementary school, her teachers did not assign homework, and that troubled her, and us," Hannah-Jones writes. "She’d bemoan how the less experienced teachers struggled to manage their classrooms and would expend so much attention on the small number of kids acting out that they’d be unable to complete their lessons or help a student stuck on a problem. There were occasionally fights in the hallway."

Instead of removing "misbehaving students from classrooms, depriving them of precious educational time they cannot afford to miss," teachers at the school "worked to refocus students and mitigate conflict," Hannah-Jones writes. "Kids like Najya, who were just trying to do their work, saw this treatment as deeply unfair."

Najya Hannah-Jones at 16

In eighth grade, when her daughter accused her of choosing a bad school, Hannah-Jones let her choose a high school -- but only a district-run public school. Najya applied to schools with good test scores and mostly white and Asian enrollments. All screen students, accepting only those with good academic and behavior records. She got into her first-choice school. It was a tough transition culturally and academically.

"She had homework for the first time, and she was suddenly inundated with pages of nightly reading for her classes," Hannah-Jones writes. "She did not know how to manage the crush of assignments, and the effort that used to earn her A’s no longer cut it."

She'd earned an A in eighth-grade algebra, but failed the state exam. Text anxiety, her parents thought. Then she started failing ninth-grade algebra. They paid for algebra tutoring. "After an assessment, the center’s director called me in and told me that Najya knew very little algebra and had huge gaps in many of the building blocks of math that she should have learned in elementary school, like mastery of long division and fractions."

Grades had lied. Tests had told the truth.

After lots of tutoring and lots of support from teachers at the school, Najya worked her way up to A's and B's again.

Many people praise Hannah-Jones' honesty and willingness to admit mistakes. Others can't forgive her for harshly condemning people who chose alternatives for their own children and for trying to deny other families gifted programs, selective high schools and charter options.

I come down close to Alex Tabarrok on Marginal Revolution, who writes:

"The piece is raw and true when talking about her personal choices, but the larger story in which NHJ embeds her personal history is mostly false."

Hannah-Jones blames underfunding, but "the failures she documents are failures of management and accountability, not lack of resources," he writes. New York City public schools spend "upwards of $40k per pupil on average," with more at schools with concentrated poverty. Her daughter's old elementary school gets "just over 52k per student, far above the national average."

He concludes: "NHJ has reckoned with her failing her own child but she has not yet reckoned with the failure of her entire educational philosophy."

Hannah-Jones doesn't look at schools where lower-income black and Hispanic students earn high test scores, perhaps because many are charters. She doesn't examine the academic impact of progressive discipline policies: Teachers who must constantly deal with disruptive and violent students in their classrooms may give up or transfer to schools where rules are enforced.

She does go back to her daughter's middle school to talk to the principal, Emily Paige, about her daughter's struggles. “It is important to not, in our pursuit of being antiracist, lower expectations,” she told me. “Because this is what happens, right? It’s racism under the guise of antiracism.”