Individual Choices Won’t Fix America’s Public Schools
Ten years ago, the journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones started a small revolution in education when she wrote an essay for the Times Magazine about finding the right school in New York City for her daughter, Najya, who was about to enter kindergarten. After some deliberation, Hannah-Jones picked P.S. 307, a struggling low-income school near where her family lived, in Brooklyn. Her logic, which she has repeated many times in the years since the essay was published, was simple: good schools were good because they had resources, funding, and engaged—sometimes pushy—parents. Bad schools foundered in part because there weren’t enough wealthy parents holding the institutions accountable. She believed that her relative privilege and standing as a star reporter for the Times could elevate her child’s school. “A New York Times reporter in a high-poverty school fucking changes the school, right?” Hannah-Jones said, during a panel discussion in 2018. “There are certain things that are just not going to happen in that school. I can go to that school and say there’s a problem and it gets fixed immediately.” Those of us with some money or connections or whiteness could save these schools with our privilege.
Her latest Times Magazine piece finds a chastened Hannah-Jones a decade later. Najya is now at a screened, selective high school—precisely the sort of institution that Hannah-Jones once might have decried as part of the problem of school segregation. Najya’s time at P.S. 307 was frustrating; her mother found that she couldn’t get e-mails returned from Najya’s teachers and sometimes couldn’t even manage to see her daughter’s schoolwork. For middle school, Hannah-Jones sent Najya to the Urban Assembly Unison School, or Unison, a small public school dedicated to serving “low-income students and students of color through rigorous instruction and a focus on social-emotional learning,” she explains. Initially, the experience there was better, at least in terms of teacher responsiveness and care. But Najya kept receiving A’s even when, as Hannah-Jones later discovered was the case with algebra, she didn’t understand the subject. All of this leads to a series of confrontations between mother and daughter, as Najya comes to realize that she has been living out something of a moral experiment. When Najya tells her mother that she wants to attend a selective, majority-white-and-Asian high school, Hannah-Jones has a reckoning, and comes to think that much of what she believed has been proved wrong.
Hannah-Jones has written a stunning essay, her most emotionally wrenching work since her 2014 investigation into school segregation in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Every parent who has had to make a choice between their ideals and what’s best for their child has felt some degree of Hannah-Jones’s misery upon realizing that she might have harmed her daughter’s future. I have significant disagreements with Hannah-Jones about what we can do to solve the intolerable and thoroughly immoral problem of school segregation, which I detail below. But I want to start with a note of appreciation for Hannah-Jones as a writer. Honesty is not a flat currency—some truths are much harder to tell than others, especially when they involve the people you love the most, and it is not easy to tell people that your convictions might have, at least in the short term, failed them.
Hannah-Jones did what so few of us in the Fourth Estate are willing to do: she decided to live her ideals. It was an enormously admirable decision, but I’ve long felt that the piece she published about it ten years ago gave far too much power to individual choices made by its protagonist. Education reporting, as I’ve found in my own career, is frequently boring, mired in budget sheets, building codes, and test scores. The American school system consists of thousands of districts, none of which perfectly cohere into a single narrative. Things that work in one place don’t necessarily work in another, and it can be hard to know why. You sort through thousands of data sets that might mean nothing, read truly unhinged curriculum papers from graduate schools of education, visit low-income schools in disarray. Two conclusions become immediately obvious. First, it will take decades of sometimes counterproductive work to provide a quality education for all students. Second, that work is worth doing. But at no point do you really believe—at least I do not—that individual choices made by parents, however virtuous they may be, will fix the problems with public schools in this country.
Hannah-Jones, by personalizing the experience, captivated the country and reignited a thousand education debates, but what we are really talking about is a personal and thoroughly idiosyncratic political journey: the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist behind the 1619 Project, who proudly put her kid in a struggling public school, has had a crisis of faith. And now, supposedly, everything that she once championed is suspect.
How could someone who has written so forcefully about the very real problems facing low-income schools really believe that she can solve them with a transfer of privilege? Class and racial segregation are harms in themselves, and it is simply a fact of American society that, when you have a school for rich kids and a school for poor kids, the rich kids will fare better at just about everything. The project to ameliorate these harms has consumed much of the education sector for the past forty or so years, and very little progress has been made. Hannah-Jones has spent much of her career writing about how racially imbalanced outcomes, especially in education, were the product of segregation, yet, when it came to her own daughter’s academic career, it seems as though she didn’t give segregation enough credit.
But what I found most confounding was whom Hannah-Jones repeatedly blames for the failed experiment: Najya’s teachers. Hannah-Jones gets so mad at Najya’s fourth-grade teachers that she writes them an e-mail and copies the school’s principal. As the son of Korean immigrants, I can recognize this as tiger-parent behavior—exactly the sort of thing that a frustrated, upwardly mobile immigrant mother would do right before she pulled her kid out of the public-school system and enrolled them at the local Catholic school. “Our experience at P.S. 307 exposed the fallacy that caring families are more important than competent teachers,” Hannah-Jones concludes—a line that could have come out of any school-choice, charter-school, or even right-wing education-reform pamphlet from the past three decades.
When Najya struggles with math during her freshman year at the predominantly white and Asian, academically screened high school that she chooses, Hannah-Jones does what countless bourgeois parents have done before her: she pays for math tutoring, and presses her class privileges in service of her child. Within this framing, she is the outraged mother bending the public system to fit her child’s needs. Hannah-Jones, who in the past has written forcefully against tutoring, has determined that these parents might have had a point.
What she has written is really more of a parenting essay than a treatise on race and the education system. Its most moving passages are about a parent striving to create the world she wants and then facing the creeping realization that she should just write the tutoring checks, call up the private-school headmasters, and surround her child with privileges that money can buy. Nearly all parenting essays, including this one, are about the upper middle class—they are moral maps for people who, like Hannah-Jones, have choices.
One of these moving scenes involves a conversation that Hannah-Jones has with Najya’s middle-school principal. The parent asks the principal why her child was given top grades while evidently not learning anything. The answer is long, but what it boils down to is that schools like this one do not exist to teach algebra to bright, upper-middle-class kids; they serve to stanch the losses resulting from the local elementary schools, which are there to help kids who are dealing with severe problems outside the classroom.
Najya’s teachers, of course, are responsible for the educational outcomes of their students. But their task is contextual: one teacher getting struggling seventh graders to a fourth-grade level might be doing a better job than one who’s teaching gifted seventh graders the basics of algebra. At schools like P.S. 307, teachers often double as social workers for poor kids who have complicated and persistent problems at home. In an episode of “This American Life” that accompanies the Times essay, Hannah-Jones explains that Najya had a classmate at P.S. 307 who was dealing with the death of a sibling. Najya had noticed that the boy didn’t have a coat and asked her mother if they could get him one. This was the sort of empathy and understanding of the world that Hannah-Jones rightfully wanted to impart to her daughter. But these are also the problems that many of Najya’s teachers were dealing with. At schools with a lot of poor students, teachers deprioritize the ones who are doing fine, at least in relation to, say, the kid whose sibling just died. Maybe it shouldn’t be this way, but I imagine that most of us would do the same.
Najya, whose parents are college-educated and relatively wealthy, should not be the standard by which one judges P.S. 307 or Unison—nor can these schools fairly be compared to places like Success Academy, which put low-income kids through rigorous classrooms. The parents who send their kids to Success Academy chose the school; P.S. 307 has many families who simply showed up to where they were districted. And yet, despite all that, there are children who attended regular public schools and Unison who did learn the material: forty-five per cent of students at Unison received a 3 or a 4 on the state reading exam, indicating that they were at or above grade level, which was only six percentage points below the citywide average. Math scores were worse, but somewhere between a quarter and a third of the students at the school were at or above grade level. For a school where eight out of nine students get free or reduced-price lunch, Unison’s teachers weren’t doing a terrible job.
In the “This American Life” episode, Hannah-Jones says that the teachers at Unison were better: caring, responsive, and dedicated to their mission. If they could not succeed, who would replace them? Where is the line of well-trained veteran teachers who can handle impoverished and disabled students while also making sure that the kids in the advanced-algebra class are getting everything they need and not falling behind? If the problem, as many will say, is the power of teachers’ unions, why do those words never appear in this essay? Let’s have a big talk about installing more rigid standards and benchmarks for public-school teachers. Let’s not blame the teachers without proposing any policy solutions or even bringing up the U-word.
A similar analysis could be applied to Hannah-Jones’s claim that high-poverty schools receive less funding. This hasn’t been particularly true for a while, at least not in any significant way that hasn’t been ameliorated by federal money, and especially not in New York City, where schools like P.S. 307 typically receive more funding than their counterparts in wealthier neighborhoods. P.S. 307, for example, spends an average of $52,349 per student and has a student-to-teacher ratio of nine to one, while P.S. 321, which serves the children of lawyers and autofiction novelists with wealthy parents, spends $26,129 per student. A variety of factors may contribute to that gap, including the relative number of students with disabilities, but it’s not necessarily the case that Najya was receiving less funding than a rich white student in Park Slope.
Hannah-Jones does repeat the old arguments about why these schools fail, but in an almost perfunctory manner, the way a heretic might recite the Lord’s Prayer more out of habit than out of belief. When taken together, the essay and the “This American Life” segment sound almost like a funeral dirge for an old way of thinking about education inequality, one that the dirge’s composer helped make mainstream. Maybe Hannah-Jones did not intend for her essay to sound like an implicit retraction of much of what she once believed, but it’s hard to read it any other way.
Today, Hannah-Jones presents her call to action as a failure, but she still seems to be thinking on the level of individual families. “As long as we continue to rescue our own children from the failing schools where we allow other people’s children to languish simply because those children have been born Black and poor in a nation of racism and riches,” she writes, “there is no absolution here.” Again, the question of schooling and inequality is reduced to individual, racialized choices. Hannah-Jones is the protagonist in her own story about the rise and fall of an idea, and although I was deeply affected by her regret, I came away even more convinced that the virtue of a parent is ultimately meaningless when it comes to improving the public-school system. Just as Hannah-Jones’s optimism, integrity, money, and influence did not turn P.S. 307 into a school that could properly educate Najya, her personal reckoning will not change things, either.
And not every middle-class or wealthy parent who similarly chose to send their kid to a low-income neighborhood school regrets their decision. For the most part, children with well-educated, vigilant parents will do just fine. If the child, like Najya, is smart and motivated and can advocate for themselves, they can navigate their way through far more difficult situations than being behind in algebra; when harms and roadblocks inevitably appear, their parents can do what Hannah-Jones did and hire a tutor or move their kid to a school more suited to their needs.
Hannah-Jones’s lament, in the last third of the essay, almost moved me to tears at first, but, after a day or so, I went back and read it again and wondered what, exactly, the big problem was. Najya had benefitted from P.S. 307 and Unison; as Hannah-Jones details, her daughter had learned to think of herself as something other than the Black girl in a sea of white and Asian achievement. And among the worst things that had happened was that she needed outside math instruction. She seems to be like a lot of bright kids who are good at some subjects and need help in others. Parents can no longer rely on grades to gauge their child’s actual knowledge, but that’s also true in many wealthy school districts and even in some private schools, where grade inflation is rampant. I hear the same complaints where I live, in Berkeley, California, home to a whole bunch of “good” public schools.
Hannah-Jones’s individual turn was always surprising to me. It runs counter to the lessons of her lengthy and groundbreaking piece on what happened in Tuscaloosa after a long-standing integration measure was lifted. Under the old system, Tuscaloosa had one large high school. There was academic tracking that internally segregated the students, but they were all together. Once the city was free to physically segregate the rich from the poor, it split the high school into three schools, segregating many of the Black students.
A reasonable conclusion you might draw from this, if you believe that poor children should be afforded equality of opportunity, is that we need large, integrated public schools that educate all the children in a community. These schools should include academic tracking that starts around the end of elementary school, and they should include robust tutoring programs in the early years to help insure that everyone enters middle school on fairly equal footing. It’s true that large-scale tracking will internally segregate a school and that outcomes will not be equal, but the point of the project of equality is to try whatever you can to make slow progress while not neglecting the kids who need a challenge, even when it seems impossible. I’m sure that some of Najya’s teachers were bad, but large schools give such teachers less hold over a student’s life. They can be subject to pressure to improve by fellow-faculty. Novice teachers have more access to mentors.
In the two-thousands, Oakland added more than forty new small schools as part of an equality effort funded in large part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Big schools in the flatlands—that is, not the wealthy hills—were overcrowded and failing. The proposed solution was to create a slate of “academies,” most of which had fewer than four hundred students as well as administrations that could act with some autonomy. But, as the city built new schools, enrollment dropped by more than forty per cent. As a result, there are too many schools with too much variation in the quality of administration and too many differing standards for teachers and students.
Unison, which Najya attended, has some hundred and seventy students. If Hannah-Jones’s recent piece made you more concerned about uncaring principals and bad teachers, ask yourself where it would be easier for them to hide: at a tiny school with just a few parents, many of them dealing with poverty, or at a giant school with thousands of meddling parents, a handful of vice-principals, and a stable of veteran teachers?
Hannah-Jones notes on “This American Life” that she was first alerted to Najya’s struggles in math when she scored below her grade level on a standardized test in fourth grade. In the Times essay, she describes having thought that Najya was simply the type of kid who struggles on standardized tests, but later it becomes clear that those tests were serving their function: to sound an alarm that something isn’t right. Parents complain about standardized testing, and perhaps there is something soulless about “teaching to the test,” but it’s crucial to take these markers seriously, especially in situations where grades have become meaningless. Tests show the gaps between subjective grades and real understanding—and this, in turn, gives the public and administrators a sense of which schools are actually teaching their students. The widespread dismissal of standardized testing is one of the silliest and most harmful developments in the past twenty-five years of education discourse. We need to teach kids to read, add, and subtract. The more individual autonomy you bring into the equation through small schools with idiosyncratic leadership, the more easily students can reach ninth grade with significant gaps in their math abilities.
We should, in other words, strive for the vision that Hannah-Jones provided in her reporting on Tuscaloosa, and stay away from the pessimism that pervades her new essay. Make schools big, make them regimented, and make them impervious to the whims of graduate schools of education. Make sure that struggling students have access to tutoring, and provide multiple tracks for the thousands of students under your roof. Hannah-Jones is still correct, in the main: it is intolerable to have a public-school system that so routinely fails its most vulnerable and impoverished students. But to improve these schools we cannot succumb to fatalism, throw up our hands, and declare the whole system rotten because it didn’t perfectly serve the needs of our child. We should still want public schools that educate everyone. ♦