The activist journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, author of the fraudulent ‘1619 Project,’ faces a complex reality about educating her smart daughter, Najya. You really want to read this one (and, like all NYT articles from me, is unlocked). Hannah-Jones and her husband, a “successful upper middle-class family,” in her own words, put their nerdy, bookish little girl in a poor, predominantly black NYC public school for reasons of ideological principle.
Faraji and I felt an obligation to make educational decisions based on the collective good and not just our individual advantage. New York is considered one of this nation’s most liberal cities, while operating a school system that is among the most racially segregated. This segregation exists because policymakers and affluent parents — even those who profess a belief in integration and equality — shed their advocacy at the schoolhouse door and refuse to take or support any substantial action to integrate the city’s schools.
Faraji and I decided that our role in this struggle meant upending the status quo and sending our child not to a wealthy white school but to a poor Black one.
It was a disaster for the child, who is now a teenager furious at her parents for ruining her chance to get a good education. For example:
But my child just shook her head, her face a mask of disbelief, and something else: betrayal.
“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, these days I feel that I failed both my values and my child.
What was so bad about these schools? One example from a story that’s full of them:
Toward the end of first grade, Najya started sometimes saying she didn’t like her school and complaining how chaotic it was at lunch. I decided to visit during the lunch period and was shocked by what I saw. Najya’s class and another class were sitting at their tables in the cafeteria with no lunch and no adult supervision. Children were running wild, chasing, hitting and pushing each other while the teacher’s aides and cafeteria workers stood by looking bored.
Several times, I had to instruct children to stop striking each other and to sit down, at one point physically pulling two boys apart. When I asked one of the aides why the children weren’t being supervised, she told me the lunch period was short-staffed. After I sat back down with Najya, she told me, “It’s always like this, and that’s why I don’t want to go to this school.”
It was not the children that horrified me — kids of all incomes are rambunctious at lunchtime. It was the callous disregard of the adults. Students respond to the high or low expectations of institutions and the grown-ups who operate them, and it was clear that these children were getting the message.
NHJ doesn’t quite realize that middle-class parents of all races pay lots of money to get away from kids like those who don’t know how to behave in a school lunch room, and school staff who cannot be bothered to care. Najya’s anger comes from her parents caring more about their racial-equality principles, which are not based on reality, than the welfare of their own daughter.
It got pretty bad. For example, in that first elementary school, Najya thought she was good at math. Turns out her teacher wasn’t grading her math homework. The poor child had no idea how incompetent she was. The Hannah-Joneses put her in a better school, but this turned out to be one that, while administered by a good principal, was full of teachers who spent most of their time doting on disruptive students rather than focusing on the kids there who really wanted to learn (even today, NHJ calls this “good educational practice”).
So they sent Najya to a middle school that practiced open admissions, meaning they didn’t turn away any child who showed up. It wasn’t a lot better. Later, NHJ visits the principal, a woman NHJ praises named Emily Paige (who, I’m guessing by her name, is white). Paige is reduced to tears as she realizes that her school failed kids like Najya, who really wanted to learn, by prioritizing the troubled kids who really didn’t:
She paused. I could see the pain of this admission etched in her face. “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.”
In the piece, NHJ still can’t let go of the idea that the reason these predominantly black and poor schools perform so poorly is because they don’t receive enough funding. You know how much NYC spends per public school student annually? About $35,000. That’s a lot. But it NHJ World, black students can’t fail; they can only be failed. Nowhere in this story do the parents of all those failing students come up as a factor.
I’ve told in this space before stories about idealistic young white liberals I know who chose to teach in predominantly or entirely black schools, where most of the students were poor, or relatively poor. All of them were traumatized by it. They were traumatized by the culture of contempt black teachers had at these white interlopers, and de facto contempt they had for their own black students, who favored racial solidarity over doing what was right by an individual black student (I’m thinking about the brilliant black kid at one of these schools who scored a perfect 1600 on his SAT, and who was encouraged to apply to the Ivies by his white teachers; the black guidance counselor instead convinced him to attend an academically bottom-of-the-barrel HBCU, out of a sense tribal obligation.)
And they were shocked by how difficult to impossible it was to engage poor black students who came from homes where, unlike the Hannah-Jones home, parents cared nothing about education. For that matter, I was once told a story by an older black woman from a family that felt strongly about education — every one of her children earned advanced degrees — who, on the day her youngest child told her that he had decided to stop with his master’s, quit her job in the all-black public school where she had spent her lifetime teaching. She told me that she realized she no longer had to put up with these uncaring kids and parents who saw teachers as the Enemy, and treated them abusively.
Reading the NHJ essay, I thought back to an essay I read many years ago by Jim Schutze, the uber-liberal but spicy city columnist at the *Dallas Observer. *Jim used to give me hell for my conservative columns in the Dallas Morning News when I lived there. I remember, though, that Schutze, though a longtime fierce advocate for Dallas public schools (“DISD” is the acronym for them), wrote a piece that I cannot find online, in which he tartly observed that pretty much the only kinds of parents who showed up to demand that their kids’ public schools be run better were white ones. As I recall, it pained him to admit it, but he did admit it.
I did find this Schutze column online, from the mid-2000s, in which he observed something similar to what NHJ does. Excerpt:
For 30 years an unquestioned article of faith at DISD headquarters has been that too much emphasis on excellence leads to an unhealthy form of elitism. By this formula, excellence equals elitism equals racism. That’s why, for example, the Talented and Gifted program has always been a sort of abused sibling within the family of programs at DISD.
NHJ ends her New York Times piece as only she could: by blaming “segregation” and the System. But what is a system made up of but people — people who have certain ideas what education is? This is true:
When given her choice of where to go to high school, Najya Hannah-Jones chose a good one that turned out to be predominantly white. She reports having to struggle there with some racism, and the fact that her previous schools had not prepared her for the work expected of her, but the kid persevered and came out on top. (It’s a story that has a lot in common with white writer Emilee Hackney’s experience going from being a top student at her working-class Appalachian high school to struggling to keep her head above water at Harvard.)
Maud Maron, a NYC activist, tweets in part this reaction to the NHJ piece:
There is still an effort–alive and well right now-to dismantle great schools like NYC’s specialized high schools because they use standardized admissions tests. The effort still relies on the same failed logic that Hannah-Jones has peddled for years. She insisted that kids like her daughter who did not score high enough on a test to gain admission were the victims of racism. But she refused to acknowledge that poor Asian kids whose parents had NONE of the resources that her daughter enjoyed (or should have enjoyed) (English speaking parents, resources to pay for prep classes, knowledge of how the system works, etc) were not racist oppressors—but kids willing to work hard and apply their smarts with parents that prioritized subject mastery and took the time to make sure their kids were actually learning.
Her daughter is right. She deserved much better. But it is not the cauldron of racist grievances that Hannah-Jones still cannot let go of that failed her daughter. It’s her daughter’s parents that did not figure out for NINE YEARS that their daughter was not learning enough.
Gotta hand it to NHJ, it was brave of her to expose her failures like this, even though she pig-headedly never abandons the ill-founded racial egalitarian principles that caused her and her husband to blow their daughter’s education for ideological reasons. I have a white friend — I think he reads this newsletter — whose idealistic liberal Christian parents moved to a tough inner-city black ghetto to share the lives of the black poor. This man, now a young husband and father, struggles with anger at his parents for making him pay the price (in bad, dangerous schools, where he was subject to racist abuse by other students) so they could Live Out Their Values.
Soon the celebrated and controversial British schoolteacher Katharine Birbalsingh, who is black, will publish a fantastic book, of which I’ve seen an advance copy. Her school, the Michaela School, in London is all-minority, and is considered one of the best schools in the city. Her students are not from well-to-do families. Their richness comes chiefly in having a headmistress who is strict, and who will not put up with excuses. In the book, Birbalsingh writes that the victim mentality that has permeated UK society for one or more generations is wrecking the country:
…I have spent thirty years on the ground in inner London schools. The reason our young adults view the world through a lens of victimhood, identity politics, grievance and individualism is because
that is how we taught them to see the world. The adults you get are the consequence of the childhood you give them.We have missed that modern schooling does not embody the values which lead to a meaningful life. Indeed, the values we now embrace produce quite the opposite. Child misbehaviour is no longer evidence that flawed people need the loving discipline of their elders. It is evidence that society must change to meet an unmet need. We therefore have adults who believe their victim status means their employers, colleagues, society and government should work around and serve them – not the other way round. We have an individualistic society because we raised children as individualists and individualism is a poor unifier for any society, let alone a diverse one.
If you missed Birbalsingh’s stirring talk at this year’s ARC conference,▶ here you go! What I wouldn’t give to see Katharine Birbalsingh and Nikole Hannah-Jones brought together for a debate. Maybe UnHerd could arrange it.
[CORRECTION: The Michaela School is not all-minority, but majority-minority. — RD]
On social media, the controversy over Erick Erickson’s bit calling out far-right radicals infiltrating the conservative movement continues. To be clear, I don’t know a lot about everybody he called out. I met Nate Fischer this summer, and liked him a lot, though we didn’t talk politics. Frankly, I had forgotten that he is closely aligned with Haywood. Reacting to the Erickson piece, I focused on Charles Haywood, the ex-shampoo magnate who is a truly sinister figure, and who is at the center of funding a lot of this. I had been reading Haywood’s book reviews for years on his website, but not regularly, so I didn’t pick up on his radicalism there.
And then he tore into me back in 2022 for my minor but key role in exposing Thomas Achord, the headmaster of my kids’ classical Christian school, who was living a pseudonymous life online as a radical racist, misogynist, and anti-Semite. In one of his posts under his false name, he boasted that he was a rising star in the classical Christian education movement (true), and that he would use his position to seduce young men into the radical right movement. My older son had taken one of his classes, and warned his mother and me that Mr. Achord was doing this, but we didn’t take him seriously because come on, Mr. Achord is so gentle and reserved. But he was right about that guy. Achord finally confessed, and was fired.
The things to read to get caught up on it are my first writing about my role in the exposé (which was written by Alastair Roberts), then Haywood’s initial response, then my response, followed by Haywood going nuclear on Your Working Boy, in which, among many other things, Haywood accused me, basically, of saying that I went after a powerless person (Achord) who had said things that I “don’t like,” all because I’m a coward who wanted to appease the Left (presumably so I wouldn’t stop getting Invitations To Georgetown Cocktail Parties™). To that I made this response, an excerpt of which is this:
I cannot stand the idea that we should sacrifice our kids to being seduced into white supremacy, white nationalism, and the rest, because hey man, NETTR!
Though he doesn’t mention me by name, Haywood says in the episode that I went after Achord wrongly because he “has no power,” and that the part I played in his exposure was nothing more than “virtue signaling” to the Left that I’m not “like those awful people.”
Oh, please. I have been
persona non gratafor years on the Left because of my views on racial politics, sexual orientation, and gender identity. Achord may have had no power on the national scene, but he had significant power over the lives and imaginations of the kids under his authority at that school, and if he had continued his ascent undetected in the classical Christian education world, over many more. And, had he been outed years later, after he had risen to a position of greater authority, the damage to the whole movement might have been massive.
Anyway, what does Charles Haywood believe? Here I should point out that Haywood is genuinely an intelligent and well-read man, a man who has a well-thought-thr…
