Ten years ago, in The New York Times Magazine, journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones explained to an incredulous public why she and her husband chose to send their upper-middle-class Black daughter to a high-poverty urban public school filled with less-advantaged Black children.
At the time, Hannah-Jones – who had written extensively about how public schools remain segregated by race and class long after the courts outlawed segregation – believed that the presence of educated, professional parents would help to integrate the school socioeconomically, if not racially, and so benefit all its students. Unlike many advocates of public education, who send their children to private schools while consigning other people’s to underperforming public ones, Hannah-Jones walked
the walk.
A decade later, she admits that the school her daughter attended was truly awful. It committed academic malpractice and tolerated utter anarchy. Her daughter, now a teenager, wishes she’d gone to a better elementary school – as Hannah-Jones herself did, through a busing program that integrated schools in Waterloo, Iowa.
Nikole Hannah-Jones' parenting isn't the problem
Now, critics are piling on Hannah-Jones, accusing her of using her daughter as a prop for her ideology – of being, in short, a bad mother. As someone who has also chosen a grade school for Black children, and who also passed up the “best” options – whether a tony private academy or a far-flung, White suburb where urban problems are mere TV fodder – I’m here to defend her on that score.
Hannah-Jones’ mistake was not that she weighed more than test scores when she chose her daughter’s school. Parents of every race make that choice based on complicated beliefs about the wider world and what's wrong with it. And educated parents of Black children face a harder calculus than most.
No, her mistake, then and now, is a patently incorrect and blindly ideological theory of what ails low-income, predominantly Black urban schools.
The real problem isn’t too few kids with educated, professional parents. It’s too many kids with dysfunctional, absent ones. Plus, teachers union politics of “do nothing and get paid.” And education professors’ lies about the panacea of so-called restorative justice and the supposed oppressiveness of academic standards. Add it all up, and no one has any incentive to do anything but placate the most violent and disruptive kids.
My husband is the son of African immigrants. He grew up just outside Cleveland, in one of the poorest communities in Ohio, where nearly everyone is Black. His parents sacrificed to send their children to an inner-city, Black parochial school because they saw the local public school, correctly, as a place rife with violence and disorder, where their children would learn little and might get hurt.
Had anyone suggested that they – a two-parent family in a neighborhood with almost no others – should send their children into that system to improve it, they might have struggled to believe the person was serious. Not because they thought their kids were better than everyone else’s, but because they knew otherwise.
Promising kids pay the price in 'dangerous' schools
Plenty of promising kids from poor Black urban families are stuck in “persistently dangerous” schools. They are failed by people like Hannah-Jones, who refuse to accept the lesson of Joe Clark, the Paterson, New Jersey, principal immortalized in "Lean on Me": Until we throw out the incorrigible and make teachers’ jobs depend on actuallyteaching, those kids will remain trapped.
Our Black sons attend a diverse urban parochial school for two reasons.
First, my husband and I do not want them tokenized and ultimately disserved in a school where they are among the only Black kids, as Hannah-Jones was. Anyone who thinks she was wrong to consider the perils of that experience, academics notwithstanding, has willful blindness of his own to contend with.
Second, we also do not want them tokenized and possibly victimized in our local public school. Ours is one of those districts, common in diverse neighborhoods just outside big cities, where de facto racial segregation and achievement gaps persist under one roof, and where nonexistent discipline is touted as equity.
No infusion of parents like us can save such schools, because the failure isn’t an accident. It’s a choice, made by unions, administrators and education schools, and given cover by influential people like Hannah-Jones who choose to be blinded by a faux-enlightened ideology.
Hannah-Jones’ daughter will be fine. After all, she has good parents. Unfortunately, Hannah-Jones has betrayed her own professed civic-mindedness in failing those kids who aren’t so lucky.
And she is still evading the truth, which is supposed to be a journalist's first obligation to the public.
Elizabeth Grace Matthew writes about books, politics and culture. Follow her on Substack.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Nikole Hannah-Jones is a good mom with a bad theory | Opinion
