The saga of Nikole Hannah-Jones and her husband sacrificing their own daughter’s education for the common good would be a sad parody taken in isolation, but unfortunately for us all, this is the progressive ideology writ large.
Last week, journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, the primary creator of the controversial and completely inaccurate 1619 Project, shocked the world when she admitted she might have betrayed her own child by making educational choices based on the needs of social justice rather than what was best for her future. In an extensive article in The New York Times Magazine, Ms. Hannah-Jones revealed that she and her husband intentionally enrolled their daughter, Najya, in a poorly performing New York City Public School because it was majority black and by refusing to take advantage of other options, they were both making a statement about so-called segregation in the school system and fighting for better schools for everyone. As she described it herself, “When Najya was entering pre-K, my husband, Faraji, and I decided to send her to the type of school that wealthier families with choices uniformly avoid — one that is low-income and mostly Black. Our decision had been informed by values shaped by my years of reporting on the enduring and too often seemingly hopeless battle for school integration.” Together, they “felt an obligation to make educational decisions based on the collective good and not just our individual advantage,” that their “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” and they did so despite that both were able to take advantage of what they would deny their own daughter, having “largely avoided segregated schools like these. He and his siblings attended integrated schools that served the military bases where their family lived. Starting when I was in second grade, my parents enrolled me in a school-integration busing program that allowed a limited number of Black students to leave their segregated neighborhood schools for white ones on the other side of town. Being given access to the most resourced public schools in my hometown allowed me to flourish academically, and I am convinced that the integrated education my husband and I received set the foundation that has allowed us to become the successful upper-middle-class family that my daughter was born into.”
Incredibly, Ms. Hannah-Jones and her husband somehow convinced themselves that Najya’s mere presence in these underperforming schools would elevate them in what strikes me as an extreme case of self-rationalization, that is justifying something you have already decided to do without any real basis in fact. “We thought by sending Najya to a mostly low-income and Black school, we could help improve it for all the children there. From my past reporting, I knew that P.T.A.s at poor schools often can raise only a few thousand dollars, but Faraji and I could write checks that exceeded the annual P.T.A. budget. I witnessed how dismissive school officials could be to lower-income parents who lodged complaints or made demands for resources and how deferential they were to wealthy ones. I believed Faraji and I could bring some of that power with us. We had connections and time and status that should not matter, but that we all know do. And more than that, we believed strongly that if families like ours went into schools like this one, it would challenge other families with similar values to do the same.” To be certain, neither of them thought this would be easy. They did not go “into this with naïveté. I understood exactly what we would face, could cite studies and statistics by heart,” but I don’t think either expected the troubles to begin as early as first grade and in the cafeteria of all places. “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.” Still convinced she could make a difference at that point, Ms. Hannah-Jones “headed straight to the principal’s office to meet with her. Afterward, I sent a lengthy email about what I had witnessed and demanded the unsafe lunchroom conditions be addressed. In what had become a pattern when we raised concerns, it took several days before the principal responded and several more weeks of emails and calls before she announced a plan to address the lunchtime issues. My husband and I were frustrated and worried but remained committed.”
Even as other parents took this as their cue to get their children out of there fast, and by the end of first grade, “all but one of the white children and nearly all the middle-class children who had started pre-K with Najya had left P.S. 307,” “We felt we could not abandon the school and our convictions at the moment we experienced the dysfunction we knew defined so many of the segregated schools serving poor Black children. We had to stay and fight for the students who did not have options, and so we started to become a thorn in the principal’s side.” Unfortunately for Najya and the other students, the principal simply didn’t care, assuming they were in the building in the first place. “While much is said about the chronic absenteeism of low-income students, there is often a parallel among staff members at these schools. Najya’s principal regularly wouldn’t engage with us or wasn’t in the building at all. 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. On those days she and other students would be sent to the second-grade or sometimes the kindergarten class, where they would be made to work on their own, and I would have to once again call the principal only to wait for days for a response.” Regardless, nothing could prepare them for fourth grade, “the worst year. At the first parent-teacher conference in November 2019, Najya’s teachers told us that she was not performing on grade-level in any of her academic subjects and that her assessment given at the start of the school year had shown she was not a proficient reader. We were perplexed. Najya was always a good student, and her past reading assessments were always at or above grade level. When we got home that night, I emailed her teachers and copied the principal. We needed to understand why our daughter was suddenly floundering. I told them that we wanted to see Najya’s reading assessment and all her graded classroom work so we could determine what she didn’t understand and get her tutoring. I was trying to signal that we were active and involved parents, that we wanted to be partners with them in our daughter’s success. Neither of Najya’s teachers nor the principal bothered to respond. What followed was a series of emails and phone calls and meetings trying to get basic items — copies of Najya’s graded work, her reading assessment, her test results — and receiving nothing.”
After several months of digging, Ms. Hannah-Jones finally learned that teachers were not properly administering the mandatory tests or bothering to grade her assignments. “What became clear to me was that Najya’s teacher had most likely never performed the school’s mandatory reading assessments for Najya or any of her classmates but instead had assumed the flagging competency of these mostly low-income Black children,” and “Finally, a few days before school let out for winter break, I received a folder in Najya’s backpack with the math assignments I had been requesting since our conference. Once I tucked her into bed, I sat at my dining room table and scanned one page, then another and another. None of them were graded. I started checking Najya’s work and discovered most of her answers were wrong. Najya believed herself to be good at math — it was her favorite subject. But now I understood she thought she was correctly solving all her problems because her teacher was not checking her work. Similarly, Najya’s writing assignments were rife with uncorrected punctuation, capitalization and grammar errors.”
Despite all this and more – including the admission that none of this was surprising, she “had observed and reported on similar educational malfeasance in Detroit, in Durham, in St. Louis, in Tuscaloosa, in Birmingham” and concerned that they had made the wrong decision, “Should we consider leaving the school? 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,” and awareness that they might permanently damage their daughter’s future, “I knew the consequences of this educational neglect would follow them throughout their lives, as the failures here would be passed on to the next grade and the next,” Ms. Hannah-Jones and her husband pressed forward with their plan to favor the collective good over their own daughter. Rather than accepting that they’d tried for five years, there was nothing more they could possible do in a system broken by the progressives and the progressives alone, and it was time to focus on Najya’s future, they persisted in keeping her enrolled through middle school, when they finally relented and allowed her to choose for herself. Why? Why would any rational person persist in this experiment for nine years, knowing the entire time that their daughter’s future was at stake?
Perhaps needless to say, many reasons have been posited. Some accept Mr. Hannah-Jones’ own explanation that what she perceived as the greater good outweighs the individual need, even of her own child. Others claim it’s evidence that she was more concerned with her own aggrandizement, a means to embellish her woke bonafides, and to some extent, she admits this herself in the actual article. Before making the fateful decision to enroll her daughter in a disadvantaged kindergarten class, she wrote an article announcing her plans to do so that received widespread praise followed by multiple job offers. Others, insist the decision reveals a fundamental lack of understanding of the purpose of education in the first place. As The Federalist’s John Daniel Davidson described it, “For as much time and effort that Nikole Hannah-Jones has spent reporting on public schools and education policy, she evidently doesn’t know what education is, or its purpose.” “It’s astonishing to read her account of the elementary and middle schools her daughter attended — violent and chaotic lunch hours with no adult supervision, no homework, no real classroom instruction — but even more astonishing to discover how seemingly uninterested Hannah-Jones was in the substance of Najya’s schooling. Years go by, it seems, without Hannah-Jones asking about what her daughter is reading, asking to look at her schoolwork, or pressing the school about not assigning homework.” Ultimately, Mr. Davidson concluded, “Part of the reason is almost certainly because Hannah-Jones’ idea of education differs from both the classical western definition and even the more pragmatic, utilitarian concept of education adopted in the West after the industrial revolution. In classical terms, the purpose of education is to impart not just knowledge but virtue. An educated student is formed in truth, goodness, and beauty, which are the proper objects of an education. In utilitarian terms, the idea is to acquire basic skills that will enable the student to find remunerative employment. Hannah-Jones seems to reject — or be completely unaware — of all this. For her, education is, on the one hand, a way of gaining credentials, and on the other, just another system to tear down as part of the cultural revolution. The actual content of her own daughter’s education is strangely neglected, despite all her agonizing over the racial and political aspects of the school system in New York.” Subsequently, The New York Post reported that beyond a lack of understanding of the purpose of education, Ms. Hannah-Jones appeared to be confused on the nature of the system in New York, which does not favor success. In fact, the principal and other administrators she criticized as derelict, have been promoted rather than demoted or outright fired.
This is all certainly true, but personally, I believe the decision reveals something even more fundamental about progressives in general. Ms. Hannah-Jones doesn’t say it directly, but it’s clear she viewed Najya’s education as a social experiment. She had no evidence whatsoever that her presence at these failing schools would improve them in any way. Indeed, the idea that she and her husband could single handedly reform a system that has been broken for decades, dominated by entrenched interests from the city bureaucracy to the teachers’ unions, one that favors failure over success, is close to laughable on its face, but she wanted to try anyway, to conduct an experiment to see if it was possible for two people to drive the sort of changes they sought and she was willing to use her own daughter as the subject. Taken in isolation, it would be a sad parody, but unfortunately for us all, this is the progressive ideology writ large. The response to the pandemic is another example of this thinking on a more sweeping scale. Though social distancing, masking, lockdowns, school closures, and other draconian techniques had never been tried, there was no evidence they would work, and indeed much of it originated, ironically in a high school science experiment, they pushed ahead anyway, turning almost all of America’s children into an experiment, one that based on lost learning hours alone appears to have completely failed. Similarly, much of what constitutes modern progressive proposals are based on wishful thinking rather than fact, whether we plan to replace fossil fuels with untested, unproven technologies, eliminate private sector health insurance in favor of Medicare for All, consigning everyone in the country into a system that is already struggling, or make college free, fix prices, declare various moratoriums, and freezes, no one really knows what the outcome will be as it’s never been done before. They promise these things will work, but have no evidence to that affect, except that you should trust the common good as they see it outweighs the individual need, and sacrifice is necessary for the cause, even of their own children.
