Much of the essay is a series of rationalizations and excuses for an indefensible choice to make her own child a tool for accomplishing a political agenda. Way back when daughter Najya was a little girl, Hannah-Jones virtue signaled her fool head off in a Times Magazine feature, “explaining” that she was sending her child to bad school in a black neighborhood so as a rich and famous parent she could change the culture of the school, its administration and its faculty. What incredible hubris, though as one wag pointed out, she’s faked her way to an imaginary U.S. history that embedded critical race theory in public and private schools, a Pulitzer Prize, a permanent platform at the New York Times and a tenured chair at Howard with no legitimate accomplishments at all, so why wouldn’t she labor under a delusion of power?
Which is more unethical: progressive hypocrites like the Obamas, who opposed school choice (you know: teachers unions!) and still sent their daughters to the ritziest private school in D.C., or Hannah-Jones (and her ex-husband) who knowingly sacrificed their own kid not to be a part of a “privileged” system that allowed the white and wealthy to flee the failing public schools, leaving inner city schools underfunded and underachieving? The ethicist’s vote: Oh, Hannah-Jones is more unethical by miles. At least the Obama girls got the best education available. Hannah-Jones sacrificed her own daughter and accomplished nothing.
The National Populist Newsletter published a long, detailed defenestration of the Hannah-Jones’s lament. It concludes,
Neither Jones nor her daughter can admit the hard truth that these black students didn’t have less when it came to school spending. In fact, because of New York City’s Fair Student Funding rule, she and her classmates actually had more.
In the comment section of the article, Jones said her daughter doesn’t believe she’s being hard enough on herself, and there’s a lot of truth to that. How did she knowingly put her child in an unsafe, failing school without supplemental tutoring? Why did she wait till the fourth grade to realize that none of her work was being graded? For someone who claims to be an education expert, Jones was constantly surprised. Still, aside from running to the principal or emailing the teacher, she didn’t do personalized follow-up to make sure her daughter met her standards. It’s question after question on a slow-moving train wreck that’s supposed to conclude with the thought that at least she was honest. But is that enough? Because if she had her way, her daughter would still be on track for a much harder life, where she failed to meet the basic needs of a college freshman. So she would have been left behind, and it would have been nearly impossible ever to catch up.
Jones worries that in fighting for all children and standing true to her values, she let her child down, but she’s asking the wrong question entirely. It’s not that raising your children with values rooted in your ideological framework is a bad decision; it’s the choice most parents make, whether that be based on religion, culture, or politics. The problem is that Jones’ ideology is inherently poisonous.
All of her answers to the problems were because of whiteness, structural racism, funding, poor teachers, or understaffing; on deeper examination, all of those explanations fall apart. Jones is so profoundly inept at analyzing cause and effect that at this point it’s a moral failing.
You’d be hard-pressed to find a single Asian or white parent who makes decisions for their children because they’re fighting for every child of that race. They understand their child will compete with every other member of their race for the rest of their life. They are not separating themselves from failing schools because they hold an animosity against black students the way [Hannah-Jones] holds a venom against whites. She assumes the worst of other people because they are mirror images of herself, and her answer to this was to disenfranchise her own child instead of making her compete in their schools and prove she was as gifted, talented, and intelligent as them.
Instead, Jones’ daughter is a victim of her mother’s virtue signaling, her lack of attention to her daughter’s education, and her refusal to ever believe that her own worldview not only imprisoned her in an endless cycle of the identitarian victimhood mind virus, but also hurt her child.
Her arguments are all about a thematic struggle when she lost sight of what was right in front of her eyes. Even when she talks about disparities in funding for black-majority schools, she’s not talking about New York City schools receiving as much, if not more, than white- and Asian majority schools. And in the need to address the greater “struggle” at large, she failed to see that the racially-lensed progressivism that she bathed in did not prioritize her daughter.
“In fighting for every black child, did I betray my own?” she asks. Why yes! Next question? But incidentally, you weren’t even fighting for every black child. You just thought you were, because bias made you stupid.
Was she even involved with the school, or did she just assume that her daughter’s mere presence would change things? Was she even involved with her daughter, to see whether she was learning anything in the school? I would think, that if she knew she was sending her daughter into combat against an unfair system, that she’d at least check for wounds on a daily basis.
I think she assumed all of the teachers were qualified to teach, that discipline was being enforced, that her daughter’s homework was being graded and that she was being given sufficient instruction.
Plenty of American parents assume that schools are the same as they were when they themselves were children. They’re not. Plenty of parents shirk their responsibility to provide for their children by making sure they are fed, bathed, clothed and have had a good night’s sleep. They want the school to teach their children everything about life and leave the parents out of it.
Nikole Hannah-Jones, like many parents, ignored red flags that her daughter was not being properly educated. She, however, probably ignored them because she had an agenda to promote.
The comment: “leaving inner city schools underfunded and underachieving?’ confuses me.
I can’t see how placing a child in a private scholl and paying for it affects the funding or achievement of public schools. Without School Choice the funding doesn’t follow the student. If anything it should cause an (in)effective increase in funding in the public system.
In Australia the government provides some funding for private schools, much to the angst of the socialists. However, having had one child in the state system and one in private education I can confirm (I was on both P&C’s) that my son in grade 10 at the private school was receiving significantly less funding than my Grade 9 public school daughter.
Here’s the excuse, (from what I understand) put forth here in the USA by teacher’s unions and their allies: The fewer students in a particular school, the harder it is for that school to secure funding from the state budget. “Why should your teachers be paid more when some of them only have ten students per classroom?” To put it charitably, conservatives see ditching public school as abandoning a sinking ship, while liberals think the crew ditching and the sponsor witholding funding is why it’s sinking in the first place. The problem with the latter theory is that schools here get plenty of funding, as the National Populist points out. Teacher’s unions have always been valuable allies of the Democratic Party, and they’re always asking for more funding, more resources, more this and that, and when kids’ education is still behind, they say it’s because they’re still not getting enough.
To add to what you are saying, here in South Carolina, the state legislature found a clever way around contributing money to parents who put their children in private school – $7500 per student. The cost per student in an SC public school is in the neighborhood of 18K per year.
I have a public school teacher friend who would make the arguments that you presented to defend securing more money for public schools. However, when I did the math it resulted in and extra whopping unbelievable amount of an additional $75 per existing public school student per year if the funding was not given to parents to supplement their private expenditures.
Every argument I have ever heard for defending public schooling in its current state has been disingenuous.
We like to remind our children who attend a private school, “Nope, you don’t have rights. Do what you are told. Uniforms, obedience and education are tools and training for when you are an adult so that you can appropriately handle your rights between your neighbor and your government.”
The money argument is a typical leftist argument. More money=better results. However, we know from almost all areas of government that this isn’t true. I asked a politician proposing more money as the solution for education if he had a single example of that working.
As far as the argument that the ‘poor’ inner-city schools are starved of funding, look at the figures below.
Detroit: $29,000/student, Michigan: $20,000/student
Chicago: $27,000/student, Illinois: $25,000/year
New York City: $35,000-$43,000/year, New York State: $36,000/year
Baltimore: $22,000/year, Maryland: $20,000/year
Mississippi: $15,000/year
So, anyone saying the inner city schools are being starved of funding is lying. These disparities have been there for decades. Let’s look at the results of this money.
School Ranking Math and Science Scores on National tests (grades 4 and 8)
Misssissippi: 26th in the country
New York: 30th in the country
Maryland: 31st in the country
Michigan: 38th in the country
Illinois: 18th in the country.
Catholic Schools: $9000/year and outscored the #1 state school system.
Do you see any correlation between money and outcome?
Sure. Inverse.
Mississippi is even more impressive , and higher ranked, in reading improvement (sort of a base for everything else, one would think), especially with the demographics Hanna-Jones is supposedly concerned about.
Seems to be a combination of cutting the crap, expecting results, and giving little/no power to teachers unions.
Hi Gamereg,
Thanks for your reply, we agree! Here are my thoughts:
1. “The fewer students in a particular school, the harder it is for that school to secure funding from the state budget. ”
I think of that as a desirable feature of School Choice. If you aren’t performing, fix it or you’re gone. OH YES, the state does have a responsibility to make education available, so perhaps it’s time for some creative sacking. I am SO funny! To quote Johnny Carson/Daffy Duck: “It is to laugh.”
2. “liberals think the crew ditching and the sponsor withholding funding is why it’s sinking in the first place.” But the schools have been doing a crash and burn for decades, so that is propaganda and deflection.
3. “Teacher’s unions have always been valuable allies of the Democratic Party,”. BINGO! YAHTZEE! WE HAVE A WINNER! That and the Teachers Unions work for the teachers and not the students – rightly, up to the point where their actions destroy the students and the country; which isn’t actually good for the teachers either. Unfortunately, all unions have this tendency to destroy the host.
Groan. YES, I can actually spell school.
I hear that there is a new book coming out titled, “The Untold Story of How Nikole Hannah-Jones Gave Birth to a Hyper Conservative Black Girl”.
There is that inter-generational whipsaw thing.
Well, maybe this is a tale that explains why black students underachieve. Here we have a successful, affluent, black educator and she was so uninvolved in her daughter’s education that she didn’t know the teachers weren’t even grading her work. Then, when she found out, she didn’t demand those teacher’s be fired and the school district start teaching. She just took for granted that black teachers at a black school wouldn’t teach black students and she isn’t demanding any change from anyone in the system.
Having been sent to catholic grade school and high school (and even having attended a catholic law school, unfortunately at the university that spawned Ms. Jones!), it was pretty obvious to me from even a young age that the catholic school infrastructure was created by catholic parents because they realized that if you wanted your kids educated properly, you had to do it yourself. Leaving such an important task to chance was not an acceptable risk. I also think that even as little kids, we thought ourselves to be valued by our parents insofar as they were willing to pay our tuition and acquire (or sew) our school uniforms considering the expenditure a sound investment in us.
And I find it interesting Ms. Jones’ mother is white.
I could not read the NYT article so I am not sure how uninvolved she was in her daughter’s education. I get the sense, though, she had this idea that she was changing a racist system from within so her actions were righteous and in line with her political ideations. But, when the cold, hard slap of reality set in and she understood that her daughter was woefully behind in every category and across all markers, clues she had been ignoring the whole time, she had to accept the sickening truth that her political experiment was not only a microfailure but a macrofailure. It was not a question of school funding. It was an issue of systemic failure, not based in race or class.
jvb
Wait—that was supposed to be a gift link! Here it is again: you should read the article.
In a society where competency matters, someone like her would never be anywhere near a professorship or a professional newspaper. I don’t often hope for kids to cut off their parents, but I hope that happens here temporarily so she can understand what she’s done.
So many excellent observations, and A M Golden’s points really struck home. My children are now 49-55, but I remember quite clearly how surprised I was to discover that so much of the discipline and rigor had disappeared from public schools 40 years ago, even though our neighborhood schools placed very well in the state-wide rankings.
From the descriptions I’ve read Najya’s former school is funded at over $40,000 per student, yet there is virtually no discipline and teachers cannot make a difference in such a chaotic environment. Discipline is not racist, it is not mean, it is not cruel, it is essential. I hope she is finding a more structured environment in her new private high school.
And where was her father in all this? Why did he not insist that Najya have a chance at a superior education? Failures, both of them.
Even in a pretty conservative part of the country, rigor has disappeared. My children (at least through junior high; we’ll see how the high school works) have unlimited chances to redo work until they get the score they want. I keep reminding my children that the real world doesn’t work like that, and you don’t get redos if your first submission is horrible.
I fear what it’s teaching my children, but I don’t have any great alternatives.
How did it happen this way? Some people blame No Child Left Behind. Others blame too much responsibility placed on the schools for raising the kids as opposed to educating them. Some think that the standardized tests are making administrations think that’s all that matters. Obviously, Nikole Hannah-Jones has her own opinion.
And this is so incredibly detrimental, not only to a child’s growth and maturation, but to his/her understanding of authority and respect and discipline. And it’s not just teachers that fall down here, it’s parents and it’s many professors in the higher institutions as well.
You see it all the time. Some child is just completely negligent and derelict in his/her duty to get assignments done. And then, three weeks from the end of the semester – hopelessly failing the class – they go into the professor’s (or the high-school teacher’s) office and begin the begging process for extra time, or extra credit. “Give me something to do that will salvage a passing grade…please, I’m begging you.”
And because our education systems are the figurative personification of putrescence, the educator caves and throws the hapless student a bone…”here, do this bit of work and (even though you’ve done nothing worthy of passing my class) if you turn it in, I’ll count it in your favor and I’ll push you through.”
What has that student been taught? That hard work produces good results? That neglecting to treat the syllabus seriously has dire consequences? No…that student walks out thinking, “Authority…deadlines…grades…standards…pffft, there’s always a way around it.”
Parents, you think you’re immune? We’ve done the same thing hundreds of times it’s everywhere as well. Parents tell their children to behave, or be quiet, or be still, or just simply obey. And when the child doesn’t, the parents repeat the warnings numerous times. “I’m going to punish you if you continue that…” Over and over and over again. What does that teach children about parents?…that parents don’t mean what they say, that children can push their parents through five, six, a dozen warnings…I’m not really going to get in trouble.
A day is coming when a child won’t get a multiple chances, where begging for mercy, or clemency, or undeserved grace is going to fall on deaf ears.
We damage children when we behave this like…and we risk setting them up for catastrophic failures down the road.
Sorry, that was a bit tangential from the OP, but Junkmailfolder brought up an outstanding point and I got carried away.
Correct. I’m on the higher end of your children’s ages and my schools were ranked high, but I’m sure there were things that had diminished from when my parents went to school in the ’50s and ’60s. My parents even moved out of their lower-ranked school district that they had gone to as kids to get my siblings and I into a different township’s schools so we could get a better education.
We probably did. An older cousin came to live with my grandparents during her senior year of high school and attended the old school district from which my parents had fled. She was so far ahead of the other seniors, she threw off the grading curve and made everyone look bad by comparison. We think she ended up being valedictorian of the class, but we don’t know for sure because she didn’t attend her graduation. Everyone at the school was mad at her for showing up the others.
I don’t even want to know how that school district is doing now, much less the higher-ranked one I was in.
I attended Catholic school in first grade. When we moved to a very small town where there was no private school I started 2nd grade in the public school. Within a month I skipped to third grade, where I was still head of the class. It helped that Mom took us to the library every week where we could check out four books at a time. And I was really clumsy, bad at sports, so I read a lot instead of playing outside. Mom and Dad always looked over my homework , never did it for me, and had me redo the problems that I got wrong. It takes both, family involvement and rigorous academics.
Najya had neither.
My dad went over the times tables with me using flash cards.
Holly Mathnerd wrote about this today:
https://hollymathnerd.substack.com/p/sacrifice-vs-conscription
Here is her summation:
“When we stop seeing people first as individuals, the danger is not that we become incapable of morality.
“It is that we can do terrible things while feeling intensely moral, justified, and righteous.”
It is worth reading.
jvb
This resonated with me: “The point is not that parents should raise children in ideological bubbles. The point is that parents across ideologies can make the same mistake: confusing their mission with their child’s mission.”
We see this all the time. How many kids are acting professionally because their parents wanted to act? Play pro sports? Participate in beauty pageants? How many little untrained missionaries are in public schools, having been sent to do battle with their 5th grade science teacher while armed only with a Bible and a few pithy phrases from Answers in Genesis? How many little boys are being sent up to political candidates like Michele Bachmann to defend his Lesbian mother?
How many children become experiments rather than cherished individuals? With Nikole Hannah-Jones’ child, we have a face, a name and an undesired outcome. With countless children across the country, we have nameless children being pawns to financially support their families, get their parents the attention they crave or otherwise further different agendas.
Yes, an excellent essay as is her usual wont.
It occurs to me that Holly and Alizia share a commonality as far as the length of their essays. However, Holly’s are quite readable and almost always make a lot of sense. She has a knack for getting you interested in whatever she’s writing about.
And she gives you a much better perspective of Jones than almost anything else you might want to read.
I have a question. She has an endowed chair at Howard, but she lives in NYC. How does she teach classes? She is listed as full time faculty and has an endowed chair (of course Google and the AI’s say she isn’t a faculty member, she is the Knight Chair for Journaism). Does she teach anything? If she doesn’t, why is she listed as a full-time faculty member in the Howard School of Communication?
A good response to her essay: Nikole Hannah-Jones ignores who failed her daughter — the teacher’s union