Nikole Hannah-Jones looks to be trying her best to honestly confront what she’s done to her daughter and figure out where she went wrong, though she still seems unsure if she did.
Ironically, though, the way she has (we don’t doubt it, anyway) harmed her daughter’s education is the result of her own parents taking the opposite course — namely, pushing young Nikole into the best schools they possibly could . . . which unfortunately taught her a great pack of nonsense that she still can’t let go of.
Hannah-Jones’ essay in The New York Times Magazine agonizes over her daughter’s fury that her parents chose to enroll her in two struggling Brooklyn schools in the belief that it would advance social justice — that they could use their own privilege to make a difference.
And she makes it painfully clear that this part of her “fight for school equality for all Black children” . . . failed.
She made some effort — visiting the high-poverty primary schooland complaining that the lunchroom was constant chaos; emailing administrators and teachers who were clearly failing to do their jobs — but she somehow wound up accepting “no” as an answer, and even no replies at all.
Time and again in her essay, she falls back on the beliefs she started with: The schools are under-resourced; “a system of inequality” that stems from “outside the school walls but is magnified within them” makes change near-impossible.
This is why Hannah-Jones’ “1619 Project” had so many gross factual errors: She’s blinded by ideology.
In reality, her daughter’s awful primary school spends a mind-boggling $52,000 per student: The problem isn’t resources, but a staff that doesn’t try to do better, and gets away with it.
A past outraged black mother might try to rally the community to demand action; we see no sign that Hannah-Jones or her husband Faraji — who in these years was moving up through the system’s parent-leadership ranks all the way to the Panel on Educational Policy, which oversees the entire Department of Education — looked to do that.
Hannah-Jones all along railed against the verystandardized testing that can expose educational failure — even as she let the system hide from her how badly it was failing her daughter, only too late going back to review homework rife with errors that teachers had never bothered to correct.
In this, she’s as bad as Felicia Thomas-Williams, the odious New York state Regent who dares claim, “You don’t assess a fish on climbing a tree, because fish can’t climb trees” to justify not checking if schoolchildren can read.
It was only when their daughter stood up and demanded better that she got into a top high school — whereupon her parents rightly supported her with tutoring to catch up.
(Prediction: This girl will go far — and will never, ever put ideology ahead of doing what’s best for her own kids.)
Never does Hannah-Jones breathe a word of criticism of the teacher unions and other vested interests that protect incompetents and the simply lazy; as best we can tell, her expensive education taught her not to consider such heresies.
Faraji Hannah-Jones insists the couple made all the right choices, bragging that his spouse, like the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is who one of the all-too-rare “individuals who stood up” for disadvantaged kids (though King didn’t stint on his children’s schooling).
Maybe he’s simply supporting his wife in her time of agony; maybe he’s drunk as deep of the Kool-Aid.
He’s certainly right that they’ve raised an extraordinary daughter who is going to extraordinary things.”
But oh, that it’s in spite of her parents’ best, self-absorbed efforts to the contrary . . .
Again, Nikole Hannah-Jones is trying to be honest, even citing “unearned valor of people commending me for the strength of my choice” to do this to her daughter — which hints at a righteous bitterness that might lead her to deeper truths.
If she keeps it up, she might even someday apologize for damning so many other parents who chose to seek the best schools for their kids, for attacking the public charter schools that give low-income families access to excellent educations, and for foolishly supporting a power structure that oppresses the very people she thinks she’s been fighting for.
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