Beege wrote about this earlier and her post got me interested in reading the entire article published by the NY Times. All I can say is that the full story is even worse than Beege made it sound. I found myself feeling some actual anger at a parent who is so wrapped up in her own boutique politics that she can’t be bothered to see things from the perspective of her own child for more than a few minutes at a time.
What comes across in the full article is not just that Hannah-Jones sacrificed her own child’s education for her politics, but that there were many moments along the way when she was getting clear signals she had made a mistake. But, to borrow a line, she persisted. So let’s dig into this. We’ll begin with this admission that better schools gave NHJ opportunities she wouldn’t otherwise have had.
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.
So it clearly worked for her and her husband, but she decided her daughter would go to a mostly black school that performed modestly instead because…Well, because she didn’t think it was fair to give her daughter the same advantages that she’d had.
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…
After much internal debate in our household, in 2015, we enrolled Najya in pre-K at Public School 307, a segregated, high-poverty school across from the Farragut housing projects in Brooklyn…
Notice that she’s talking about her child’s school in terms of her role “in this struggle.” She’s deciding based on what’s right for herself, a well-known social-justice activist, not what would work best for her daughter. Again, all of that is just the set up for what comes next, which is lots and lots of disappointment.
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.”
Her daughter was six years old and was telling her the school her well-off parents had enrolled her in was terrible. So of course Hannah-Jones ignored her daughter and ignored that other parents were removing their kids from the terrible school.
My husband and I were frustrated and worried but remained committed. By then, 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…
Again, Hannah-Jones doesn’t see school as a place that should, primarily, be about educating her daughter. She primarily sees it as a place to exercise her values for the collective good. But her daughter keeps letting her know she doesn’t like the choice mommy has made.
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…
But fourth grade was the worst year.
In fourth grade, Hannah-Jones discovered that her daughter’s assignments weren’t being graded at all. She spent weeks fighting with the principal and the teachers only to learn those teachers were doing nothing.
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.
At this point, would you take your child out of this school if you were really a concerned parent? I would. Also, there’s a lot of whinging about the fact that these poor black kids are being left behind. But the problem here isn’t just the kids. It’s clearly the teachers who are making $60,000 to $100,000 per year and not doing any grading at all. Whose fault is that? How will desegregating those classrooms help? Will it make these unionized teachers better? Will it allow the school to fire any of the poor performers? It will not.
Meanwhile, Hannah-Jones gets yet another signal that this school is terrible and finally comes close to feeling something like parental responsibility. It has been five years at this point.
And then Najya came home despondent one day in February. She told us that her teachers had stopped calling on her. She’d become so frustrated that, waving her hand furiously, she began to blurt out the answers. But that got her in trouble. Wrapping Najya in my arms, I reassured her she was bright and doing nothing wrong. “We will address it,” we told her, projecting confidence. But that night, after I tucked Najya into bed, I sat across from Faraji in our living room and broke down in sobs. 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.
Should she rescue her child or, in keeping with her beliefs, continue in vain to try to save the whole school system. You’ve probably guessed by now she chose the latter. Elementary school did teach her something though. She learned that it’s not just the parents that are the problem. It’s the crappy teachers who don’t earn their pay.
…with all the power and resources at our disposal, we left Najya’s elementary school at the end of fifth grade feeling wholly defeated by a system of inequality that may begin outside the school walls but is magnified within them.
Again, the focus is on the parents and how they felt. The thoughts for their daughter’s future and what she is experiencing at this very substandard school seem to have been fleeting.
I’ll spare you the Middle School saga which is more of the same. Her daughter’s grades went up but she notices in passing that she never has any homework because none is being assigned. Will this come back to haunt her child? Stick around and find out.
Let’s skip ahead to the moment when Hannah-Jones’s daughter looks up the performance of her schools and confronts her mother for sending her to horrible schools instead of good ones.
In the outside world, my choice had earned me valor. And yet that day, under the withering glare of my daughter, the words that I was formulating sounded hollow to my ears even before they passed my lips…
…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?”
From this point on, Hannah-Jones agrees to let her daughter make her own decision about high school. And, to her daughter’s credit, she decides to care about herself and her future rather than everyone else.
We visited several, and in the end, Najya was admitted to her first choice, one of the city’s hardest public high schools to get into. She was proud of herself, and I was proud of her, too: She had done her research, set a goal and achieved it.
Her daughter was suddenly surrounded by white and asian kids who assumed she wasn’t smart, which wasn’t the case. But she was behind. Her time in crummy schools with no homework hadn’t prepared her for a real workload.
Najya’s cultural struggles were soon overtaken by academic ones. The first semester for Najya felt like drowning. She had homework for the first time, and she was suddenly inundated with pages of nightly reading for her classes. She did not know how to manage the crush of assignments, and the effort that used to earn her A’s no longer cut it. Najya had never been taught the skills of independent study, and suddenly the child whose identity had been the nerdy honors student was working harder than she ever had and barely keeping up…
This became an unbearable pattern. She’d come home glowing about an algebra exam because she “really knew the material this time” and my stomach would tie into knots. A few days later, I’d trail her upstairs to find her crumpled on her bed. “I studied so hard. I just feel so dumb.”
My child’s confidence wilted like an unwatered plant…
I enrolled Najya in algebra tutoring. After an assessment, the center’s director called me in and told me that Najya knew very little algebra and had huge gaps in many of the building blocks of math that she should have learned in elementary school, like mastery of long division and fractions. The intervention would need to be intense, but Najya was smart, she assured me, and with the proper support would catch up.
Her daughter Najya did eventually recover and make up the lost ground, but that was entirely her own doing. She chose the better school and she did the work to make up for her mother’s years of poor choices on her behalf. It’s hard to see this as anything but pointless and cruel. Only harm resulted from this decision to put her daughter last and her own beliefs and interests first.
Finally, at the end of this, Hannah-Jones realizes what should have been obvious a decade earlier. It was her failure that mattered most.
I felt overcome with regret. Najya deserved better. They all did. But she was mine. This girl, my only child, looked to me to protect her, to give her what she needed to thrive. And I had not chosen her.
I almost cannot type the words. Because when I do, an image of her in her blue school uniform, her hair in beaded cornrows that clicked when she swung them, with her sweet, baby-toothed smile springs to mind, and the tears come.
Hannah-Jones really made this her story so it’s no surprise it ends with her growth, but it’s too late to undo her mistakes. Her terrible choices have limited her daughter’s options, perhaps permanently though I hope not. This is a terrible way to learn a lesson that should have been obvious the first time her child came home and told her that her school was bad and she didn’t want to go there anymore.
Politics makes some people into monsters who can be cruel to others, even members of their own family, even their own kids. That’s what this story is really about. Kudos I guess for admitting as much, but it does seem to me that putting herself front and center in this whole process, as she’s still doing now with this article, was a big part of the problem.
Editor’s Note: President Trump is fighting to ensure America’s kids get the education they deserve.
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