DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Nikole Hannah-Jones Just Wrote the Best Case for School Choice She’ll Ever Publish.
The neighborhood school system in New York is atrocious. She knew this before sending her child to one. This is a mother who visited the cafeteria herself, who pulled fighting kids apart, who sat down and read through the ungraded homework page by page. She saw it happen, in real time, year after year. And she kept her child in that system anyway, all to make a point.
Middle school didnāt fix it. At Urban Assembly Unison, the school eliminated homework outright and adopted an āAlgebra for Allā policy that pushed advanced math onto students, Najya included, before theyād mastered the material underneath it. An outside tutor later found Najya hadnāt even mastered long division or fractions, the building blocks the algebra was supposed to rest on. Najya got Aās at Unison. She also, by her own account years later, ādidnāt know anything.ā
Hannah-Jones wants readers to see this as evidence of a broken, racially rigged system that owes her daughter something it never delivered. Some of what she documents is real: underfunded schools, high teacher turnover in high-poverty buildings, and the well-established fact that screened, selective public schools skew whiter and wealthier in a city like New York. That part of the argument isnāt fiction. Itās also not the part that determined what happened to Najya.
What determined what happened to Najya is that her parents, fully informed and financially able to choose otherwise, chose a demonstrably struggling school for seven consecutive years, and admit, in the mother’s own essay, to reading every warning sign along the way.
Then something remarkable happens in the piece, and itās the part that should have led the article: as an eighth grader, Najya finally got the freedom to choose her own high school, guided by her own criteria rather than her motherās cause. She picked a rigorous, selective school her mother had spent a career arguing against.
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