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PaperclipPerfector  13hr ago (text post)   1895 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026

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Nikole Hannah-Jones has a piece currently lighting up the internet about the impact of putting her daughter in a public school: In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?

So, like the generations of Black parents who came before us, Faraji and I felt an obligation to make educational decisions based on the collective good and not just our individual advantage. New York is considered one of this nation’s most liberal cities, while operating a school system that is among the most racially segregated. This segregation exists because policymakers and affluent parents — even those who profess a belief in integration and equality — shed their advocacy at the schoolhouse door and refuse to take or support any substantial action to integrate the city’s schools. 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.

...

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.

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.

...

The school turns out to be - sit down for this - full of rowdy and rambunctious students and attempts to fix it were met with slow, pro forma responses (the well-behaved kids also complained about the bad kids eating up all the attention or getting praise for basic behavior):

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.”

Teachers apparently failed to perform basic evaluations and passed her through:

Then one day in December, Najya came home and excitedly informed me that she had suddenly jumped three grade levels in reading in one month. Knowing that this was virtually impossible, I reached out to the school’s literacy coach and learned that after we began asking for the reading assessment, Najya’s teacher had instructed the coach to perform the evaluation and that she found Najya was reading just fine. 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.

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.

Not learning their lesson (NHJ admits all the other midde class parents left this school) she decided to double down for middle school. Except now she was getting the additional problem of receiving straight-A report cards while her child was apparently learning nothing.

She eventually cracks and sends her daughter to a white and asian school of her choosing, despite much bellyaching. But still, she's haunted by her past:

Algebra, she thought, was the one exception — this was a subject she believed she knew. She had taken it in eighth grade but had to retake it because she hadn’t passed the statewide exam. At the time, I was somewhat concerned, but as Najya had earned A’s in the class I assumed she didn’t pass because, like many children, she has trouble sometimes on standardized tests. When she had to take the course again, I thought that the concepts would be familiar to her. One night early in the semester as we were eating dinner, Najya gushed about how easy the test had been. “I know I got an A, or at least a B,” she said smiling. A few days later, she came into the house, ran to her room without speaking, slammed the door and sunk to her floor, sobbing. She’d failed it.

But there's a happy ending: her child's new school, in addition to her tutoring, actually do help her catch up on all she missed out on. What conclusion does NHJ draw from this?

Most New York City public elementary students attend a school zoned to their neighborhood — children in wealthy white neighborhoods attend wealthy white schools, and poor Black children attend poor Black schools. But if affluent parents move to a gentrifying neighborhood, they can exercise “school choice” and send their children elsewhere. There are schools in neighborhoods like Harlem, Crown Heights and Bedford-Stuyvesant, where I live, where about a quarter of the kindergarten students zoned for those attend them, according to a 2018 report by the Center for New York City Affairs. By middle school and high school, a majority of students take part in the school-choice attendance system, but most kids cannot get into selective schools and instead find themselves in schools that have no enrollment criteria.

That leaves schools like Unison with few students from affluent families and a disproportionate number of students who are low income and diagnosed with learning disabilities. While more than one-third of Unison students have learning disabilities, 17 percent of students at Najya’s high school do.

Essentially, the "racial apartheid" described in this article is that affluent parents independent of race - like NHJ - do not want to deal with the incompetence of public schools so there isn't enough bread to spread the jam of disruptive, incompetent children and educators over.

The article is making waves as a chronicle of absolute parental abdication, and also a sign that the light may be breaking through even on the Left about schools, given how much of an advocate NHJ was against "apartheid'.

For the former I have to say that, as a third worlder, I just find it despicable (Susan Wolf didn't have to work hard to convince me sainthood wasn't necessarily an unalloyed good). You send your kid to the best school you can and damn everyone else. I suppose it can be defended as an act of admirable tribal solidarity performed by a moron with strange ideas about education, but imo even a steadfast refusal to contemplate HBD wouldn't change your duty to put your kids first. We did so with a 99% black population with a token Indian/Arab presence.

As for whether it represents a start on the road to progressive course correction, which requires a validated member of the Party to make the crituque, it's encouraging that someone like Nicole Hannah-Jones is the one writing this, but note what's missing.

The story is all about "apartheid". No mention of the fact that her daughter's failing schools were receiving upwards of $40,000 a year per student and had good teacher-to-student ratios. The story never has a mea culpa for all the parents she would have looked down on. The story has nothing to say about the persistent disciplinary issues that wrecked the chance to teach. It's all the fault of apartheid and if only we could have less apartheid and spread around the good students enough that they could actually overcome the laziness and incompetence of the school administration (it never seems to occur to her that the fact that her child's principal barely got out of high school has any bearing on the situation her daughter finds herself in)

This makes some sense, given her own history:

My husband and I had 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.

But the problem comes when people just won't sit still for this. NY schools have lost parents even as spending has gone up for a reason. There aren't enough pristine white schools to give an extra ~5% minority population. And the minorities that do well at NY magnet schools themselves see little reason to avoid "apartheid" and go deal with this. As NHJ herself and the quoted UCLA notes, they run away to better schools too.

So does this article represent some sort of climbdown from the myth that all these schools need is more money, more of other people's children? No. It's an emotional read, but it seems like nothing about her underlying views has changed at all except for the fact that she should have let someone else be the greater fool. If anything, this can easily be read as a call for more radical action.

Not sure it matters. As the article makes clear the parents who have the skin in the game and wherewithal don't need a national debate, they just leave. And the system flounders in their wake.

Came by this rather remarkable clip from posted April 6, 2018:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=THpSxTiaAUc?si=QubJo-dqpU6dnZMs&t=2003

A person who understands community and a person who understands that we cannot live in this world and only be concerned about ourselves. Our fate should be tied to each other, and our children's fate should be tied to each other, because this is actually why integration matters. If your kids are in that school, you damn sure make sure those schools get what they're supposed to get. But if you can just separate all the poor people and put them in these schools over there, you don't care what happens to those kids in that school. A New York Times reporter in a high-poverty school changes the school, right? Okay. There are certain things that just are not going to happen in that school. I can go to that school and say there's a problem, and it gets fixed immediately.

For the former I have to say that, as a third worlder, I just find it despicable (Susan Wolf didn't have to work hard to convince me sainthood wasn't necessarily an unalloyed good). You send your kid to the best school you can and damn everyone else. I

This scenario just wouldn’t be plausible in countries where misbehaving children are beaten instead of given the run of the place- no matter the parent’s resources, schools in Africa do not have this specific problem. The instructional quality at this school was almost certainly fine to good- this particular girl just couldn’t take advantage of it due to the other students’ behavior.

I suspect this is part of the Mississippi miracle- in the Deep South, disciplining children is broadly popular, including among the black population. The average person thinks schools should use harsher methods, not more empathetic ones, even if there’s a race difference in outcome. One or two particularly bad kids would simply be removed from the class, and everyone else quiets down a bit.

I have often said it, will repeat it again - school outcome is not a matter of resources, but will. Carrot, stick, blackboard, chalk, some paper, pen and 1952 schoolbooks and well stocked library is enough if the teacher wants to teach, and pupils to learn.

What she describes is not school, but ghetto kindergarten. And well - you get ghetto results. No matter how much resources you pour - the outcome will always be shit. Money can't fix culture, they can only express it more.

The problem is that everyone has rights, no one has obligations. So you can't actually impose discipline in any meaningful way.

Slightly offtopic - one of the strangest things in american media is how it treats suspension as big deal and punishment. As if there will be a kid that will be sad out of 2 more weeks of vacation.

While more than one-third of Unison students have learning disabilities, 17 percent of students at Najya’s high school do.

Those are absurd and outrageous numbers. That have as much connection with reality as her 1619 project.

You send your kid to the best school you can and damn everyone else.

I think there are different degrees to that.

Turning your kid into a martyr against "school segregation" is plainly wrong.

On the other hand, I do not think parents should feel obliged to take up a second mortgage to send their kid to a school or university they can't comfortably afford.

I went to German public school, even though my parents could probably have afforded to send me to some private school instead. As upper middle class people, we had generations of tradition of attending the standard state-run schools. If I had struggled, I am sure my parents would have found a solution, but all in all it was rather ok. I am rather thankful that they did not try to optimize too hard for my education -- being the child of helicopter parents who push you relentlessly is its own curse.

Turning your kid into a martyr against "school segregation" is plainly wrong.

Yeah, as they (should) say, the problem with communism is that eventually you run out of other people's kids, so at least kudos to her for testing her theories on her kid and not on other people's.

*EDIT: Though of course if she had her way, she would do it with both, as the lesson she's learned with this is that she should have let other people's kids go first so they could cushion her own's fall when she dropped her into the pit.

On the other hand, I do not think parents should feel obliged to take up a second mortgage to send their kid to a school or university they can't comfortably afford.

The answer is to have exactly what the author of the article is moaning about: public schools that do screening.

I know society has started to wake up from this, but it's still so shocking to see how much political capital was burnt on the left over the past generation over this bizarre ideology, and how everyone that dared to question it was scolded, chided, or threatened off as some heretic.

It's one thing to have misjudged the school, but for an investigative journalist to have apparently never sat down and examined her daughter's writing or math performance at home personally, and be blindsided by this result after years of issues, just blows my mind. It reminds me of the dozens of interactions I've had with with people making proclamations about society, and having turned out to have just half-skimmed some nyt article on the topic a few months ago.

an obligation to make educational decisions based on the collective good

IMO if HBD is true wrt intelligence (and there is a preponderance of evidence) then segregated schooling is actually favorable to the collective or common good. If you have a cohort who are never going to succeed academically and are destined to work in the service industry or similar, then their wellbeing is reduced if you seat them in classes with the exceptional due to demotivation and status reasons. Allowing them to have fun and socialize instead of learning biology is for the best. They are actual learning important lessons in those moments where they are…

running wild, chasing, hitting and pushing each other

as this teaches about important social cues that will help them deal with coworkers later on in their career. I’m not joking. Learning when you’ve pushed your classmate too hard because he flipped out is a skill that will carry over at 30 when you rib your coworker too hard, causing conflict. Learning how to deal with the monotony of classrooms through small talk will carry over to the Amazon warehouse. Etc. It’s better for these students to be segregated among income/lifestyle peers than to have peers who become absurdly successful relative to themselves. The latter does not feel good. But it feels good to be around those you can compete and compare yourself with.

segregated schooling is actually favorable to the collective or common good.

Not necessarily. I could see a strong argument that proper exposure and socialization with the normies is actually good for the supergeniuses. Of course as long as the normies are disciplined and kept in line so they don't interfere with the education process.

Since human cognitive development is highly rapid during schooling years, it's actually perfectly fine to put the geniuses in a class a few years ahead. Their cognitive abilities will actually match up quite well and the pace of the material will match the students reasonably well. Works better in US style schools where students are floating and go to the classes in their schedules.

IMO I actually opposing segregating schools based on intelligence. I think it’s better for everyone to be in the same school. You can still have AP classes etc for high performers.

I think flyover America ran there schools this way since they lacked density for segregating by ability. Plus the initial filter for my grand daddy moved to Iowa to be a farmer wasn’t a strong filter for IQ.

This is the big issue with not segregating “ running wild, chasing, hitting and pushing each other”

School can turn into a prison for smart kids when it’s violent. I don’t think the flyover schools had the same amount of antisocial behavior. That needs fixed or you need to segregate.

It doesn’t work that way. If you’re in a public school, ADA accommodations are legally required, IED plans and extra teachers for the low performing kids are required. There’s no requirement for AP to even be offered. So when the budget cuts come, they cut the non-required elective programs, and AP and advanced courses.

I don’t believe in the ADA or lot of federal regulations anyway. As far as school goes I definitely think it’s most important the smarter kids get the training they need.

That being said atleast for these NYC schools they seem to be spending 50k a year so I would expect they can do both.

The middle class flyover area I grew up in had far less funding and had no problem complying with special ed requirements and having 20 AP courses.

Would it be wrong to suggest that we should codify requirements to improve education for smart kids too?

Only if your socialism is of the national variety.

If it is, you'll understand that you need exceptionally well-educated students to spread the Revolution and defend your glorious Motherland from enemy pig-dogs. The system is already communist: taking more would be counterproductive, for you need to keep your smartest properly motivated to export/maintain the Revolution by force of arms, so you need to compete with the nations you'd use those arms on. (Exposing them to the bottom 90% would degrade their desire to accept the unequal tax rate, for the same reasons we're talking about now.)

If it is not, you'll understand that exceptionally well-educated students are the enemy, which is why intentionally handicapping them is morally correct. This is still the same communist-type redistribution- from worthful to worthless- but in this system it's front-loaded because this kind of communist lives in a post-scarcity environment where the smart people have already solved all their problems (so you don't need as many of them, which makes them a threat, which means you need to redistribute that superiority lest they turn it on you)[1].

For the National Socialists, they're still working on that, so they can't do this to anywhere near the same degree (and it would undermine the "national" part). Indeed, one further notes that National Socialist is a society in which the male and female roles in society co-operate (which is arguably a large part of why women/redistributionists instinctively hate systems that were more National than Socialist in the popular culture- which is why Red Tribe and Nazi Germany are equivalent to them).

[1] Which gives rise to the Harrison Bergeron story- which I notice describes Cain's perspective of the logical consequence of Abel realizing more gifts than Cain is equivalent to/inherently grants him power over Cain, and hence why Cain must kill him.

National socialism is a compromise between the two (which doesn't itself guarantee competence- the US is more competent than China was more competent than the Soviet Union was more competent than the Italian fascist). When there are no more conditions of reality that the inferior need the superior to destroy, the superior must be enslaved lest he realize.

Which is why Blue states are that way, despite being full of (on paper) superior people. Abel is, quite rationally, afraid; Abel sees it as sinful to build a weapon against Cain, and what modern post-scarcity societies are grappling with is if God will punish Abel for defending himself. Because the Protestant Christian answer is "yes".

IED plans . . . for the low performing kids are required

I'm sure you mean IEP, but as typos go, this one's a certified banger.

Don't tell me, are you opposed to strapping IEDs to low performing kids for deployment on the front lines?? This gives them purpose in life and removes their dysgenic genes from the societal pool! A Win/Win!

Pitch this to Brussels - Europe has two problems now - Russia's war on Ukraine and excess of economically unproductive male migrants. Mass deploying your offensive tactics will solve both beautifully.

I suppose it can be defended as an act of admirable tribal solidarity performed by a moron with strange ideas about education

I do defend it. If NHJ had never put her money where her mouth is, where would we be now? She'd still be an influential columnist, calling the system racist, helping funnel ever more taxpayer money down the gullet of failing students, teachers, administrators, and systems. Now at least we have an admission of being wrong, even with dozens of caveats and carveouts. The left never does this. All it took was an act of child sacrifice, and I'd rather it be from them than me.

The story is all about "apartheid". No mention of the fact that her daughter's failing schools were receiving upwards of $40,000 a year per student and has a good teacher-to-student ratio. The story never has a mea culpa for all the parents she would have looked down on. The story has nothing to say about the persistent disciplinary issues that wrecked the chance to teach. It's all the fault of apartheid

To your point, though, there was much more to learn here that wasn't. But let's boil this down further than "apartheid".

The inevitable, forever sin of black pundits is tribal racialism at any cost. As she describes her daughter's redemption in the new school, doubtless helped by a wide variety of people, note that only black teachers are offered applause for doing their jobs. The worthlessly incompetent, often just straight up even coming to work, are of some mystery race.

If you ever happen to enter purely black spaces on social media, where they feel relatively safe from view, It's obvious that they know what the problems are and who is causing them, whether it's crappy service at restaurants, insane violence, or idiotic music. But even there, the leftists viciously attack the supposed Uncle Toms. Even after suffocating external criticism so completely, it's impossible for them to tolerate Noticing even from their own people.

NHJ still fundamentally hates white people and "white" institutions. One of the best parts of sending her to PS 307 was how dark the crayon was she used for her self-portrait, a level of skin color fetishization completely alien to any white kid in America:

She was also developing a strong sense of herself as a Black girl in a classroom that, unlike the rest of the school, was multicultural and economically diverse, a reflection of the city and the world. At the start of each year, the students created self-portraits, and I chuckled with my husband when our light-skinned child chose to draw herself with the chestnut-colored crayon and not the beige one because that is how she saw herself.

If I go too much longer I'll get myself tied up in knots. This article is woefully inadequate, and another example of how truly sick the focus on race in America truly is.

And yet, it's a huge victory, and the response (IMO) has to be moderate to encourage more of people admitting that they were even kinda wrong. I couldn't forsee a person this morally repugnant writing anything like this a decade ago. It's amazing what children can do for parents.

The people who can"t even raise their own children are presuming to tell you how to raise yours. Who cannot see the shortcomings of their own race, but presume to tell you yours. Who live in a system that bends over backwards for them, but tell you that it is systematically evil against their favor.

They are fools, and you should not take them seriously.

most of the highest-performing public middle (and high) schools use what are called academic screens — a combination of grades, interviews, portfolios and standardized tests that determines admission — to allot access to public schools that most public-school children can’t get into.

This systemic sorting of worthy and unworthy children is justified by saying that our “brightest” students deserve and demand more rigor. While many of the city’s Asian students have benefited from these screens, in reality the screens are part of a tawdry bargain to keep a dwindling number of white and wealthier parents from exiting the public school system.

Stopping short of calling it outright racism, but...

Because these public schools admit students based on a single entrance test, Faraji and I have long opposed them

This sentence had me yelling insults at my screen.

The thing about caring about getting good academic results is that you have to actually care about the actual academic results, not about celebrating the wonderfulness of being a minority. Trying to engineer the results from the ground up regresses a lot more middle class kids (and in this case, upper class kids) than it elevates working and welfare class kids.

It’s post-woke up time. And it’s slowly being realized that the problem isn’t the resources but the students. Which eventually leads you to conclude these issues are not fixable.

On the AFD rising in popularity I said below that 20 years ago I thought the west could go to Afghanistan and create America. Now I worry that Afghanistan came to America and it’s the west that needs saved. This is the same situation but at the lower local government level.

The problem is discipline. When you can't kick out the troublemakers (and there's a problem where the kids have a legal right to an education and can't be left out of school permanently, so down the line some unfortunate school ends up forced to take the dregs) and it's white supremacy systemic racism to correct homework or have standardised tests, and failing kids is disproportionate (and of course racist) punishment of minorities, then you end up with a situation where (the same with security guards and shoplifters) the teachers, aides, other school staff don't step in and intervene (because laying a hand on one of the precious blossoms is assault and will get you into trouble) and they just pass the kids at the end of the year on to the next class (because not graduating them is also racism plus costs the school administration money).

Nikole and all the other activists and white liberal allies created this situation, and now she's astonished to learn that her daughter was being failed? So long as daughter came home with "I got another A on the test, Mom!" there was no need to go over her homework, or check if she was learning anything. That would have taken valuable time away from Mom's work and she would never have won that Pulitzer for The 1619 Project.

As for failing algebra - remember, maths is racist!

It’s worth noting that actual normie black parents are usually the first in line to demand schools bring back paddling. They believe in discipline but have trouble enforcing it without external assistance.

The problem is discipline

I agree with this. I would simply say- different types of kids need different types of schools. The type of kid who's impulsive, low IQ, and starting fights at school would benefit immensely from a school that stresses discipline and rote memorization, which seems to be the path that Mississippi has used in its "miracle." A kid who's extremely bright would probably benefit more from something like the Montesorri schools, where they get a lot of freedom to explore whatever they want at their own speed, and encouraged to think creatively. I obviously don't know what Nikole's daughter is like, but I'm imagining a kid who's just relatively normal - pretty well behaved but not perfect, reasonably smart but not a genius, etc. For a kid like that, a normal American public school works fine, but only if they have way to limit and deal with the real problem children.

Also, yeah, probably not a shock that a black woman who writes professionally is much better at words than at numbers. That's fine, there's nothing with that, but we can't be blowing smoke up their asses and pretending like they're acing the math exams when they're really not.

(and there's a problem where the kids have a legal right to an education and can't be left out of school permanently)

Y tho?

Universal K-12 education is, in the West, only a reality since the end of World War 2 at the earliest. Even still, my parents (late 1940s births) easily recall multiple classmates dropping out at various times in high school to start working (usually a family small business like a restaurant).

Articles like this one also show that somewhere between 25-50% of kids who are "graduating" aren't anywhere near where a High School Graduate of, say, 1965 would be in terms of ability across all subjects.

So why the continued farce and the presumption that there is some sort of "right" to ~12-14 years of education on the state's dime?

One of the more common arguments I hear is that "I don't want to live around stupid people." But, again, everyone already does unless you're smart and financially productive enough to buy your way into a non-stupids-allowed community. A HS diploma (or, for that matter, a bachelors, masters, or PhD) doesn't mean a person is somehow immune to making bad personal choices and/or horrific anti-social choices. "moRe EduCaySHun!" Is one of those meaningless battle shouts of the emotion-first sort who earnestly meant "black lives matter!" during 2020 and "trust the science!" .... also in 2020.

Related, most of the meta-studies on educational outcomes I've read boil down to the idea that once a school is past a basic threshold of quality (i.e. no metal detectors, not a common location for police calls etc.) that most of the difference in outcomes is explained by parental involvement in a child's education. Again, the NHJ story does a great job of pointing out that NHJ checked out of her own child's education for a decade. Contrast that to the cosmopolitan PMC class common meme experience of "Dad would yell at me over Algebra homework every night in 8th grade, lulz."

Most "right to education" arguments, imho, boil down to the same logical fallacy - no one is preventing you from educating your own child. The "right to education" people ask for is "the right to outsource educating my child to the state (which, by extension, means socializing the bill for it as well)." Throw in the truly evil organizations that are Teachers Unions and you have the recipe for a perverted race to the bottom.

A return to homes-school-plus style education has knock on effects for society as well. Historically, a lot of the "one room schoolhouse" establishments were provided out of necessity through collective action of the locals. It gave the kids an education, and the parents a day care center while they focused on the arduous labor of an agrarian life. Furthermore, the social stakes were much higher. The children were going to school with the children of their neighbors. If a kid was being disruptive, the whole town would know and the parenting abilities of the family would be drawn into question. The kids knew, explicitly, that behaving well around their peers was necessary for social and even physical survival in the future. If Little Timmy was a terror in the 5th grade, he might not find the loan waiting for him after a bad harvest.

While I'm not advocating for such a harsh RETVRN to highly constrained social systems I am, as always, advocating for a much more explicit and consequence heavy form of pro-social behavioral forming. This is why, elsewhere, I've advocated for a soft return to bullying. When we don't shape the behavior of kids, we do them no favors. They grow up maladjusted and end up dead or incarcerated. Not kicking a kid out of 6th grade for being out of control isn't a tender mercy, it's just a rolling forward of social debt that gets paid out on the floor of a NYC subway car (Daniel Penny reference, too lazy to direct link).

A "basic right" to education creates the incentive to lie to children, the same way a "basic right" to healthcare creates the incentive to lie to the unhealthy. As soon as you guarantee something, taking it away becomes an injustice. Better to have an earned-reward system, even if that earning is such a basic threshold that not clearing it is an obvious sign of social malignancy.

I’m firmly in favor of tracking kids. I think kids should be in some form of education through 18. I just don’t think trying to force everyone through a pre-college curriculum is good for lower achieving students. No amount of IEP and extra help is going to take a kid who reads like a first grader in ninth grade and make him capable of doing even community college work. I’m not even convinced you could take a kid with the reading comprehension and math skills of a sixth grader and get him ready for university level work. The bad thing, for them about trying to do such a thing is that basically you set his expectations far above what he can actually accomplish, so anything less than university and white collar work is beneath him, but you also fail him by not teaching him the kinds of skills he can actually use to support himself. Teach a kid with a sixth grade reading comprehension and math skills to do trade work, and he can not only support himself, but if he works hard enough might even own his own business. A kid with worse skills might not be able to do that, but maybe could do simple line cooking or manual labor or something. But if those kids try to compete with high achieving students who can leverage those skills, they’ll just end up unemployed and probably unemployable.

At the same time, those kids will slow down the education of the rest of the class to their level. The kid who’s disruptive because he doesn’t understand the concept of algebra is holding back other kids. Having the teacher repeat lessons because he can’t do them slows the class down as well. The smart kids end up never developing their skills to their potential because they’re stuck in classes with kids much dumber and the curriculum is geared to them.

Beat me by 12 minutes but was going to be surprised if I was first:

Creator of The 1619 Project, Pulitzer Prize winner, and MacArthur Fellowship recipient, Nikole Hannah-Jones probably can’t do middle school algebra.
In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own? [Archive link]

A decade ago, I made a decision about my daughter’s education that I hoped would challenge New York City’s separate and unequal school system. Now 16, she thinks I made the wrong choice.

A ten year follow-up to this article:

Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City [Archive Link]

How one school became a battleground over which children benefit from a separate and unequal system.

The main characters are the mother, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and her daughter, Najya. There is a husband, Faraji, but I’m not sure exactly what it is he does here.

I agree with those I follow on X that it really is a remarkable article. The remarkable thing is that Nikole Hannah-Jones in many ways admits she screwed up. She put her money – or in this case, her daughter – where her mouth is and forced Najya to live out Nikole Hannah-Jones's beliefs. I’ve seen many great takes. Nikole barely understands the education system at all. Nikole doesn’t understand her daughter’s education at all, but I think there’s something deeper going on.

But our experience at P.S. 307 exposed the fallacy that caring families are more important than competent teachers. Here we were, this upper-middle-class, educated, highly involved family with a house brimming with books."

A few paragraphs earlier:

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.

That’s at least a semester if not years without doing one assignment with her Najya.

And then again

Algebra, she thought, was the one exception — this was a subject she believed she knew. She had taken it in eighth grade but had to retake it because she hadn’t passed the statewide exam. At the time, I was somewhat concerned, but as Najya had earned A’s in the class I assumed she didn’t pass because, like many children, she has trouble sometimes on standardized tests.That’s at least a semester, if not years, without doing one assignment with her kid.

I don’t think Nikole is just an absentee parent; Nikole went years without checking Najya’s middle school math homework because Nikole can’t do middle school math.

The reality is that Nikole, Faraji, and Najya are just not particularly bright. Nikole and Faraji are part of the most privileged class over the last few decades: midwit people of color. DEI propelled them to the highest of heights. Nikole is legitimately earnest in her beliefs, and sent Najya into classrooms where the average IQ would be a comfortable thermostat setting. I actually don’t think Nikole should beat herself up too much; she only set Najya back slightly. Najya is performing exactly where one would expect a student of “average” intelligence to perform in the current schooling system.

As Nikole is fond of doing, she plays some rhetorical sleight of hand:

she [Najya] was earning nearly all A’s and B’s. And at the end of the school year, she passed her state algebra exam.

Reading between the lines, Najya gets A’s and B’s in the soft subjects and was pulled through the very easy state algebra test with tutors and now will never take another math class again. Najya can even rest easy at night comfortable in the belief that she is actually Very SmartTM, and any evidence to the contrary is test anxiety and her mother's fault for sending her to bad schools.

Some factual notes, the school Najya was sent to spends more than $50,000 per student and has an average class size of 10. Via are very own TracingWoodgrains

Some factual notes, the school Najya spends $50,000 per student and has an average class size of 10. Via are very own tracewoodgrains

Damn. Wouldn't it be cheaper to hire a live-in private tutor for every five children?

Live-in is expensive, and people worry about socialisation.

Damn. Wouldn't it be cheaper to hire a live-in private tutor for every five children?

This is to a very real extent what some families are discovering about voucher programs. The state of Arizona seems to have the most developed "direct payment" program, with "Empowerment Scholarship Accounts" that put $6,000+ per child straight into a parent's hands. If you've got four school-aged children to homeschool, the state will put $24,000 directly into your hands to purchase learning resources. If you've got a co-op with ten kids, that's $60,000 to pay a co-op teacher.

And that $6,000 is actually saving Arizona money, because Arizona normally spends about $12,000 per enrolled student on public education. Imagine New York following suit at the 50% mark--the state spends about $37,000 per enrolled student, so they could offer $18,000 per student to parents instead.

The amount of money in American public education is utterly staggering. Teachers complain about their pay (who doesn't?) but how much are teacher's union representatives, highly compensated superintendents, armies of DEI staffers, etc. actually contributing to improved childhood education? I'm pretty comfortable that the answer is "not contributing anything at all," but even if I charitably allow that half of what they do is worthwhile, the level of graft would still be measured as tens of billions of dollars each year. Public education is overwhelmingly a jobs program (and influence laundering machine).

I'm pretty comfortable that the answer is "not contributing anything at all,"

Actively harmful, in many cases. See e.g. the fad to ban algebra from middle schools for equity reasons, which wasn't coming from the teachers (who aren't innocents in the sorry state of the educational system, but their roles are at least grounded in something real).

What a wild dereliction of parental responsibility. How do you go nearly a decade without realizing your kid is learning nothing except how to avoid getting stabbed in the lunch room?

I guess if it's any consolation, NHJ has made a lot of money in the meantime by giving moral cover for rich coastal elites to sabotage the education of potential competitors, so whatever permanent damage she did to her daughter, there's a nice financial cushion for her and a pretty unobstructed path to admission to an elite university, so she'll be fine.

Lots of credentialed women will just stubbornly believe institutions over their own lying eyes.

How do you go nearly a decade without realizing your kid is learning nothing except how to avoid getting stabbed in the lunch room?

Besides being a stubborn narcissist and ideologue that knew she'd get this exact response if she quit these schools before her daughter was done schooling?

The schools seem to avoid any way of being held accountable. By her account they didn't do any standardized (racist, she would have called them) assessments and it was pulling teeth to get them to do it, gave no homework (which would help parents get a benchmark) and at a certain point they were just passing her on effort in algebra.

Given most of the likely parents in that school, this would have served to satisfy people and draw no attention until it was too late.

She herself was almost certainly negligent despite her claims to have been open to tutoring her kids, but all of these factors seem to have made it worse.

There aren't enough pristine white schools to give an extra ~5% minority population.

This is the problem isn't it. I'm all for giving disadvantaged minorities a leg up, but our changing demographics means that there are too many disadvantaged minorities to spread out. I'm fine sending my kid to a school that's 5% or 10% black. I'm not fine sending my kid to a school that's 50% black. So people pull their kids out, or move to a different school district, and pretty soon we have schools where everyone is a disadvantaged minority and they all suffer.

I live in a lily-white area of a lily-white, high income town. But when I looked up the demographics of my local high schools, I was shocked. It's like 25% black and 25% Hispanic. Where do these kids come from? The school is still doing pretty well by state standards, but I imagine it's not that far from tipping into dysfunction.

Where do these kids come from?

If it's anything like my local school district, it's partly that people are choosing other education options (homeschool, private), and partly that people are having fewer kids and the youth demographics are different than the overall numbers. At least here, youth population is up (not even true everywhere), but district enrollment is down a lot.

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