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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   23652 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.

We're all stuck in a maze of ideological contradictions with no escape. That's why I'm somewhat more sympathetic to Nikole Hannah-Jones than most of the people here. She is someone who took Steve Bannon's words to heart:

When two-thirds or three-quarters of the CEOs in Silicon Valley are from South Asia or from Asia, I think ... A country is more than an economy. We're a civic society.

In other words, a group recruited from the top N% highest-IQ people from all over the world is not really a nation (society, community, etc.). They may be economically successful, but they'd be missing something important of non-monetary value. At least, Steve Bannon seemed to think so. And recall, it's the immigration hardliners on the right (including Bannon, and those further to the right) who say: "Citizenship is not a question of merit. If you're a Talented-Tenth individual from a 3rd-world country, then your responsibility is to stay there and help lead your country. You abandoning your people to come here will just make both our country and yours worse off."

This is precisely what Nikole Hannah-Jones wanted.

But of course, all of this is living in a fantasy world that either never existed, or at least hasn't existed for a long time. Unilaterally "cooperating" while everyone else around you is shamelessly "defecting" will just bring misery upon yourself without achieving any benefit in the end.

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

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.

She posted this on X [Archive] on June 9, 2024.

Eight years ago today the @nytmag published my cover story on school segregation in the great “melting pot” of NYC and the way elite parents and politicians conspire with structural inequality to keep our schools separate and unequal. Eight years later, this sweet baby girl on the cover is getting ready to graduate 8th grade as a bright, empathetic, funny, honor roll student from @uaunison, a non-screened, neighborhood middle school. By test-score metrics many would label this school a failing school, but just as I write in the piece, we judge these schools AND their students without ever stepping foot inside. My daughter is not worth more than any other child. Eight years later, I still know we made the right choice.

That is a fascinating find. The transcript cuts off too soon. Continuing

the mums who live across the street in the housing project can go to that school and complain day in and day out and every-one writes them off and no-one cares and then we say "they just don't care about their kids' education, they just don't advocate for their kids --- its not true; we don't listen to them" This is about us sharing the advantage that we have with those that don't have it, so maybe my kid doesn't get every single advantage but she already has so many

NHJ is almost there - she just has to realize what the "advantage" is. But she fumbles it, following up with a non-sequitur.

I think what I'm asking people to do is if you can give your kid everything else do you have to take the public resources and an education as well from the poor black or brown child maybe a good public education is the only thing that their parent could give them, that's the argument I'm making

I can trace discussion of the "advantage" back to Hirschman's book Exit, Voice, and Loyalty published in 1970. The political impact of the book came from the idea of coerced loyalty. If the rich are unable to "exit", they will speak up, that is use "voice" and this will improve things for the poor as well as the rich.

This idea was applied to education in the United Kingdom. Here is an article from twenty years ago https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2005/may/02/election2005.publicservices

During the 70s and 80s, looked at through the prism of Hirschman, the left and the right in Britain were polarised. The left wanted to reduce the possibilities for exit and promote voice by, for instance, abolishing private schools. The right wanted to increase the possibilities for exit through privatisation and school vouchers. The centre brooded away, and has now come up with its own solution: choice.

My old analysis was that "voice" depends on both "talk" and on "listen". Failing to speak up (talk=0) results in voice=0. Complainers may also be ignored (listen=0) which also leads to voice=0. A minimal model is multiplicative voice = talk × listen. Reducing "exit" affects "voice" both by increasing "talk" (if you cannot walk away, you can always try complaining louder) and also by reducing "listen" (why bother listening to people who a trapped? They just have to take it.) And my guess at the effect sizes was that halving "exit" doubled "voice", and reduced "listen" to one quarter. 2×1/4=1/2. "talk" may have increased, but "voice" halves.

NHJ confirms my guess with her emphatic claim that "mums who live across the street in the housing project" exercise "talk" and this fails to constitute "voice" due to the absence of "listen". Then she stops short of noticing that her advantage is "exit". When she finds out that the school doesn't listen she can move her child to a school that does.

There is an ambiguity about "exit". What is the end game of strong exit rights? Does every-body move their children, the school shuts down, and the teachers lose their jobs? Do enough parents move their children to get the attention of the head master, who sacks teachers that don't listen, or who listen but fail to act, resulting in the school improving? Or does the system win? The rules that create a dysfunctional system are state level rules and nothing improves.

I'm unhappy about using fake numbers in my exposition. We may say that voice is a function of exit, writing v(e) and that voice depends on exit via both talk and listen, writing v(t(e),l(e)) before using the chain rule to obtain dv/de = ∂v/∂t dt/de + ∂v/∂l dl/de. Then I'm making claims about signs.

  • ∂v/∂t > 0 talking contributes to voice
  • ∂v/∂l > 0 listening contributes to voice
  • dt/de < 0 if you can leave, leave; if you cannot leave, complain.
  • dl/de > 0 people listen when their customers can walk out of the door taking their money with them

and finally

  • dv/de > 0 because dl/de is the big one, not dt/de

which says that removing peoples exit rights reduces their voice.

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.

This is reminding me of The Exile's piece on Dworkin

Everyone in her circle knows that you say the right things and then fuck off with your kids because you're not gonna overcome institutional inertia and the consequences of disparate impact thinking. she was the one who actually believed it was just "resources" and that she could bully an entire school into shape.

I'd compare it to voting third party on the logic that a third party could be viable if enough people were willing to vote third party. Whether it's true or not, you changing your stance doesn't make everyone else operate on that logic.

But it's not like she was ground down by the experience of trying to improve the education her daughter was receiving. Instead, she basically just assumed that her daughter was being taught, took the school's word for it that they were doing a good job, and... That's it. No actual effort to bully the school into shape. If she had, she could have changed course for her daughter much more quickly.

Even given her ideology, it doesn't make sense. She should have been working to improve the school for the collective, instead of whatever it is she did.

She had periodic bursts of energy (which the schools absorbed with apathy and meaningless validation) but then seemed to give up/assume the best based on the grades she was getting. I can only assume she didn't want to look at it too close precisely because she talked herself unto a hill. Once things seemed to be working out she was happy enough.

She did try to bully the school into shape, she wouldn't call it "bullying", but this is pretty much what I imagine bullying a school into shape to sound like:

After lunch, I headed straight to the principal’s office to meet with her. Afterward, I sent a lengthy email about what I had witnessed and demanded the unsafe lunchroom conditions be addressed. In what had become a pattern when we raised concerns, it took several days before the principal responded and several more weeks of emails and calls before she announced a plan to address the lunchtime issues.

We had to stay and fight for the students who did not have options, and so we started to become a thorn in the principal’s side.

The article is full of the assumption that all these poor kids needed is a NYT writer savior telling the principal that maybe they shouldn't let kids act rowdy. As if it never occured to them.

All this to avoid accepting that, let alone admitting anything regarding genetics, some kids' early years and family environment set them up to fail and drag down others with them and that the damage caused to others by trying to act like they can be given the same chances is not worth it.

After lunch, I headed straight to the principal’s office to meet with her. Afterward, I sent a lengthy email about what I had witnessed and demanded the unsafe lunchroom conditions be addressed. In what had become a pattern when we raised concerns, it took several days before the principal responded and several more weeks of emails and calls before she announced a plan to address the lunchtime issues.

A "big government" socialist learning how the government really operates.

NYT writer savior telling the principal that maybe they shouldn't let kids act rowdy. As if it never occured to them.

Dangerous Minds and its consequences.

That works as an argument for removing the freedom to choose schools for your kids. Not as an argument for individual parents to martyr their own children on the altar of ideology. Forcing all the rich people to mingle with the poors may make a difference. Forcing your own kid to do so while alternatives exist will only leave you isolated and powerless.

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.

Several years ago I was very concerned about sending my kids to a school with a majority of non-white kids, for practical concerns with violence.
Now there is an additional concern in the whitest of schools, which is the tendency of white educators to enforce progressive values.
Here's an interesting anecdote, the son of a Polish immigrant was getting in trouble in elementary school, because of his rowdy behavior. Compared to all the other kids of tech-wealthy Indian immigrants at that school.

Physical removal, so to speak.

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.

Suspension is a serious punishment for a good student. Suspension isn't an excused absence, so the student also gets poor grades because of the suspension.

You gotta teach them about anarcho-tyranny when they're young, they'll be seeing a lot of it in the real world.

Much like with prison you have to accept that, for some, the punishment is not to correct but to keep them away from people who can be corrected.

Probably the most accomplished kid to come out of my high school lost his 4.0 due to forgetting he had a pocket knife in his PE bag and getting a suspension. He was more than a little upset. Only got to do his post-doc work at Harvard.

A good teacher would have said ‘put it back in the bag, under your jockstrap and gym socks, I didn’t see anything this time’.

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.

I went to German public school, even though my parents could probably have afforded to send me to some private school instead.

Germany has academically selective public schools which have not been overrun by a high-IQ, high-grindset immigrant group. Completely different ballgame to NYC.

Did the part of Germany you lived in actually have good private schools? In the East, the best public schools are squarely superior, as evidenced by the intake of math/science olympiads, and private schools are mostly considered a way for rich people and politicians to sequester their kids.

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.

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.

Thing is, society has NOT started to wake up from this. Originally there was some pretense that there was a debate over whether schools would work better (for black kids, anyway) with the leftist policies or the traditional ones. The lefties won, implemented their policies, they didn't work... and they still cleave to them. There's nearly no backlash. Not only isn't it about the outcomes, it never was; the desire for the policies themselves is a first principle. This also holds in other areas such as crime.

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.

If they’re really super-geniuses, they can learn socialization from a curriculum and limited practice. Two years of Toastmasters did more for me than twelve years of public school, though I’m autistic smart, not ground-breaking physics smart.

I recommend the club structure and original public speaking curriculum of Toastmasters founder Ralph Smedley, which is in the public domain.

There is a case for segregation by tested mind-type, but untested individuals segregated by stereotypes would be more societally harmful than the gain.

Not necessarily. I could see a strong argument that proper exposure and socialization with the normies is actually good for the supergeniuses.

It's an argument, but when the 'supergeniuses' are getting beaten up and their 'socialization' is to the role of pariah, then if you don't reconsider you're doing the same thing progressives do when they swear that not disciplining the violent will improve the system.

Socially, however, this is not good, you’d have to concentrate the genii anyways.

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's funny that you mention Iowa because I went to school in Des Moines and the system there absolutely DOES segregate based on intelligence. While local high schools do have AP classes, the students who score particularly highly on the statewide standardized tests get put in separate math classes starting in 5th grade and by 8th (or rarely 7th) grade start getting bussed to a magnet high school for part of their days to learn through an accelerated math/reading/science curriculum. Though that still means time spent at the source schools for certain electives and non-accelerated courses (music, foreign language, art) the smart kids are still pretty well insulated from the average kids for all the rigorously academic subjects.

(Though I would be remiss to not mention that Ames Public High School still dominated all the math competitions anyway...)

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][2].

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".

[2] The prototypical example of this is arguably the Khmer Rouge (under the assertion that post-scarcity was imminent and possible with existing technology and would arrive once the collective population of Abels were exterminated). They were wrong, of course, but the justification for "kill anyone who looks intelligent" makes perfect sense when viewed through this lens.

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.

All recent NATO ads feature a cast that is as white as AfD ads:

I don't think they plan to let migration backgrounders get anywhere near firearms at all.

Mena migrants (including the ones putin sent to invade) will be exempt from conscription while still getting gibs. Meanwhile the few remaining indigenous young adults will be first in line to be used as cannon fodder.

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 not coming to work at her previous school, 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.

If they were such fools, they wouldn't have won so totally.

Just because Lysenko won the political game didn't make him right. Reality intruded and discredited him.

Certainly he was wrong scientifically. But not a fool; he knew that actual reality was of far lesser practical significance than political reality.

"A black woman invented the telescope. You might disagree. You might even have evidence to the contrary. But you have to ask yourself: is this really worth losing my job over? A black woman invented the telescope."

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.

Was funny to see the maneuvers Ta-Nehisi Coates went through in his most famous book to blame this - and the insistence that he stay disciplined do well at school from teachers - on white supremacy.

Even if black parents in America are reluctantly beating their kids so racist white cops don't shoot them, we have a bunch of natural experiments from dozens of countries that don't have the white man breathing down their neck.

I'd imagine that's more working to lower middle class black people. Nicole there is very proud of being upper middle class, doncha know. She and hubby both, from high toned families. So physical discipline or corporal punishment would be a no-no there (though she does admit pulling kids away from each other in the lunch room incident, something she could only get away with because she was a parent and not a school employee, and she was lucky none of those kids went home to complain to their own moms about being attacked in the lunch room by this stranger).

It's very funny that the highly educated smart parents had no idea their kid was falling behind so badly, and their solution was not "we'll help you", it was "we can hire tutors". Even for her own child, her immediate reaction was to outsource the solution to someone else.

Also, she never seems to have considered that maybe her child is... average. Not bad, not dumb, just average. No, daughter has to be a paragon of all the virtues and was failed by her terrible school. She keeps banging on about the kid being an honor student but can't seem to see how that looks when put beside "and her English essays were full of mistakes, bad spelling, etc. and her maths homework was terrible and she didn't understand several necessary parts of the curriculum". Seems like it would be very easy to be an honor student if the teachers don't correct your homework and automatically give you As on tests!

But 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.

...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.

But all that aside, I think the worst failure of parenting on display is that Nikole and her husband apparently took no interest at all in the kid's education. Oh sure, they liked writing big cheques to cover shortfalls in funding, but neither of the pair of them seem to have looked at "are you doing homework? what test did you do? can I see what you wrote?" No, they just accepted when she came home with a report card filled with high scores, but never actually sat down and looked at the work. Nikole was too busy brushing off her daughter's complaints because they made her feel bad about her wonderful choices to force educational improvement in the bad school. A school she knew was a bad school, a school she picked because it was a bad school.

To do something I'm loath to do - defend teachers - what do you do with a societally median student when the rest of the class are two standard deviations bellow? I totally could see Najya being head and shoulders above the rest of the class. I assume the teachers are still moving on the rest of the kids to the next grade, so what are the teachers going to do with their best student? Give her C's along with the illiterate kids?

Who knows if this person is legitimate or not. She has since locked down her account. See a screenshot of her profile from this post on x if she deletes it. Happened to still have the post in cache so got a screen shot.

Hilary M (@hilarym99) 6:16 PM · Sep 20, 2026

I mean this sincerely: are there teachers out there individually correcting kids homework? Cause I’ll come out and say rn that I am not (nor could I) and my own kids HW never came home corrected. We go over it in class. Kids are responsible for checking it when we do.

And she tellers all her residents not to grade homework. https://x.com/MassJumbo/status/2102124751124598931

My homework was graded. That's broadly true.

We go over it in class. Kids are responsible for checking it when we do.

We also didn't do this. I went to school decades ago so maybe I'm out of date.

What I remember from school was having to grade each other's papers.

You are really supporting the people of my X bubble, who when presented with a tweet suggesting we pay teachers what they were worth, mostly responded about how much money we would save or how minimum wage laws make it illegal.

To be clear I don’t quite understand the job-qualification reasons for elementary school teachers to need high school diplomas, let alone masters degrees, and would would replace elementary school teachers with the top x% of 11th grade girls if made supreme dictator. But what I remember from middle/high school was turning in homework, the teacher passing it out again in a random order, and having to Mark answers with a differently coloured pen as the teacher called them out. Tests were mostly scantron and graded by machine. The teacher had to grade essays, but not day to day assignments.

That or correcting it ourselves. That said, homework doesn't count and I was in a high achiever school so the teachers probably figured if we don't do that correctly the only people we're cheating is ourselves.

Pretty normal striver parenting- her kid being average is just not a comprehensible idea. But normie blacks use corporal punishment up and down the class ladder much more heavily than whites do; support for corporal punishment in institutional settings is mostly blacks and white southerners, and this includes fairly up-middle class people.

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.

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 went to a Montessori school for a year and a half, and nah, they are for drama kids. The only reason why kids are brighter in Montessori schools is selection effect. Shape rotators benefit from schools that are designed to challenge them every day.

Fair enough, I"e never actually been to one. Is there anything you could actually recommend, which is relatively available in the US? (so not, like sending them to some super elite private school in Manhattan).

I'm not familiar with US schools at all, sorry.

(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.

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.

Yet the fundamental problem is that a provably fair metric for this justifies discrimination.

Everyone knows that "scientific X-ism" is starting from the conclusion first and working backwards. What happens when you don't do that and still come up with X overrepresented in the set? (And "couldn't graduate from high school" is a stronger signal than the traditional examples of race or sex. Scientific credentialism, perhaps.)

Hence the answer of "never ask that question, also sacrifice the time and potential of people who can graduate in such a way that sufficiently soothes society's guilty conscience about discriminating against the failures".[1]

Which means that there's a tendency to make society feel guiltier about that- that as society perceives itself as even richer, more sacrifice should be demanded from everyone to get over the fact that some people are better than others.

(Example: in 2020, American society got an absurdly generous stimulus package (of both money directly, but also of time, as it was illegal to work. Within 3 months, in every major city, protests broke out with the goal of increasing the amount of sacrifice to compensate for the existence of social malignants. That's what the cries of "Black Lives Matter" ultimately mean.[2])

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?

Assume the above is true, and take the view that high school and college are just one very long IQ test. Those 12-14 years [so basically, most of a productive person's youth] taking the test are ultimately forfeit[3]. That level of sacrifice is required- a tax, if you will- paid to the societal consensus.

In return, that consensus will commit violence against socially malignant persons older than that (who "were given every chance and now deserve the outcome of prison or death"). In other words, past the age the youth have sacrificed for this protection, we no longer pretend a malignant person "could have been a future doctor or lawyer" no matter how many [crocodile] tears are shed.

Asian countries do this too, but to a far greater extent to the point that men and women who fail tend to kill themselves. This is because by failing, they're permanently demoted into the class against whom all of society, including themselves, agrees discrimination is warranted. (If they didn't believe this, they wouldn't be taking the honorable way out- that's why that type of suicide is "the honorable way out" in the first place.[4])

[1] These human beings are, in a fundamental sense, bad harvests. Ancient peoples made many sacrifices [including perfectly good human beings directly] to prevent bad harvests, but the purpose was more likely for any member of society to be able to ease their consciences and understand they did all they could if the harvest was bad anyway. (When the bad harvest is a human being, the moment that human's life ends in imprisonment or death does not qualify as being sacrificed. Actively having chosen to be an opponent precludes this from being a sacrifice.)

[2] The term "omnicause" describes this effect in the general case, but is also designed to destroy any other local system of sacrifice by insisting upon the primacy of typical American blood feuds like racism, sexism, anti-/semitism (depends on the day), etc.

[3] It is no different than any other child sacrifice. Yes, the one being sacrificed survives, but they have sustained very serious injury for no other reason than the religion of the people demanding it. Sacrificing babies to Moloch for a good harvest has the approval of everyone...

[4] ...including the child who will be incinerated. The holiest children play their part.

Because education was seen as the route out of poverty. Because employers tell the governments that "we want a workforce with skills in A, B and C". Because as society grows more technologically advanced, you can't really just finish school at fourteen and start working as a ploughboy anymore.

Long ago, when I was in school, we were told that international comparisons of academic ability severely underestimate Americans. Many other developed countries track students and only the topmost track takes the assessments. So it is the upper portion of Europeans and Singaporeans vs all Americans. Their upper portion is much better than our median. Unless we were all geniuses or them all severely disabled, that would have to be true.

So indeed universal K-12 is somewhat strange, even among modern developed countries if you count the college track.

And these poor kids don't get any part of any tracked or non-tracked system. No food at lunch, only punches. No grading of any math assignment, only As.

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.

I definitely agree with educate kids at the level they're at. The one caveat is that in the past, it was more class-based. "No use putting Johnny into the more academic class, he's not going to college, all his family work in the box factory and that's where he'll end up too". That way, bright kids from poor backgrounds got left out and left behind.

Of course it's swung too far the other way and now it's "college or nothing". And that's before we even get into the kids with behavioural problems, mental issues, really hellish family circumstances, etc. Schools are being asked more and more to take on roles beyond education; they were always about creating future citizens, but now they're supposed to take on the roles of parents and social workers, feeding the kids, socialising them, indoctrinating them with the current 'all right thinking people are on this side of history' stuff, on top of (or even instead of) teaching them the three Rs.

I'd never make a school teacher. It's a tough job, and despite all the Hollywood movies, it's not enough to be young, smart, motivated, and stand in front of the class of surly slackers and get them to blossom with their hidden gifts just by force of your personality and challenging the status quo expectations of the prejudiced and out of touch school administration. Doesn't work like that in reality.

I mean I think there are a lot of philosophical reasons that we ended up here. First of all, you have the blank slate growth mindset memes that say that any kid no matter what can do literally anything and that the only failure is to stop trying. This isn’t true, or at least not as true as we would like it to be. You might get a 10% improvement if you’re putting in more work, but you can’t take a kid who in tenth grade can’t do basic algebra and send him through the MIT engineering program. A second related problem is that equality of outcomes is expected, and thus any attempt to put kids into skill appropriate classes is going to be illegally discrimination if the classes are not absolutely equal numbers of all races and genders in each track.

Im mostly a pragmatist in most social issues. The best solutions are the ones that work for the majority of people involved. And I don’t really care to pretend that blank slate is real when most of my practical experiences with real people across all kinds of contexts show that humans are individuals practically from birth. There are vast differences in skills, interests, personality, and diligence that affect what a kid is capable of doing from birth. What’s funny to me is that we are fine with this in sports. We don’t take the kids who throw dirt clods in the outfield and shunt them through select high skill baseball as if they are simply one outstanding coach away from a future million dollar contract with the Yankees. They have tryouts, and you either make the team or you don’t, and everyone understands it and accepts it.

As far as schools becoming everything a kid needs, I think this is a problem of the government taking on those roles. It happens all the time. The government starts offering a service and other groups that had been doing those things tend to step back until the government is the only game in town. Why would you take the time to teach your kids to be good citizens when the government will do it for you? Why would a church or community group do that when they can outsource it to government?

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. Edit: Apparently he is the NYC Public Schools Contracts Committee Chair

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 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 be 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

Here we were, this upper-middle-class, educated, highly involved family with a house brimming with books.

Which apparently neither of the parents bothered reading to the kid, or helping her read. Hence Nikole's shock when she finally saw the school work her daughter was producing.

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).

Teachers complaining about pay makes me far angrier than it probably should because of how extremely overpaid many of them already are. I'm sure there are some rural Oklahoma districts paying new teachers $30,000, but this is not the norm. Every time I've looked into specific numbers, it's turned out that teachers make as much or more than similarly educated/skilled professionals in other fields, once you account for teachers' extraordinarily generous benefits and the fact you only have to work 9 months out of the year. When my mother retired from teaching kindergarten a few years ago, she was making well north of $100,000 a year for 4-5 hours of work a day, 200 days a year, in a job where she received essentially zero oversight and enjoyed the sort of job security where nothing short of a felony conviction would stop the checks from coming. I understand that this was in a California school district and does not represent the situation everywhere, but my experience is that teaching is one of the easiest and most remunerative professions available for the vast majority of people who currently work as teachers (there's a reason you always see laid off teachers working menial service jobs and entry level clerical work, and not pivoting to the sort of white collar work you'd expect their educations would qualify them for -- teaching was already by far the most attractive option available to them).

It's this bizarre martyr complex where teachers are constantly crowing about how unappreciated they are, completely blind to the fact that they're already basking in universal adulation far in excess of what their actual contribution to society should dictate. Every teacher I've ever met complains about how little credit they get for the time they spend after hours grading papers, etc. without any overtime, and they are universally shocked when I explain to them that's how it works for literally every non-hourly profession. Like they couldn't wrap their minds around the idea that other people also sometimes have to take work home, that they're not the only ones who don't get to always "clock out" at the end of the official work day.

It takes a lot of audacity to claim you have a thankless job when you have a literal pile of "thank you" gifts on your desk at the end of each school year.

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.

One thing that stuck out to me was comparing deliberately sending her daughter to shitty schools to civil rights-era parents fighting segregation (notably about sending kids to better schools) is a world in itself.

You have the claim to be heirs to the civil rights act. You have the inability to actually improve things so in the name of equity by golly no one gets a good education. Not on her watch. You have the mental jujutsu to advocate for literally the opposite of the tradition you claim to be heirs of.

I have a small child and have been worried about public schools, private schools, etc. and I don’t know if this article makes me feel better or worse.

I have a small child and have been worried about public schools, private schools, etc. and I don’t know if this article makes me feel better or worse.

So long as you don't deliberately decide to send your child knowingly to the shitty school because 'you is well-off, you can pays for supplies'n'trips'n'sheet by riting Big Chex, this will make it all better' then you can feel better because you are better at parenting than the Hannah-Joneses:

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.

EDIT: As an aside, can anyone tell me who is the Hannah and who is the Jones in this double-barrelled household? "Faraji Jones" seems intuitively right, but is it? 😁

I’m not worried about deliberately hobbling my kid for politics, I’m worried about finding good schools. It seems like “no homework because it’s inequitable” is fairly common these days, among other practices with similar goals, at least according to teachers: https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/research/equitable-grading-through-eyes-teachers

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 chance 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.

The schools seem to avoid any chance 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.

The issue is that these schools don't have the ability to do anything about it, so it is logical that they will just hide it.

If only a small percentage of students come from a dysfunctional family, then the school can put a lot of effort into helping them, or just kick them out. Then the functional majority sets the standard. When the majority is dysfunctional, the same solutions no longer work, and you would need other solutions, like extending the school day, and having children do their home work under supervision of a teacher.

The school can't decide that though, and the people actually in charge of the education system have delusional ideas, where they design a system around mostly functional communities with rare exceptions, not communities that are mostly dysfunctional with rare exceptions.

She herself was almost certainly negligent despite her claims to have been open to tutoring her kids

She is or at least was just as delusional as the people in charge of the education system. She assumed that the school would grade and communicate honestly, even though if they did, she would be the first in line to call them racist.

Oh, even if the kid had done badly on tests (had the school given them), our girl had a ready-made excuse: stereotype threat. Kiddo doesn't do well on tests because she doesn't do well on tests just like plenty of others, not because she's dumb (and to be fair, I don't think the daughter is dumb, or at least no dumber than the average kid) or doesn't know the material, or is just bad at the subject (as a maths failure, I sympathise with the daughter studying, thinking she did okay, then getting back a fail on the test - many such incidents!):

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.

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.

In certain neighborhoods in Dallas ISD, part of the benefit of accepting a housekeeping job is your employer lying to the schools about where your kids live- the school doesn’t care, these are mostly well behaved Hispanics whose parents believe in the Chancla, and if they show up to school, they get $9k on top of the property taxes from the sorts of houses that have full time housekeepers in Dallas. The kids get a better education. The employers get to throw in a fringe benefit practically for free. Their kids, of course, go to private schools, mostly Catholic or episcopal.

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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