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PaperclipPerfector  13hr ago (text post)   2085 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.

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!

(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.

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