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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!

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.

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

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.

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