I'm finally reading the Nikole Hannah-Jones essay "In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own? 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" (NYT gift link).
September 21, 2026
"When Najya was entering pre-K, my husband, Faraji, and I decided to send her to the type of school that wealthier families with choices uniformly avoid..."
"... one that is low-income and mostly Black. Our decision had been informed by values shaped by my years of reporting on the enduring and too often seemingly hopeless battle for school integration.... We are both beneficiaries of educational opportunities that were forced into existence by generations of Black parents willing to put their most personal stake — their own children — in the fight for school equality for all Black children....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.... 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.... Najya deserved better. They all did. But she was mine. This girl, my only child, looked to me to protect her, to give her what she needed to thrive. And I had not chosen her. I almost cannot type the words...."
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70 comments:
Indulging Diversity (i.e. color judgments, class bigotry) is a character reveal.
Ah, choice, not Choice, means her daughter still has a chance. If she avoids the DEIst tar pit that has trapped her mother with pride and prejudice.
Our entire public education system is infested with college educated women who hate children.
What can you say? only 25 percent of the kids under 18 are white in NYC and that includes Jews. The total number of whites in the NYC public schools in down to 10-15 percent (depending on who you read).
So, if black parents aren't satisfied with the Public Schools its not white racism. Asians, OTOH, seem to do OK no what what system they are in. Public or private. So what is the solution? You tell me.
I assume these sort of articles are supposed to make the white NYT's readers feel good. Yes, they concerned about black folk - unlike those nasty Trump voters. But how this will affect or change anything is unclear.
Note that Nikole Hannah-Jones wanted HER kid to have better opportunities than all those little people had access to.
It only became a problem when it was HER kid. It was never a problem when it was poor women's kids.
This is a natural outgrowth of female reproductive competition. Women naturally compete by sabotaging the offspring of other women.
You cannot let women have control of systems like this. They will warp and destroy them.
There can be some women involved. But the fundamental systemic design needs to have a male outlook. Men compete by creating more wealth and more opportunity for women to have kids.
When women have control of systems like Health Care or Education like they do now they will destroy them.
You can whine and cry about what I said but until we as a species start looking at these core biological drives and growing past them this is the way it has to be.
"I used to have three theories about how to raise children. Now I have three children and no theories." 1940s joke
The poor child was sacrificed on the alter of Liberalism, just like Mayans.
Also note how these people never talk about how badly boys are being treated in these schools.
The disparities between male and female in school outweigh even the disparities between races.
If the roles were reversed and girls were being treated this way women would be up in arms.
Remember, Chelsea Clinton wept over her grandmother not having an abortion with Hillary. There was a reason for that .... liberal women are AWFL.
What a horrible mother, sacrificing her child's future for her political hobby horse. I guess Najya should feel fortunate, though. Her mother could have strangled her instead.
She was blinded by ideology and made a very wrong decision.
Does she expect every other parent to be so blinded?
It is not "racism" to not want to subject your child to misery. Nor is it "racism" to want the best for your child. It is economics and human nature. And your duty as a parent.
IOW, she "sacrificed" her own child on an alter to DEIsm. Lot of child sacrifice. Lot of that going around.
"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..."
And, apparently, while she and her husband are "educated" or at least credentialed in higher education, neither took the time and effort to monitor their daughter's schooling and give her the benefit of their higher education that might have permitted the daughter to be an example to the poor Black children at the school.
Oops.
It'd be nice if *something* came out of this tragedy, but I bet she has no better idea *why* the NYC school system is so poor than when she started.
She's full of it. So many urban black households, married couples (when that was more common) and single mothers alike, would rightfully act out of concern for their own family and make efforts to have their children attend local parochial (usually Roman Catholic) schools instead of public schools.
Racism has led Nikole Hannah-Jones to make a shit-ton of foolish mistakes and ludicrous utterances. But then, it would be folly to expect anything else.
The "poor" black school that NHJ foisted upopn her kid had the same funding as the public schools in wealthy neighborhoods. Public education isn't just a squanderfest, it's a squanderfest designed to prevent children from reaching their potential. no sentient parent could possibly have taken as long as NHJ to figure out how underserved their kid was.
But don't worry, NHJ. Your kid will be coveted by elite schools as a a celebrity offspring with a DEI bonus.
She'll regard herself as an impostor, but we all know that runs in NHJ's family.
My kids were at a Ed Hirsch Core Knowledge charter before we moved out of state. We spent a year before covid in a regular public school in our new state. Highly rated schools. I remember going to parent teacher conferences for my 3rd grader and her teacher saying that they were going to work on times tables that year and that it was really important because she (the teacher) hadn't really mastered her times tables until college. !!!!
I pulled my kids out during Covid and homeschooled them. My daughter didn't know her times tables. We actually had to work on basic math facts that year. But we did it and the kids never went back to public school. We found a classical charter opening the next year. None of my kids' teachers now have trouble with math. This is a no trainer for me as their mother.
Brainer d'oh!
The entire construct of public school, or even brick and mortar school is badly outdated. Whatever performance it achieved at some point in the past, cannot be replicated today. The high school I attended in Springfield, MO, now boasts a 96% graduation rate, and this is proudly backed by a student body of which 16-25% are proficient in math, 37-40% proficient in English, and 21% proficient in science. They haven't had a National Merit student in the past three years. Student to teacher ratio about 15 to 1. The school operating budget is on the order of $18-19 million. It's my belief that those few students interested in math and science proficiency could easily gain it without being institutionalized in a school that is clearly failing its basic mission. I can accept stupidity and poor performance, but there is no point in paying for it. I feel sure that I, personally, could oversee a system that produces such poor results for a fraction of that cost. The graduation rate might fall though because I don't believe in social promotion.
At first I thought it was in her favor that she has addressed this with some honesty. But as I thought about it more and more, it seems to me that she is quite willing to cash in on her own stupid pompous mistake, and her daughter's misery, if it means she can one again put herself center stage. What has she done to correct her mistake and course-correct her daughter's education? It reads to me like she's been watching this unfold all along, and has only decided to really get focused once her daughter is well into high school. It's still all about H F-J, and race-hustling. '...Fighting for every black child...' What an ass.
Oso Negro said...
The entire construct of public school, or even brick and mortar school is badly outdated. Whatever performance it achieved at some point in the past, cannot be replicated today.
The entire premise of the public school system was to miseducate poor people so they would become unthinking drones that worked in factories.
It was a broken model from the start.
Aggie said...
At first I thought it was in her favor that she has addressed this with some honesty. But as I thought about it more and more, it seems to me that she is quite willing to cash in on her own stupid pompous mistake, and her daughter's misery, if it means she can one again put herself center stage.
Aggie nailed this charlatan on the personal level.
These people are all demons. The coddled, selfish, college educated american women don't realize the backlash they are priming.
Sending your children to public school is child abuse.
SHUT THEM DOWN.
It would be better to have no public schools at all than to spend $50k per student for “education” so bad.
The whole point of the real estate industry is avoiding people like this.
“Feraji and I felt an obligation to make educational decisions based on the collective good and not just our individual advantage….”
These two fundamentally misunderstand human nature. Each person pursues their own best interest. And when it comes to your kids, you do what is best for the child. If that involves some sacrifice, so be it.
A friend told me that her late husband used to say they were driving a new car off of a cliff every year so that there kids could go to Catholic schools in Omaha. Their son, like his dad, went to Creighton Prep. The three girls, like their mom, all went to Marian high school. All four of them are very successful today.
I blame Notre Dame for not instructing NHJ on human nature. Instead she learned about identity politics and that is not good for her family or America.
The other major issue here is that the public schools in major cities are a disaster but there is no political will to fix the problem because the teachers’ union is a top donor and voting bloc for the Dems.
What struck me is that in a decade she didn't notice that her child could not do math or read and write competently. My parents were busy but they would have noticed.
She said she was enrolling her daughter in a poor inner city school to help all the children get a better education. What did she do to see that that happened? Did she volunteer to tutor? How active was she in PTA? What did she do when she noticed that her child got all A's but couldn't read or do basic math? Did she notice at all? Was her child life and education simply a virtue signalling vanity project? Sounds like it. Girl's boiling mad? Sounds like she learned something, if only about her parents.
"These two fundamentally misunderstand human nature. Each person pursues their own best interest."
The only system that works.
Great moments in hubris:
"A NYT reporter in a high-poverty school f-ing changes the school … I can go to that school and say there is a problem and it gets fixed immediately” - Nikole Hannah-Jones
Wow.
"The only system that works."
And the one the left insists needs to be overthrown.
Part of her theory is that if well-to-do resourceful parents with high standards pull their kids out of the public schools, there will be no resourceful parents with high standards left to make sure that the school has its act together. The idea is that if you are a resourceful parent with high standards, you could do something about it, at the point you realized that the school was failing. This story, among other things, is about how it turns out that it doesn’t make one bit of difference if you ARE a resourceful, affluent, parent with high standards. She repeatedly engaged the schools and their people. These interventions made zero difference. This I think is what was the most surprising thing to her about the whole experience.
Planned pupilhood is next to planned parenthood are insane choices or choices of the insane? The jury is out with its verdict.
"These interventions made zero difference. This I think is what was the most surprising thing to her about the whole experience."
So she learned from her experience and now she's a school choice advocate.
Right?
"So she learned from her experience..."
Internet meme:
Woman, crying in her car: "Our Democrat mayor and governor are destroying my city. That's it! I'm done! Next time, I'm voting for a different Democrat."
"She repeatedly engaged the schools and their people."
A normal parent would have eventually changed course for the sake of her child.
that's because you DID make the wrong choice
You set your daughter to a shithole school where the barbarians are allowed to run wild, as as a consequence no one else gets any education they or their parents don't put into them.
You, NHJ, are a failure as a mother, and an idiot at understanding the world around you
Nausea
Via a comment on Steve Sailer's blog post about NH-J's article I got this commentary from RedState
"Middle school didn’t fix it. At Urban Assembly Unison, the school eliminated homework outright and adopted an “Algebra for All” policy that pushed advanced math onto students, Najya included, before they’d mastered the material underneath it. An outside tutor later found Najya hadn’t even mastered long division or fractions, the building blocks the algebra was supposed to rest on. Najya got A’s at Unison. She also, by her own account years later, “didn’t know anything.”
Hannah-Jones wants readers to see this as evidence of a broken, racially rigged system that owes her daughter something it never delivered. Some of what she documents is real: underfunded schools, high teacher turnover in high-poverty buildings, and the well-established fact that screened, selective public schools skew whiter and wealthier in a city like New York. That part of the argument isn’t fiction. It’s also not the part that determined what happened to Najya."
Link to RedState posting
Nothing new here. Leftists in power WANT poor outcomes and stupid masses. we all know why. Power.
If the left is willing to do this to their own children, what do you suppose they're willing to do to yours?
I mentioned on the overnight thread that my parents did something similar to me and my three siblings, keeping us in declining inner city public schools that were rapidly becoming almost all black. Maybe the schools weren't so bad, because we did manage to learn. There weren't many choices other than private schools, which they didn't really have the money for, or moving to the suburbs. We didn't hate our parents for this, but when I look back it's clear they risked our education and safety for the sake of their ideology.
Just an old country lawyer said...
She said she was enrolling her daughter in a poor inner city school to help all the children get a better education. What did she do to see that that happened? Did she volunteer to tutor? How active was she in PTA? What did she do when she noticed that her child got all A's but couldn't read or do basic math? Did she notice at all? Was her child life and education simply a virtue signalling vanity project?
Bingo. if she actually gave a damn, she would have been working with her daughter, and at her school every week, or at least once a month, volunteering, and finding out how bad it was
@Dave Begley said..
Who wins at Notre Dame : Plato or Aristotle
Are we to believe daughter's school was neighborhood school or kid was bussed? Did kid have school playmates or parents circle kids to play - how are they faring - something must have stuck out.
NHJ got a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant.
Some genius. Can the Foundation get its money back?
As I wrote on a different thread, Nikole Hannah-Jones was NOT, as she asserts, "fighting for every black child," unless she means that she was fighting to make them ignorant and incapable of doing well in the 21st century. At 80, I am old enough to remember the Freedom Riders, and the discovery of the bodies of Goodman, Schwerner, and Cheney. People risked their lives, people GAVE UP their lives for what Hannah-Jones blithely throws away, for her own child and for every black child in NYC.
If you want a living definition of the phrase "beneath contempt," Nikole Hannah-Jones is a good starting point.
From the Foundation’s website regarding her 2017 award, “ Hannah-Jones's deeply personal account of her own experience as a parent in New York City's public school system, "Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City" (2016), shows that school segregation is not an isolated phenomenon but rather a defining factor of most cities across the country. Currently at work on a book about school segregation, Hannah-Jones is compelling us to confront segregation as a fundamental cause of racial disparities and reshaping national conversations about education reform.”
She pulled this stunt on her daughter for book research.
BTW, two Madison residents got genius awards in 2025.
“ Matt Black is a photographer chronicling people and landscapes in marginalized communities across the United States. In distinctive black and white images, Black compels viewers to grapple with the prevalence of poverty in the United States and its impacts on daily life for many Americans.” 2025 winner.
What if Althouse wins in 2026? Winners announced on 9-29.
Here’s what they will write.
“Ann Althouse is law professor emerita at the University of Wisconsin. We aren’t going to add a hyphen and the word Madison as everyone knows where the School of Law is. And adding the hyphen lowers the status of the true and original University of Wisconsin. We mean they don’t put that hyphen on the football uniforms, right?
Since her retirement, she gets up before sunrise every day when she is home and - accompanied by her beloved husband Meade (no first name necessary) - photographs the sun rise at Lake Mendota. She only skips if it is freezing cold or raining.
One might think that the results would be boring. Far from it! Different every time! A wide variety of colors and super interesting cloud patterns.
Some have compared Althouse’s work to that half-blind French guy and his garden. Trust us, Althouse’s work is way better.
We thought about giving Althouse this genius award for her writing on her blog. She has not missed a day since she began which is way more impressive than Cal Ripken, Jr.’s badeball streak because Ripken got winters off.
But an award for writing would result in us getting all sorts of grief from our liberal friends. While Althouse might not be a conservative, she’s damn close. We suspect she’s been influenced by that husband of hers and her commenters. The late Rush Limbaugh was a regular reader and that’s a real indictment there! Horror of horrors!
So, we decided to do this approach because we really like her pictures and want to encourage her.
And while Althouse can spend or invest this fabulous sum of money any way she desires, it would be great if she held a giant party for the Althouse community with a secret special musical performance.”
Althouse! We could use an old-fashioned fisking of this NHJ essay. Is the narrator reliable? (Example: should we believe that NHJ and her husband for years didn't realize their daughter still didn't know fractions?) Is this piece actually contradictory? (School has very specific problems (and gets lots of resources) but NHJ falls back on racism/segregation as answer.) Is NHJ chiding herself or slyly promoting herself, as now woker than woke? Thorough reading needed . . .
Barack Obama, a man who was 50% Black, was President from 2009-16 and did absolutely nothing about segregated schools "in every major city"?
She got her story. Some would say a handmade tale.
Horrible mother. Her daughter hates her for good reason.
JIM, you're damned right he didn't
"Althouse! We could use an old-fashioned fisking of this NHJ essay...."
Sorry, this one didn't call me. Seems like kicking somebody when they are down. But I agree I could have done more: The continual use of the conclusory word "segregated." The failure to say that the terrible school is very well-funded. I believe that school gets $50,000–$52,000 per student and NYC’s average is something like $35,000. The whole subject is very sad.
Narrator: She in fact, did not have her daughters best interests in mind.
Anyone who knows anything about John MacArthur knows that he is spinning in his grave about what the "genius" grants have turned into. He ran his insurance empire out of a coffee shop in Florida. His original board was a bunch government-skeptical free booters. But, as always happens, woke professional staff gradually took over the institution, and the genius grants became laced with politically correct attaboys and attagirls, handing out the moolah with regard to race, creed, and color.
Bah!
NH-J is no genius.
I went thru this when I first moved to NYC from SF. I put my kids in public school. The problem is violent black culture and low IQ within that culture. I had to walk my kids the few blocks to school and walk them home so that the black kids would not gang up on them and beat them up. The schools were constantly vandalized and covered with graffiti. Parental involvement in the school was close to zero. There is no way to fix these schools because it’s the parents and students who are the problem. Eventually, I just got out. Moved to Woodstock where the public schools are great.
Now THIS is funny!!
Experiment with child. What could go wrong? Uh, oh, it failed. Impossible -- we meant so well!
Will she ever consider the corollary? That all her reasoning is backwards and upside-down? Of course she will! Paddy Clarke ha ha ha.
--- The entire premise of the public school system was to miseducate poor people so they would become unthinking drones that worked in factories.
It was a broken model from the start. [Achille]
This is wrong. Idiotically wrong. In fact, what high schools used to be two generations ago is better and more demanding than most colleges are today.
Of course, you've already declared I should be executed for disagreeing with you! So let me just say, you have supplied a pat putdown that enables you to continue not-thinking.
--- It's still all about H F-J, and race-hustling. [Aggie]
Really? How can you say such a thing?
"I almost cannot type the words..."
She almost couldn't type the words! Almost.
Almost! But fortunately for us and the whole world, if not her daughter, she did.
I lived in a deep blue urban area with school age kids and remember this sort of impulse well, especially among liberals (which is nearly everyone). With many parents, it was an earnest, well-meaning effort to be a part of and support the community (in that “it takes a village” way) and effect, or at least influence, some sort of positive change. And yes, probably assuage some guilt for being white or having a little bit of money.
The catch was that if you were going to be a change-maker you had to treat it like a full-time job; a Flock camera pointed at every teacher, administrator, textbook and activity. Mere presence isn’t enough
While I think NHJ definitely had ulterior motives, I think in some sense she was probably thinking the same way as those well-meaning liberal savior parents She just wasn’t up to the task of actually doing the work.
Side note: this approach was mostly applicable to elementary and middle school levels. All bets were off when it came to high school.
DEI, oh. DEI, oh. Daylight comes and she wants to forget.
I have seen this play out in small towns, too. I know a couple of people who cared deeply about the public schools, sent their kids there then ran for the school board to try to change things. One was even the president of school board. They all ended up quitting in frustration because they couldn't change anything and sent their kids to private schools.
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