Nikole Hannah-Jones offered her daughter to the Goddess of Public Education. The goddess failed her.
Hannah-Jones, as you may know, is the New York Times writer and progenitor of the infamous 1619 Project, a distortion of American history arguing that the driving force of the founding of America was the motivation to preserve slavery.
Never mind that eminent American historians from both the right and the left have condemned the project: Hannah-Jones has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize, her initial essay in the New York Times Magazine is now a book, and there is now a high school curriculum based on the 1619 propaganda in between 4,500–5,000 schools. The 1619 project is part of the “Hate America” movement.
And propaganda it is, as Hannah-Jones has admitted that her reason for the project was political—that is, she was out to promote a political agenda, academic integrity be damned. In so doing, she is following a trend in the academic discipline of history, contending that the subject should be taught to bring about social and political change. Historical accuracy takes a back seat.
Several years ago, Lucas Morel of Washington and Lee University elaborated on the impact of the 1619 Project:
Hannah-Jones is now collaborating with Oprah Winfrey and Lionsgate on film and television projects and has contracted with One World, a division of Penguin Random House, to publish an amplified book version of all the magazine essays plus books of essays, fiction, and poetry on the project theme. Random House Children’s Books will also produce 1619 Project books for young readers, and Random House’s Ten Speed Imprint will produce a graphic novel.
Betrayal
More recently, Hannah-Jones was back in The New York Times on September 20 with an essay confessing that she has betrayed her daughter by deliberately sending her to a deficient public school. Her daughter Najya, now sixteen, resents her parents’ choice. The essay is a chronicle of a failed education deliberately orchestrated by her parents.
Before going further, let me be clear: This essay is not an attack on public schools. Far from it. We all have a vested interest in the success of public education and should support it in any way we can, even if some of us have chosen an alternative of our own. The American founders—such as Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and Benjamin Rush—argued emphatically that the success of the American project rests on properly educated citizens.
“Najya was asking what I’d accomplished by not choosing the ‘best’ school for her. And the honest answer is, I don’t know.”
This essay, however, is an observation of how misguided—if not immoral—efforts to improve public schools may be, and it tells us something about why public schools are not improving when they could be.
She begins,
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.
The essay continues as her daughter Najya realizes what her mother and father had done. She asks,
“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked. . . . By dismissal time, Najya’s shock had turned to boiling, and the seatbelt had barely clicked before she was confronting me.
Najya, an ambitious student now thinking about her future, continues with her indictment of her parents,
“We looked up our school! We saw the test scores. We saw the ratings.” She ticked off the school’s below-state average reading and math scores, and that it ranked poorly on a popular school-rating website.
Hannah-Jones and her husband knew exactly what they had done. She writes,
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.
Hannah-Jones never explains her “values” throughout the essay, but whatever they are, they justified sending her daughter, beginning in kindergarten, to the worst school available rather than the best.
Hannah-Jones and her husband, by contrast, had attended much better schools and had “flourished academically.” Not including Faraji’s net worth, Nikole Hannah-Jones is estimated to have a net worth of at least $3 million. They could have sent Najya most anywhere. So why send her to an inferior school? The answer is shocking:
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.
She explains, “We thought by sending Najya to a mostly low-income and Black school, we could help improve it for all the children there.” She admits, “But my child just shook her head, her face a mask of disbelief, and something else: betrayal.”
Najya was asking what I’d accomplished by not choosing the “best” school for her. And the honest answer is, I don’t know. When it comes to the choices my husband and I have made about public education, these days I feel that I failed both my values and my child.
More accurately, Hannah-Jones put her “values”—whatever that ambiguous word means—before the welfare of her child. Such “values” seem quite destructive and morally confused. This drove her to prefer “the group” over an individual child—their only child. Although she would not admit it, and probably doesn’t even understand it, such a disordered collectivism is a relic of Marxism, which has failed both the individual and the group.
Sixteen-year-old Najya proved wiser and in possession of more common sense than her parents.
I explained our decision over and over, but my answers never satisfied her. “But what did it do?” she’d ask. “Putting me in this school didn’t change anything. . . . It makes no sense.”
Faux Nobility
Hannah-Jones is a martyr for some and assumes a noble pose in her essay—but it is unwarranted. When making their decision to send Najya to a culturally and academically poor school, Hannah-Jones writes that her family joined the ranks of the “Little Rock Nine,” the black students who entered Little Rock Central High School in 1957 after the unanimous landmark Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education (1954). In doing so, they were the first crack in the dam of school segregation. It was a heart-wrenching, violent experience, but they planted themselves squarely in the heritage of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. As time has passed, they have justly received numerous prestigious awards, including the Congressional Gold Medal.
Hannah-Jones put her “values”—whatever that ambiguous word means—before the welfare of her child. Such “values” seem quite destructive and morally confused.
But there are two problems with this comparison. One, these students were of high school age, and they knew what they were doing. Najya did not find out until it was much too late that her parents had acted contrary to her best interests. She knew nothing of her parents’ awful decision until she discovered it herself.
Secondly, the Little Rock Nine’s bravery changed the world, but as Hannah-Jones confesses, she and her husband accomplished nothing. Although she calls her essay a “confession,” it is more of an abdication of guilt and an indictment of a system that tolerates schools such as the one to which she and her husband sentenced their daughter. Yet if condemnation of public education in the US were going to make a difference, we’d have the best public schools on the planet. But we don’t.
Hannah-Jones describes her choice to prioritize the “system” over her daughter as a “sacrifice,” but that implies that her daughter made the choice when she did not. Rather, Hannah-Jones and her husband sacrificed their daughter’s well-being in the interest of their muddled “values,” which look suspiciously like a political agenda.
In another lapse of intellectual integrity, Hannah-Jones creates a straw man and then attacks it when she claims that, rather than work for school improvement, “we have instead chosen to succumb to a collective apathy in the face of a system so devastatingly unequal that it puts at odds trying to be a good person with trying to be a good parent.” But who are the “we” who have “succumbed to a collective apathy”? She doesn’t say. I personally don’t know anyone who is apathetic about “a devastatingly unequal” education, but maybe I run with the wrong crowd.
Moreover, she claims the problem with public schools is racism and the refusal of “those who hold the most power to change.” She further—probably unwittingly—invokes Aristotle’s distinction between a good person and a good citizen. In Book III of Politics, Aristotle said that a good citizen must sometimes act contrary to the regime in which they live if that regime is flawed. In that sense, they may not be a “good,” obedient citizen. In this case, however, Hannah-Jones creates a dilemma between a good person and a good parent. In other words, the “system” has prevented her from being both a good person and a good parent. There’s no nice way to put it: this is nonsense.
Her closing paragraph reveals she has still failed to understand—or admit—that she outrageously failed her daughter because, in Hannah-Jones’s own words, she did not “rescue” her daughter from a poor education. At best, she claims, if there is guilt, it is collective guilt.
But for all of our justifications, including mine, an undeniable verity remains. As long as we continue to rescue our own children from the failing schools where we allow other people’s children to languish simply because those children have been born Black and poor in a nation of racism and riches, there is no absolution here. Not for me. Not for you. Not for any of us.
The best that can be said for that closing declaration is that it is confused and confusing.
Only One Chance at Fourth Grade
In writing this essay, replete with pictures of her daughter from kindergarten through high school, Hannah-Jones tempts the reader to ask: Is she exploiting her child—again? We all now know exactly what Najya looks like from kindergarten into high school. The whole world also knows that she is poorly educated.
If they had really wanted to change the system and do the best for their daughter, what else could her parents have done? Let’s see: They could have sent Najya to the best school available, and since they were a family of means, they could have funded the same opportunity for several other children. Then, over time, they might have donated the seed money for a more general scholarship program. Indeed, several such programs were established in honor of the Little Rock Nine. Or they might have put their energy and money behind a public charter school or a public magnet school. Or they might have located a struggling public school and volunteered there, even occasionally serving as guest teachers. Her husband is an IT professional, and she is a newspaper writer—just don’t let her teach American history.
The problem, however, is that for Democrats, scholarship programs are anathema because not everyone receives scholarships. This is “equality” run amuck. Some Democratic politicians and the leftist Teacher Unions (e.g., the NEA and the AFT) have gone so far as to try and destroy the massively popular Washington, DC, Opportunity Scholarship Program. Najya has consistently proven smarter than her parents. She asked,
“So you had money to send me to one of the best schools, and you chose not to?” she said, hurling her words. “Because other kids are disadvantaged, you didn’t want to put me in a great school?”
It is not unusual for some to criticize parents when they choose a private school, a religious school, or a homeschool over a public school. As we have learned, however, many of these critics, if they have the means, will themselves send their offspring to private schools. We have seen it time and again. We can’t blame them: It would be irresponsible to do anything else, if there is no public school within reach. They realize that their child has only one opportunity for each grade level.
At the same time, however, they oppose such opportunities for families without the means to do the same.
The hypocrisy is insufferable.