A decade ago, superstar journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote the cover story of the New York Times Magazine about her decision to send her daughter to a local public school, which was segregated and enrolled a large proportion of low-income students, instead of choosing a high-performing public school, a charter school, or an elite private school.
Last Sunday, she wrote a long story in the same magazine admitting that she was wrong ten years ago. She admitted that she and her husband had made a mistake by pressing their views on their daughter.
Their child was disappointed by the low standards and expectations, the indifferent teachers, and the general disorganization of the school her mother chose. Eventually, her daughter was allowed to choose her high school, and she picked one with high standards and academic challenges. Her elementary and middle schools were segregated Black; her high-performing high school is largely white and probably Asian.
Jones quite rightly complains about the intensification of school segregation in the decades since the federal courts abandoned their commitment to desegregated schools. She is right. The nation turned its back on school integration, in large part because whites opposed it and left cities that tried to integrate their schools. They moved to the suburbs, many or most motivated by their desire to escape school integration.
Numerous studies have documented the positive effects of racial integration, but white parents move out. They leave to avoid the kind of schools that Hannah-Jones’ daughter didn’t like, and by leaving, create many more such schools.
Of the nearly one million students in the NYC school system about 16% are white, 42% are Hispanic, 19% are Black. Almost 19% are Asian. 2% are multiracial. About 1% are Native Americans.
This is a key, unmentioned fact in Jones’ compelling article: only 16% of the students in New York City’s public schools are white. Physically and logistically, it is hard to imagine how the schools can be integrated when there is such a small proportion of whites.
She quite rightly complains about the school system’s tolerance of incompetent administrators and inferior curriculum in many of the city’s segregated Black schools. Black students like her daughter can gain acceptance into high-performing integrated schools, but there is no obvious path to integration for the very large number of schools where the student body is Black and Hispanic and impoverished.
Peter Greene wrote a thoughtful column about Jones’s article and the reactions to it. The usual public school haters loved it. They overlooked the fact that when Hannah-Jones urged her daughter to make her own choice, her only condition was that she had to choose a public school. She did and it is an excellent school.
Please read Peter’s reflections.
I do agree with this reaction:
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Hannah-Jones’ essay obviously validates school desegregation as a path to equity. A point about integrating schools is that Asian students, overall on average, tend to be high academic achievers — often higher than white students, compared group by group. (This has confounded some desegregation experts attempting to analyze San Francisco’s school diversity efforts, since our district is heavily Asian.)
So this is awkward even to discuss, but it’s not just about mixing white students with students of color. If it were possible to just move students around to integrate schools, the effective method would be to integrate white *and* Asian students with demographic groups that tend, overall on average, to be lower academic achievers.
Unfortunately, empowered parents kick and scream about any such efforts. Sometimes it’s racism and sometimes it’s understandable. And schlepping low-income kids outside of their neighborhoods is often a burdensome inconvenience to already stressed families.
I once interviewed desegregation expert Gary Orfield for a blog post and asked him if any diverse high-poverty districts anywhere had successfully desegregated their schools. He basically said, hesitantly, um …. maybe Louisville … and I didn’t have the resources to research further. It seems like a key question to pursue, though.
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You wrote: “She quite rightly complains about the school system’s tolerance of incompetent administrators and inferior curriculum in many of the city’s segregated Black schools.”
She also complained about the uncaring attitude of teachers. You of course deliberately omitted that part because you will never, ever criticize anything that a unionized teacher does – Randi would ostracize you if you ever did that.
NHJ’s essay is the best argument for school choice that I’ve ever seen.
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Brianna, read again.
I wrote:
“Their child was disappointed by the low standards and expectations, the indifferent teachers, and the general disorganization of the school her mother chose.”
I did criticize the teachers in the segregated, low-performing school.
I write without fear or favor.
Did you read that Nikole Hannah-Jones insisted on a public school, and her daughter is thriving.
A tip: when you read, read all the words.
FYI: have you ever noticed that the highest performing states are unionized: New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut?
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You ignored Peter Greene’s treatment of the article too.
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This article was discussed on Facebooks LAUSD Parents supporting teachers page. I reflected on my experience in LAUSD. Here’s my comment.
“LAUSD has an 80 percent poverty rate. From my experience and observations as both a kindergarten teacher and a traveling K–5 theatre teacher, I did not observe the things described in this article. LAUSD schools are well managed, and the majority of teachers are highly competent.
One anecdotal example of that success is my brother’s stepdaughter, who grew up in a low-income household with a single mother. She thrived in LAUSD. She was one of those kids who simply loved learning, and with the support of her teachers and schools, she excelled academically and ultimately received a full-ride scholarship to UC Davis.”
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I am a big fan of Nikole Hannah-Jones and I remember admiring the essay she wrote when she decided to send her daughter to the public elementary school that had primarily economically disadvantaged non-white students instead of the far more affluent one.
There is so much to unpack in this piece, but I was struck by how this part at the ending of the article is barely mentioned:
“She then said she was glad she had not spent her early years in a white environment as many of the Black students at her high school had, because she’d developed a strong sense of her identity and had the confidence to speak up against the casual racism they sometimes experienced. Najya said that spending the last two years in classrooms full of privileged kids had taught her that these students weren’t smarter or even necessarily better behaved than the kids she had gone to school with before; they just had more.”
Nikole Hannah-Jones rightly acknowledges all the ways in which her decision harmed her daughter. But she – and most of the opinions expressed by readers and pundits – seem to be minimizing or discounting the benefits that Najya herself can see.
It’s inexcusable that her daughter’s two schools seemed to fail her and other students who were willing and able to handle far more challenging academics. The article was excellent on not relying on easy scapegoats “bad teachers” or “bad principals” while at the same time making it clear that was a lack of oversight by those who could and should have been responding to the problems. I don’t necessarily believe that every school serving all disadvantaged students fails miserably to teach 8th grade students who can handle it algebra and lets their parents believe the kids are A+ math students. Something is amiss there. But I wish Nikole Hannah-Jones had recognized that even the best private schools, and also in the so-called “good” more affluent public schools, the use of paid tutors is rampant. Students who don’t understand the material get outside help. But it’s a serious issue if the math teacher didn’t even notice. Were there no classroom tests, or was her daughter acing them, and if so, why?
In the article, NHJ writes: “Even if her schools were not academically the strongest, I explained, her father and I knew that we could provide for her tutoring and any other assistance to make up for what her school may have lacked.”
It sounds as if NHJ did this in elementary school – after seeing ungraded assignments – but didn’t for middle school, trusting the A grade in Algebra. But even in the so-called “best” schools, many parents have to rely on tutors to cover an 8th grade Algebra 1 curriculum that (last I checked years ago) includes material that I didn’t learn until my junior year in a high school math class for “advanced” students.
The underlying myth that parents should choose the “best” school if they can swing it is nonsense. Plenty of people who could afford private school send their kids to decent public schools. The comments to the article include parents who did choose the “best”school only to have children who were miserable and the long-term effects of their suffering couldn’t just be addressed with private tutors. The fact that NHJ daughter could catch up and thrive because she believed in herself isn’t something guaranteed. Even as a teenager, her daughter can recognize that she did get something very important from the choice her mother made.
There are many, many good enough schools – both public and private – where students thrive and also are academically challenged. Regardless of the demographics of their students. Schools that serve disadvantaged students need far more money to address the issues that affluent schools know that parents will pay tutors and therapists to address. But even with limited resources, there are extremely disadvantaged public schools that do much better for their students than the one NHJ’s daughter attended.
What is most problematic for me is that the story probably misleads readers unfamiliar with how the word “segregated” is tossed around when describing the vast NYC public school system. They seem to think there are schools for affluent students – mainly white – and schools for poor kids.
At Stuyvesant High School, white students DO reflect their overall proportion of the school system at 16%. “Asian” refers to a students from a variety of ethnic backgrounds, and Asian students – not white students – are disprortionately represented at over 70% of the students. It isn’t white students, but Asian students – often from disadvantaged backgrounds – whose families will be affected with a change to the “one test admissions” policy of the specialized high school system, since they will be the students affected – not white students who make up 16% of Stuy and 16% of the students in NYC public schools.
Stuy is only 51% economically disadvantaged, and there is a higher concentration of economically disadvantaged students – 58% – at Brooklyn Tech, another specialized high school that does have a “disproportionate” number of white students. 24% of the students at Tech are white, 12% Black and Latino and 58% Asian. I don’t know if people outside NYC understand that there is a higher concentration of white students at the specialized high school with that has a higher concentration of economically disadvantaged students. It’s the high school where they are “correctly” represented at only 16% that has fewer low income students.
In other words -it’s complicated. Even more so when you look at non-specialized high schools – many of which are popular and academically rigorous.
I looked at the demographics for a popular, highly regarded high school that sounds like the one NHJ’s daughter attends.
32% White
26% Asian
18% Black
18% Latino
58% economically disadvantaged.
Here are two more typical “segregated” NYC high schools:
Edward R. Murrow High School:
30% White
22% Asian
19% Black
24% Latino
68% economically disadvantaged.
Beacon High School:
35% white
14% Asian
12% Black
33% Latino
62% economically disadvantaged
MS 88 – a District 15 Middle school, has students passing Algebra 1 Regents, despite being only 33% White and Asian and 64% Black and Latino (and 64% economically disadvantaged).
There is a myth that all NYC schools except the ones educating almost exclusively white and Asian students are failures. There is a myth that white and Asian students only attend schools that are primarily affluent with only a small handful of Black and Latino students. It’s true that in a school system with a very high percentage of disadvantaged students, those schools might be LESS disadvantaged, but the majority of students in their schools are still living in poverty. White students in NYC attend diverse schools that are mostly low-income students. There are other schools with virtually no white students, but the schools white students do attend are very diverse and economically disadvantaged. They may be disproportionately represented, but not at all in the way that most people think of when they hear the word “segregated”.
In NYC, a parent who sends their kid to a high poverty (58% economically disadvantaged) high school where the demographics are 32% white, 36% Black and Latino, and 26% Asian can be accused of sending their kid to a school that “entrenches segregation”.
And it is true that in a large urban school system with even higher percentages of economically disadvantaged students who aren’t white, schools like that are considered a huge problem. But it should be acknowledged that those schools aren’t segregated” the way that most people understand that word to mean.
A more positive spin is that NYC public schools have some of the most diverse high schools in the country. And it also has some high schools that serve almost 100% non-white students that are struggling due to a variety of reasons that NHJ very accurately speaks to in her important essay. But simply calling NYC a “segregated” school system gives an inaccurate portrait to most people unfamiliar with the schools.
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