Nikole Hannah-Jones, founder of the 1619 Project and winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, has written a blockbuster piece, “In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?” on the reality of sending her daughter Najya to failing schools in New York City.Â
Hannah-Jones, a domestic correspondent for The New York Times Magazine covering racial injustice and civil rights, had tried to live out her progressive values and sent her child to the local, deficient public school. Writing in 2016 for the magazine, she noted that her neighbors in the quickly gentrifying neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant were opting out of the local school. “I didnt know any of our middle-class neighbors, black or white, who sent their children to one of these schools,” Hannah-Jones shared.
Hannah-Jones did. Now, ten years later, Hannah-Joness latest piece shows that her project had been a failure, at the cost of her childs education.
Its a difficult read. Hannah-Jones wanted to live out her values, especially the belief that children should go to their local school and that school choice is unacceptable. But those ideas failed when they hit reality, and Hannah-Jones spent nearly a decade coming to accept that.
The column illustrates the struggles her daughter had at her elementary school, where teachers were disinterested and bad behavior went unpunished, and then in middle school, where homework went unchecked and standards were low.
Hannah-Jones believed that through her force of will, and her prominent position, which she mentions several times in the piece, she and her husband could improve these schools. What shes missing is that it was her own misconceptions and bad ideas that got these schools into a bad position in the first place.
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In 2018, Hannah-Jones gave a keynote address at the Color of Education event, an annual summit in North Carolina “dedicated to achieving racial equity and eliminating racial disparities in the education system.” She spoke about how terrible it was that White kids in North Carolina were choosing charter schools instead of public schools in places “like Wake County that for years was a model of integration.”Â
So integration is good? But when a Black student in the audience asked Hannah-Jones for guidance on “navigating the predominantly white colleges and universities to which she has applied,” Hannah-Jones was quick to respond that she should go to Howard University, a historically Black college or university (HBCU) because, well, integration is bad.
Hannah-Jones ended that talk with this line: “The future of our children and the nation depends on progressives winning the fight to reclaim public schools.”
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Well, progressives reclaimed public schools in New York City. Theres no way to look at New York City schools as anything but the testing ground for the exact policies Hannah-Jones would want. Progressive Mayor Bill de Blasio removed “screens” â comp
