She chose to send her kid to a failing school and her kid is mad about it | Hour 1

And once again, a periodic reminder. Holy smokes, did we dodge a bullet with Nicole Hannah-Jones. Oh, my goodness. You can't see it because it's radio, but I am smiling. Maybe you can hear me smiling. I'm smiling that she is. Not in the employ of UNC Chapel Hill. She almost was. We came this close. And then the whole thing got thwarted, and she was like, I don't even want to go there anyway. It was her alma mater, I believe, Nicole Hannah-Jones. And she is the author of the 1619 Project, right? The fabrication of American history that is now injected into many K-12 education curricula around the country, right? And she had a big write-up. She's been, she's gone viral. Again, she's gone viral, this time for writing a ridiculously lengthy piece. It'll take you like an hour to read this thing at the New York Times Magazine. And she is a columnist for the New York Times, and she writes about education issues. She's living in New York City, and she admits in this ridiculously lengthy piece, that she sacrificed her own daughter's education for mommy's ideology. And her daughter is pissed. Okay. She is, she is mad. The daughter is pretty hacked off about it. When she found out that mommy sent her to a failing school, rife with chaos, absentee teachers, no grading, no homework. fake assessments that were never done that said she's either at or above grade level or below grade level. But they actually didn't do the assessments. This is what the education expert columnist for the New York Times, this is what she sent her kid into in order to prove her ideology. The name of the piece is called In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own? And the answer to that is yes. Yes, you did. You ignored the child right in front of you, preferring instead to focus on the statistics, right? That's what she was doing. She was sacrificing her own flesh and blood for the universal collective. Statistical group of kids. And she starts off by talking about how her kid jumps into the car one day after school. She's picking her up. And the daughter. Named Nadja said, did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here? See, Nadja and her friends had started thinking about their futures, their honors students. They searched the nation's top colleges and That led to a curiosity about New York City's highest-ranked public schools. And then they wondered about their chances of getting in. They decided to Google their own school, because they're in middle school, and they found their own school's ratings, and oh my goodness, we're going to a terrible school. She and her trio of, quote, black girl nerds confronted not only the reality of the city's deeply segregated educational landscape, but also that the Brooklyn school they all attended existed firmly on the wrong side of the divide. Our decision to put her there had been informed by values shaped by my years of reporting on the enduring and too often seemingly hopeless battle for school integration. This is what she has been devoting her efforts to, basically bringing back race-based busing. This is her ideology. This is what she wants to see done. She says she and her husband Faraji felt an obligation to make educational decisions based on the collective good and not just our individual advantage. New York is considered one of the nation's most liberal cities while operating a school system that is among the most racially segregated. Really? Really? How could that happen? How on earth does it happen that a liberal school district has like the most segregated schools? So weird. 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. She goes on to say that the battle for school integration was not catalyzed by the desire to put black students next to white students, but by an effort to ensure that black children received access to equal educational resources, right? This was always the argument. This was what occurred here in Charlotte in the Swan decision that prompted this, the race-based busing in, in CMS for decades. Julius Chambers was the lead attorney in that case at the time. And I remember talking to old reporter, Mike Koza from down the hall at WBTV. And he told me about the case that he had covered. And he said, Julius Chambers, who was a, lawyer for the black parents, the Swan family. And he brought up the school officials and he would go through like the, like the desks and the textbooks and all this stuff. And in the white schools, they were getting all the new stuff. And in the black schools, they were getting all the hand-me-down stuff, right? Thus proving racism, discrimination against the black students, right? And that's what then prompted the court order to blend the demographic populations, the in order to make sure that all the schools are getting new stuff not based on race. Makes sense, right? When presented with that evidence that white schools are getting all the new stuff and they're getting attention paid to them and the black schools are not getting that stuff, it makes sense then to say, okay, you got leadership in the school district that is obviously making decisions based on race, so therefore you got to blend all of these racial groups so this way you can't be doing that. it will stop the racists that were in charge of CMS from doing that. Again, I can understand the logic there. Makes sense. However, as time goes on and the population becomes less and less racist-y, which I know some people don't believe that that has occurred, but as a Gen X-er, I came up in the age of the United Colors of Benetton, and so no, you should not be doing what CMS was doing. However, as people begin retiring out of these systems, new elected leaders come in, and at some point then it's like, okay, these decisions are not being made based on race anymore, so do we need to keep busing? And that's why eventually the federal court said, you have eliminated the last vestiges of racism. You've got black elected leaders running the school district, so you don't, You don't need to be doing the race-based busing any longer. Democrats blew a gasket over this because they were basically hiding test scores, the achievement gap between black and white students. Black students were not performing as well, but every school was above average, and that's what they wanted. They wanted all the schools to be seen as good schools, quote-unquote, but when you dig into the numbers, you find out that the achievement gap still exists. that it's not simply being at the good school. There's something else going on there. And this is what Nicole Hannah-Jones doesn't seem to be able to wrestle with in her 17,000-page piece at the New York Times Magazine. There's something else going on. She gets close. She identifies some of the results, but then just trucks it up to, you'll never guess, Yeah, you probably will. Lack of funding. Right. And racism. That's that's why her daughter isn't performing well in an all black school is because of lack of funding and racism. Right. All right. For over a year now, you've heard me talking about create a video. Great local company in Mint Hill that has helped more than two million families preserve their memories by turning old photos. VHS tapes, film reels, and slides into lasting keepsakes. Now, Creative Video is helping families and groups create brand new memories while they're traveling. Introducing Group Travel Videos. Perfect for family reunions, church mission trips, group vacations, destination weddings, student trips, senior adult. Groups, sports teams. I mean, really any gathering of people that you care about that's traveling together. 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You can email Katie, Katie at group travel videos.com group travel videos from old memories to new adventures, preserving life's moments for a lifetime. Uh, all right. So, uh, yes, let's see. This is from Eric who says, um, Nicole Hannah Jones sent her child to a public school, three Oh seven PS three Oh seven. And, uh, Yeah, their per pupil spending there is like 52K a year. That is accurate. This according to Brittany Bernstein at the National Review. PS307 spends a whopping $ 52, 000 per student each year. That is more than three times the national average, which is like $ 16, 500 and change. The school also. Benefits from a smaller-than-average student-to-teacher ratio. Remember when that was all the rage? Overcrowded classes, kids can't learn because there's 20 kids per class or 25 kids per class and all that. We've got to reduce the student-teacher ratio. So what would you think would be a good student-to-teacher ratio? One that could reasonably assure parents that their kids are getting a lot of one-on-one time. What do you think a good student-to-teacher ratio might be? Right? If 25 to 1 is too much, 15? Is it 15 to 1? 10 to 1. PS307' s student-to-teacher ratio is 9 to 1. Nine kids per adult. 9 to 1. I mean, that's, like, that was the size of my classes after school with, like, the religion teacher from the church. Like, you'd have, like, seven, eight, nine kids in our living room, you know, learning about the church, learning about the sacraments and stuff, catechisms. Catechisms. And by the way, the teachers at PS307, they pull in, they average about $ 100, 000, more than $ 100, 000 a year. So they're making six figures. There's only nine kids they have to deal with in the classroom. And each one of those kids represents $ 52, 000 in expenditures. Meanwhile, at the nearby Community Roots Charter School, which is also in front of a public housing project, more than 80% of the students are proficient in math and reading, despite the fact that that school spends only $ 26, 000 per student, so less than half of what PS 307 spends. Hmm. Wonder why that would be. Or how about Mississippi? We've heard about the Mississippi miracle, right? They went from 49th in the nation and the butt of all the jokes. They went from 49th in fourth grade reading. Now they're in the top 10. They spend somewhere between 12,000 to 15,000 per student. So when Nicole Hannah-Jones says that it's a lack of funding and racism as to why this school is failing, I'm not so sure that's actually true. In fact, I know that's not true. I have been covering education policy for 25 years. It's not the money. In fact, in North Carolina, in our landmark Leandro school funding lawsuit, went on for like. 40 years or something. It is now over. It has ended. But the original judge in that case, he said, this is not a funding issue. This is how the districts are run. This is a leadership issue. This is an adult issue. This is the adults that are in the system, the adults that are raising the kids. This is on them. Nicole Hannah-Jones admitted... that she made a mistake in sending her daughter to a struggling New York City public school in the name of social justice. The essay reveals both an admirable degree of self-introspection on her part and a remarkable lack of curiosity about why exactly PS 307 provided her daughter with such a poor education. She was unsparing in detailing all of the symptoms associated with New York City's lackluster education. Public education system, poor test scores, chaos in the lunchroom, massive gaps in grade-level knowledge. But her ideological blinders limited her to one diagnosis. Underfunding, driven by racism. That's all she can see. Because, you know, when all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And that's Nicole Hannah-Jones. Once again, we dodged a bullet here at UNC. So the.... Then the saga here of Nicole Hannah-Jones sacrificing her own child's education at the altar of mommy's ideology. She wrote a huge piece at the New York Times Magazine about how her daughter's pretty hacked off at mommy because she didn't get to go to a good school. And there were all these examples of how the school failed. And of course, to Nicole Hannah-Jones, which elevates the ideology above her child, It's all about underfunding based on racism, even though the kids per pupil expenditure at her daughter's school is like three and a half times the national average. It's double the per pupil expenditure at the charter school across the street. From Brittany Bernstein at National Review, the teachers unions are not even mentioned a single time in Hannah Jones's essay. They have simultaneously levied their power to weaken educational accountability measures. Nicole Hannah-Jones explains Nadja, her daughter, was one of the brightest students in her class, but she still could not pass the state algebra exam. Hannah-Jones recalls finding her daughter's math folder filled with ungraded assignments that included mostly the wrong answers. A school literacy coach told her that Nadja's teacher had most likely never performed the school's mandatory reading assessments for Nadja or any of her classmates. Nicole Hannah-Jones, however, focuses on racism and funding as the causes of the poor academic performance in schools like PS307, without any evidence, really. Her preferred solution is a system of forced integration, so busing. in which white and Asian students from wealthier areas would be made to travel to schools in poorer black neighborhoods to achieve some demographic equilibrium. She portrays the associated challenges as justified sacrifices in pursuit of equity. She also pays no interest in examining how students' home lives might be impacting their performance in school. Is there something about what's going on at the home. From the piece, this is the issue of the resources and the allocation of resources. She says, we thought by sending Nadja 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 PTAs at poor schools often can raise only a couple thousand dollars, but Her husband and she could write checks that exceeded the annual PTA budget. So they're like, we have all this money. We're going to fund the PTA. We're going to cut all these checks. We have connections and time and status that should not matter. But we all know it does. 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. See, we would be the inspiration for others. You'll never guess what happened next. Yeah, it didn't work. She said about this car ride home from school where her daughter confronted her. She said, I told her I was aware of the school's academic rankings, but the test scores alone do not define a school. Glancing between her and the road, I told her everything that I had said a hundred times on stages and interviews and discussions since I had made her a symbol of how the choices we make can help sustain or dismantle educational inequality. Yeah, so when she first made this decision a decade ago and she wrote about it, And she went viral then. She was like the hot commodity. Everybody wanted her to come and address their audiences, their groups, right? They wanted her to come on podcasts, do interviews and stuff. Look at her. She's so heroic, sacrificing her own daughter, putting her, she's going to be the change she seeks in the world. And so she talked about all this. A decade ago. And. Now she's telling her daughter the same things. That she told all those audiences. See but her daughter. Was the one. Who has to live with this. Her daughter was the one that had to go. To the school where the lunch rooms. Were the scenes of brawls every day. Where her teachers didn't give her homework. Where they didn't grade her tests. Where they didn't show up. Like. They didn't even show up to work. They would have like their their normal teacher would be there like one day a week. She said, I talked about the deep inequality in New York schools and how like those black families who came before us, we had an obligation to be part of. The struggle of our larger community. Even if her schools were not academically the strongest, 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. But my child just shook her head, her face a mask of disbelief and something else, betrayal. She said, quote, so you had money to send me to one of the best schools and you chose not to? Because other kids are disadvantaged, you didn't want to put me in a great school? Nadja 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. Because you did. Like, that's your kid. I've said this for years. When it comes to government education, K-12, government schools, nobody is going to care more about your child than you. You're sending your child off to the government to be educated by strangers. You may get to know that teacher or those administrators over the course of years, but when you do that, you're sending your kid off to be educated, to be instilled with values and to be instilled with behaviors, to be instilled with knowledge that they deem to be worthwhile and worthy. But those people aren't going to care more about your child than you. This is from Peter Boghossian. He writes that a decade ago, Jones. Sent her daughter to this high-poverty, mostly black Brooklyn school so the family would not be, quote, part of the problem. Weak teaching and low standards produced inflated grades and major educational gaps. The daughter later chose a demanding high school and needed remedial tutoring. Jones now says she failed both her values and her child. One reason her essay is interesting is that her politics are explicitly race-conscious. Her work treats race as the... master category of American life. She centers black historical experience as the nation's origin story and presses for race-specific remedies rather than race-neutral liberalism. He said, before reading the piece, I was skeptical, thinking that she would not sincerely question any of her core assumptions. Jones does question the cost, but she does not rethink the cause. She treated a statistical child as more morally urgent than the child in her own house. She will admit what that ranking cost her daughter. She will not admit that the ranking was wrong. All right, two more parts here from this piece by Nicole Hannah-Jones detailing how she sacrificed her child's education for her ideology. she said, while much is said about the chronic absenteeism of low-income students, there's often a parallel among staff members at these schools. Nadja's, her daughters, Nadja's principal regularly would not engage with us or wasn't in the building at all. In Nadja's third grade year, Her teacher missed a significant number of days, leading Nadja to complain about the substitute teachers who rarely taught and how sometimes there was no sub at all in the room. Later on, she says, our child was suffering, but all these children, sorry, our child was suffering, but all these children were. They were languishing in classrooms with educators. I'm going to put air quotes around that word. who did not take their academic potential seriously and largely refused to teach. You're not an educator if you are refusing to teach. She says, what would happen to those children if we abandoned them as everyone else with power had? In other words, like if we pull our daughter out, what happens to all the kids we leave behind? They're still trapped there. Yes, if only there were a way to get kids out of these failing schools, to give them an option, a choice, you might say. She said, And then our society would blame their academic limitations on the dysfunctional culture and poor choices of their marginalized families because blaming poor families is more convenient than calling for dismantling of segregation. See, again, it's always going back to it's the segregation. Okay? There's some segregation. That's the reason why. It's the racism. Peter Boghossian says... Jones believes that we will blame dysfunctional culture and poor choices while she takes it for granted that the reader will agree that that's the wrong thing to blame. But ironically, throughout this entire piece, what she keeps on citing is exactly that. Parents who choose not to engage with schools and who do not discipline their children. He goes on to say the argument we need to desegregate black schools to make them successful is contributing to the very thing she's waging war against, racism. She writes, as if a black school cannot succeed until enrollment, racial demographics change. Why do black schools need white and Asian people to be successful? Why? But that's the argument she's making. Why? Why? Jones does not, what she doesn't do is shed the ideology that produced the harm. The child noticed. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast. So if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to the Pete calendar show.com. Again, thank you so much for listening and don't break anything while I'm gone.