Attacks on Excellence is a series from Education Progress featuring critical coverage of the education policies and research paradigms that are holding students back.
There are two stories I could tell you right now, in the wake of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s viral article about her daughter’s education.
The first is this: The Pulitzer-winning New York Times writer of the 1619 Project sent her daughter Najya to an impoverished, majority-black elementary school because she wanted to use her influence to help all black children. She exercised her voice to change the school, and eventually Najya grew into a bright and capable honor roll student at a non-selective neighborhood middle school that was better than its test scores would say. However, systemic inequalities were too entrenched, and her daughter wound up failed by the same systems that failed many others, learning less than she expected before choosing to attend a rigorous high school and working hard to catch up.
But here’s another story: A wealthy and influential woman exercised New York City’s generous school choice options to send her child to an out-of-neighborhood school that currently receives more funding than almost any other school in the country and more than 90% of other schools in New York City, boasting funding of $52,349 per student and a 1:10 faculty-student ratio as of the 2024–2025 school year.1 She did so because that school exemplified her values, and she persuaded parents around the country to make similar decisions on the strength of her conviction. For years, she experienced a sort of motivated blindness towards the dysfunction of a place that saw children fighting in the lunchroom unsupervised, assigned fake homework and gave fake grades, and ignored her daughter’s needs, giving her the opportunity to brag in public about the value she brought her daughter’s school even as they ignored her in private. She did the same in middle school, building a close relationship with her daughter’s principal while celebrating her daughter’s place as an honor roll student and dismissing warning signs because some kids struggle with tests. As late as 2024, she spoke about her decision in glowing terms.
It was only when her daughter told her that she never got the education she wanted that she told the truth about what happened, revealing a decade of education horror stories.
There are many things I want to say about the article, but the most important thing I can say is that I believe she wrote it as an act of love. She could have stayed silent in public as her daughter recoiled against the choices she made. Nobody was pressing her for an update. No matter how carefully she frames the outcome, the article does not help her politically. Kids are so powerless, so reliant on the adults who shape their worlds for them, and it is very easy for those adults to insist the kids see the world through their eyes or tell them they will understand the parents’ decisions when they are older. It is a gift to tell your child you were wrong about something important.
Next is that Najya will be okay. I do not say this because I believe education does not matter or that kids’ lives are not enriched by going to schools that take them seriously, provide a safe environment, and teach them meaningful and rigorous material at their level. It does, and they are. But there are many important things in life, and she has a capable and loving family who will fight for her.
Almost as important, however, is that Najya lived, and suffered through, the world Nikole Hannah-Jones and her political allies built. Almost everything about Najya’s school experience is a result not of structural inequities in society, but of a system that has every possible incentive to produce precisely the result Hannah-Jones bragged about and her daughter suffered through. It is admirable, courageous, and loving of her to write an article that, read seriously, undermines her entire political project.
But the article does undermine her entire political project, and an honest accounting of it must say so.
Her choice is a strange one on its own terms. She claims most black students in New York are forced to attend segregated schools, then outlines how she repeatedly chose schools outside her neighborhood with a high degree of flexibility based on her needs and wants. She was not trapped with, and did not choose to send Najya to, a neighborhood school where everybody lacked options. She looked for an overwhelmingly poor and black school for her daughter, reversing her own parents’ decision to seek an integrated school for her. Having done so, she compares herself favorably to other parents who “refus[e] to take or support any substantial action to integrate the city’s schools.” What she did was the opposite of integration.
Last year, I wrote about the “hostage theory” of education, a term coined by black Washington Post columnist Bill Raspberry after Washington, D.C. destroyed one of its best elementary schools in 1967. At a time of enormous white flight, the Amidon School was a successful, integrated magnet elementary school that maintained a stable ratio of about 70% black students and 60% of students from public housing while delivering high-quality, effective education to its students. Because two other elementary schools near it fared much worse at the time, the Washington, D.C. school board made an innovative, award-winning decision: they would combine the three elementary schools, sending students to one for first and second grade, one to third and fourth, and one to fifth and sixth, so the well-off parents would be inspired to help the other schools.
Hobson v. Hansen and the Decline of D.C. Schools
In Washington, D.C.’s history, there were three superlative predominantly black public schools. Two of them were destroyed, one by negligence, one by malice. The third was almost stillborn, strangled in its infancy and neglected in its adolescence, but it persisted.
The project collapsed into dysfunction within a year. Parents who moved to the school’s boundaries because they believed in the project of an integrated education first suffered for it, then left the school. As Raspberry wrote in 1970, “Now instead of one good and two bad schools, Southwest Washington has three bad ones.”
Fifty years later, we are having the same arguments in the same ways, and the same forces hold power all too often in education policy. Everything about Hannah-Jones’s experience was hostage theory made manifest, with her own daughter as the hostage. She believed that the way to fix the education system was for parents to send their children to hand-picked underperforming schools, delivering their own time and resources to improving the education of all students at those schools.
In hostage theory, every successful school is the enemy, because every successful school is a sign that wealthier or whiter students must be hoarding education. Details like Amidon’s integration or Stuyvesant’s high proportion of low-income Asian students tend to be shoved away. The proposed solution, then as now, is to strip opportunities away from those who have on the theory that if they are forced into dysfunctional environments, their willpower will fix things.
The article shows the impossibility of such a position. There are several moments from it where I want you to put yourself in the shoes of the educators involved. Seriously think about it.
What would you do as the teacher of Najya’s fourth-year class, in a room where most students are performing far below the “grade level” standard you are required to teach them at, when one of your top students, getting private tutoring on the side paid for by her wealthy mother, eagerly raises her hand to answer every question? How much of your time and attention and care would you spend on her compared to rushing around the classroom putting out the constant small fires erupting in a room where for many students getting them to school already feels like an accomplishment to you?
Even granting the difficulties of the environment, it’s alarming and a clear dereliction of duty that teachers seem to have been fabricating scores on tests and ignoring homework. So — say you’re the principal of the school. A wealthy parent who has chosen your school as a passion project objects that your standard way of doing things is failing. Do you kick up a fuss and go toe-to-toe with the teacher’s union, pushing for teachers to be retrained or fired and looking for a batch eager to bring Standards and Accountability to the school? Or do you collect your paycheck, let teachers collect theirs, and explain each time the topic comes up that the school is underfunded, and that you’re doing your best in a difficult position until the school’s funding per student eclipses your city’s per capita income? Do you, eventually, stop taking her calls?
Or take Najya’s experience with middle school algebra, which saw her getting A’s in an eighth grade class before failing the standardized exam (which Hannah-Jones assumed was “because, like many children, she has trouble sometimes on standardized tests”). Imagine you’re a teacher at a school that has adopted an “Algebra for All” policy on the logic that “students should not be deprived of advanced academic opportunities because in the past they attended schools that did not properly educate them.” You have a classroom full of students, most of whom have enormous gaps in their understanding of arithmetic, and you are instructed to teach algebra to them and reminded that your class and school will look bad if they all fail. Do you give them grades that match their proficiency, letting most of them fail? Or do you lower the curve?
Every incentive in the environment inexorably pushes the same direction: blur quantitative metrics and call them into question, because metrics show gaps. Ignore students at the top of any given class, because other students have urgent problems and you need to triage. Provide fake homework and non-rigorous classes, because you are expected to advance students in lockstep, year after year, through material tailored for a hypothetical student their age no matter their actual education gaps and needs.
I would never send my children to a school like P.S. 307. I am likely to be, instead, one of the parents Nikole Hannah-Jones decries, looking for the sorts of schools she calls “part of a tawdry bargain to keep a dwindling number of white and wealthier parents from exiting the public school system”: schools that are prepared to teach my children at whatever level they are ready for, in safe environments, in rigorous and competent ways. I will do this, and I will advocate for other parents to do this, because I believe that it is better for everyone if schools serve the public rather than the public serving the schools.
You should not send your child somewhere out of obligation, then try to warp that place into your own image. You should find a school that wants your child there, not as an unpaid tutor or a role model for others, but because the school believes that every one of its students deserves an education that meets them where they are at. Instead of decrying schools that want to keep wealthier and white families in public districts, and that in so doing provide free opportunities that kids from poorer and non-white families can and readily do take advantage of, education advocates and parents should celebrate those schools as examples of free excellence.
As for schools like P.S. 307? The crisis they are facing is not one of funding. It is one of honesty amid perverse incentives. You cannot improve a system that does not want to improve. If education advocates insist that the challenge is always one of funding, that all kids should be taught the same material at the same pace in the same classrooms, and that the fault lies with parents who leave rather than schools that make them leave, you could pay $100,000 or more per student without making a real difference.
Nikole Hannah-Jones contributed to the honesty problem for a decade, painting a glowing picture of an environment in which her daughter was suffering. Even in her new article, she could only selectively cite national numbers to allege a resource gap, because in New York City, the P.S. 307s of the city have long been funded more generously than the Stuyvesants.2 Even in her new article, she celebrates that she persuaded many parents to follow in her footsteps even as she reveals that her daughter was frustrated and poorly served the entire way. Even in her new article, she criticized both the standardized tests that revealed her daughter’s actual needs and those who fought to preserve the selective public schools her daughter used as a lifeline away from her choices.
It is to her great credit that she listened to her daughter’s frustrations and used her platform to voice them, but advocates of hostage theory will never fix public education. Those who want to improve education in the United States should listen to Nikole Hannah-Jones not for her prescriptions, but for her accounting of the pain her advocacy of hostage theory caused her daughter.
Your kids only get one childhood.
Numbers and calculations from NYSED’s Report Card Database. P.S. 307 is in the 96th percentile of New York state schools (181st out of 4,736) and in the 93rd percentile of New York City schools (105th out of 1,591). As reported in City Journal, the school spent $26,372 per student when Najya was in third grade, higher than the New York City average and twice the national average at the time.
Stuyvesant’s 2024-25 budget per student was $25,359, less than half that of P.S. 307. These numbers are not atypical for New York City.
Right on target.
It jumped out to me that NHJ has high praise in her piece for the principal at her daughter's middle school, who shares her "anti-racist" worldview. And that principal does sound like a thoughtful, caring and dedicated administrator. But the school didn't assign any homework "because studies show that it does not have much impact on academic achievement"? Her daughter got As in algebra and was told she was excelling even though she "had huge gaps in many of the building blocks of math that she should have learned in elementary school, like mastery of long division and fractions"?
Yes, the structural factors that create separate and unequal schools are a real problem. I don't think NHJ is wrong about that. But so are the counterproductive, radical chic ideas that have taken root with many activists, and that she championed for the last decade plus. Ideas that led to the lowering of standards, the elimination of accountability, and the restriction of options and choices. (To be fair to NHJ, she gestures at this in her piece with the one statement from the principal that in lowering standards they may have practiced "racism under the guise of antiracism.")
For me, the tell here is the maddening truth that black and brown enrollments in NYC's elite high schools used to be much greater, back in the '70s and '80s when racial tensions in NYC were much higher and overtly discriminatory beliefs more widespread in American cities. But then in the name of detracking anti-racist activists demanded that g&t programs in the elementary and middle schools in NYC's poor and minority be dismantled, and as a result the number of kids passing the entry exams to schools like Stuyvesant plunged, and have remained abysmally low ever since. That's not the fault of structural racism, however real, that's an own goal.
There's a great deal of sense in this article, but it still fails to face up to the central reality that underlies all of these issues.
The presumption, shared by Nikole H-J and others, is that there are "good" schools and there are "bad" schools, and that whites use all their influence to ensure that their kids go to the "good" schools, and hence do well, whereas society is rigged to ensure that black kids get sent to the "bad" schools, and hence do badly. Thus, the holy grail is to find some way of ensuring that black kids get into the "good" schools, whereupon everything would be fine.
The reality is that (to a very good approximation) there is no such thing as a "good" school or a "bad" school. Everything about a school's discipline standards and academic outcomes is actually down to the intake of kids that it gets.
As a thought experiment, consider taking the best-performing and worst-performing schools, and swapping around the cohorts of kids, while keeping everything else the same. Instantly, the "best-performing" school would become bad and the "worst-performing" school would become good.
It's very easy to teach the cohorts of kids that the best-performing schools get (easy to have good discipline, appropriate material, and to properly mark and grade their work) whereas it is almost impossible to do the same for the cohorts of kids that the worst-performing schools get.
It is a refusal to accept the above reality that underlies all the bad policies that keep getting imposed on US schools. We need to stop blaming the performance gaps on the schools; the schools are doing their best.