Ultimately her daughter recovers, but we see a completely broken system that is unresponsive to internal voice, and until now she made no attempt to blow the whistle and utilize her professional position to do so.
The whole incident illustrates not only how messed up so many of our schools are despite abundant funding, it also raises the question of what the schools are even for. If her daughter can fully recover from severe deficits and be getting As and Bs at a challenging school within a year, what are the first eight years of school for? How much of the schools, grades and tests are fake? Can we somehow do better? [...]
New York City PS 307
Nikole sent her daughter Najya to PS 307 entirely by her own choice.
Nikole Knew And Had Exit Ramps
I can sort of understand trying this at the start, but it got increasingly unreasonable as the years went on and Nikole got more information.
She tried to ‘stay and fight for the students who did not have options.’ She learned that the teachers did not care, on the level of often not showing up and having substitutes that didn’t teach, and the Principal couldn’t be bothered to show up either. Then in fourth grade she learned her daughter was behind on all subjects, and when she emailed the staff, she got ignored. What did she expect?
PS 307 Is Fraudulent And Indifferent
Then it got better, or worse, depending on your perspective.
Then, Najya’s math assignments were found, mostly wrong, entirely ungraded. Again, what was the plan? Keep nagging the same people who don’t care?
But, somehow, Nikole decided she needed to ‘keep fighting,’ by running into the same brick wall, rather than save her drowning daughter. I don’t really know what she was expecting. These people knew Nikole was literally a New York Times reporter on inequality. They also, correctly, figured out she was not going to do anything that threatened them.
A Good School
Having not gotten into the top schools because she was unprepared for the test, and not being allowed to pick private schools, her daughter tried all that was left.
What Were Elementary and Middle School Even For?
The story has a happy ending. With intense help, Najya catches up and acclimates. Which raises the question of what all those years of school are even for in the first place. If Najya was never taught academics, and Najya never got good discipline or socialization because of classroom conditions being anarchic, and it took less than a year to have her back on her feet, what were those eight years even for?
Also, I hate to be the one to say it, but if you really want to do homework, it’s not like you can’t come up with some homework.
The worst torture of all, perhaps, comes near the end.
The Project Was Ideological
It was all her choice, and it was clearly done for ideological reasons.
[ed. See also: American students are getting dumber (SB).]
The whole incident illustrates not only how messed up so many of our schools are despite abundant funding, it also raises the question of what the schools are even for. If her daughter can fully recover from severe deficits and be getting As and Bs at a challenging school within a year, what are the first eight years of school for? How much of the schools, grades and tests are fake? Can we somehow do better? [...]
New York City PS 307
She felt, by her own description, an obligation to her sense of the common good at the expense of her daughter.
Her daughter began struggling. Tutors were brought in. Najya’s academics kept struggling. Then after many years her daughter looked up the school’s test scores, and oh boy was she pissed off. And this was when her daughter thought all the better schools would cost money.
Her daughter began struggling. Tutors were brought in. Najya’s academics kept struggling. Then after many years her daughter looked up the school’s test scores, and oh boy was she pissed off. And this was when her daughter thought all the better schools would cost money.
Nikole Hannah-Jones (NYTimes): 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.Yeah, pretty much. As many others said, it was a very brave and praiseworthy decision to write this post. It does not make up for the events that gave her the opportunity to write it. I won’t get into the minefield of trying to understand her logic, except that she put various ideological abstractions ahead of her daughter’s education.
But my child just shook her head, her face a mask of disbelief, and something else: betrayal.
“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?”
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.
Nikole Knew And Had Exit Ramps
I can sort of understand trying this at the start, but it got increasingly unreasonable as the years went on and Nikole got more information.
Nikole Hannah-Jones (NYTimes): Toward the end of first grade, Najya started sometimes saying she didn’t like her school and complaining how chaotic it was at lunch. I decided to visit during the lunch period and was shocked by what I saw. Najya’s class and another class were sitting at their tables in the cafeteria with no lunch and no adult supervision. Children were running wild, chasing, hitting and pushing each other while the teacher’s aides and cafeteria workers stood by looking bored.This is where she fully loses me. This happens, and then she sends her daughter back for second grade. That’s all the information you need. You have a neighborhood public school that isn’t this one. What the hell? And yes, it is both the adults and the kids, both acting that way in part because of each other.
Several times, I had to instruct children to stop striking each other and to sit down, at one point physically pulling two boys apart. When I asked one of the aides why the children weren’t being supervised, she told me the lunch period was short-staffed. After I sat back down with Najya, she told me, “It’s always like this, and that’s why I don’t want to go to this school.”
It was not the children that horrified me — kids of all incomes are rambunctious at lunchtime. It was the callous disregard of the adults.
She tried to ‘stay and fight for the students who did not have options.’ She learned that the teachers did not care, on the level of often not showing up and having substitutes that didn’t teach, and the Principal couldn’t be bothered to show up either. Then in fourth grade she learned her daughter was behind on all subjects, and when she emailed the staff, she got ignored. What did she expect?
PS 307 Is Fraudulent And Indifferent
Then it got better, or worse, depending on your perspective.
Nikole Hannah-Jones (NYTimes): Then one day in December, Najya came home and excitedly informed me that she had suddenly jumped three grade levels in reading in one month. Knowing that this was virtually impossible, I reached out to the school’s literacy coach and learned that after we began asking for the reading assessment, Najya’s teacher had instructed the coach to perform the evaluation and that she found Najya was reading just fine. What became clear to me was that Najya’s teacher had most likely never performed the school’s mandatory reading assessments for Najya or any of her classmates but instead had assumed the flagging competency of these mostly low-income Black children.That’s fraud. And also rather evil. Nikole has the types of connections that can start investigations. Why are we only learning about this now? Like, what?
Then, Najya’s math assignments were found, mostly wrong, entirely ungraded. Again, what was the plan? Keep nagging the same people who don’t care?
But, somehow, Nikole decided she needed to ‘keep fighting,’ by running into the same brick wall, rather than save her drowning daughter. I don’t really know what she was expecting. These people knew Nikole was literally a New York Times reporter on inequality. They also, correctly, figured out she was not going to do anything that threatened them.
Nikole Hannah-Jones (NYTimes): What would happen to those children if we abandoned them as everyone else with power had?
Moving In Unison
The story briefly improves at the middle school, Unison, but one quickly notices that all the positive anecdotes are signaling. There is a food-justice club and trips and “Hamilton” and Black History Month. Nothing wrong with any of that, but basics first, and then Nikole noticed the students never got homework and the teachers could not control the classrooms. And so on.
The story briefly improves at the middle school, Unison, but one quickly notices that all the positive anecdotes are signaling. There is a food-justice club and trips and “Hamilton” and Black History Month. Nothing wrong with any of that, but basics first, and then Nikole noticed the students never got homework and the teachers could not control the classrooms. And so on.
A Good School
Having not gotten into the top schools because she was unprepared for the test, and not being allowed to pick private schools, her daughter tried all that was left.
Nikole Hannah-Jones (NYTimes): I would give her absolute autonomy, with the exception that she had to choose a public school. She would research them, she would decide which ones she wanted us to visit and she would choose where she applied.Najya got into a ‘good’ school with strong academics, and as one would expect was overwhelmed because she’d previously never even been assigned homework. She’d failed the Algebra test the year before, but Nikole assumed that was just bad test taking, rather than (of course) that the school had failed to teach her math for years. Unison does ‘Algebra for all’ as a supposed college gateway, and the way they did it was they just passed everyone without teaching the kids algebra.
A few days later, Najya handed me a list. Her top schools were heavily white and screened their students, the type of public schools I had spent my career arguing against.
What Were Elementary and Middle School Even For?
The story has a happy ending. With intense help, Najya catches up and acclimates. Which raises the question of what all those years of school are even for in the first place. If Najya was never taught academics, and Najya never got good discipline or socialization because of classroom conditions being anarchic, and it took less than a year to have her back on her feet, what were those eight years even for?
Nikole Hannah-Jones (NYTimes): Unison had eliminated homework because studies show that it does not have much impact on academic achievement, and that assigning it often sets up for failure students who are so academically behind that they cannot do the work on their own.Doesn’t this challenge the entire educational system at its core? We are basically saying that nothing matters, and all that work is for show, unless you need to be on some sort of cutting edge or elite track.
Also, I hate to be the one to say it, but if you really want to do homework, it’s not like you can’t come up with some homework.
The worst torture of all, perhaps, comes near the end.
Nikole Hannah-Jones (NYTimes): One day in June as I was immersed in writing this essay, my phone rang. It was Najya. She’s now 16 and was finishing the final weeks of her sophomore year. She was making her daily call for lunch money, a ritual I created to force her to check in with me once during the school day.Okay, that’s it. Forcing your 16-year-old to call you in the middle of every school day or she starves? Nikole is a monster.
The Project Was Ideological
It was all her choice, and it was clearly done for ideological reasons.
Jack: In all the talk about NHJ sending her child to a high-poverty school, I think it’s been under-mentioned: she could have chosen her neighborhood school. She did not. She hand-picked a school with the demographics, amenities, and faculty she wanted, then used private tutoring.
Of course her daughter was mad! Her mom used her resources just as every rich parent does, choosing a well-resourced school in line with her values, but the values were “My child should be in a school with poor kids and receive private tutoring to compensate for bad instruction.”
Hostage theory, except the only hostage-taker is a parent with self-contradictory values around education.
She started the private tutoring when her daughter was in fourth grade and continued bragging about the approach through 2024.
Jack Despain Zhou: 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.
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. [...]
Null Hypothesis Watch
I circle back to the real larger scandals here, of which there are two.
First, that the schools are getting massive amounts of money, not teaching students or controlling classrooms and outright committing fraud, and no one seems to care:
Which is that despite Najya getting very little education and no homework for eight years, in which she lacked basic math concepts and presumably had similar gaps in other subjects, by the end of ninth grade she was at a competitive school earning As and Bs and doing fine.
Which is great for Najya. I love a happy ending. None of this is on her in any way, and she fought hard to go to a good school and then to catch up. But, again, what is the point of elementary and middle school, if one year of concentrated effort can fix that?
Manhattan Institute: NEW: We visited PS 307, the failing public school that Nikole Hannah-Jones sent her daughter to.The Two Big Scandals
The teachers make an average of over $100,000 a year. The school spends $52,000 per student each year. The student/teacher ratio is 9 to 1.
We went to another school just down the street that spends less than half of what PS 307 does—yet the academic outcomes are significantly better. Underfunding and racism aren’t causing schools to fail.
Jack: This is the per-pupil funding for the elementary school Nikole Hannah-Jones sent her daughter to.
If you subscribe to the funding theory of education, how much would have been enough? It’s already crossed the average per capita annual income threshold. Maybe $100k? $200k? [...]
I circle back to the real larger scandals here, of which there are two.
First, that the schools are getting massive amounts of money, not teaching students or controlling classrooms and outright committing fraud, and no one seems to care:
Peachy Keenan: Why am I just learning now that public schools in the New York city ghetto don’t assign homework, don’t grade tests, don’t respond to parents emails or phone calls, don’t supervise feral, fighting kids at lunch, don’t know or care if their students can read or do grade level math, and give them As on their report cards when they are actually doing F level work?The second is the one that no one seems to notice.
Why did Nikole Hannah Jones bury this explosive lede?
Why isn’t she writing emergency front page @nytimes stories about this shocking, incredible, abject citywide failure that costs people who pay taxes over $50K per student per year?
Why isn’t she holding emergency all-hands on deck meetings with @NYCMayor to shut this down, rescue these kids, fire everyone involved?
We all know why. But no one at the Times will say a word. LOL.
Which is that despite Najya getting very little education and no homework for eight years, in which she lacked basic math concepts and presumably had similar gaps in other subjects, by the end of ninth grade she was at a competitive school earning As and Bs and doing fine.
Which is great for Najya. I love a happy ending. None of this is on her in any way, and she fought hard to go to a good school and then to catch up. But, again, what is the point of elementary and middle school, if one year of concentrated effort can fix that?
by Zvi Mowshowitz, DWAV | Read more:
Image: Wayne Lawrence/NY Times
