This piece is a follow-up to one she wrote in 2016: Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City (gift link).

See also The Problem We All Live With.

Such as a deveasting read—as a parent and as a person wants a better world for all kids. My partner and I sent out kids to public schools. I'm very sorry to say that we tapped out at middle school. I felt like we were letting our community down. But in the end, our kids undeniaby got a better education. I suppose one way we tried to live with the decision was to make sure they understood and appreciated the opportunities they had. I think we succeded in that. But at what cost? 

In her most recent (and perhaps final) book, An Education, Diane Ravitch offers a pretty excellent play-by-play on how Bloomberg & Associates stripped NYC public schools of any shred of equity by jet propelling a corporatist school-choice movement, no better than the likes of Florida, but just kept it all looking like neighborhood pubic schools. Woof.

There is so much going on in this essay and I empathize with most of it because I encounter the plight of parents trying to do right by their kids daily, and there is so much mobility right now between charters and public schools in the aftermath of COVID and the culture wars. It is unfortunate that public school has become the site of so many other systemic failures, which were touched on here, but not nearly enough. Some things that stood out to me...

The chances of success for Najya and her classmates in math were further reduced by the fact they were taught each year not by a master teacher but by a novice, a common circumstance at high-poverty schools.

This is a systemic reality nationwide given tenure. Seasoned teachers (and its no guarantee that they're better) get their pick in terms of assignment. I think it's a mistake to assume that new teachers are less qualified though. Often newer folks who are in the more energetic phase of their careers will seek schools like #307 out for its myriad of challenges. How teachers are hired, trained, and placed needs a hard look, but it's challenging given iron-clad collective bargaining agreements. Newer teachers receive a ton of evaluative support, but adults working in these environments often come from circumstances similar to those of their students hoping to make a difference. Are educators in these environments getting the social-emotional support they need to get through every day? Not even a little bit.

On the newer principal ... "But she was trying to perform an impossible balancing act thrust upon educators at schools with extreme proportions of students living in poverty, which often also serve a disproportionate number of students diagnosed with learning disabilities. Schools like hers tend to rely on a zero-tolerance disciplinary playbook and often simply remove misbehaving students from classrooms, depriving them of precious educational time they cannot afford to miss. But at Unison, teachers constantly worked to refocus students and mitigate conflict. This is good educational practice, but kids like Najya, who were just trying to do their work, saw this treatment as deeply unfair."

I empathize with this the most, and I found this to be the most insightful part of the essay. It is impossible. When you work at a school where learning loss is the least severe trauma, where the real work isn't teaching and learning, but providing a safe space in which to triage the impact of everything that ails our society on kids, a secondary trauma response manifests in the adults in the room, and that is to keep everyone together and "okay" and survive. This was acute during COVID and we never recovered. Adults who are doing this instead of automatically expelling students are keeping the promise and the mandate the author has tried to invoke as a parent alive because they know the easier choice can throw a young person into an even more brutal system from which there is no escape. 

This is so complicated and difficult. I was touched by the time and attention given to the topic, but there is so much more to this that we all need to think about and unpack. So many more people need to take an interest in the system and get involved, not just tack their aspirations to it.

It's one step closer to destroying class mobility for so many people. America's public schooling used to be a bastion of an educated populous. Now its scarcity mentality and class separation.

Research consistently shows that home environment and economic resources outweigh school selection when predicting student outcomes. Going to a "good school" isn't what will lead to a child's success, but rather most parents who would've made that choice tend to have the time and resources to help at home as well.

Both my kids go to public school and while there are "better" options, I'll trade a few test scores on an algebra exam to have more exposure to children of different ethnicities, abilities, religions, and economic backgrounds.

Her original piece 10 years ago, from before I had a kid, has stuck with me so deeply and informed my understanding of why public education matters and how we need to live our values. I am impressed that she published this update, which really complicates the original essay even as it re-asserts those values. God forbid my parenting challenges and mistakes be this public. 

This piece will stick with me for a long time. The word that kept coming to me throughout was brave. 

Brave to write about their original decision a decade ago, brave to stick with it during those initially tough times (and do everything they could to make it work), brave to 'pivot' when they needed to, brave to face the brutal reality of their choices when their daughter confronted them, and brave to write about all of it and share their story with us. And I'm considering everyone (Nikole Hannah-Jones, her husband, Faraji, and her daughter, Najya) brave in this situation, but major props to Nikole in this piece & her responses in the NYT comment section. 

Everyone will have a point of view on what they did. But, we don't receive many retrospectives like this. Grateful for their bravery in all of it. 

There's more for anyone interested, as this week's episode of This American Life has Nikole Hannah-Jones "revisits that [2016] argument [she made in the NYT], and that choice, in a series of conversations with producer Chana Joffe-Walt and with her daughter, Najya, who’s now 16 and has her own very different views." Wherever you find podcasts or https://www.thisamericanlife.org/898/an-argument .  

The fact of the matter is that the student population is not the root cause of the problem and, on some level, the funding isn't really the problem either (because the hardest schools often are spending much more per student).

The problem is the stress, crime, exhaustion, poverty, minimal parenting, and disconnection from the value of education that exists in many communities. You can't blame the kids for growing up in those circumstances.

If you are an average first-year teacher learning the trade and you are in a "normal" school, the pace of student challenges, outbursts, and disruptions is hard but manageable. But in the hardest schools, the room is out of control from the get-go. You never really get your head above water. Don't blame the kids, ask yourself why some groups of kids are like that and some aren't.

p.s. Another nice admission that she was not 100% right came from Angela Duckworth. Just "trying harder" is not enough for these kids or their teachers. The whole situation is the problem:

https://www.angeladuckworth.com/situated

I found this reflection an honest and vulnerable look at the alternative from a kid who did get sent out to “good” schools, and what we mean when we say “good”