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This is going to be an online meetup using Zoom. If you've never used Zoom before, don't worry — it's easy to use and free to join.

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TAKEAWAYS FROM NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES' EDUCATIONAL EXPERIMENT: WHAT'S WRONG WITH OUR PUBLIC SCHOOLS?

INTRODUCTION:

In this meetup, we'll discuss the broader implications of two articles by the New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones. She's perhaps best-known for her role in promoting the paper's 1619 Project back in 2019 that analyzed the legacy of slavery on African-Americans and America more broadly, concluding that the country is still systemically racist. However, the articles we'll look at aren't connected to the 1619 Project, but rather cover Nikole Hannah-Jones's decision to send her daughter Najya to an underperforming majority-black public school in an effort to fight systemic racism and then dealing with the lackluster results and her daughter's resentment a decade later. Her articles and responses to them have kicked off a broader discussion about the problems with many public schools in America that lead to educational deficiencies and poorer life outcomes, particularly for poor minority students.

Her first article is from June 2016 and is entitled "Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City" and explains why, two years prior in 2014, she and her husband Faraji chose to send her then 4-year-old daughter to the Daniel Hale Williams School (a.k.a. Public School 307 or P.S .307) in Brooklyn's Vinegar Hill neighborhood, situated next to the Farragut housing project. P.S. 307 was a poorly performing, majority-black & Latino school where 9 of 10 students met federal poverty standards. The Hannah-Joneses had the financial means and connections to send their daughter to a private school, or could've sent her to one of the higher performing charter schools in Bedford-Stuyvesant where their family lives. But they hoped that since Nikole is a high-profile journalist and Faraji is an IT professional who served as the school's PTA co-president, they'd be able to advocate for both their daughter and the other children at P.S. 307 and thereby improve the educational experiences of the disadvantaged kids who had no other options. In a panel discussion in 2018, she said: "A New York Times reporter in a high-poverty school f--king changes the school, right? There are certain things that just are not going to happen in that school. I can go to that school, and say there's a problem, and it gets fixed immediately."

Her article also describes how her daughter's school got caught up in the debate over the city's school rezoning plan that proposed to send some children from the more affluent, majority-white DUMBO, Brooklyn Heights and Concord Village neighborhoods who were trying to attend the high-performing but overcrowded Emily Warren Roebling School (P.S. 8) to her daughter's school (P.S. 307). Many parents of children from both school districts opposed the rezoning, albeit for different reasons. Parents from kids at P.S. 8 voiced concerns about the lackluster educational standards and potential for bullying at P.S. 307, whereas parents from kids already attending P.S. 307 - including Nikole Hannah-Jones and her husband - voiced concerns about a "yuppie invasion" that would gentrify the school's culture and deprive minority families of a say in the school board's decisions. Ultimately, the two school districts were partially rezoned and some families were shifted out of the overcrowded zone for P.S. 8, but very few middle-class families decided to send their children to P.S. 307, with most opting for charter schools or private schools instead.

Eight years later, in June of 2024, Nikole Hannah-Jones seemed happy with her choice to send her daughter to P.S. 307 and with her daughter's middle school, posting on X: "Eight years ago today the @nytmag published my cover story on school segregation in the great 'melting pot' of NYC and the way elite parents and politicians conspire with structural inequality to keep our schools separate and unequal. Eight years later, this sweet baby girl on the cover is getting ready to graduate 8th grade as a bright, empathetic, funny, honor roll student from @uaunison [i.e. Urban Assembly Unison Middle School, a.k.a. K351], a non-screened, neighborhood middle school. By test-score metrics many would label this school a failing school, but just as I write in the piece, we judge these schools AND their students without ever stepping foot inside. My daughter is not worth more than any other child. Eight years later, I still know we made the right choice"

However, things clearly changed by the time of her second article in Sept. 2026, which is entitled "In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?" This follow-up article details how a little over two years ago when her daughter was finishing up 7th grade, she used the internet to look up her middle school, Unison. She was shocked to find out it was (like her elementary school) one of the lower performing schools in the city. After confronting her parents and angrily asking why they chose to send her to a "bad school", they explained their reasons but she still didn't agree with them. So they allowed her to choose where she'd attend high school, provided it was a public school. She chose a higher-performing, majority white & Asian high school and was accepted, only to quickly find she was underprepared in math and study skills and initially found the school's more elite culture to be strange.

In her 2nd article, Nikole looks back at her daughter's elementary and middle schools more critically and notes some persistent problems she'd downplayed earlier. For example, when she visited the elementary school at lunchtime she found:

"Children were running wild, chasing, hitting and pushing each other while the teacher’s aides and cafeteria workers stood by looking bored.
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.'"

Worse, the school’s principal was hard to reach and often absent, as were the teachers. Najya’s third-grade teacher missed many days. The substitute teachers barely taught anything, and sometimes there were no substitutes at all—the kids would be shunted into a second-grade or kindergarten class, where they were, in theory, supposed to do independent work. When parents complained to the principal, it would take days or weeks to get a response.

Things got worse in middle school. The principal there was much more responsive, but as Nikole discovered, educational malpractice was the norm. Najya loved math and considered herself adept at it. Yet when Nikole reviewed her daughter’s classwork (there was no homework assigned at this middle school), she was shocked to discover that her tests had never been graded. They were full of wrong answers. Yet she’d been getting A's. It was the same with English - her work was ridden with grammatical, spelling, and punctuation errors that no one had corrected.

There has been other signs she was behind her grade level. For example, Najya had taken algebra in 8th grade but had to retake it because she hadn’t passed the statewide exam. Nikole says that, "at the time, I was somewhat concerned, but as Najya had earned A’s in the class I assumed she didn’t pass because, like many children, she has trouble sometimes on standardized tests." However, in 9th grade, a private tutor assessed Najya and revealed the problem wasn't merely test anxiety - Najya not only didn't understand algebra, but she had also never learned fractions or long division.

Luckily, with the help of private tutoring, Najya (now 16) was able to catch up academically. She's now starting her second year of high school as a sophomore, and says she's happier where she is now and looking forward to college.

In retrospect, Nikole says that "these days I feel that I failed both my values and my child." Some of the strongest criticisms came from Najya herself, who in an interview with This American Life (Episode 898) argued with her mother on-air, saying: "That makes no sense. You're talking about 'Oh, we're going to give you the worst [education], just because it's not fair.' I didn't ask to be born. All you're supposed to do was just like put me in a good school... Everyone is not your kid. You can't save everyone who doesn't want to be saved... There is no benefit that came out of you putting me in those schools... Why couldn't you benefit kids in another way? There were other options... You put me on the line and it didn't work."

In the 1st section, we'll talk about how Hannah-Jones's article connect with the broader debate over the amount of funding per student and how that's related to teacher quality, classroom sizes, educational resources, and school infrastructure.

In the 2nd section, we'll talk about how Hannah-Jones's article connect with the broader debate over teaching methods, grades, homework, and standardized testing.

In the 3rd section, we'll talk about how Hannah-Jones's article connect with the broader debate over school disciplinary guidelines (i.e. zero tolerance vs restorative justice) and what to do with disruptive or violent students.

In the 4th.section, we'll talk about how Hannah-Jones's article connect with the broader debate over how public schools can racially segregated or integrated and how that influences the school's culture & the racial attitudes of students.

Please keep in mind that we are merely using Nikole Hannah-Jones's articles as a jumping off point for our discussion, so we won't be heavily focusing on the specifics of what happened to her daughter, whose exceptional in several ways. Instead, we'll focus more on what happens to many American children in low-performing schools, most of whom don't have parents who can afford a tutor to get them caught up if they fall behind and often can't get into a high-performing school later on.

RELEVANT MATERIAL FROM PAST MEETUPS:

We covered the effect of race/ethnicity on economic success in the fall of 2017 called "Deep Culture and the American Dream". We looked at arguments surrounding the alleged "culture of poverty" that holds back both poor urban blacks & poor rural whites, and contrasted this with the cultural traits of "model minorities" like Jews & Asians that allegedly lead them to be successful. The general takeaway seems to be that social scientists disagree over whether culture causes a person's socio-economic outcomes or whether it's the other way around.

Back in June of 2017, the Skeptic meetup had a discussion entitled "A Skeptical Look at Education" where they discussed how several economists like Arnold Kling, Steven Levitt & Bryan Caplan are skeptical that most educational interventions make any long-term, scalable, replicable difference. The reasons for this include the heavy influence of a child's innate abilities (i.e. IQ & personality traits) for both good or bad outcomes, the effects of learning loss and lack of learning transfer that make long-lasting results difficult, the way promising educational initiatives often get watered down when they're rolled out on a national basis, and the way school funding often runs into diminishing returns.

In October of 2017, the Skeptics had a meetup entitled "The (Pseudo)Science of Success" where they looked at various claims about educational interventions discussed in Malcolm Gladwell's books Outliers and David and Goliath where he downplayed the role of innate talent and emphasized the importance of the "10,000 Hour Rule" where lots of repetition is needed to master a skill, advantages from redshirting (i.e. holding your child back a year) to benefit from the "relative age effect", sending your child to a less exclusive school so they can benefit from the "Big Fish, Small Pond" effect, and also looked at how overcoming "desirable difficulties" like mild learning disabilities can teach grit & persistence. Critics have faulted Gladwell's understanding & communication of some of the social science studies he cites, but most agree that he correctly pointed out that IQ runs into diminishing returns once you're smart enough to attend college & get decent grades (i.e. IQ 115), and that a person's work ethic & social skills matter more for determining professional success or failure for college grads.

In Aug. 2023, the Skeptics had a meetup entitled "Is Mass Incarceration a Conspiracy?" that fact-checked various allegations about the prison system in the U.S. In the 3rd section, we looked at how several aspects of the "school-to-prison pipeline" are overstated, to the point that many people believed that private prisons look at third-grade reading proficiency levels to gauge where they should build another facility (false), or that there's more black men in prison than in college (also false). Most of the academic debate revolves around the difficulty of determining causation when it comes to figuring out why students who frequently get in disciplinary trouble in school are more likely to end up in prison later in life - i.e. does strict school discipline stigmatize many normal teenagers who were temporarily acting out due to peer pressure & raging hormones and set them up for failure later in life, or are we merely seeing the tendency of juvenile delinquents to continue their criminal behavior as adults?

DIRECTIONS ON HOW TO PREPARE FOR OUR DISCUSSION:

The videos & articles you see linked below are intended to give you a basic overview of some of the major debates over public schools. As usual, I certainly don't expect you to read all the articles prior to attending our discussion. The easiest way to prepare for our discussion is to just watch the numbered videos linked under each section - the videos come to about 57 minutes total. The articles marked with asterisks are just there to supply additional details. You can browse and look at whichever ones you want, but don't worry - we'll cover the stuff you missed in our discussion.

In terms of the discussion format, my general idea is that we'll address the topics in the order presented here. I've listed some questions under each section to stimulate discussion. We'll do our best to address most of them, as well as whatever other questions our members raise. I figure we'll spend about 30 minutes on each section.

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I. THE DEBATE OVER PUBLIC SCHOOL PERFORMANCE AND FUNDING:

  • How much of the educational achievement gap between wealthy and poor school districts can be attributed to differences in school funding?
  • Which investments — teacher salaries, smaller classes, instructional materials, or improved buildings — are most likely to produce meaningful improvements in student achievement?
  • Hannah-Jones' elementary school P.S. 307 spent $52,000 per student, and Brookings research shows that high-poverty, predominantly nonwhite districts often spend more per student despite poorer outcomes. Does this undermine Hannah-Jones's argument about underfunding, or do disadvantaged students simply require more resources?
  • To what extent are deteriorating schools in predominantly Black neighborhoods the legacy of historical racial discrimination versus more recent factors such as declining populations & aging infrastructure, or higher cost of living for teachers in urban areas and higher administrative overhead that eats up too much of the budget?
  • The economist Noah Smith argues that we're better off paying for fewer high-quality teachers with larger classes than more low-quality teachers with small classes, but doesn't larger classes result in "teaching to the middle" where smarter kids are bored and struggling kids fall further behind?
  • Rich Lowry argues that successful charter schools show how high expectations, strong leadership, and classroom discipline can matter more than funding. How much of their success reflects these practices versus differences in the students and families they attract?
  • Hannah-Jones blames educational inequality largely on racial and socioeconomic segregation, while Lowry argues that we should simply allow parents to seek better, safer schools with vouchers or charter schools. Could both explanations be correct, and does school choice risk leaving struggling schools even further behind?

1a) CBS News, "School building gap: Looking at funding disparities in schools across America" (video - 5:56 min)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAZ4P5uaiRI

1b) National Review, "Why Did This New York Times Writer Sacrificed Her Daughter’s Education?" (video - 13:59 min, start at 7:40)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0L78QbcJuZ8&t=7m40s

II. THE DEBATE OVER PUBLIC SCHOOL PERFORMANCE AND TEACHING, GRADING & TESTING METHODS:

  • Roland Fryer identifies five practices of successful charter schools: longer school days, frequent assessments, intensive tutoring, teacher feedback, and high expectations. Which might have prevented the failures Hannah-Jones describes at her daughter's schools, and which would be hardest to implement?
  • Fryer emphasizes high academic expectations, while Hannah-Jones describes teachers neglecting good students to focus on disruptive ones. How can schools challenge high-achieving students without leaving struggling students further behind?
  • Equitable grading advocates argue that grades should measure academic mastery rather than behavior, attendance, or homework completion. Is this a fairer assessment of learning, or should grades also reflect diligence, punctuality, and responsibility?
  • Hannah-Jones's daughter received excellent grades despite major gaps in her math skills. Would mastery-based grading have exposed these deficiencies earlier, or might policies intended to reduce failing grades make inadequate instruction harder to detect?
  • Does grading homework unfairly disadvantage students lacking resources and parental support at home? Or could reducing homework deprive these same students of essential practice and independent study skills?
  • Arlo Kempf argues that standardized tests are useful when properly designed and interpreted. How do they compare with teacher-assigned grades, and which would have provided a more accurate picture of Najya's academic preparation?
  • Hannah-Jones opposes selective high-school entrance exams because they disproportionately exclude Black and Latino students. But would replacing tests with grades, teacher recommendations, or interviews be more equitable, or simply introduce different forms of bias - like social graces & parental connections?

2a) Roland Fryer, "The Economics of… Education Reform" (video - 3:43 min)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c77X2k0cxek

2b) Investigative TV w/ Sean Otterspoor & Joe Feldman, "How some educators are replacing traditional grading with equitable grading" (video - 6:43 min)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tO1hsZofg_w

2c) TED Ed w/ Arlo Kempf, "Should we get rid of standardized testing?t" (video - 5:40 min)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtE0OsRWeYI

III. THE DEBATE OVER PUBLIC SCHOOL PERFORMANCE AND DISCIPLINARY GUIDELINES:

  • Vox argues that zero-tolerance policies can push students toward dropping out or entering the criminal justice system. How much of this relationship is caused by harsh discipline versus the underlying behavioral or family problems that led to punishment?
  • Vox highlights racial disparities in school discipline, with Black students often receiving harsher punishments for similar offenses. How much of this reflects racial bias, differences in student behavior or school environments, or subjective disciplinary standards?
  • Vox presents restorative justice as an alternative to punitive discipline. When might mediation and conflict resolution work better than punishment, and when should disruptive or violent students be removed from classrooms?
  • Katharine Birbalsingh argues that progressive educators underestimate how disruptive students undermine their classmates' learning. How significant are these negative peer effects, and when is suspension or expulsion justified to protect other students?
  • Birbalsingh argues that effective teaching requires meaningful consequences for misbehavior. But what responsibility do schools have to educate students they suspend or expel? Could alternative schools or specialized behavioral programs balance their needs with those of their classmates?

3a) Vox, "The school-to-prison pipeline, explained" (video - 3:15 min)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoKkasEyDOI

3b) Katharine Birbalsingh, "Nikole Hannah-Jones Ruins Black Kids’ Lives… Even Her Own Daughter’s" (video - 43:42 min, start at 3:24 & listen to 18:00)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYcYPKSUIKA&t=3m24s

IV. THE DEBATE OVER PUBLIC SCHOOL PERFORMANCE AND RACIAL SEGREGATION VS INTEGRATION:

  • Hannah-Jones attributes school segregation to historical discrimination, district boundaries, and affluent parents avoiding predominantly Black schools. How much does segregation reflect racial bias versus socioeconomic differences and parents seeking better schools?
  • Richard Kahlenberg emphasizes socioeconomic integration, while Hannah-Jones advocates both racial and economic integration. Would integrating schools by family income achieve most of the educational benefits, or does racial diversity offer additional advantages?
  • Some Black parents at P.S. 307 feared integration would undermine their school's culture, while Hannah-Jones's daughter experienced racial stereotyping and isolation at a predominantly white and Asian high school. Does integration generally improve racial attitudes, or can it sometimes intensify tensions and undermine minority students' sense of belonging?
  • Kahlenberg and Lecker advocate controlled school choice to encourage socioeconomic integration. Could school choice and charter schools overcome residential segregation, or would affluent families use their advantages to secure the most desirable schools?
  • Raj Chetty's "moving to opportunity" study suggested that low-income children benefit from moving to low-crime middle-class neighborhoods, but adolescents often experienced slight negative or neutral long-term effects. What factors account for these disparate results, and how might this also apply to low-income minority students attending a majority-white middle-class school?
  • John McWhorter, Roland Fryer and Stuart Buck have argued that high-achieving Black students sometimes faced a social penalty for "acting white", especially in racially integrated public schools. Critics point to surveys showing that Black students generally admire academically successful peers. How strong is the evidence for this cultural explanation of achievement gaps, and can both findings be true?

4.) ReasonTV w/ Richard Kahlenburg & Wendy Lecker, "Brownstone Brooklyn's Racial Divide: Why Are the Schools So Segregated?" (video - 11:17 min)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yePxe4kKC5k

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Related topics

Racial Equality
Homeschooling
Economics
Education Reform
Public School

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