Nikole Hannah-Jones on Hard School Choices

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. 10 years ago, Nikole Hannah-Jones of The New York Times came on this show to talk about a story she wrote at that time, 2016, that set off arguments at dinner tables and school tours, you might say, across New York City. She had spent years already reporting on the fight for school integration, and when it came time to choose a school for her daughter Najya, she made a choice that many parents with her knowledge of the system would have avoided. In her new essay, she writes, "Our decision had been informed by values shaped by my years of reporting on the enduring and too often seemingly hopeless battle for school integration."

That's from her new piece, which is definitely being passed around a whole lot on parents' social media and elsewhere. She and her husband back then enrolled Najya in a mostly low-income, mostly Black neighborhood school in Brooklyn where she lives. As she puts it now, "We thought by sending Najya to a mostly low-income Black school, we could help improve it for all the children there." Here's 30 seconds of what she said on the show 10 years ago.

Nikole Hannah-Jones: I didn't intend the story as moralizing to other parents. I did intend the story to say that the personal choices we make have much larger ramifications. I think that what is clear is that while the segregation we see in the city is in many ways socially constructed, it is in many ways a result of policy. It also is a result of the individual decisions that parents make, and that as long as we all throw our hands up and say the problem is too large, the system is at fault, and we make decisions that privilege our own children, then we uphold that system.

Brian Lehrer: Nikole Hannah-Jones here in 2016. Najya is now a high schooler with college on the horizon. Nikole has gone back to ask what happened to that hope. New York schools, by the way, remain among the most segregated in the country. This article is very personal, very vulnerable. I think she deserves a lot of credit for that, and asks some very tough questions. Nikole Hannah-Jones is a domestic correspondent for The New York Times Magazine, founder of the literacy program the 1619 Freedom School, and founder of the Center for Journalism & Democracy at Howard University. Nikole, thanks for joining us. Welcome back to WNYC.

Nikole Hannah-Jones: Thank you, Brian. That was interesting to hear my voice from 10 years ago. Wow. It's been a journey.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, it's been a journey. First, I want to just express my appreciation for the courage it probably took to publish the new article. In the service of a greater good, you made yourself vulnerable by going public with your conflictedness this time around, including some regret about the most intimate and heart-wrenching of things, parenting in the face of competing risks and virtues, if I can put it that way. I hope a lot of people read the article and appreciate that, too. Was it at all a difficult decision whether to go public with this?

Nikole Hannah-Jones: Not really. My biggest concern was, of course, my daughter, and she was the first one that I asked. I felt, honestly, an obligation to revisit the piece 10 years later. I felt an obligation to be honest about how it went. I felt an obligation to let my daughter have a say, because clearly she was the one who had to live our decisions day to day within her schools. I asked her, "Would it be okay?" I asked her, did she want to participate. She did. Once I got her consent, it wasn't a hard decision. I just felt I have integrity. I had to come back and tell people how it went.

Brian Lehrer: The new article is called In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own? For people who haven't read it or heard you, you've been a few other places, on the station, certainly This American Life, that you have a long relationship with. Looking back at Najya's earliest years at PS 307, what were the first signs that the school might not be delivering for her and her classmates?

Nikole Hannah-Jones: One, let me just say, you don't make this decision and expect you're going to go into schools that are providing the absolute highest of standards of education, right? If that was happening, there would be no need for me to be writing about school inequality, and there would have been no need for me to try to go into a school, but the school, when we initially went in, was being led by a very dynamic principal named Roberta Davenport. She had grown up in the housing projects across the street from the school, and she had really turned it into a flourishing learning environment, but as I note in the piece 10 years ago, just a year into us being at the school, she retired, and a new principal came in.

That principal, it became quickly, we realized, was not up to the task. She could not fill the shoes of Roberta Davenport, and she could not hold the school together. By 1st grade, there were already structural issues happening at the school. I talk about in the piece my daughter coming home and saying that the lunchroom was very chaotic, that she was worried about it. I visit the school, and what I saw was just devastating and enraging. The concern started pretty quickly after Ms. Davenport left. At that time, she still had excellent classroom teachers.

I think it's important to point out that, of course, the piece is looking at some of the colossal failures that we endured at that school, but pre-K, kindergarten, 1st grade, and 2nd grade, she really had amazing educators, but there were other things happening in the school outside of her classrooms that started to raise concerns.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take some calls. If you are a New York City parent, teacher, or student, or even a former one, tell us about a school decision you are confronted with that might have been in this lane, something that you thought is in the best interest of all children, society as a whole if you're a Black parent, and in the context of the segregation that New York City public schools are still rife with, or anything like that, did you have to choose between your values and what you thought was best for your own child? 212-433-WNYC, if you have a story, or if you've read the article, or just hearing Nikole Hannah-Jones now and have a question, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692.

You write, "We left Najya's elementary school at the end of 5th grade feeling wholly defeated by a system of inequality that may begin outside the school walls but is magnified within them." Defeated is a striking word from someone who has spent a career on this fight. In fact, I wrote down one of the things that Najya said on your This American Life episode, which was, "You put me on the line to help the school, but it didn't work." How much do you agree with her conclusion about that regarding her elementary, maybe her middle school, too? Does it change your opinion at all about what active parents like yourself can do at the school level?

Nikole Hannah-Jones: I don't completely agree with my daughter. I think that we absolutely did have impact on individual children in that school. When we found out that her 4th grade math teacher was not teaching the students, that the reading teacher was not properly assessing the students, we were able to get remediation for all of the kids. We were able to get the superintendent to agree to add an additional classroom teacher to help remediate the kids. We were able, throughout the years, to have various impacts on that school.

I also think-- I mean, I know this, that just having the children that Najya went to school with be able to see someone like myself and my husband in the school, for her to be able to build relationships with those students, I would like to think that that was reciprocal, that my daughter was getting something out of that and those children were as well, but were we able to structurally change the school? No. Did I ever think that a single family-- I mean, I write as much in the original piece that a single family can't change a school, and it can't change a system, but if none of us go into these schools and try, the system, of course, will never change.

We did feel defeated as a family by our experiences there, but I really don't want listeners or readers to take away from this that the decision to try was wrong or that we regret our decision to try. The history of social movements is that it often takes a very long time to see progress, and that they start as a few, and then you have to be able to mobilize more and more people, and that there's often what's perceived to be as a failure before you get a breakthrough. I'm saying it was hard. I'm being honest about the struggles of that. I'm being honest about how my daughter felt about us making these choices for her, but I'm not arguing in any way that it was wrong for us to try.

Honestly, I would do it again. I would do it again using what I've learned from our first try. I would do some things differently, but it still, to me and my husband, was the right thing to do and is the right thing to do.

Brian Lehrer: You mentioned how long this has been going on. Maybe an indication of how long it's been going on will come from our caller, Janet in Crown Heights. Janet, you're on WNYC with Nikole Hannah-Jones.

Janet: Good morning. I'm in my 70s, and my mother took me out of public school in the South Bronx and put me in a very progressive school in the Lower East Side. Then, as a parent, I took my daughter out of a progressive elementary school and put her in a prep school. My daughter is now faced with the same problem that my mother and I were faced with. She's in a public school, and it's a good school. A public school in Baltimore. She's learning about everybody, but what I found as a public school teacher is that, parents, I want to let you know that the biggest problem is in the junior high schools, because as a public school teacher, I saw many kids coming out of junior high school unprepared.

We need to deal with the quality of our schools, how other children are coming into these schools with problems, and how do we help them learn, because I think all children want to learn, and they're dealing with so many problems. The children who are equipped and ready to learn are sometimes being stopped because of the behavior problems of kids that are having a lot of problems. We need to make it work for everybody.

Brian Lehrer: Janet, thank you very much. Here's a text, Nikole. A listener writes, "I beg parents not to send their Black children to predominantly white schools for the sake of a better education lest they experience the relentless racial bullying that inhibited my ability to reach my full potential." Obviously, the personal experience of another Black listener. That's part of what's in your article, right? It's like pick-your-own racist adventure, if I can state it like that.

You don't quite say that in the article, but it's either you're in a school with mostly low-income Black and brown kids, and systemically it's less likely that you're going to get a good education, but then if you do, what your daughter has now done at the high school level and go to a mostly white school that's "a better school," you're going to experience the downside of that. Maybe you want to put it in your words.

Nikole Hannah-Jones: Yes, absolutely. I have a line in the essay that says if you are a Black parent, there will be a struggle. It's just a matter of which one. So many people have said I sacrificed my child. I agree that my child did have to endure some sacrifices, but had I sent her to predominantly white schools the entire time, she also would have had to endure some sacrifices. It's just, for us, which sacrifice we think is worthy or worthwhile and which one we don't. I do want to say there are high-achieving, predominantly Black, even public schools.

I made my daughter tour, for instance, Medgar Evers College Preparatory School in Brooklyn because I didn't want her to get the message that it always has to be either-or, that a Black institution means it's low-performing. I also mentioned that a few weeks into her experience at her selective high school, she wanted to go to another high-achieving Black high school, Banneker. The problem is there aren't enough of those schools. That these schools are atypical. My husband and I were not trying to just go into a well-resourced Black school. We were trying to go into the type of school that, unfortunately, most Black kids in the city have to endure.

Brian Lehrer: To that, there's been some sharp response from the right, as I'm sure you're aware, to your story. I'm going to cite an example or two here. Writers at City Journal, National Review, Fox News, New York Post say, for example, PS 307, where Najya went to elementary school, spends roughly $43,800 per student per year, so money doesn't explain what happened. They say the real failures were ungraded homework, skipped assessments, and citywide changes like ending school letter grades and test-based promotion, which were supposed to be in pursuit of equality.

They point to charter networks like Success Academy as proof that high expectations work for the same kids. Which parts of that argument do you accept, if any, and what does it leave out?

Nikole Hannah-Jones: Let me first say I don't disagree that a big part of the issue was a lack of quality and care of teachers. I give the examples of the homework not being graded, of teachers who did not believe that these students had the ability or potential to achieve. That's absolutely a issue. Though I've also reported in plenty of schools, including my daughter's middle school, where that was not, to me, the case, that teachers did not believe in the abilities of their students and were not trying as hard as they could. I think it's important; I've seen this per-pupil expenditure number thrown around.

I don't know if it's good faith or bad faith, but PS 307, about one out of five of its students are homeless. Almost half of its students have a diagnosed learning disability, and 90% of them live in poverty, so to simply look at per-pupil expenditures and not understand that the cost of inequality means you have to spend a lot more. If you have that many students with learning disabilities, those students have to be assigned a para, someone who can work with them one-on-one. It's just more expensive. When you have students living in a school that serves a student body of that rate of poverty, of course, it's more expensive to try to educate those students than a school of high wealth. I don't think that that figure is fair.

The last thing I'll say on that, many of these high-poverty schools are also deeply under-enrolled because parents who can opt out, opt out, but the standing costs remain the same. It costs the same amount of money to keep the lights on, to have air conditioning in the school, to have a gym teacher, to have a cafeteria worker, whether you have 500 kids in that school or 200 kids in that school. Because the funding is per pupil, you're getting actually half of the per-pupil expenditure, but you still have the same infrastructure cost. If my daughter's classroom has 30 kids in it or it has 15 kids in it, you still have to pay that teacher's salary.

I wish people would just dig a little deeper on-- There's a reason why we have Title I funds. There's a reason why we give more funding to high-poverty schools, because it is just much more challenging to provide education in a school where every single student is living below the poverty line.

Brian Lehrer: We're in our last few minutes with Nikole Hannah-Jones. We told you off the air that I'm going to invite you to pose a question that I might ask Mayor Mamdani when he's on the show tomorrow about what the city might do about this persistent segregation, but before we close with that, let me get one more caller in for you. James in Manhattan, a retired New York City public school teacher in the South Bronx. James, we got 30 seconds for you, so go for it.

James: I'll go real quick. First of all, I appreciate everything that I've heard today, and your guest has been fantastic. I wish in my 25 years of teaching in the South Bronx that I had more parents like her who were as involved as her and her husband were. I think that would have made all of our lives a lot easier, but I also have fears that this type of story, that people are going to hear this and think that the entire public school system is full of teachers not grading their math tests, et cetera, et cetera. In my 25 years in two different schools in the South Bronx, I just saw people giving everything they had.

Brian Lehrer: James, I'm going to leave it there. I get both of your points. Real quickly, Nikole, on his first one, I think a lot of teachers will say, "It's the parents in these low-income households as a group." That's generalizing, "but they don't put in the effort that the parents in the middle and upper-class households do."

Nikole Hannah-Jones: One, I know for a fact that's not uniformly true. I can tell you, if I was never in my daughter's school, no one would have condemned me as a parent because I'm middle class. I also think I want to acknowledge to him, and I hope it's clear, that I have experienced many excellent educators who are going up against incredible odds. I affirm that, but I also think we need to understand I am not, as a parent, a professional educator.

Yes, I can support what's happening in the schools, and it is my duty to support what's happening in the schools, but even if a child has a parent who doesn't care about their education at all, that child deserves to be taught. That child deserves to have access to a rigorous curriculum. If you have a child for seven hours a day, that child should be able to read and do math. Yes, it should work hand in hand, but we send our children to school for a reason, and it is not-- The child deserves an education no matter what their parents are and what their kids do.

Brian Lehrer: I know you've got to go in two minutes.

Nikole Hannah-Jones: Okay. I'm sorry.

Brian Lehrer: You don't propose solutions, really, to my eye, in the article, other than, say, generally, this long-term segregated system needs to change. Do you have any thoughts on how? Mayor Mamdani will be on the show tomorrow, and if you're interested, I'd be happy to put a question or suggestion to him from you about what he might do in this lane.

Nikole Hannah-Jones: Oh, I absolutely do. If I were to be able to ask Mayor Mamdani a question on this, what I would say is, public schools are the greatest socialist institution in America. That the father of the public school, Horace Mann, called public schools a great equalizer. In the United States, 9 out of 10 children attend public school. Here in New York, the schools disproportionately serve the children of the working class. The working class in the city is disproportionately made up of Black and Latino residents. This school district is largely serving the city's working class, and yet they are facing deep racial and socioeconomic segregation in our schools.

Brian Lehrer: So change what, Mr. Mayor?

Nikole Hannah-Jones: Right. My question is, Mayor Mamdani went back on his promise to end mayoral control of the schools. He's the mayor. I want to know when we're going to see a plan to address and dismantle school segregation in the city. We could eliminate middle school screens. We could actually zone children to schools. There are many levers we can pull. The reason I don't name solutions is because we already know what the solutions are. We just don't have the political will to enact them. I would like the mayor to answer, when are we going to actually see a real and substantial plan to address the racial, social, and economic isolation of students?

Nothing can help the working class change its material condition more than actually having access to an equal and quality education. I want to know when we're going to see a plan from him.

Brian Lehrer: Nikole Hannah-Jones is a domestic correspondent for The New York Times Magazine, founder of the literacy program the 1619 Freedom School, and founder of the Center for Journalism & Democracy at Howard University. Her new essay is called In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own? Thank you for sharing this with us.

Nikole Hannah-Jones: Thank you.

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