One of the most interesting things about Nikole Hannah-Jones’s essay describing her daughter’s experiences in New York City’s execrable public schools is how long the problems have been going on.
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She knew it firsthand, putting her daughter into impoverished black-majority P.S. 307, a school with its low test scores, and then at explicitly woke-and-black Urban Assembly Unison middle school, making eight years of substandard education.
Everyone else at the schools and in the district knew it was badly run, failing to teach children to read and do fractions Every parent of the children attending knew the teachers were unresponsive or absent, and the principal frequently had better things to do than come to the school. The kids knew that discipline wasn’t enforced, and every kid was promoted to the next level with all A’s, no matter how little they had been taught. The test scores and proficiency scores and school rankings ensured that everyone else who looked knew it, too.
I went to journalism school in New York City back in the early 1990s, and at our briefings on the city, before RW1 class, in parts and pieces we knew it. They actually taught us novice journalists about the conditions of the New York City public schools, citing the powerful unions as the reason, at Columbia journalism school.
So with this the way it was, why did it go on so long, why was there this wall of silence?
And why did Hannah-Jones pull the plug on it in her essay, laying out just how bad these schools were and how they damaged her daughter’s educational prospects?
I think the answer lies in her own ideology, in her own ‘contributions’ to social thought. Her error-filled 1619 Project, which the American Federation of Teachers promoted in schools, likely in those very schools Hannah-Jones’s daughter attended (Update: was taught), claimed that America was fatally flawed from its foundation, and remained hopelessly flawed. Black people were victims. The only conclusion that could be reached from it was reparations and of course, reinforced affirmative action.
That made it easy to not worry too much about the results coming out of the public schools, which Democrats running these cities don’t worry too much about as they throw more money at them. It would explain why promoting black children without merit, giving every kid an ‘A’ no matter how poorly they performed, could continue without any apparent consequences for the kids or the schools. One reason, of course, is that teachers were afraid to be branded ‘racist’ if they did flunk any of the kids for nonperformance, given the atmosphere. Another reason was, why not? If teachers could never be fired for failing to teach and kids would go on to college no matter what their preparation, why not just give all A’s? There would be no consequences either way and less attention from giving the A’s and passing the kids along to the next level.
But what actually became of the kids in these failing schools, especially the ones who were tracked into college with no education?
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They weren’t denied college because of their lack of preparation. Instead, DEI ensured that they were admitted even without skills or education solely based on the color of their skin, for diversity’s sake. DEI is the final end point for this awful system of passing kids through with no education, yet providing all the rewards of what elsewhere takes effort and achievement.
The result is what we see now in colleges — kids at prestigious schools taking remedial reading and math classes — as many as 40 to 60 percent, according to the leftist Center for American Progress, along with huge dropout rates among minorities who had been passed through these systems, in large part because the kids aren’t prepared and can’t keep up. Even kids who would do well in state institutions are thrust into very prestigious ones, and then flunk out and feel resentful because they can’t keep up. They usually, like Hannah-Jones, put the blame on whites, when in reality, they were failed by the entire school-to-DEI pipeline, which worked so well until President Trump came along and knocked out that last pillar — DEI and its merit-free affirmative action.
Which seems to be why the coast was clear for Hannah-Jones to write her piece about how her daughter was cheated of an education in New York City’s failing, but very expensive-to-taxpayers schools.
The game was given up when the girl couldn’t get into a prestigious high school, and unless she caught up, a prestigious college — a big if, and much harder if you have to do it when you are older, and incidentally, something Hannah-Jones never confirmed that her daughter was able to do in her essay.
DEI was no longer there to make everything all right. If someone can’t compete, she can’t use her skin color as a substitute, now. The safety net is gone. Kids really do have to be able to do the work. The old race-based spoils system that has corrupted and cheapened so much of higher education is gone.
And that is why Hannah-Jones had the sudden realization that her daughter had been cheated.
She will blame whites, she will blame Trump, of course. But the reality is, that the DEI at the end of the rainbow was unsustainable, and now the spotlight is on the public educational system which is cheating black children of their right to an education and deserves all the scrutiny it is getting. No more leaning on DEI to cover up decades of educational failure for them. That blows the lid off the whole failure of public education and its systemic cheating of black schoolchildren.
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