Wokester supremo, Nikole Hannah-Jones, who authored the 1619 Project, admitted she cheated her daughter of an education by placing her in a bad public school despite having the means to put her in a good one — all to fight racism and promote equality.
Read more A tale of two good canines and one very naughty one
In a long essay for the New York Times magazine, she rued that she did it to make an ideological point, not just about segregated, missing the obvious idiocy that putting her black daughter in a black school wouldn’t fix it — but against white and Asian parents who do all they can to get their kids get a good education, through vouchers, charter schools, private schools, homeschooling, and tax credits — anything but the public schools she sent her daughter to.
She demonized them and their cause, again and again over the years, claiming school choice “doesn’t work” and anyone who wanted it was a flaming racist:
Under the city’s so-called school-choice system, most of the highest-performing public middle (and high) schools use what are called academic screens — a combination of grades, interviews, portfolios and standardized tests that determines admission — to allot access to public schools that most public-school children can’t get into.
This systemic sorting of worthy and unworthy children is justified by saying that our “brightest” students deserve and demand more rigor. While many of the city’s Asian students have benefited from these screens, in reality the screens are part of a tawdry bargain to keep a dwindling number of white and wealthier parents from exiting the public school system.
A ‘tawdry bargain,’ she calls it. After hearing from her daughter, she found out the hard way that racism was not the reason New York City’s public schools were so awful.
As City Journal’s Jennifer Weber noted:
Her daughter’s school failed not because of racism or segregation but because of bad pedagogy, the promotion of “equity” over standards, and zero accountability.
In other words, teachers’ unions.
But people who fought for better education for their kids were the bad guys, the white and Asian parents who didn’t want to send their kids to bad schools. She’d show them by placing her bright, motivated daughter in a bad public school.
For perspective, her take against school choice was hardly just her own. She was doing it as part of the establishment herd’s narrative, which ran these kinds of articles in the past decade:
The Racist Origins of Private School Vouchers – Center for American Progress, 2017
The Racist Beginnings of School Vouchers | NEA, 2026
New evidence on school choice and racially segregated schools –Brookings Institute, 2017
Opt-Out Education: School Choice as Racial Subordination — The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2014
School Vouchers – An Enduring Racist Practice | NEA AR –Arkansas Education Association, 2020
YouTube transcript (with my corrections):
Moderator: And you talked about busing in your video and school choice in New York City. I feel, to me now, [it] just moves people around, you know? And so people aren’t going to school with the folks in their neighborhood. And I do think there’s something to—there’s there’s something really like magical about the kids on the same block going to the same school. But because of this segregation of our communities, we have this issue: it’s that we need to move people around, [and] is choice actually [helps] with that sort of but I would love to hear your thoughts.
Nikole Hannah-Jones: So, one in New York City, school choice doesn’t tend to help with integration. What school choice does is it allows white and middle-class parents who are in neighborhoods with segregated schools to get away from those schools.
And if you look at the best schools in the city, they are disproportionately white and Asian. And Black and Latino kids, who are the majority of kids in this district, are not getting access to them. And so this is how choice is this like nice veneer of [it being] an equal system and allows everyone access [to] all of these schools.
But as we, as we show—you may or may not know—the best schools, so specialized high schools, you have to take a single test. A test that the Department of Education admits that what’s taught [on] that test is not taught in most of the schools that Black and Latino kids go to. So they are testing on something it’s not actually a curriculum; it’s not actually being taught in the same way. [It] becomes a [proxy] for [tracking]. Right? G&T is also [a way of] allowing segregation within integrated schools. So G&T is a very heavily white and Asian [program], even if the schools are Black and Latino.
Many of the best middle schools and high schools, you have to apply. You have to apply in person during school hours. You have to submit a portfolio, and then you get selected into these schools. So that’s not equal choice. Particularly, we know we have a very segregated, unequal educational system where kids are coming out of high schools where they don’t know how to build a portfolio, no one’s prepared them to build a portfolio. Their parents are working hourly jobs where if you’re forcing them to apply in person at 2:00 o’clock in the afternoon, that means they’re losing that $8 an hour that they need to pay their kids because they’re making poverty wages. So choice here has largely served to benefit white and middle-class [parents] but gives the veneer of equality when that’s not how it functions. And what happens is that most low-income Black and Latino schools end up going to their neighborhood schools by default because they are not getting access to those other schools, and they stay in their neighborhood schools which are segregated and often low-performing.
Read more The bennies flowing to Americans from Trump’s tariffs
There are so many things wrong with her logic in that 2017 passage it’s hard to know where to start.
One, black and Latino kids don”t have access to good schools? Is there someone telling them they can’t apply to the good schools? Don’t think so, so that’s not the problem.
Two, the kids in bad schools are not being taught what they need to know to pass their entrance exams? Who’s fault is that? Look to the teacher’s unions, not the white and Asian parents who want no part of this deficit. Is she saying that the curriculum can’t be fixed? That the only solution is to force whites and Asians back into the bad schools? Such impressive logic.
Kids can’t build a portfolio? Actually, they can’t read, write or do math, that is the real problem. I doubt that in the internet-age kids can’t build portfolios, too, actually, or that a harried mom in an $8 an hour job would refuse to take her kid to testing, or just put the kid on the subway and have him or her take that test alone, if it would change the course of the kid’s life for the better. It’s not good parenting to choose an $8 an hour job day over a kid’s future. Parents sacrifice hugely for their kids’ future in the Asian and white communities.
Which brings up my last point: So do black parents.
Nobody gets demonized harder by this leftist hive than black parents who want to pull their kids out of failing public schools.
As I wrote here, and here, in 2013, black parents in Louisiana fought like tigers to get their children into good schools in that state, through a voucher and school choice program introduced by the state, and the Obama administration tried to shut it down. The black parents fought back and a court threw the Obama bid to block the kids’ education into the dumpster and allowed the black parents to send their kids to good schools.
Test scores in succeeding years, most famously, in Mississippi, but all over the South including Louisiana, have risen to the top tiers in the country.
Hannah-Jones has been an education reporter for a long time, including before her employment at the New York Times in 2015, and I haven’t found a single word from her about this titanic school choice battle fought and won by black parents over the right to get their kids out of failing schools that refuse to teach.
Hannah-Jones dismissed the calls for school choice from parents of all colors as not working, or else in the case of the whites and Asians, strictly motivated by racial animus.
Now in the wake of Hannah-Jones’s mea culpa essay, they are fighting back. Look at this op-ed from today’s Wall Street Journal, written by school choice advocate Maude Maron:
Nikole Hannah-Jones kept asking me, “What are you willing to give up for equality?” In her mind, if white parents like me somehow got less, black students like her daughter would be better educated. Her favorite buzzwords, “integration” and “segregation,” were being thrown around like it was 1954 (combined, we used them 69 times in a 90-minute interview) even though it was 2019, and no school in America bars any student for being black.
In fact, I was on the side of equality, and I did pay a price. In my capacity as president of a local school council, I was defending New York City’s “screened schools,” which admit students based on objective criteria, without regard to race or ethnicity. Ms. Hannah-Jones was interviewing me for a New York Times series titled “Segregated City,” a video companion piece of sorts to her 2016 article “Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City.”
Everyone I knew told me not to do it. I probably should have listened. I was run out of my job as a public defender, lost many friends, and had to navigate a steady stream of racism accusations while serving on the school council.
Hannah-Jones suffered no consequences for being wrong, only her daughter paid, or the poor fools who listened to her and acted on her recommendations. But this woman did pay a price, a steep one, a lost job, racism charges all over the place.
And Maron isn’t the only one who paid a price for standing up for school choice amid this smog of racism allegations that had no merit whatsoever.
Before she says another word about this, Hannah-Jones owes these people apologies. They’re now coming back to haunt her and rightly so, given how wrong she was about forcing kids into failing schools. The parents she demonized were right all along and they aren’t going quietly into the night.
Read more Another wrinkle in the COVID conspiracy
Image: Screenshot from Talks at Google video, via YouTube