Today’s column is going to add to this wealth of evidence by zooming in on New York, which spends more than any other state on a per-pupil basis.
But we’re going to zoom in even further and look at P.S. 307 in New York City, where spending is an astronomical $52k-plus for every student.
Why are we looking at this school?
Because this is the government school where Nikole Hannah-Jones sent her daughter for ideological and racial reasons.
Here’s some of what she wrote in her New York Timescolumn.
When Najya was entering pre-K, my husband, Faraji, and I decided to send her to the type of school that wealthier families with choices uniformly avoid — one that is low-income and mostly Black. …the test scores and poor academic performance that typify these schools reflect not just the disadvantage of the students but, more essentially, the disadvantage of the schools. …Faraji and I felt an obligation to make educational decisions based on the collective good and not just our individual advantage. …Faraji and I decided that our role in this struggle meant upending the status quo and sending our child not to a wealthy white school but to a poor Black one. …We thought by sending Najya to a mostly low-income and Black school, we could help improve it for all the children there. …we enrolled Najya in pre-K at Public School 307, a segregated, high-poverty school… For years, I had been defending my decision to Najya, trying hard to balance empathy for her with the justification of her father’s and my choices. I wanted my child to see it my way, to see the struggles she was having as part of a lineage and a mandate… But now I felt overcome with regret. Najya deserved better. …my daughter’s sacrifice could not transform a system that those who hold the most power refuse to change.
Reading her column, I felt some sympathy for Ms. Hannah-Jones. I don’t think her motives were bad.
But I think she was blinded by ideology.
Why does she think she was sending her kid to a “poor” school when per-pupil spending was actually absurdly high?
Why does she not understand that “those who hold the most power” are all leftists who have the same views as her?
National Review‘s Charles Cooke shares his perspective on this controversy. He’s much less forgiving.
Here are some excerpts.
For penning this mea culpa, Hannah-Jones has received a good deal of praise. Well, you can count me out of all that. Her actions were morally indefensible and analytically ignorant, and her supposed metamorphosis remains invisible to the naked eye. She has always been a ridiculous zealot. Now, she’s a cautionary tale, too. …The fanatics who “informed” on their family members during the worst days of the Soviet Union were not admirable for their commitment to the cause; they were anti-human freaks who upset the natural balance of the universe. Nikole Hannah-Jones’s sin was far lesser than theirs, but it was still a sin. …she still has no idea why schools tend to fail. Like many of her colleagues, Nikole Hannah-Jones ignores the available data and instead pins the blame on funding gaps that don’t exist, racism that cannot be identified, and attitudes that nobody in our current era actually exhibits.
The last sentence is spot on, echoing the two points I made. The school has tons of money and the entire system is controlled by the left.
One obvious conclusion is that maybe, just maybe, it’s the system that’s wrong.
And that’s one of the messages in Ian Rowe’s column for the New York Post.
Despite having the means and connections to send their daughter, Najya, to a more selective school, they enrolled her in a “mostly low-income and black” public school in Brooklyn. Now she’s expressing doubts about her choice, but her experience leaves a valuable lesson — about the importance of school choice. …She writes that she feels she “failed both my values and my child,” that she is “overcome with regret,” that “Najya deserved better.” Her daughter, by Hannah-Jones’ own account, asked whether her parents had sacrificed her education because other children were disadvantaged. …The lesson of her experiment is not that privileged families must keep their children in disorderly schools as an act of moral witness. The lesson is that family structure and parental agency can buffer a child from a weak school — and that hundreds of thousands of low-income parents are denied the power to make the same calculation. They cannot hire tutors on demand, reach a superintendent or wait a decade to course-correct. They need high-quality options for their children now. …parents of …“languishing” children do not want absolution from Nikole Hannah-Jones. They simply want the same privilege she and her husband ultimately exercised: the right to choose a better school for their own child.
