Posted on 09/30/2026 11:50:21 AM PDT by grundle
Nikole Hannah-Jones regrets sending her daughter to a ‘bad school’. But she misses the crucial reason why it failed its pupils
Back in 2002, not long after the US was struck by terrorists, and I watched the world spin into chaos, my mother told us we had to leave our apartment. She had lost her job the year before and had fallen behind on rent. We were evicted.
We moved in with my great-grandmother and shared a bedroom for two years. My mom enrolled me in the local school in Kansas City, Missouri. In sixth and seventh grade, from age 11, I went to an inner-city middle school where most of the kids were on free or reduced-cost lunch.
For the first time in my life I was a minority, attending a majority-black school, experiencing firsthand exactly what Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote about in her viral piece for The New York Times earlier this month. In the piece, Hannah-Jones — the creator of the 1619 Freedom School, a non-profit educational programme aimed primarily at helping black students improve literacy while also teaching black history, culture and civic identity — revealed that she felt profound remorse for sending her daughter, Najya, to an inner-city school. Najya, now 16, recently told her mother: “I never really got the education I wanted.”
The difference between my mother and Hannah-Jones is that my mother didn’t send me to this school to virtue-signal to her elite friends that she was “doing the work” to challenge “separate” and “unequal school systems” — it was out of financial hardship and circumstance. Within two years, my mom married again — only because she wanted to get me out of that school.
Hannah-Jones argued that her decision was in part informed by her understanding that “nationally, a black student is less likely to have teachers who are qualified and experienced” and to “have up-to-date technology and attend school in modernised facilities”.
But studies have disputed that these schools receive less funding. A recent academic report on racial disparities in school spending showed that the typical black pupil attended a school receiving 8.8 per cent more per-pupil spending than the typical white pupil in the same metropolitan area. A Hispanic pupil’s school received 5.1 per cent more than their white counterparts. This is partly because lower-income schools are more likely to have pupils without English as a first language, which makes education more expensive.
From my experience, I learnt that even if a school is well-funded (the one I went to had no lack of funding; we even had PalmPilot computers in our classrooms) and has good teachers, disruptions can be so frequent that learning becomes nearly impossible. This was my biggest challenge, not a lack of experienced teachers or school funding.
Unless you’ve experienced this firsthand, it is impossible to understand. Every day is a fight for survival, not a place to get an education. During passing periods, I’d hurry as fast as I could to avoid being “jumped”. I’d walk down the hallways seeing fights break out with alarms blaring and the school’s lone police officer running through masses of pupils after a kid had been beaten up. It’s impossible to learn when you’re constantly in survival mode.
At the end of seventh grade, there was a succession of bomb threats. Some days my mom kept me home; other days pupils had to vacate the building until police officers could sweep it. My mom had more meetings than I can count with school administrators, begging them to expel the pupils who were threatening to beat me up daily. They didn’t.
Hannah-Jones’s daughter began complaining about her school and so she visited during lunchtime. She noted it was “chaotic” and she saw children who were “running wild, chasing, hitting and pushing each other while the teacher’s aides and cafeteria workers stood by looking bored”. I saw this happen with my teachers, too. But it was often due to outbursts during class. A pupil would stand up and cuss out a teacher; sometimes I saw them get physical. The kids would often create commotions in the classroom — displaying that they had no interest in learning. But it wasn’t that the teachers were “bored” or “lazy”, as Hannah-Jones observed in her piece; it was that they did not, or could not, enforce the rules.
This was when public schools introduced critical foundational algebraic concepts to children. I fell permanently behind in math and never caught up. I later moved to a new school in the suburbs, but I remember having no idea what was going on in my eighth-grade math class. My math grades in high school and my ACT math scores were so low that, in college, I needed remedial classes for the first few years. The university in Kansas I attended was majority white but in my remedial math class, nearly half the students were black or non-white. School administrators had failed these children, just as they had failed me.
The truth is, most pupils in these schools are not “troublemakers”; they truly want to learn. But the 10 per cent who do cause daily disruptions are hardly ever expelled. According to a 2025 academic review: “At least 29 states and DC have passed laws limiting formal suspensions and expulsions.” California represents one of the most aggressive examples of this shift in school discipline: state law bars schools from expelling pupils for “wilful defiance” or disruption alone. Ironically, Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Freedom School has advocated against disciplinary measures for disruptive pupils, preferring “restorative” options over punitive ones.
My school failed me. Hannah-Jones now believes her daughter’s school failed her. In different ways, the adults surrounding both of us failed, too. By not insisting that pupils adhere to basic behavioural standards, teachers and administrators hurt the majority of pupils who really want to succeed.
Hannah-Jones’s daughter will probably be all right. I was. So many children were not. And that is the greatest sin of all.
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But the biggest problem is the lack of discipline in the schools. It makes learning impossible.
...................
This is a choice.
This is not an artifact.
This is about leftist takeover of the schools and the country.
This is being done PURPOSEFULLY.
Once you know that... it all makes sense.
“But the 10 per cent who do cause daily disruptions...”
Expulsion and even suspension is pretty much a forgotten idea and as for the ‘board of education’ well...
I’ve seen this in my wealthy suburban school. Except it wasn’t black kids.
I think the key is that there are a lot of kids who should not be mainstreamed into regular class rooms. We had a couple of kids that were disruptive when my children were in school. It took parental involvement to nip it in the bud. They were pulled out of those classes and practically schooled one on one. I know it sounds extreme, but we were paying for teacher’s aides—and those few kids needed the aid more than those in my daughter’s class.
A constant theme to me is that parental control is gone. Without two parents in the household who are committed to getting their kids educated, the kids will flounder and eventually fail.
It sounds trite, but having a father at home who would look at what you are doing and “gently” redirect your focus. In my case it was a stern look and a question along the lines of “what do you think you are doing?!” I had seen his “disappointed” look at my older brother when he was acting out. I wanted no part of that!
This small portion of children are feral. They are raising themselves on the streets. They take out their frustration on the teachers and the classroom. A small portion of kids can disrupts dozens of others.
No one wants to deal with the answers, because they are not popular or pleasant.
“ the 1619 Freedom School, a non-profit educational programme aimed primarily at helping black students improve literacy while also teaching black history, culture and civic identity”
That is not what 1619 is about.
Wow.
Mom sounds like a whore.
“I think this would be a wonderful opportunity to pause for a moment and give thanks for the great contributions of the black community to our society.”
I agree with what you’re saying but I assume you understand that this condition (strong families, good behavior, etc.) was only in the PRE-Civil Rights days. Those days ended when a bunch of WHITE Leftists went into those black communities and decided to stir things up. Then the DEMOCRATS latched on to them as an easy votes, which led to today’s mess mess. Like passage of the 19th Amendment (and thus the destruction of women as defenders of what America stood for), the destruction of blacks in America was orchestrated by WHITE Men, sadly.
The truth is, most pupils in these schools are not “troublemakers”; they truly want to learn. But the 10 per cent who do cause daily disruptions are hardly ever expelled. According to a 2025 academic review: “At least 29 states and DC have passed laws limiting formal suspensions and expulsions.” California represents one of the most aggressive examples of this shift in school discipline: state law bars schools from expelling pupils for “willful defiance” or disruption alone. Ironically, Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Freedom School has advocated against disciplinary measures for disruptive pupils, preferring “restorative” options over punitive ones.
This is about 70% of the problem. The other 30% is related — it’s that a much lower percentage of parents of those inner-city kids care about education to the degree parents do in better schools. Too many parents that don’t care enough to discipline their kids, don’t make them do homework, and no respect is taught for teachers.
But the biggest problem is the lack of discipline in the schools. It makes learning impossible.
_______________________________________________________________
I have to say that mostly I agree with your statement but we cannot discount the lack of discipline in the home. If parents could make children do their homework, check their homework and communicate with the school especially the teachers the students could learn and there would be Discipline in the school room.
Perhaps I’m a bit naive but I think if students were being successful in the classroom they would have some feeling of pride and have a desire to continue doing well, the discipline problems would go away.
One problem in today’s society of course is single parent families but many parents are totally absorbed by Tick Tock or or some other form of digital entertainment and therefore have no time for helping their children through school.
The classrooms In schools that are so called white majority areas do not perform better because of the white area they are in but because there are two parents who loved the children and want to make sure they do the best they can.
Before the War on poverty there was not such a disparity in white black and other nationalities or ethnicities in Educational performance Everyone did mostly the same until we removed fathers from the home. I don’t believe the problems we now have are caused by race but by welfare homes where there are not two parents in the home who have to work to provide for their children. When there is no responsibility to perform work to take care of your children then there is no feeling of responsibility for the children, The government takes that responsibility. When the government takes responsibility it takes it away from someone else and that causes a social problem.
When children don’t get an education or at least a good education They have little prospects for getting ahead in society, they still want what everybody else has but don’t have the legal means to get it. I’m not saying that education makes everybody rich. Education includes more than the three R’s, the learning of social behavior is important and is totally lost in these “hood” schools.
I think it would be easy enough to greatly increase the performance in these under performing schools, just make the parents financially dependant on how the kids do. That would be especially easy when wellfare payments are already being made.
The author makes the mistake of assuming the creation of these chaos factories is a failure. I would say they are exactly what leftists want and are a great success for their movement.
During the summers of 1958 and 1959 my sister and I went to a day camp in the Portland, Oregon ghetto. The camp was 80 percent black, my sister and I are white.
There was never any racial strife. When we had parents day the black mothers who were slim and well-dressed would bring great food for the get-togethers. The black fathers were at work.
And then along came LBJ to destroy the black families and cause racial strife.
The handful that cause trouble in school eventually graduate to the streets where they become law enforcement’s problem.
It’s a barfing emoji if your font supports it.
you are the stupid one
have you seen a commercial in the last two decades ?
how can you be so dense ?
The truth is, most pupils in these schools are not “troublemakers”; they truly want to learn. (False) But the 10 (20-30) per cent who do cause daily disruptions are hardly ever expelled (True, afraid of the parents).
The technology access is BS. I work in a what is considered as an inner city school. We have 1 to 1 tablets, we have computer labs, we have educational programs that run on these things and our school rank C and some D in the Texas grading system. I’ve been here for a pretty good stretch, when the district had 25% whites, we had recognized schools, but as the minorities rose and the white population declined, son of a gun know what happened? Test scores plunged. Today we have around 15% or less and our scores show it.
Johnson used single mother welfare to take the black vote away from Republicans and create a permanent black bloc that voted democrat. "Lets just see those damx nixxexs vote Republican after this!" he said, or something close to this.
And sure, at some level there was a black culture which did not match White Protestant culture.
The mother was fortunate to have escaped KCMO with her daughter intact.
During the summers of 1958 and 1959 my sister and I went to a day camp in the Portland, Oregon ghetto. The camp was 80 percent black, my sister and I are white.
There was never any racial strife. When we had parents day the black mothers who were slim and well-dressed would bring great food for the get-togethers. The black fathers were at work.
And then along came LBJ to destroy the black families and cause racial strife.
________________________________________________________
I could not agree with you more. I believe that Lyndon Baines Johnson did more to destroy this country Than any single person who has Ever lived on this planet.
My hope is that he was only trying to preserve the vote for Democrats for the next 100 years and not to destroy this country giving it socialism. He has however led us down the path of destruction.
The person next in line for doing the most to destroy this country was Hussein Obama by convincing Biden to open up the floodgates of Illegal Aliens. I tuly don’t think Biden had any idea what he was doing in the White House. His and Obama’s treason to me is worth the gallows.
What Obama and Biden did to Trump to keep him from being elected in and of itself was treasonous and should deserve a death sentance.
Here’s an exercise to try (which illustrates your point). Look at the black % of the city’s population and guess the murder rate. Or look at the murder rate and guess the black % of the city’s population. Try it for any city =>
Within two years, my mom married again — only because she wanted to get me out of that school.
Wow.
Mom sounds like a whore.
__________________________________________________
Funny how we see things so differently, I would say she was a selfless saint.
What about the innocent guy she married under false
pretenses just because she liked his Zipcode?
Sounds like fraud. A big giant lie. Sleeping with him for his money.
Consensus = whore.
We don’t have to live like this. It’s a time for choosing.
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