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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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I’ll bet she was more popular than the black girls. Just suggesting.
A stupid cliche
Some blame goes to the schools, but 80%-90% of the blame goes to ghetto culture, black families (or the lack thereof), and overall America's extreme political-race culture and the inability to speak truth.
How 'bout this: reduce welfare payments to 80% of their current levels if the father is not present, but 100% if he is. Momma is going to hold the father's feet to the fire for that much cash, or maybe she'll think twice about having kids with no father.
Howard Stern — of all people! — often complained that he had to attend a public school with a large percentage of black students. Not because of any sort of virtue signaling by his parents but because of where his family lived. Pattern recognition can occur at any age.
The solution is simple. We need only do it.
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.
Their peaceful and generous nature makes them ideal neighbors, lending testimony to their exceptional family values and parenting skills unrivaled by any other culture.
Their child-rearing practices and skills mixed with their unparalleled work ethic are second to none.
Their rationale and logical thought toward circumstances coupled with their innate capability to de-escalate situations is to be envied and coveted.
Their commitment to academic excellence enriches our schools and serves as an example to all who hope to achieve prominence as a people.
Real estate values are fueled by the mix of African-Americans into an area due to their caring and respectful nature of these communities, an example of all they have achieved through their enthusiasm for self-improvement, hard work and a self-reliant nature.
Without their industrious and creative drive, we would be poorer as a nation.🥱
It’s refreshing to read an article that doesn’t capitalize the ‘b’ in black.
Just what do you mean by that?
A good friend of mine was a math major in university, and took a job teaching at a Rust-belt public high school.
He was a big guy, so they also gave him a class with a lot of the young black toughs. He has told me some version of every story you’ve ever heard about fights, disruptions, terrible disrespect, foul language, lack of parents, etc...He said it was baby-sitting and mob-control instead of teaching
He would identify about 5 or so kids (usually girls) from each of his classes, who really wanted to learn, and he would hold an informal, separate math class at some other time or end of the day, to review and practice what should have been done in class.
He lasted about 10 years, and gave up his state pension track, etc... to go to a local private high school.
Is the square at the end supposed to mean extreme sarcasm?
I was in junior high in a school just outside of Boston when they were trying to integrate the schools. This description above is true, and people that deny it are clueless or liars. It was a horror show.
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.
One of the narratives by victims in the late Colin Flaherty’s
web posts was an interview with a girl in middle school whose parents had just moved with her and she was told by her new teacher to sit in the front row near his desk. Despite this, a muscular male student who had been held back from grade advancement twice, suddenly rushed up to her and slammed her in the face, knocking her unconscious. Different races.
Author Flaherty died of cancer January 11, 2022 at age 66.
Looks like a bored yawn on my screen....
I’ve been asking this question for years and have yet to be answered:
Name just one single place where black people have moved into in significant numbers where it was cleaner than before, crime rates went down, and it became more prosperous.
i went to baltimore public schools in the seventies... Northern Parkway Junior High School and Northern High class of 1980.
in Junior high, i was beat with a text book over the head in the hallway coming from lunch, kicked down the hall til i turned to fight, sprayed with a fire extinguisher, sprayed with chocolate pudding at lunch, slapped by a girl whose hair was set on fire in front of me, so i slapped it out and she slapped ME, i fought a guy for looking up my sister’s skirt as she walked up the stairs, i had a basketball thrown at me for just playing defense... good times, good times.
When democrat causes receive government funding, the funding ends up funding something else.
The only way democrats win is through laundered money. For slanderous political ads, fake polls and stealing elections.
I’ll bet she was more popular than the black girls. Just suggesting.
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