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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Thanks for posting this.
When I moved to KC From Chicago I located over the state line in Kansas to avoid exactly this happening to my daughters. This is great confirmation that I made a good choice. Of course, we moved here from Chicago where there was a 50% drop out rate, which was even worse.
the destruction of blacks in America was orchestrated by WHITE Men, sadly.
Should read, was orchestrated by WHiTE DEMOCRATS, sadly.
Should read, was orchestrated by WHiTE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS, sadly.
There...fixed it
1. You're suggesting that blacks don't have agency. That "WHITE Lefists" control black behavior.
2. And if you're going to make an issue of these Leftists' ethnic identity, you might as well add (and you won't like this) that a disproportionately large number of "WHITE Leftists" in the Civil Rights movement just happened to be Jewish.
So you admit you are unable to answer.
Why would they act any different inside a school from how they act outside a school?
“1. You’re suggesting that blacks don’t have agency. That “WHITE Lefists” control black behavior.”
Correct, that should be OBVIOUS when we see things like George Floyd, taking knees, etc.
#2, I choose not to go there (and it doesn’t mean you’re wrong).
"We demanded that America help us develop. But if this was logical it was also naive. It seduced us into putting out faith right back into the hands of the same White America that had oppressed us in the first place. We began to live by a formula. America's racial guilt was our power. White guilt became Black Power.
"Of course there was a catch. To milk White guilt we always had to be victims of White racism. White racism and black victimization became the heart and soul of liberal power in America."
-- Shelby Steele, What Killed Michael Brown?
somebody please ‘splain it to him ..
I don’t know who this “him” is. I is a her.
I am just seeing just how much rope you need.
Bump
LBJ!
That son-of-a-gun should be on a spit-roast in hell. LBJ had JFK killed so his wife, Lady Bird, could keep getting money for transporting soldiers. And he rigged elections in Texas for Lady Bird as long as he lived. Pure power mad scum.
Within two years, my mom married again — only because she wanted to get me out of that school.
Not because she loved the guy.
Because she wanted to latch on for the benefits.
Whore.
guess that’s why you can’t unnerstan normal things
I know normal is a state in Oklahoma.
My Dad was stationed at Craig AFB near Selma Alabama in the mid-60s. Out driving on a back road, he slid off and into a ditch. A half dozen big black guys were working in the field nearby. They came over and asked if he needed help. He said yes.
With the black guys and my Dad lifting and pushing, and my Mom at the wheel, they got the car out of the ditch. My Dad offered to pay them and they laughed and said no thanks!
I’m NOT saying there were no racial issues then! IIRC, blacks were 50% of the population and only 2% of the voters. It probably helped that my Dad was obviously military, and while many of the WHITES in Selma refused to do business with military guys (since they were “Feds”!), most of the blacks we met were nice to us.
But that was a long time ago. Craig AFB became minority housing and, last I heard, was a drug-ridden hell hole. The town itself is now 82% black.
https://www.reddit.com/r/UrbanHell/comments/17zeoce/selma_alabama_feels_like_a_postapocalyptic/
On a positive note? It is...”Safer than 7% of U.S. cities.”
https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/al/selma/crime
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