Nikole Hannah-Jones’s Daughter Is Not the Only Victim

U nsatisfied with miseducating Americans about their country’s founding through her ahistorical 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones took it upon herself to personally wreck her daughter’s schooling. She admitted as much this week in a viral essay: Hannah-Jones deliberately enrolled her child in New York’s abysmal public schools and watched her flail along with the rest of her classmates, mostly poor, black students. The decision was made to puncture these schools’ “segregation” and “systemic inequality” by closing off opportunities for one more affluent pupil.

The narrative makes for a depressing read. But although the author acknowledges that she sacrificed her child’s education to the cause of racial balancing, the damage her ideology has caused to education more broadly goes far beyond one girl. For those in Hannah-Jones’s progressive tradition, it matters not whether any individual student’s learning is better off — just that educational systems are fairer in a cosmic sense.

In 1954, the Supreme Court held that school districts could not exclude or assign students based on their race. By the mid-1960s and 1970s, however, authorities established as part of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society were insisting that cities affirmatively deconstruct the “racial imbalances” that segregation caused — including in jurisdictions that were never segregated. The federal Office of Education expected districts to double their transfers of black students to majority-white schools within a year, regardless of neighborhoods’ racial makeup.

Cities’ consensus solution was to put black and white children on buses and ship them to distant schools attended predominantly by the opposite race until they were sufficiently integrated. If racial balance was achieved, families’ losing access to their neighborhood schools was of secondary concern. Children came home late and tired, and parents revolted. Boston’s public schools lost a third of their white students in 18 months as families fled to the suburbs. Once black parents were permitted to choose where their children went to school, most kept them close to home. This development bothers progressives.

Chafed but undeterred, reformers shifted their focus to equalizing educational outcomes across different racial groups. Advancement across the board was not enough when disparities remained. Under the banner of accountability, and scandalously supported by conservatives, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 required schools to disaggregate test scores and graduation rates by race and ethnicity. Like the Soviet Union setting grain production quotas, it decreed that every demographic group at every school must reach predetermined proficiency rates — rising eventually to 100 percent — or administrators would be sanctioned.

With those incentives, states and districts defined proficiency down. As graduation rates and state-reported test scores boomed, other metrics with no government order to increase — such as SAT performance and international assessments — started sagging.

Easier coursework made students of different races more equally successful on paper. By genuine aptitude, however, drawing the finish line closer allowed poor and minority students to fall furthest behind. Children of affluent, well-educated parents often face independent expectations of rigor at home. Others must receive such expectations mostly from school and will rise only to the bar that teachers set for them.

In the last decade and a half, progressives have directed their ire at the very concept of educational standards, as pupils of different races still performed unevenly. Poorer children were unfairly “burdened” by studying outside of class, so 40 percent of teachers are reducing the amount of homework they assign, and 24 percent assign no homework at all. Only six states now require students to pass an exam to graduate high school, down from half of states in 2012. Several districts have adopted “equitable grading,” which includes no failing grades, no penalties for late work, and unlimited retakes on tests.

Reformers believe absurdly that discipline does a disservice. When minority students were being punished more frequently than others, Los Angeles banned suspensions for “willfully defiant” misbehavior. The resulting disorder makes learning harder for everyone else in the classroom, who also tend to be minorities.

In 2021, New York City began phasing out its gifted-and-talented program because, while 70 percent of the district’s students were black or Hispanic, three-quarters of those enrolled in the program were white or Asian. Outcomes for lower-performing students didn’t improve, but high-achieving children suffered measurable losses. Hence, greater equity.

“So long as the gap is smaller” between the rich and poor, Margaret Thatcher once said of socialists, “they would rather have the poor poorer.” Progressives in education, of whom Nikole Hannah-Jones is one in a long line, think much the same of learning. That is, so long as students like her daughter are equally miseducated, justice has been done.