I wrote yesterday about Nikole Hannah-Jones. One thing I implied, but didn’t say explicitly, was that this incident ought to be the end of Hannah-Jones as a public figure who has anything whatsoever to do with education. My friend Mary Katherine Ham proposes that:
When an expert in education so thoroughly demonstrates a jarring and near complete lack of expertise in the act of getting an education for her own daughter, we should stop taking advice from her on curriculum, instruction, and all other fads disguised as wisdom she offers. That seems like the least we could do. Her daughter’s personal struggle, which is indeed sympathetic, wasn’t much of a teachable moment for her, as she doesn’t seem to have updated any of her priors (and actually fudges funding facts, so as not to disrupt the narrative of under-resourced schools). But it should be a teachable moment for us, about the outsized influence of a scholar who claims to know better than anyone what her daughter would be up against in the school to which she chose to send her, but was inexplicably surprised and left her daughter completely unprepared for it.
What, exactly, is the counterargument to this? Hannah-Jones has extremely strong views about education — views that she wishes to impose nationwide. She was heavily involved in the grotesque 1619 Project, which, unfortunately, has been woven into the curricula in schools across the United States. Her New York Times bio boasts early on that she likes to write about schools. And these are the results of her personal experiments? That her own daughter thinks that she was “betrayed” by her ideas. Why, in any universe, would I want her to have anything to do with my children?
There’s nothing shameful about being wrong from time to time. We all are. But when you are wrong on the one thing for which you are known, then it’s time to do something else with your life. There are many other people in this country who are thinking seriously about education, and who have not been embarrassingly, publicly wrong on the topic. Nikole Hannah-Jones completely ignores them — seriously, search for the word “Mississippi” in her essay! — because their work is fatal to her worldview. Americans ought to respond to this by ignoring Nikole Hannah-Jones in turn.