How NYC Public Schools Failed Nikole Hannah-Jones’s Daughter

Nikole Hannah-Jones admitted in a recent essay for the New York Times magazine that she had erred in sending her daughter to a struggling New York City public school in the name of social justice. The essay reveals both an admirable degree of self-introspection on Hannah-Jones’s part and a remarkable lack of curiosity about why, exactly, Public School 307 provided her daughter with such a poor education.

Hannah-Jones was unsparing in detailing all of the symptoms associated with New York City’s lackluster public education system — poor test scores, chaos in the lunchroom, massive gaps in grade-level knowledge — but her ideological blinders limited her to one diagnosis: Underfunding, driven by racism.

“Nationally, schools in predominantly nonwhite districts receive $23 billion less in annual funding than their heavily white counterparts,” Hannah-Jones writes, citing a 2019 analysis by EdBuild as evidence.

“In everything that we measure, these schools have less, even though the economically struggling student bodies they serve need more,” she claims. “And so the test scores and poor academic performance that typify these schools reflect not just the disadvantage of the students but, more essentially, the disadvantage of the schools.”

The study she cites is not only seven years out of date, but also excludes federal funds. Including federal funding, schools serving low-income and non-white communities receive more money per student, not less.

PS 307 actually spends a whopping $52,000 per student each year — more than three times the national average of $16,526. The school also benefits from a smaller-than-average student-to-teacher ratio of 9 to 1, and teachers make more than $100,000 a year on average.

Meanwhile, at nearby Community Roots Charter, which is also in front of a public housing project, more than 80 percent of students are proficient in math and reading — despite the school spending less than half of what PS 307 does ($26,000 per student), according to the Manhattan Institute.

High per-pupil spending is often associated with worse outcomes, particularly in New York state, which has the highest per-pupil spending in the nation. Notably, Mississippi, which has been commended in recent years for pulling off an education “miracle” — rising from 49th in the nation in fourth-grade reading in 2013, into the top ten — spends somewhere between $12,000 to $15,300 per student when including all local, state, and federal operational funds. What made a difference in turning around educational outcomes in the state was not increased spending, but strategic investments in deploying specialized literacy coaches to the lowest-performing schools and training teachers in phonics-based, evidence-based reading instruction. The state also moved to hold teachers accountable, instituting an A-to-F grading system for schools and clear early-grade evaluation benchmarks.

In New York, high teacher salaries, staff compensation, and pension costs — negotiated by powerful teachers’ unions — drive up costs, as do a high cost of living and heavy spending on special education.

The teachers’ unions, which are not mentioned a single time in Hannah-Jones’s essay, have simultaneously levied their power to weaken educational accountability measures. The state once required student achievement measures, including grades from state tests, as part of its Annual Professional Performance Review system. But a 2019 law removed the requirement that state tests be used in teacher and principal evaluations and made the choice of assessment subject to collective bargaining. In 2024, the New York State United Teachers union (NYSUT) backed legislation to de-link teacher evaluations from student performance measures like test scores and required evaluation systems to be collectively bargained. The legislation, which passed via unanimous vote in both the state assembly and the state senate, further eliminated an expedited disciplinary procedure for teachers who repeatedly received “ineffective” ratings.

The NYSUT said the changes were achieved after “decades of union activism.”

This lack of accountability measures seem to have impacted Hannah-Jones’s daughter.

She explains that Najya was one of the brightest students in her class, but she still could not pass the state algebra exam. Hannah-Jones recalls finding her daughter’s math folder filled with ungraded assignments that included mostly the wrong answers. A school literacy coach told her that Najya’s teacher had “most likely never performed the school’s mandatory reading assessments for Najya or any of her classmates.”

Hannah-Jones, however, focuses myopically on racism and funding as the causes of the poor academic performance in schools like PS 307, with little evidence. Her preferred solution is a system of forced integration, in which white and Asian students from wealthier areas would be made to travel to schools in poorer, blacker neighborhoods to achieve some demographic equilibrium. Hannah-Jones portrays the associated challenges — longer commutes for students, transportation expenses, and the dissolution of school ties with the community — as justified sacrifices in the pursuit of equity.

But it’s unclear that massively disrupting students’ lives would improve conditions in badly performing schools: A study of busing in Boston and New York City by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that traveling further increased integration among students but produced little or no causal improvement in test scores or college attendance.

In addition to ignoring the role of teacher unions, Hannah-Jones shows no interest in examining how students’ home lives might be impacting their performance in school. Family structure is the strongest predictor for problems at school, according to a recent analysis from the American Enterprise Institute. Children living in non-intact homes or with unmarried parents were 47 percent more likely to have their parents contacted by their school than were children from intact, married-parent families, the analysis found.

Headline Fail of the Week

The New Yorker recently published an essay on “The Unsettling Ambiguity of Early Pregnancy.”

Writer Apoorva Tadepalli describes her own experience testing positive during five pregnancies and then spending time unsure whether she would miscarry. She goes on to examine the uncertainty surrounding early pregnancy tests, miscarriage, and viability.

But she also says the black-and-white line between being pregnant and not pregnant is “misleading,” arguing that women can be “kind of pregnant” or “a little bit pregnant.”

“This article just seems like a tortured attempt to make pregnancy into a subject experience in order to justify abortion,” conservative activist Lisa Cusack told Fox News. “The fact that an at-home pregnancy isn’t sophisticated enough to pick up the beginning stages of every pregnancy doesn’t mean you’re ‘kind of pregnant,’ or that pregnancy itself, which literally begins with conception and ends with birth, is ‘nonlinear.’”

But Elizabeth Barcohana, America First Policy Institute California ambassador to the America First Women’s initiative, blamed the magazine, not the author, for the piece’s framing.

“The New Yorker’s editors betrayed the author with this provocative headline, because what she’s really talking about — in a vulnerable way that millions of women can empathize with — is the utility and impact on women of unreliable early testing,” she said. “She tried to talk about something totally legitimate for women trying to start a family, and they [editors] hijacked it.”

Media Misses

• Former ABC News correspondent Terry Moran claims he tried to report on then-President Joe Biden’s health in late 2023 but he was shut down by higher ups at the network.

“In late 2023, early 2024, you know, it was pretty clear that Biden was fading rather quickly,” Moran told The Daily Beast podcast. “I had actually traveled with him to Japan in the spring of 2023 and kind of eyeballed him there, and I thought, ‘Okay, he’s still functioning, but man, he’s frail.’ He looked like he’d blow away in a stiff wind.”

“I tried to do the story of Biden’s health before anybody else did in network, because I’d seen it,” Moran said. “And I got shut down very hard.”

• The New York Times issued an editor’s note this week after a piece on a documentary about the killing of Palestinians by Israeli forces in Gaza included a line that read, “Israelis are deeply divided over how to apportion blame for the policy, military and intelligence failures that preceded the attack and the war. But Israelis still largely view themselves as the victims of Oct. 7.” The paper ultimately attributed the offending line to an “editing error.”

“Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article included a statement that was intended to convey Israelis’ perception of the government’s military response to the Oct. 7 terror attack in relation to the attacks, but inadvertently suggested that Israelis’ experience as terror victims was a matter of perception. It has been removed from the article,” the Times wrote in a message now attached to the report.