We all have principles, including political ones, of one form or another but many of us are prepared to bend or modify or look again at such principles if evidence is to be found that shows us to be wrong or if something massive is at stake such as children’s education. I for example would not vote for my local Lib Dem councillor candidate but I’m adult enough to know that this particular individual does a good job as as councillor despite the party he belongs to. I didn’t vote for him but I’m broadly happy he’s in place. I would also overlook a head teacher who was a screaming Communist in their personal life if the educational setting they ran provided decent, individualised and unbiased education to the children they serve. I don’t want Communists running anything but if they kept it to their private life and didn’t let it interfere with their professional life then it’s right for me to be flexible.

The New York Times writer and Black political activist Nikole Hannah-Jones and her equally ideology infected husband do not possess such mental and ideological flexibility. Their personal distaste for academically successful, selective schools that kept out those pupils who might be troublesome led them to sacrificing their own daughter’s education for their ideology.

This pair, who are from the American middle class Black Left, thought that by placing their daughter in a Black majority state school that was non-selective that, because of their background and skills, they could make a difference to other Black children. Their daughter has paid the educational price for her parent’s blinkered ideological views. Despite this pair serving on the school’s parent teacher association and despite them having the sort of skills that others at the school do not have not only did they not improve the school environment, because of organisational inertia, but their own daughter suffered.

The school’s non-selective intake policy meant that the school had a much greater number of children from challenging family backgrounds and more children with special educational needs. Pupil behaviour was poor, the school attracted the worst and most lazy teachers, there was no attempt to do much in the way of education and this couple’s daughter’s education suffered.

Nikole Hannah-Jones said: “When Najya was entering pre-K, my husband, Faraji, and I decided to send her to the type of school that wealthier families with choices uniformly avoid — one that is low-income and mostly Black. Our decision had been informed by values shaped by my years of reporting on the enduring and too often seemingly hopeless battle for school integration.”

She goes on to explain that education in New York has developed into one that from the bottom up that has become segregated. It’s clear that many New York parents, White, Latino and Black who have become successful don’t want their kids going to school with kids from Black or Latino ghetto backgrounds, schools with disproportionate numbers of special needs pupils or schools with poor quality teaching. This is not top down state imposed segregation which is easy to condemn, this is market segregation and because it’s the result of a free market exchange is far more difficult to morally argue against. Not only is it something that is difficult to take a moral stand against, because it’s individuals making their own choices, but changing that would require massive State intervention of a sort that many people might not be comfortable with. The answer is for the parents of the intake of these poorly performing schools to learn to value education and that’s something that they are going to have to learn for themselves.

What gets me about this whole story is that this couple did not suffer the same educational background that they inflicted on their daughter.

Nikole Hannah-Jones added:

“My husband and I had largely avoided segregated schools like these. He and his siblings attended integrated schools that served the military bases where their family lived. Starting when I was in second grade, my parents enrolled me in a school-integration busing program that allowed a limited number of Black students to leave their segregated neighborhood schools for white ones on the other side of town.

Being given access to the most resourced public schools in my hometown allowed me to flourish academically, and I am convinced that the integrated education my husband and I received set the foundation that has allowed us to become the successful upper-middle-class family that my daughter was born into.

We are both beneficiaries of educational opportunities that were forced into existence by generations of Black parents willing to put their most personal stake — their own children — in the fight for school equality for all Black children.”

So why on Earth did this couple not nod appreciatively at the kids of previous generations who weathered the storm of racial bias and grasp the educational opportunities offered by more selective schooling? They had the resources and the drive to do so. They could have afforded tutors for entrance exams and much more but chose not to do this because of their baked in and half-baked ideology.

Nikole Hannah-Jones talked about the reasoning behind her and her husband’s decision. She continued:

“We thought by sending Najya to a mostly low-income and Black school, we could help improve it for all the children there. From my past reporting, I knew that P.T.A.s at poor schools often can raise only a few thousand dollars, but Faraji and I could write checks that exceeded the annual P.T.A. budget. I witnessed how dismissive school officials could be to lower-income parents who lodged complaints or made demands for resources and how deferential they were to wealthy ones. I believed Faraji and I could bring some of that power with us. We had connections and time and status that should not matter, but that we all know do. And more than that, we believed strongly that if families like ours went into schools like this one, it would challenge other families with similar values to do the same.”

Nice idea. Sounds nice. But it was a disaster for this pair’s daughter. She suffered greatly and one day their daughter asked the question that this couple really didn’t want her to ask which is ‘why did you sent me to this terrible school’?

Nikole Hannah-Jones added:

“In the outside world, my choice had earned me valor. And yet that day, under the withering glare of my daughter, the words that I was formulating sounded hollow to my ears even before they passed my lips.

“Your school is not bad,” I told her, modulating my voice. “What are you talking about?”

Najya grew agitated. “You know what I am talking about. We looked up our school! We saw the test scores. We saw the ratings.” She ticked off the school’s below-state average reading and math scores, and that it ranked poorly on a popular school-rating website. I said I was aware of her school’s academic rankings, but that test scores alone do not define a school.

Glancing between her and the road, I told her everything that I had said a hundred times on stages, in interviews, in discussions since I had made her a symbol of how the choices we make can help sustain — or dismantle — educational inequality. I talked about the deep inequality in New York’s schools and how, like those Black families who came before us, we had an obligation to be part of the struggle of our larger community. Even if her schools were not academically the strongest, I explained, her father and I knew that we could provide for her tutoring and any other assistance to make up for what her school may have lacked.

But my child just shook her head, her face a mask of disbelief, and something else: betrayal.”

Yes indeed. You and your husband betrayed your own child. You cast her into the educational lions den in order to prove a political point and her early education suffered and she has had to work much harder than other school pupils in order to catch up. She’s only begun to catch up after common sense descended on the author and she and her husband put their daughter in a more suitable educational environment.

I was gobsmacked reading this story which I’ve linked to below. Gobsmacked that parents could care so much about ideology and so little about their own child’s rights to a decent education that they put her in a sink school that other more ambitious parents avoided like the plague.

Read the rest of this terrible story via the link below:

https://archive.ph/7Xfxl#selection-4539.0-4553.56

I’d like to thank mataHarry over at Harry’s Place for alerting me to this particularly troubling tale.