And not every middle-class or wealthy parent who similarly chose to send their kid to a low-income neighborhood school regrets their decision. For the most part, children with well-educated, vigilant parents will do just fine. If the child, like Najya, is smart and motivated and can advocate for themselves, they can navigate their way through far more difficult situations than being behind in algebra; when harms and roadblocks inevitably appear, their parents can do what Hannah-Jones did and hire a tutor or move their kid to a school more suited to their needs.
Hannah-Jones’s lament, in the last third of the essay, almost moved me to tears at first, but, after a day or so, I went back and read it again and wondered what, exactly, the big problem was. Najya had benefitted from P.S. 307 and Unison; as Hannah-Jones details, her daughter had learned to think of herself as something other than the Black girl in a sea of white and Asian achievement. And among the worst things that had happened was that she needed outside math instruction. She seems to be like a lot of bright kids who are good at some subjects and need help in others. Parents can no longer rely on grades to gauge their child’s actual knowledge, but that’s also true in many wealthy school districts and even in some private schools, where grade inflation is rampant. I hear the same complaints where I live, in Berkeley, California, home to a whole bunch of “good” public schools.
Hannah-Jones’s individual turn was always surprising to me. It runs counter to the lessons of her lengthy and groundbreaking piece on what happened in Tuscaloosa after a long-standing integration measure was lifted. Under the old system, Tuscaloosa had one large high school. There was academic tracking that internally segregated the students, but they were all together. Once the city was free to physically segregate the rich from the poor, it split the high school into three schools, segregating many of the Black students.
A reasonable conclusion you might draw from this, if you believe that poor children should be afforded equality of opportunity, is that we need large, integrated public schools that educate all the children in a community. These schools should include academic tracking that starts around the end of elementary school, and they should include robust tutoring programs in the early years to help insure that everyone enters middle school on fairly equal footing. It’s true that large-scale tracking will internally segregate a school and that outcomes will not be equal, but the point of the project of equality is to try whatever you can to make slow progress while not neglecting the kids who need a challenge, even when it seems impossible. I’m sure that some of Najya’s teachers were bad, but large schools give such teachers less hold over a student’s life. They can be subject to pressure to improve by fellow-faculty. Novice teachers have more access to mentors.
In the two-thousands, Oakland added more than forty new small schools as part of an equality effort funded in large part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Big schools in the flatlands—that is, not the wealthy hills—were overcrowded and failing. The proposed solution was to create a slate of “academies,” most of which had fewer than four hundred students as well as administrations that could act with some autonomy. But, as the city built new schools, enrollment dropped by more than forty per cent. As a result, there are too many schools with too much variation in the quality of administration and too many differing standards for teachers and students.
