There’s a price to be paid when common sense is sacrificed at the altar of political activism. That’s the hard reality the writer Nikole Hannah-Jones — or really, her daughter Najya — is facing, according to her recent New York Times Magazine article. A decade ago, Hannah-Jones announced that she would purposefully send her child to a “mostly low-income and Black school” to combat education inequality. But it was her daughter who suffered the consequences.

Najya faced academic neglect at these schools. She was misled about her actual abilities through inflated grades. She did not receive the appropriate support she needed to flourish. And this was all too predictable, given that Hannah-Jones knowingly chose a struggling public school. Her husband initially worried about putting their daughter at a disadvantage. Najya, upon learning her parents had the resources to send her to a good school, felt betrayed: “Because other kids are disadvantaged, you didn’t want to put me in a great school?”

Hannah-Jones’s article is brutally honest about the reality inside American schools. But despite seeing all the problems in front of her, the writer still walks away with the wrong lessons. She blames what she considers “segregation” as the reason for the problems in Najya’s schools.

Her argument assumes that affluence, and perhaps even race, determines which students will simply be bestowed with better educational opportunities and which will always be at a disadvantage. Hannah-Jones misses the fact that schools serving disadvantaged students are also capable of providing an excellent education. The law already prohibits schools from excluding children based on race. The problems are actually the very ones she describes.

The first inconvenient reality is that schools sacrifice order and fairness when they do everything to acquiesce to disruptive kids. At one of the schools, teachers spent much time responding to misbehaving students. For students like Najya who were trying to do their work, it felt unfair to watch teachers devote so much time to dealing with disruptive behaviors. The presence of disorder also makes room for other problems, such as schools struggling to attract high-quality teachers. This was a persistent problem Najya faced, as her schools often had staff who failed to do their basic jobs of supervising or teaching students.

This leads to a second inconvenient reality: many schools mislead students about their capabilities by doling out A’s and reducing rigor. Najya had received high grades in her algebra class, but failed the state exam. This became such a repeated pattern that she “developed testing anxiety”.

But here’s where the third inconvenient reality comes in. Testing anxiety may be more of a sign of under-preparation than of something being wrong with the test. Students are frequently told that poor performance can be dismissed because the assessment is meaningless or because they might just be bad test-takers. But in this case, the repeated pattern of poor test results became too difficult to explain away. And it turned out that after enrolling in algebra tutoring, Najya was struggling with foundational math skills such as fractions and long division.

Many of the problems that Hannah-Jones identifies can be addressed regardless of race. Najya eventually passed the state algebra exam once the math deficiencies were addressed. Schools should maintain high academic standards. To achieve this, they should also maintain order and safety.

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Neetu Arnold is a Paulson Policy Analyst at the Manhattan Institute and a Young Voices contributor. Follow her on X @neetu_arnold

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