One of the most interesting things about Nikole Hannah-Jones's essay describing her daughter's experiences in New York City's execrable public schools is how long the problems have been going on.
She knew it firsthand, putting her daughter into impoverished black-majority P.S. 307, a school with its low test scores, and then at explicitly woke-and-black Urban Assembly Unison middle school, making eight years of substandard education.
Everyone else at the schools and in the district knew it was badly run, failing to teach children to read and do fractions Every parent of the children attending knew the teachers were unresponsive or absent, and the principal frequently had better things to do than come to the school. The kids knew that discipline wasn't enforced, and every kid was promoted to the next level with all A's, no matter how little they had been taught. The test scores and proficiency scores and school rankings ensured that everyone else who looked knew it, too.
I went to journalism school in New York City back in the early 1990s, and at our briefings on the city, before RW1 class, in parts and pieces we knew it. They actually taught us novice journalists about the conditions of the New York City public schools, citing the powerful unions as the reason, at Columbia journalism school.
So with this the way it was, why did it go on so long, why was there this wall of silence?
Join the conversation as a VIP Member