Ten years ago, New York Times Magazine writer Nikole Hannah-Jones explained her decision to enroll her daughter, Najya, in a segregated, high-poverty Brooklyn public school, P.S. 307, despite having the resources and knowledge to send her elsewhere. Now, a decade later, in a follow-up essay, she concludes that her choice failed her daughter—and that segregation was to blame.
How does a child with two educated, affluent, involved parents, in the highest-spending school system in the country, reach ninth grade without knowing fractions? Hannah-Jones’s own reporting shows how: through failed pedagogy. The failures that Hannah-Jones recorded demonstrate how schools trained teachers in ill-conceived but fashionable instructional methods—at the expense of proven approaches—while also incorporating equity policies that eroded standards and made no one truly responsible for student learning.
Finally, a reason to check your email.
Sign up for our free newsletter today.
In November of her fourth-grade year, Najya’s teachers told Hannah-Jones and her husband that the girl was below grade level in every subject and that a fall assessment showed she wasn’t proficient in reading. Hannah-Jones asked to see the assessment and got nothing for weeks. Then Najya came home reporting she had increased three reading levels in a month. The school’s literacy coach explained that the teacher had only then tested her. Decades of research on ongoing assessment have shown that teachers who measure regularly and adjust their instruction get better results than those who don’t. Yet Najya’s teacher had not measured what the girl knew until Hannah-Jones questioned it.
Hannah-Jones had also requested to see her daughter’s graded work, but that also took weeks to receive. When it finally came, the math folder showed that none of the work had been marked and most of the answers were incorrect. Yet Najya believed that math was her best subject.
The most effective teaching methods have been known for half a century. Material should be presented in small steps, students should be given the opportunity to respond, their responses should be checked, and incorrect answers should be corrected. Project Follow Through, the largest experimental study of education ever funded by the U.S. federal government, examined methods of teaching children from disadvantaged economic backgrounds and found that direct instruction, which included teaching students to master skills, performed better than the “discovery models” favored by progressive educational reformers. The discovery models, however, had a built-in appeal for many educators: they made it acceptable not to provide feedback or assess students.
And that’s precisely what Najya didn’t get—the feedback. She thought her answers were correct. Every answer not checked was, in the end, tallied in her favor.
Najya’s public school career unfolded as the city pursued a series of education policy changes under Mayor Bill de Blasio that, in the name of promoting equity, led to lower expectations and standards in city schools. The city last awarded its schools overall letter grades in 2012–2013; P.S. 307 received a C that year, classifying it as a “focus” school because of its poor performance. De Blasio got rid of school letter grades in 2014 and replaced Michael Bloomberg’s policy of closing underperforming schools with the Renewal program, which spent hundreds of millions of dollars on extra services on those failing institutions.
That same year, the city stopped using test scores to determine whether third- to eighth-graders were ready to move on to the next grade and handed the decision over to principals, who reviewed “promotion portfolios” of classroom work from students flagged as at risk by teachers. (The year before, 8,000 students had been kept back.) Thereafter, a child could go from one grade to the next, as Najya did, without anyone checking that she had actually learned what she was supposed to learn in the previous grade. The principal of a school that Najya attended later described this policy as “racism in the guise of antiracism.”
In middle school, Najya was placed in an eighth-grade algebra class as part of “Algebra for All,” a Bill de Blasio initiative designed to ensure that all eighth-graders had the opportunity to take the course. She earned As in the class. Then she failed the Regents exam.
A 2012 study, tracking thousands of students in the United States and the United Kingdom, found that a fifth-grader’s understanding of fractions and division better predicts achievement in high school algebra than anything else, including IQ and family income. Fractions and division were the skills that Najya’s tutor later discovered she lacked.
In seventh grade, Najya enrolled in the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT), the one test that determines admission to Stuyvesant and the city’s other seven specialized schools. When her friends dropped out of the prep course, and Najya also wanted to, Hannah-Jones insisted that she take the exam. According to Hannah-Jones, neither Najya nor any other black student whom she knew got a high score. Hannah-Jones blamed this on race.
Hannah-Jones allowed Najya to select her own high school, provided that it was a public one. The girl picked a screened school in a wealthy area, one of the hardest to gain admission to. These screened schools make admission decisions based on grades. Najya’s As helped her get into a school of choice.
The two standardized tests that she had taken, however, gave a more accurate picture of Najya’s knowledge than her grade transcript. One was the SHSAT; the other was the algebra Regents, which the city will no longer require for graduation starting in 2028. These were the only ways of measuring what Najya knew objectively.
Hannah-Jones’s story has prompted impassioned responses across the political spectrum, from praising her for her frankness in admitting her failures to condemning her for making a child the experimental subject of her political obsessions. The arguments can obscure another key aspect of the article, which is Hannah-Jones’s dubious analysis of why the schools failed.
She says that Najya’s third-grade teacher frequently failed to show up, and that the school struggled to find substitutes, so the students sometimes spent these days in other grades’ classrooms. Teacher absenteeism still runs high in many New York City public schools. The city’s most recent Mayor’s Management report shows that 15.8 percent of teachers, almost one in six, missed more than 11 school days last year, which amounts to over two weeks of teaching.
Hannah-Jones pointed to a lack of resources as a reason for these failures. She refers to a national study showing that nonwhite school districts get $23 billion less in funding. That finding has been contested and likely overstates the gap. But whatever the national picture might show, the claim certainly doesn’t hold true in New York City. When Najya was in third grade, state records show that P.S. 307 spent $26,372 per student—a figure higher than the city average, about 20 percent higher than the state average, and twice the national average.
Hannah-Jones concludes that segregation failed her daughter. But those P.S. 307 classrooms would have failed any child, regardless of color. Najya finally learned fractions when someone focused on her skills and how to improve them. Every child deserves that.