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Everybody, according to an old saying of unknown but apparently wise origin, is an expert at raising other people’s kids.
One child of recent national interest is the daughter of Nikole Hannah-Jones, the journalist who led “The 1619 Project,” a controversial and Pulitzer Prize-winning reexamination of American history through the lens of slavery, instead of treating that American horror story as a sidelight.
In a conversation that occurs in middle-class Black households nationwide, including mine, Hannah-Jones and her husband, Faraji Hannah-Jones, decided to take a bold, unconventional step: They enrolled their daughter Najya in a local public school next to a public housing development in their Brooklyn neighborhood
The intention, she wrote in a long essay published in The New York Times Magazine, was “to challenge New York City’s separate and unequal school system.”
Despite the civil rights revolution, Hannah-Jones wrote, most Black students “languish in the type of schools that the law was supposed to have eradicated.”
“So, like the generations of Black parents who came before us,” she continued, “Faraji and I felt an obligation to make educational decisions based on the collective good and not just our individual advantage.”
They made that decision 10 years ago. Now, as she revealed in the Times essay, the family decided to reverse their earlier decision and move Najya to, yes, a private school.
Her mom recalls how Najya, now 16, said something when picked up at school one day that caused her to have second thoughts.
“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” Najya asked.
Najya and some friends had searched on Google about college opportunities, which led to a search of New York City school rankings. Which led to the discovery that their school ranked dismally low, which made them wonder about their chances for future academic success.
“I feel like you got cheated,” Hannah-Jones told her daughter later. “And I’m sorry for that.”
The “dynamic, exceptional principal” when Najya enrolled into pre-K retired at the end of the year, and her replacement was not up to the task of maintaining her high standards.
Toward the end of first grade, Najya started complaining about lunchtime chaos in the cafeteria.
Two classes were sitting in the cafeteria with “no lunch and no adult supervision,” Hannah-Jones wrote. “Children were running wild, chasing, hitting and pushing each other while the teacher’s aides and cafeteria workers stood by looking bored.”
When Hannah-Jones asked an aide why the children weren’t being supervised, she was told there wasn’t enough staff. Evidently.
Thus began a process many parents of public school students will recognize: emails, calls and attempts to meet with the principal, followed by silence and runaround, and eventually by halfhearted new policies that don’t quite address the core problem.
That problem, in Hannah-Jones’ estimation, is the “callous disregard” of the adults entrusted with her child’s education.
This is where Najya’s story takes a heartbreaking and enraging turn. In 4th grade, her parents were notified that Najya “was not performing on grade-level in any of her academic subjects and that her assessment given at the start of the school year had shown she was not a proficient reader.”
Hannah-Jones went into high gear, emailing teachers and the principal asking for a look at assessments, assignments and tests, hoping to figure out how she could get Najya the tutoring she needed.
She got no reply.
At length, Hannah-Jones concluded that Najya, and likely her classmates, were never given mandatory reading assessments.
Then, one day, Najya proudly told her mother that her reading level had jumped three grades in one month.
Hannah-Jones argues that this sort of educational malpractice was possible because the student body in question was “mostly low-income Black children,” of whom little was expected. It’s hard to disagree.
None of this is news to parents in troubled school systems.
The fact remains that sometimes our responsibilities to do what’s best for our children conflict with broader obligations to society, including to those who are less fortunate than our children, and however a parent decides to act can carry unfortunate consequences, including failure and regret.
As an old slogan goes, it takes a village to raise a child. It takes good parents, too.