My parents were big supporters of public education.
Teaching was their life’s work. They spent almost their entire careers in the District of Columbia Public Schools system. However, they chose to send my four siblings and me to Catholic schools through grade 12. They sacrificed almost everything to do it. Many of their educator friends made similar choices.
My husband’s mother made a similar pick. He still recalls how out of place he felt after his mom — also a schoolteacher — enrolled him in an expensive, predominantly white boarding school in New England when he was just 11. Last year, during one of his school reunions, I walked around and marveled at the beauty of the campus.
At the same time, though, the thought of him dressed in his little blazer and being so far away in Massachusetts makes my heart ache for the adolescent version of him. Not that he regrets it. It put him on the path to Princeton University.
Like many other middle-class families, our parents faced a difficult decision: send us to our neighborhood schools with all of their problems, or identify the best possible educational opportunity for us elsewhere.
Add in a bunch of other variables that Black students in predominantly white private schools often still face — including social isolation and subtle discrimination — and the decision becomes even more difficult.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the choices Black parents have to make for their children after reading Nikole Hannah-Jones’ essay in the New York Times about what her family went through getting her daughter educated in New York City public schools.
The Pulitzer Prize winner, who founded the 1619 Project, could have afforded to send her daughter to the most exclusive school in the city. Instead, she enrolled her only child in a segregated, high-poverty public elementary school in Brooklyn across from a public-housing project.
Because she and her husband were well-off financially, Hannah-Jones naively thought they could use their resources and networks to help the school thrive. It was a decision based “on the collective good and not just our individual advantage,” she wrote.
She acknowledged that her decision returned to haunt her years later when her daughter was in middle school and confronted her, saying, “So you had money to send me to one of the best schools, and you chose not to?”
Gulp.
As Hannah-Jones noted in a response to a reader comment about the article, teenagers have a way of humbling us.
In the piece, Hannah-Jones delves deep into why she made the choice that, she eventually concludes, was a mistake.
“Najya deserved better. They all did. But she was mine. This girl, my only child, looked to me to protect her, to give her what she needed to thrive. And I had not chosen her.”
It was a stunning admission.
Not to mention brave.
When it comes to choosing schools, there aren’t always suitable options, especially for socially conscious Black parents like Hannah-Jones. People sometimes find themselves having to make a no-win choice the way she did.
“Which struggle are we asking our children to bear? Stay in the neighborhood school and risk being underserved; leave for a more selective or whiter school and risk isolation, racism, and the message that the children left behind are not worth saving,” Sharif El-Mekki, CEO of the Philly-based Center for Black Educator Development, told me in an email.
Hannah-Jones’ daughter, Najya, now attends a selective, predominantly white and Asian public high school. Hannah-Jones wrote she is better off academically, but racism is a factor. “My daughter had never been part of a minority in a school, and now she sat in classrooms where some classmates casually tossed around racial slurs as if it were cool.”
Najya also has regular homework assignments, which was something she wasn’t used to. She hadn’t learned to study on her own. Her grades faltered. Her parents hired an algebra tutor and learned that their student “had huge gaps in many of the building blocks of math that she should have learned in elementary school, like mastery of long division and fractions.”
Eventually, Najya was able to get her footing and started getting A’s and B’s again.
I reached out to Shanée Garner, executive director of Lift Every Voice Philly, a grassroots, Black-led parent organization, who pointed out, “The most heartbreaking aspect of [her] story is how clearly it reveals a trap any of us can fall into: Believing that being right, or having access and influence, is enough.”
She added, “There is no perch high enough and no argument brilliant enough to produce the seismic and enduring shifts our public systems require.”
Public education needs widespread systemic reforms to better serve diverse populations.
That’s where critics should be directing their outrage — not at Hannah-Jones for the choice she made about schooling her daughter, a decision that was rooted, as others have noted, in an attempt to live out her principles. Some people are mad at the wrong things. As Hannah-Jones noted, Najya will be fine. She “has learned resilience,” her mother told a reader online.
But what about all of the children enrolled in schools that don’t adequately serve them? They must not be ignored. Their schooling matters, too.
When it comes to those often-forgotten students, we already know where Hannah-Jones stands on the principles of equity, fairness, and equal educational opportunities. What about the rest of us?
