“1619 Project” creator Nikole Hannah-Jones and her husband Faraji made a decision 10 years ago. Despite their success and privilege, and the ability to use those to benefit their daughter, they instead decided to enroll her in an underperforming school. Explaining the decision at the New York Times Magazine, where she is a staff writer, Hannah-Jones wrote that she “was determined not to do what I’d seen so many others do when their values about integration collided with the reality of where to send their own children to school.”
The experiment did not go well. Najya Hannah-Jones, Nikole’s daughter, became frustrated with the level of dysfunction and lack of educational opportunities almost immediately. Classroom instruction was at best lacking and often nonexistent. Lunchtime in the cafeteria was chaotic. Students in the middle, as is often the case, were ignored while the most poorly behaved ones took up all the teachers’ attention. Najya’s assignments were given grades but weren’t actually graded. By the time she convinced her parents to let her transfer out for high school, she was severely behind academically and required tutoring and other help to get caught up to her new peers.
Hannah-Jones, in lamenting the failure of her experiment, wrote, “[Our] experience at P.S. 307 exposed the fallacy that caring families are more important than competent teachers.” Here, much as with the initial choice she and her husband made regarding Najya’s schooling, Hannah-Jones is wrong. While it is true that one set of caring parents cannot effect school-wide change, one factor differentiating high- and low-performing schools is the amount of parental involvement. But for Hannah-Jones to acknowledge this, she would have to adjust her staunch opposition to school choice.
For her, and many other opponents of school choice, the entire idea is rooted in racism and classism. Affluent people can afford neighborhoods with better schools. Parents with connections can use school choice to get their kids into those schools. Schools in poorer neighborhoods suffer.
A big problem with this argument is that spending doesn’t correlate with academic success. Mississippi, a highly impoverished state, is making headlines for how it went from 49th in the nation to a top 10 state for student success. It did not achieve that by boosting spending, but by changing its approach to education. The state’s Department of Education grades schools, sends in specialists to help underperforming ones, and isn’t afraid to hold students back. That Mississippi has a relatively weak teachers union helps, which is another lesson from the state. Most people aren’t ready for that argument, though.
The argument they are ready for is that we need to do a better job of educating our kids. Contra the Hannah-Joneses of the world, school choice is great way to achieve that, but it’s not because it allows the best students from the wealthiest families to consolidate in certain schools, but because desirable schools in areas that offer choice also feature the most involved parents. Admittedly, I’m biased here. My three daughters all spent years in a classical charter, one that was more diverse than the general population of our area, much to the chagrin of school choice haters. Parents at that school knew what was going on. There were always volunteers for field trips and lunchtime and recess help. More important, we parents were on top of our kids’ academic progress.
Contrast that with stories I heard in Washington D.C. back in 2014. I was there for a conference on school choice, so we weren’t there to argue about the idea but to figure out how to use it to improve all schools and increase parental awareness about the options they had. When opportunities arose, volunteers went out to recruit students who would benefit from schools with programs designed to help kids catch up.
The parents the volunteers talked to simply assumed their kids were successful. They were passing and heading to the next grade at the end of every school year. The truth was the kids weren’t actually passing but being passed along. Many were behind academically and not at the levels they needed to be at for the grades they were in. Some were wholly illiterate. Their parents had no idea.
What the Hannah-Joneses experienced was in the same vein. Sure, Nikole and Faraji could advocate for Najya, they could challenge the system, they could send emails, they could arrange meetings with faculty and staff. What they could not do was make other parents care as much as they did. And when the parents don’t care, when school is just a place you send your kids to get them out of the house or because you need childcare to go to work, you end up with dysfunction.
When parents — like those at charters, private schools, and highly desirable traditional public schools — know what’s going on, there are too many voices for administrators to ignore. The parents also possess the intimate knowledge about their children that allows them to actually parent them, discipline them for misbehaving, and help them when they need help with their homework.
There’s a certain faction of the U.S. population that is obsessed with the idea that education is too important to be left to parents. It is the ultimate public good, one that must be socialized and rigorously governed from the top down. Public schools are romanticized as magical classless places where every child can become a winner, regardless of his or her background. Homeschooling is frowned upon, because “socialization.” Charters are misunderstood as being private schools rather than public ones.
For such people, as with Hannah-Jones, the belief in public schools as places that can help all students achieve their full potential borders on religious. The ones that are failing in that mission just need more money and more diversity. More important, any competing institutions need to be abolished. How this eliminates the financial advantages of schools in wealthier districts more effectively than school choice is never explained.
We will never achieve a system in which all parents are involved. Not everyone went to college nor do they expect their kids to excel academically. The world needs people who are good at skilled trades, though those often involve more math and physics than is appreciated. (The people practicing them may not even recognize the level of math and physics they’re using on a daily basis.)
But it’s also true that a failing school can never be spent into a successful one. A school where a majority of the student body has disinterested parents is going to be a school where a majority of the students reflect that disinterest. There are solutions that don’t require involved parents, but they would require us as a society to be a little less squeamish.
For example, I had an extraordinary science teacher in junior high, one who pushed underachieving students toward success, at least in her class. Were an educator attempt to employ Mrs. Burt’s methods in 2026, she would find herself in search of a new job. The unions can only protect so much.
Mrs. Burt’s class was chaotic. Somehow, for that period, she had nothing but boys. Many of my classmates were rambunctious troublemakers with little interest in education. They didn’t do their homework, they didn’t do their reading, they constantly disrupted class. Part of it was a game. Mrs. Burt was not afraid to throw things at us when she was annoyed, and the boys enjoyed provoking her to do so. She’d throw her keys, ice from her cup, the blackboard eraser, whatever was at hand. Still, she quickly hit her breaking point.
Tired of the chaos, she made a drastic decision, giving everyone in the class an assigned seat. When she was done, she pointed at the two rows on her left. We, she said, were the smart students. We got to ask questions. The other three rows, she explained, were the dumb students. They could nap, they could draw, they could do whatever so long as they were quiet. They were not allowed to ask questions.
By the end of the semester, all five rows were the smart rows. Boys who put forth effort in any of their other classes were showing up having done the reading, having done their homework, having prepared for the day’s lesson. That it was a class full of boys probably helped. We trash talk one another to bond, so being called dumb wasn’t taken the same way as it likely would have been taken in a class full of girls.
Mrs. Burt cannot exist today. We’re too sensitive, even as we need her more than ever. Not that she could produce parity across every school district in the United States. There are always going to be disparate outcomes. And while it’s easy to attribute those outcomes to societal forces, in reality, the disparity often starts at home, something Hannah-Jones should have realized when she backed down from her ideological commitment and instead focused on commitments as a parent. She took responsibility for her daughter instead of ignoring her to take responsibility for the community. If only everyone were so selfish about their kids’ educations, then we’d see the sort of transformation nationwide that Hannah-Jones saw in the high school that Najya chose.
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Rich Cromwell is a writer living in Northwest Arkansas. He produces the Cookin’ Up a Story podcast, which you can listen to here. You can also follow him on X: @rcromwell4.
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