Two weeks ago, a short blur in my busy life as a math teacher, one of my closest friends sent me a link to Nikole Hannah-Jones’ viral September 20 New York Times Magazine essay “In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?”
Since then, I’ve noticed a cacophony of response to her story here on Substack. My slowness to process the piece seems to have made me to be casually late to the cultural and political spin party her story has clearly occasioned.
No shame in this of course—I’m drafting this particular paragraph in the early morning hours before driving to work to go teach math. And as it turns out, having had time to reflect, I still have three fresh things to add to the din. These takes, which I’ll publish in separate short essays, draw not just from not just my perspective as an in-service teacher but also from my vantage as a parent of (in keeping with Hannah Jones’ drumbeat-like focus on race) two white male young men.
Schools Really Are Segregated
Perhaps the most central of many claims in Hannah Jones’ article is the idea that K-12 schools are way more segregated than most people want to admit. On this one, I think she’s right, and I want to explain my take on why.
“In New York, a combination of housing segregation and ‘academic’ sorting, called school choice, that begins as early as pre-K means most Black students – even middle class ones – are forced to attend racially segregated schools with high rates of poverty.”
Forced is a strong word, and so perhaps not entirely accurate. But housing segregation and school choice policies certainly contribute to school segregation not just in New York City but to varying degrees of intensity across all US metro areas. For data on this check out the Segregation Tracking Project at Stanford, among many other sources.
My own viewpoint as both a parent and a teacher is that segregation, by race and class and academic preparedness, operates in overlapping ways. It operates across districts, which I saw as a parent in leafy formerly redlined East Sacramento, as I watched my neighbors consistently make choices to flee Sacramento City Unified for schools in San Juan Unified (in full disclosure my older son, now a budding physicist, went to school at a science magnet in San Juan).
The great majority of these East Sacramento parents are, like me, reliable liberals and progressives. Sacramento is the Midwest of California, they say. But it’s still California and we’re mostly all libs. Except, I guess, when it comes to our kids.
Segregation also happens within districts. As a parent, I was here once again as culpable as anyone in the way I played the school choice game. My wife and I chose a “gifted and talented” elementary program for our sons, and while we kept our younger boy (now studying economics at a competitive Southern California liberal arts college) in District, we sent him to a small, application only academic magnet school.
Here I’ll put on my teacher hat too, and note that one of my very most talented math students, a child of ambitious immigrant parents, goes to the wildly diverse high school I teach at in the Sacramento suburbs precisely because Sacramento City caps admission at the (also very diverse) campus my son got into by lottery. Seems to me Sac City is deeply foolish to limit the size of its more academic programs, but that’s a whole other essay.
Friday Night Lights – An American High School (Photo by Author)
More broadly, the point I’m making is that we all play the school choice game. In purposely sending her child to an academically weaker school in Brooklyn she knew to have a chaotic learning environment, Hannah Jones truly was an outlier (other opportunities certainly existed for her to send her child to very successful, heavily Black schools, as this Substack article points out). As a nationally prominent writer and a person able by her own admission “to write checks that exceeded the annual P.T.A. budget,” Hannah-Jones appears to have thought she could change the rules of the game on her own. No wonder her daughter was more than a bit pissed off come middle school age.
Looking back at the more local scene, I feel compelled somehow to make sure parents outside of Sac City don’t get a free pass for living in the suburbs. Some play the game by buying or renting in expensive and smugly liberal Davis, or upscale and more conservative Folsom, or some of the tonier and more segregated neighborhoods in Elk Grove. It’s the same thing as moving to Westchester or the New Jersey wealth belt if you live in New York. Other parents, like my wife and I and like Hannah Jones herself, play the game in the central neighborhoods we prefer for lifestyle or professional reasons.
But Hannah Jones is correct that disproportionate numbers of Black families, wherever they live and especially those families with long roots in this country, come to the school choice game dealt both a weak hand of cards and a lot of historical wounds.
Before leaving this topic, I want to point out that segregation happens within schools too. This is not malicious, but it is absolutely a byproduct of master scheduling. As a teacher I’ve long noticed that kids in honors or specialty programs travel together. Even items as subtle as, say, a band class and a singleton AP US History class both scheduled for (say) second period can create a situation where academically needier students without higher-status electives like band or APUSH cluster together in second period math and English classes.
There is absolutely a racial dimension to this supposedly race-neutral, in-school sorting process, but it’s not one the system wants to address. Instead, school leaders are still mostly content to navel gaze about equity and pretend they have become psychologically self-aware enough to root out personal biases among the line teachers they wish to think are the source of the problem.
A decade or more in, it’s obvious to practically everyone that this project is not generating results for Black and brown youth. But system insiders are still afraid to speak to potential alternatives, and still speak in generalities about disadvantage. But all historical disadvantage is not the same, as I think Nikole Hannah-Jones might agree. One of several obvious alternatives to the “navel gaze about equity” plan would be to create smaller classes with more supports for Black youth in particular.
There are challenges to this of course, and I think we don’t want to create class sections from any one racial category. But the “navel gaze about equity” plan, aside from being patronizing and offensive, isn’t even effective. Perhaps this is because it was never serious to begin with, and has always been, to borrow from Tyler Austin Harper, a kind of immune response the education system uses to protect itself from real change.
From a teacher point of view, another way to look at within-school segregation is to propose that it’s definitely possible for administrators and counselors to create near-impossible class sections for teachers. It seems to me this very thing happens on the regular, even if not by intent. Then, because of the undifferentiated pay structure within teaching, these sections get handed to the least experienced teachers, those too new in the system to have won plums like easier-to-manage honors and AP classes.
A few teachers, and in this I include myself, teach tougher classes in part by choice. But most teachers experienced enough to have choices tend over time, very reasonably, to choose to teach more motivated or skilled students.
Teachers play the “choice” game too, in other words. Most of us, again reasonably enough given the incentive structures within the system, choose to teach at less demanding schools and in classrooms with better-prepared students. I think that changing this incentive system is yet another strategy—beyond the aforementioned one around specifically investing more in Black youth—that school leaders could use to truly change things for disadvantaged populations.
But the regime, of course, doesn’t actually want to change. Regimes rarely do, even those led by people who want to see themselves as “good” blue state liberals. So, instead, we mostly get more of the “equity immune response” and move on with business as usual.
Hannah Jones is Off Target About Two Other Very Big Things…
If Nikole Hannah Jones is fundamentally right about the problems with segregation in American public schools, she is off target about several other things. The most painful, from my point of view, is that she comes off as a persistent bully in the personal interactions she describes with teachers, administrators, and even yard duty personnel. Or, maybe a gentler way to say this is that she shows a lack of deep understanding and compassion for the challenges and limitations and incentives faced by system insiders.
The more important problem, however, is that Hannah Jones fails to follow through with the logic of her own argument as it relates to creating a safe environment in schools, which requires a renewed willingness to impose loving but firm consequences on problematic behaviors.
More on these arguments in a future post or two …
