What Are Progressives Supposed to Do About Public Education?

Politics Nikole Hannah-Jones’ attempt to live her values backfired. But what’s the alternative? Getty Images Plus Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Over the weekend, the New York Times Magazine published a piece by journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, in which she grapples with the decision to send her daughter to a low-income majority-Black poorly rated public school in her Brooklyn, New York, neighborhood. Hannah-Jones has made her career writing about race, class, and school segregation, and a decade ago she wrote about the choice to forgo the quote-unquote better school options those in her educational and economic cohort generally chose. “Saying my child deserved access to ‘good’ public schools felt like implying that children in ‘bad’ schools deserved the schools they got, too,” she wrote back in 2016. “I understood that so much of school segregation is structural—a result of decades of housing discrimination, of political calculations and the machinations of policy makers, of simple inertia. But I also believed that it is the choices of individual parents that uphold the system, and I 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.” Ten years later, her daughter is 16, and old enough to have a say. And for high school, she made about as different a choice as possible, opting into one that is highly rated and selective—and majority white and Asian. And as she’s realized just how behind she is at her new school, and all she hadn’t learned at her previous ones, she flat-out told her mom that she feels betrayed. For elementary school and middle school, Hannah-Jones’ daughter, Najya, went to schools where the lunchroom was a chaotic scrum, hallway fights happened often, teachers spent an enormous amount of time on disruptive students to the neglect of those who were there to learn, homework wasn’t assigned, in-class assignments weren’t corrected, and even though she got A’s in math, it turns out she couldn’t do basic algebra or even long division by high school. When she made the decision to put her daughter in a troubled school, Hannah-Jones wrote that “I also knew that we would be able to make up for Najya anything the school was lacking.” That turned out not to be the case. Intensive math tutoring seems to have gotten her up to speed. But that came after failing a state math exam, something Hannah-Jones wrote off as her daughter simply struggling with standardized tests. And it came with tanking confidence and growing anxiety from a kid who is clearly bright, curious, and highly capable. The response to Hannah-Jones’ update has been overwhelming. Many people (myself included) applauded her for her honesty and her ability to look quite critically at how her own choices—made in accordance with strongly held and admirable principles—may have harmed the one person in the world she’s supposed to most ferociously protect. Others picked apart her parenting choices, mocked the very principles that informed her decisions, or turned the problems in some public-school classrooms into ones caused by their own pet theories. There were grosser reactions, which I suspect stem from some conservatives’ continued obsessions with battling another Hannah-Jones endeavor, the 1619 Project, that are well worth ignoring entirely. At its core, though, Hannah-Jones’ article is as much about the shameful realities of too many American public schools (especially those that serve Black and brown students) as it is much more fundamental questions: What is the purpose of public education? What do we owe everyone’s children? And what specific obligations do we owe to our own? These questions were political fault lines well before this story published. To many conservatives, this seems obvious: You have obligations only to your own child, what you owe anyone else’s is minimal, and your own authority over your children is ultimate and nearly unlimited. The state, in this view, shouldn’t have much of a role in educating children in the first place—that is the job of the parent (never mind that more than a quarter of American adults are nearly or functionally illiterate and 15 percent cannot do the most basic math, such as adding or subtracting). When it comes to what you owe your child, well, that should also be up to the parent. Pro-family conservatives routinely oppose basic child protection laws, like having social workers check up on homeschooling families or bar people convicted of crimes against children from homeschooling. They have fought efforts to ban child marriage and to criminalize the practice of teachers hitting or otherwise abusing children in the classroom (including disabled students). Empowered within the Trump administration, they have set about dismantling the Department of Education and America’s long, proud, and astoundingly economically fruitful tradition of publicly educating all of its residents. Progressives and liberals see it differently, to put things mildly. Foundational to both worldviews is the idea that citizens should have equal rights and opportunities. Public education serves that purpose: Without it, individual opportunity waxes to extremes and wanes down to near-nothing according to the incomes of one’s parents. Public education is also broadly socially beneficial: The more educated the populace, the better able it is to participate in our democratic processes and to contribute to the economy. The abilities to logically reason, to analyze, and to work through complex problems are skills built by literacy that also contribute to a more productive and peaceful polity. When kids from less-fortunate families have access to a good education, they have the chance to pull themselves up and bring subsequent generations along with them. These ideals, though, have crashed into the hard reality of American life and our country’s history. Equal opportunity has never really existed, especially for Black people, in America. The truth of our history is that an entire population was brought here and forced into slavery, their families separated, their rights zero. They were barred from learning how to read, let alone from getting to vote or even being considered full citizens. That was followed by decades of legally enforced segregation and discrimination and policies that are hard to see as anything but either intentionally or negligently impoverishing. While the era of legal segregation in schools and elsewhere has ended, segregation itself has not. American public schools, including those in minority-white New York City, remain sharply segregated along racial and economic lines. The question of how to fix this is one that has roiled the broader left for decades, and that animated Hannah-Jones’ initial decisions about her daughter’s education. In one telling, Hannah-Jones seemed to believe that her obligation to everyone’s children and to the public school system generally was more important than any obligation to her own child. There are many progressives who make this argument: One idea is more or less that no child is a special snowflake with more rights than any other, and so in the interests of equity, you should curtail your privileged child’s opportunities. (“They’ll be fine” is a typical refrain here.) Another, more compelling argument is that if enough privileged parents send their kids to “bad” schools, then eventually the “bad” schools will improve, and that these are basic social obligations we owe one another. (A less-convincing corollary is that the “bad” schools aren’t bad at all, it’s just racist parents who believe that some schools are bad—an argument starkly contradicted by Hannah-Jones’ experience, as well as things like test scores, which, to be fair, many detractors also say are racially biased.) The problem, though, is that “Sacrifice your child’s education because they are not special and other kids need more” is not exactly a compelling sell to many parents. This is a broader problem with many progressive efforts: Without the ability to immediately overhaul all of society, making outcomes more equal turns instead into a race to the bottom. But everyone being equally poorly off isn’t particularly appealing to most people. It also runs counter to most parents’ impulses, which are to protect their children and to expand their universes of opportunity. This is of course not true for all parents, which is also an inconvenient truth that both conservatives and progressives seem to sidestep. Some parents are truly awful: abusive, neglectful, don’t care if their child gets a decent education or becomes a violent hellion who makes life for his teachers and classmates hell. Many more are simply incapable of good parenting, so caught up in their own struggles they cannot give their children even the basics. Many conservatives are eager to heap scorn on and blame these parents, but then their answer for what to do to help their children is a shrug—or, worse: expel or jail the most troubled kids, which can wreak generational havoc. Too many progressives, on the other hand, refuse to acknowledge that many of the problems plaguing public schools do in fact stem from dysfunctional family situations and checked-out educators, and that that reality—not just bigotry—might shape the willingness of more-engaged families to send their children to institutions where dysfunction is the norm and learning is limited. In truth, most parents will put their own child’s needs first, even if they say they don’t believe their child should be treated better than any other. You buy your kid a coat; you may donate one to a homeless shelter, but you probably aren’t buying coats for every kid in America (or every kid the world over). This is a good thing. Efforts to sever a parent’s particular and deep ties to their own offspring run counter to the basic biological imperatives that enable the continuity of the human race, and routinely end in tragedy. But it’s also intolerable to live in a society that forgoes its obligations to other people in it—especially children, who are any society’s smallest, most malleable, and most vulnerable members, and those who will shape its future. These two things—obligations to one’s own child, obligations to everyone’s children—can sometimes be in tension. But they don’t have to be in total conflict if we adopt a general politics of understanding that the things you want for your child are probably similar to the things other children need, too—and if you can see advocating for your child and advocating for the needs of others as mutually reinforcing rather than a zero-sum game. Education is a good example. American public schools were not bestowed upon us by God; we can change how we fund them, how we staff them, and what we expect from them. We can also take a view that I suspect is held by Hannah-Jones, that a good education means more than algebra and literacy (although it obviously has to mean those things, too). A good education also means experiencing the friction and the sparks of interacting with people who are different from you—whose families look different from your own, whose assumptions and priors do not match yours, who have more resources than you, who have less. A good education also does start at home—and that means raising your children to know that you, the parent, have their back and are their ultimate and unwavering advocate, and also that you’re modeling how to be a decent person in the world, which means caring about other people, too. What does this mean in the real world? It won’t be the same for every family. At the very least, I would argue that it means supporting evidence-based and appropriately funded public education that rejects the dogmas and ideologies du jour in favor of rigorous academics, high expectations, and ample support to help students achieve what they can. It means not lowering the bar just because some students have a harder time clearing it, but figuring out how to give those students the help they need to get over it. One mistake progressives have made in the past few years is seeing differences in outcome as evidence of a fatal flaw in whatever is measuring those outcomes (standardized tests, for example), rather than as weather vanes pointing toward what needs more attention. The removal of test scores in college admissions and the growing hostility toward putting high-achieving kids into gifted programs feed into this sense that progressive education policy is more about taking away than building up—that the promise of equality isn’t about lifting up the less fortunate, but tearing down those who are doing well. Appropriately balancing your obligations often means giving particular consideration to your own child, who is, after all, here only because you chose to bring them into the world. Making schools and society better does not have to start with making things for your child worse. It does mean, though, figuring out what “better” means. Are rankings and test scores the be-all and end-all to what you would consider a good education? Or do you care as much about your child being curious even if there’s no professional or rational economic purpose behind it? How much value do you put behind your child learning how to navigate a diversity of experiences and interactions with many different kinds of people? With the right political choices, we can have all of the above. But we’re not going to get there if people on the left start from a place of presumed scarcity, demanding that individual parents make intolerable sacrifices that set back the people they love most, and if the progressive message is that the only way to even the scales is by setting both sides to zero. Education New York Times Parenting Politics Race