‘Perverse priorities’ made Nikole Hannah-Jones put her cause before her child

New York Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones thought she was making her educational choices to favor the interests of black people, and she was — just the wrong ones.

In a long essay for The New York Times Magazine, the radical African-American journalist writes about how her decision to send her daughter to dreadful New York City public schools for ideological reasons ended in tears. 

Jones, who achieved notoriety for her role as an editor of the paper’s “1619 Project,” believed that putting her daughter in rotten elementary and middle-school schools would strike a blow for racial equity. 

In her view, it’s unfair that so many black kids are trapped in under-performing New York City schools.

If she trapped her own daughter in them, the thought, she and her husband — with their superior wherewithal — could make the schools better for everyone. 

What started as a project motivated by a savior complex ended as an episode of educational Munchausen syndrome by proxy.

Her bright young daughter fell far behind where she could have been academically.

Most parents who are paying attention and who have the means would immediately get a kid out of a school where there are fights during the lunch period, where there is no homework, where the principal and teachers are routinely absent, and where schoolwork isn’t graded — but Nikole Hannah-Jones persisted. 

By the time her daughter was old enough to realize what was going on and force her mother to let her apply to better high schools, she knew no algebra despite getting excellent grades in math at the subpar schools. 

Hannah-Jones should be furious at the adults who failed her daughter so abysmally.

But she is, in effect, still on their side — by portraying school choice as a racist scam and complaining about a lack of resources. 

The New York City officials, administrators, principals and teachers who are blighting the futures of young people aren’t white supremacists.

By and large, they agree with Nicole Hannah-Jones politically; many of them are African-American.

You can either be with them, and their narrow interest in protecting the school system from serious challenge, or with the kids. 

Hannah-Jones is in a version of the same conundrum as the Black Lives Matters activists who believed it was “anti-racist” to agitate against the police.

Then, when they got their way and the police stepped back, more black people were killed. 

Here, it is supposedly “anti-racist” to keep everyone in disorderly, incompetent public schools — and the victims are black children who have no idea of how little they’ve learned until it’s too late. 

This is a strange form of racial solidarity.

There’s no doubt that schools have a tougher job when they have a high population of disadvantaged students.

But the problem is not funding, as Hannah-Jones suggests:  Studies from the centrist Brookings Institution note both that high-poverty, non-white districts spend more per pupil than lower-poverty districts, and that higher spending doesn’t ensure better results. 

The Success Academy charter schools in New York City have shown that disadvantaged kids can thrive when there’s an old-fashioned mix of high expectations, strict discipline and rigorous instruction — in other words, what the traditional public schools,  mired in a self-interested, unaccountable bureaucracy, can’t deliver. 

When she sent her daughter to failing schools, Nikole Hannah-Jones imagined herself acting in the tradition of pioneering parents during the Civil Rights Movement who sent their children through their mobs to integrate whites-only schools.

Those parents desperately wanted a better education for their kids, though, whereas Hannah-Jones fed her daughter into terrible public schools in the forlorn hope that maybe she’d be OK.

If not, at least Hannah-Jones had steered her clear of competitive schools with lots of white and Asian kids. 

That, of course, was a perverse priority.

The famous line is that a neo-conservative is a liberal mugged by reality.

New York City’s public schools mugged Nikole Hannah-Jones — and yet she still doesn’t want to press charges. 

X: @RichLowry