PAUL PETERSON, HOST:
This is the Education Exchange. I am Paul Peterson, the Director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University. Thank you for joining us. In 2010, Nikole Hannah-Jones had a daughter with a husband who had been educated at one of the schools operated by the Department of Defense, one of the best administered school systems in the United States. Hannah-Jones herself attended schools in a middle-sized community in Iowa, one of the highest performing educational states in the country. But both of them turned their education into successful careers. But when they came to New York City, Hannah-Jones and her husband decided they would place their own daughter in a low-performing elementary school in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood that was beginning to gentrify in 2014. They discovered the teachers didn’t care, and they were told lies about the progress their child was making in school. Meanwhile, Hannah-Jones’s own career was about to skyrocket. In 2019, the New York Times published a compendium of highly construed, misleading commentaries on race relations that were edited by Nikole Hannah-Jones. It was called the 1619 Project, after the arrival in 1619 of the first slave ship in the North American colonies. The New York Times then pushed this project into classrooms across America, encouraging teachers to peddle Marxist dogma instead of teaching a balanced understanding of the evolution of race relations in the United States. She was helped along by elites across the country. She received a prize from major foundations. And I remember listening to her at Stanford University after she had been graciously, even enthusiastically introduced to great applause by the provost of that august university. Hannah-Jones had arrived. Not all was as well as it seemed, however. Just a couple of weeks ago, the New York Times has published a confession by Hannah-Jones that her daughter is furious with her for not giving her the best possible education available. Now, there are plenty of charter schools in New York City, and Hannah-Jones passed them up. So, to discuss Hannah-Jones’s confession, I have Steven Wilson with me on the Education Exchange. Steven is the founder of Ascend Learning. It’s an urban charter school network. Today, he is the senior fellow at the Pioneer Institute and founder of the National Summer School Initiative. He’s the author of an important book on charter schools entitled The Lost Decade. I’m very pleased to have Steven Wilson with me on the Education Exchange today. Thank you, Steven, for joining me.
STEVEN WILSON: Wonderful to be back with you, Paul.
PETERSON: Steven, should Hannah-Jones have sent her child to a charter school?
WILSON: Yes, of course. I mean, that’s an easy question. What’s absolutely extraordinary is that charter schools never come up in her at all, right? So she sees that she has two options, which is to enroll her child in a low-performing school in a primarily Black and low-income community that, as you mentioned, is gentrifying the district in which she lives, or to send her child to a more affluent middle class and mixed-race school, which she declines out of the view that she must make a commitment and so should others to her neighborhood schools, no matter their condition. What she doesn’t ever mention, Paul, is that she had a third option, which is to send her child to a high performing urban charter school that would be blocks away from where she lived.
PETERSON: But wouldn’t she have to win the lottery to get in? Those charter schools are very popular and there’s long waiting lists. So, you know, she could have applied, but would she have gotten it?
WILSON: Well, she might very well have. There are a significant number of schools. She would have had the neighborhood preference for living nearby. And she could very well have gotten in. And more to the point, I think, is that, of course, we are artificially, by matter of policy, capping the number of seats in these high-performing schools. There is a statutory cap of a certain number of schools in New York City. It’s been raised a couple of times, but now we’re stuck. And the cap serves no other purpose other than to restrict entry and to preserve the majority system, no matter how chronically low performing. And so, what I think is really quite striking about her piece, which I actually think is very provocative and does a great service, maybe inadvertently, to school reform, is that she acknowledges that she could have used her power and privilege, her own words, in a different way. And of course, the way she could have used that is to advance school choice, and charter schools and make them an opportunity for far more students.
PETERSON: Well, Steven, you wrote a book called The Lost Decade, a fascinating book. I still think it’s an incredibly important book. But the argument of that book is that urban charter schools have lost their way. They have been perhaps influenced by the 1619 Project that Hannah-Jones distributed to the schools across the country. Are you sure that Hannah-Jones’ daughter would have been better off at a charter school?
WILSON: Well, first of all, Paul, you’re in fine form today. These are great questions. But yes, I think so. Look, I mean, there are some charter networks. that have absolutely stayed true to their original vision of academic excellence. And academic excellence means an obsessive focus on instruction, the quality of instruction in every room. And that’s what they did. They had as their north star great teaching. So I’m thinking of networks like Success Academy, the largest charter school network in the city, where virtually every child is each year found to be on grade level and therefore progressing towards the opportunities of college and career, and others like I mentioned in my piece the Classical Schools Network which is even higher performing approaching 100 proficiency with a vast number of students performing at the highest level four that the state identifies. But then to your point there are many other large networks that shared these objectives that drifted away circa I would say beginning around 2014 around the time that Hannah-Jones was considering with her husband where to place her child we began to see a movement away from these commitments, which reached full flower in 2020 with the racial reckoning and the murder of George Floyd. And so, in that movement, these networks move towards the ideology of anti-racism. And what I think is so courageous about Hannah-Jones’s piece is that quietly and without full acknowledgement of what she is revealing, she shows the failures of anti-racism and how they have given harbor to low achievement, to academic indifference on the part of the staff, to grade inflation, to testing hostility, to the destruction of culture and discipline in schools. And in many of the networks in New York City, results have indeed plummeted. So, the question I think is, can there be a rebuilding? And I would like to see Nikole Hannah-Jones use her voice to call out the failures and excesses of anti-racism and to return to what anti-racism could look like, which is high expectations for every child and rigorous academic teaching.
PETERSON: So, she attributes her daughter’s unhappiness to the segregation of the schools that she attended. And of course, she chose a segregated school, but after experiencing it, and actually she seems to have noticed that as a child, but I’m not sure why she sent her child there. Why would she, if segregation automatically produces a bad school, why did she send her child there?
WILSON: Well, I think her argument is pretty straightforward, but curiously anachronistic. It’s that the solution to low-performing urban schools is to overcome school segregation by both race and class. She would properly, and I think rightly emphasize class, probably more than race, and thereby create schools that have a variety of students, including economically advantaged parents, and that would drive up the performance of those schools. She doesn’t explicitly name the mechanism either for how quality would be produced by that action, nor does she describe how this desegregation would occur. Right. So, in the first in the first question, she doesn’t describe why it is that more middle-class participation would improve schools. In fact, she acknowledges that her own participation did nothing to improve her daughter’s school. She thought that her participation in the school, her insistence on change, her demands of the principals would correct the wrongs that her daughter calls out and that she then sees with her own eyes. But it doesn’t have that effect. And likewise, she doesn’t describe how she would achieve this radical social transformation of desegregating New York City, which presumably would involve mandatory busing of students from one neighborhood to another, which I don’t think there would be any appetite for.
PETERSON: You know, one of the things, maybe it’s there and I’ve just missed it, but I didn’t see a thing that she did to help raise the qual–… I mean, she was not a member of the PTA. She didn’t form an activist group that would sort of pressure the system to make sure that they were doing more to have effective teachers in the classroom. Did she do anything?
WILSON: Well, I think that she describes I think what’s so stunning about this piece and actually quite valuable about the piece is that she makes vivid, Paul, what low performing schools look like in a day-to-day way, largely, but not exclusively by reproducing her daughter’s description of this. So, I’m talking about things like an elementary school lunchroom that is out of control, where kids are running riot, where there is the constant danger of children getting hurt. And she vividly describes adults standing by along the walls of the lunchroom doing nothing. See, this is exactly what we need. We need to make vivid what does low-performance look like, and what does adult indifference look like? So, I think to your question, though, she sees these things. She comes to observe lunch herself. She sees all of this chaos and indifference on the part of the staff firsthand and she storms into the principal’s room and she calls it out so that is a kind of involvement and what she finds is that there are long delays nothing really happens, maybe a little thing is fixed. But the overall culture of the school which it turns out to be impervious to her efforts. And you’re right, I mean, she could put together a PTA effort. She could gang together with other parents to demand change. But you know what, it wouldn’t make any difference because this is a system that is fundamentally unreformable. And the only path to educational change is to create de novo schools that create their own cultures of excellence. And that’s, of course, the purpose of the charter law.
PETERSON: Well, she talks about how under-resourced this school is. It sounds to me when I read this is that there’s no money available to address any of these problems that you’re discussing. And you’re right, but it’s true. She does do these various things, but then she implies that the money’s just not there to deal with the issue. But what was the amount of money that was available for a pupil at this school?
WILSON: Right. So that’s a way in which I think the piece is dishonest because it does sustain the widespread myth that many on the left have about the low performance of urban schools, that they’re under-resourced. So, it may surprise her readers to know that the first school that she enrolled her daughter in, P.S. 307, an elementary school, spends $52,349 per student in each year. And Paul, that’s understated as we know because it doesn’t include pension costs and unfunded pension liability which is basically a blank check to spend as much as you want by creating a liability that eventually taxpayers will have to pay. And then when she moved her child to middle school, the Unison School, it was $43,975 per student. We’re talking about staff-student ratios of about 10 students for every staff. I mean, these are just absolutely eye-popping numbers. And by the way, what happens when low-performing schools lose students, is that their per spending goes up even higher because there are fewer students to educate and more money per student.
PETERSON: No, that’s a very important point, I think, that the under-resourcing is a myth. There’s plenty of money there. It’s just the way it’s being spent doesn’t pay off. And now—
WILSON: Yeah, and I just I’m sorry to interrupt, Paul, but I think it’s important to say that this is not consistently the case. There are many remaining low spending urban districts in the country. It’s not consistently true. There are also problems of intra-district inequalities. But we can see that in this case, New York City spends a fortune on schools, and the schools that she attended were no exception.
PETERSON: Yes. You know. There’s one group of students that disappears in this account, and that’s the 16% of students that actually she reports, but then pays no attention to the 16% of the students who are Asian. Now, they are doing very well, it has to be said, and they are forming a hefty proportion of those students who are attending the highest-level schools in New York City that require you know high test scores in order to get into or other indicators of dedication to the educational process. So, what can we learn from the success of Asian students in New York City in the very kinds of schools that you have lamented here and she is lamenting here?
WILSON: Right. So, I think what we can learn is that when you have parents who have a ferocious commitment to their students’ education that just runs so deep in their culture, they’re going to do whatever it takes to ensure that their students succeed. And that’s not in any way to say that other parents of other backgrounds aren’t motivated and care less. You just have in the favor of the Asian community, typically, this long history of absolutely ferocious dedication to academic achievement and they will take other measures when their schools fail them. They will enroll them in tutoring and other activities to bring them back up and so I think what that story tells is that when, to your point, when you look at the admission of Asian students to New York City’s competitive high schools, their exam high schools, they do well because they are prepared and they can get in. Whereas what we see on the side of advocates like Nikole Hannah-Jones is that the constant invocation of racism as the problem has actually made things far worse. Of course, racism is very real, but what we see through the charter school effort is that students of all types can achieve at extremely high levels if you have a school culture that is transformative, that says within these four walls, we have the resources. We’re not going to invoke racism, as real as it is. We’re not going to invoke families and blame families and communities. We’re going to say we have the resources, hey, $52,349 per child, and we have everything else here to absolutely knock it out of the park. And then having made that decision, which is the hardest part, they then do exactly that.
PETERSON: You know, there’s a recent scholarly analysis that shows Department of Defense schools are performing and making major gains in student performance and have done so over the past two decades. And that’s different from what’s happening in our public schools and our charter schools, even our Catholic schools. These Department of Defense schools that Hannah-Jones’s husband attended, seem to be spectacular places. Do you have any sense of what’s happening in that sector?
WILSON: Yeah, I think that if we look at the DOD schools, first of all, it’s not new. They have been strong, as you say, for decades. And what you see there, I think, is two important things. One is that they have an old-fashioned commitment to instructional rigor beginning with a strong cumulative knowledge-based curriculum, a pedagogy of probably largely direct instruction and clarity, accountability for results internally, a centralized drive for excellence. So, all those things that we know reliably result in high achievement. Secondly, we have a culture in the services of rigor and discipline. And I think that that plays into it too. That sense of purpose and not excuse making, which marks the American military, is mirrored in the schools that they run. And I think that those two factors are the formula everywhere in great schools.
PETERSON: Steven, Roland Fryer in the Wall Street Journal just a week ago made the thoughtful observation that he too felt cross-pressured as a Black parent between wanting the best education for his child and wanting to preserve the cultural traditions of his community. And is that something that, is that what Hannah-Jones is saying here or is he making a different point?
WILSON: Well, I can’t speak for her. I think that what she tells us in her piece is that she wanted a school that upheld her family, her cultural and racial background, and that ensured that her daughter carried forward a sense of pride and empowerment as a Black girl, and of course, that entirely makes sense but the charter schools that we’re discussing together do that as well they have a very strong sense of identity they uphold the cultural pride and distinctions of their students, they make a point of ensuring that every child is heard and known. The contrary to widespread conceptions if you were to look at the curriculum of places like Success that I mentioned or of the other large networks like Uncommon Schools or KIPP or Achievement First, what you would see is that it is a curriculum that is deeply multicultural and that foregrounds correctly literature by Black and Latino writers. You’re going to read Frederick Douglass’s astounding Fourth of July speech. You’re going to study James Baldwin’s writings. This is going to be a very important part of the curriculum. So, this sense of preserving and foregrounding identity is a feature of both types of schools. The difference is that in one, there are strong educational outcomes. In the other, it becomes a project almost solely about identitarianism.
PETERSON: Do you think we’re getting the full story of what happened at these schools, or are we getting a highly selected one? I tend to worry about that simply because Hannah-Jones, in the 1619 Project, painted a portrait of America, this evolution that’s just… You know, it’s so unsigned that it’s highly selective that you really can’t say this is the full story. So, have we been told the full story here?
WILSON: Yeah, so you’re talking about the full story in the public schools?
PETERSON: Are these schools really this bad?
WILSON: Oh, I think they’re absolutely this bad. Oh, yes, you have to only visit them to see it. I remember going to a New York City school a few years ago in the summer to observe the summer school program that my organization provided, of which these particular New York schools were participating. And I walked into the room and I noticed, the first thing I noticed was what we call in the trade, room design, namely that the small number of students, because it tends to very small class sizes in summer programs, were dispersed all around the room. So, when one child was making an observation about the novel that they were all reading, the other children couldn’t hear them because they were spread so far apart. So, I just spoke up and said, students, can we bring all of our school, all of our seats together so we can hear each other well? And the adults looked at me aghast that I was suggesting this. So, to me, this was just very telling, again, this kind of indifference to the basics of what makes for a successful education. The quality of implementation of the curriculum was so weak that you would never expect to see results. So yes, I think, as I mentioned earlier on in our conversation, what I found so striking about Hannah-Jones’s piece is the way that she makes this educational neglect vivid. She’s not just asserting it. She’s very specifically describing it. So, to give a few examples: Her child participates in algebra in 8th grade. That’s a good thing, right? To have algebra available to students in middle school is far from a given. Of course, it should be universal and in high performing charters, every child is taking algebra by the eighth grade, if not sooner. That’s just a fact. But then what happens is that her daughter goes to high school and she starts to fail algebra. And she’s stunned because she’d gotten A’s all along in algebra without knowing any algebra. That’s not just my description. That’s in her own words. So that would be another example. Another one that, Paul, I found just super vivid is that Najya describes how her teacher spends an inordinate amount of time addressing two students whose misbehavior defines the culture of the room. And Hannah-Jones says, in a way, this is a good thing. These two students need attention, need care. And her daughter says … expletive deleted … No, this is wrong. What about the 20 other students in the class who are not progressing, who are treading water. And that’s exactly right. That’s the other thing. That’s another example of a failure point that is extremely widespread. Teachers were asked to become therapists, and it was viewed as a therapeutic engagement for teachers. Well, they’re not therapists. They’re there to teach. And if you have effective teaching, you will engage every child in the room and behavioral problems will recede. Behavioral problems arise because students are not getting a regular experience of success every hour. If lessons are well designed and students have that little jolt of academic success every hour, they start to reconceive themselves, “Hey, I’m good at school”. And that changes everything.
PETERSON: Yeah, this is in some ways a very courageous essay because it is talking about your own family life and putting it all on display. Is it a repentance? Is the 1619 Project, is it basically saying, “I was wrong there? Was I wrong to do this? I’m moving in a new direction.” Or what do you think?
WILSON: I think this is a fascinating question. I think what we see here are Hannah-Jones’s intimations of a change of view, but she doesn’t step all the way into it. So, the place that she gets the closest to that mindset change or admission or acknowledgement is when she is sitting in a tearful exchange with the principal of her daughter’s middle school, whose name is Emily Paige. And they lament the challenges of the school that the school faces. And Paige makes an extraordinary admission. She basically says that in the name of anti-racism, we screwed up. She says, “In not giving homework, we didn’t honor their academic selves. And that’s where I could cry because it’s just awful. It is important to not, in our pursuit of being anti-racist, lower expectations,” she says. And she continues, “Because this is what happens, right? It’s racism under the guise of anti-racism.” So, I think that that gets as close as Hannah-Jones is willing to go. But I think that that alone is very courageous. So, she’s right there at the line of saying, that we made a terrible wrong turn by eliminating grading standards, by eliminating behavioral requirements by dumbing down the content by asking teachers to be therapists by saying that simply by virtue of race all Black students are suffering from trauma. All these kinds of things that have marked this turn in education. She’s right there at the line of saying it, but she doesn’t go all the way there. So, I think the next step for her, I hope, is to come right out and say, which would be the ultimate act of courage, and to say this was a fierce wrong turn and we need to correct it. If we’re really serious about creating opportunity for all students, if we’re really serious about creating educational opportunity for historically marginalized students, this is what we would do. We would ensure that they had a rigorous education, and we would never tolerate the kind of neglect that she so vividly describes. But she doesn’t get all the way there, you’re right.
PETERSON: Well, thank you, Steven, for that illuminating, you know, conversation about what really are we being told in this essay and how can we learn from it. And so, thank you very much for joining me on the Education Exchange.
WILSON: A pleasure always, Paul. Thank you.
PETERSON: I have been speaking with Steven Wilson. He’s the author of The Lost Decade, Returning to the Fight for Better Schools. He’s also a member of the staff at the Pioneer Institute. Currently a new project, which is entitled the National Summer School Initiative. I am Paul Peterson. This is the Education Exchange. Please join me for a new podcast every Monday at noon Eastern time on the Education Next website.
