Schools cannot fix themselves unless society fixes segregation first. That’s one way to read Nikole Hannah-Jones’s conclusion at the end of a troubling account of choosing a low-performing Brooklyn elementary school for her daughter—and of the many ways that school subsequently failed to educate her. Weak instruction, a dysfunctional culture, absentee teachers, and low expectations left Najya with glaring academic gaps that years of good grades had obscured. Yet Hannah-Jones emerged from the experience more circumspect about her own family’s decision than about the ideas that informed it. She says she is more sympathetic to parents who choose to leave struggling schools, even as she continues to oppose policies that would make it easier for more parents to do the same. Despite all that went wrong for her daughter, Hannah-Jones has suggested that she would make the same choice again, and hopes that Najya will eventually understand why.
Segregation and concentrated disadvantage surely make a school’s job more difficult. Hannah-Jones is right that more integrated schools can have a positive effect on minority students. However, evidence that integration can help improve academic outcomes is not evidence that schools must become integrated before they can do so. Segregation didn’t require teachers to be chronically absent, instruction to be weak, classrooms to be chaotic, expectations to be low, or grades to conceal the fact that students weren’t learning. Educators can begin addressing these issues without residential integration or wealth redistribution. Segregation may help explain why the school’s work was harder, but it cannot explain away its failure to do that work.
Gallons of digital ink have already been spilled about Hannah-Jones’s incuriosity about the reform implications of her own story. But readers needn’t wait for her to draw them. Najya earned good grades in math without mastering long division or fractions. That should raise questions about external assessments. Teachers were frequently absent or ineffective. That should raise questions about accountability, competence, and employment protections. The principal was often inattentive and unresponsive. That should raise questions about district leadership and supervision. Hannah-Jones’s essay supplied unusually vivid evidence for asking questions that her analysis left largely unanswered.
To her credit, Hannah-Jones has begun asking some of those questions herself. In a New York Magazine interview, she acknowledged that some of the failures she witnessed demanded remedies other than integration—and ventured into fraught territory:
What we know is the best qualified teachers do not tend to be placed in the neediest schools… And so what often happens—and I’ve seen this not just in New York, in every school district that I’ve covered this—is the teachers who can’t get jobs anywhere else often end up in schools like that… So this is where we need some real soul searching, right? Like, what is the union willing to do to ensure that teachers can be placed where they’re most needed? That’s something you can’t even talk about. But the fact is that is an obstacle.
She went further, conceding that “there are things that could be done without integrating a single school.”
That admission points toward a key distinction: Schools cannot solve every societal problem, but that does not absolve them of their unique responsibilities. In her early work, Diane Ravitch chronicled the history of schools being used, often unsuccessfully, to achieve social rather than academic ends. Her concern wasn’t that problems like segregation were unimportant, but that efforts to solve them through schooling would distract schools from their distinctive intellectual mission of educating children:
[There was a harmful] idea that the school can be expected to solve all of society’s problems. The social-efficiency experts, who called themselves progressives, claimed that what was good for society was good for children… And the best way to serve society is to prepare workers. And who should they be? The children of immigrants and the poor and people who are not articulate enough to make demands.
The danger now as then, in Ravitch’s telling, was that children who most needed a rigorous education could instead receive one subordinated to broader ambitions for social change. P.S. 307 could not eliminate poverty or residential segregation. It should have been able to teach fractions, ensure that teachers showed up for work, maintain order, and give parents an honest accounting of whether their children were learning.
To be sure, there’s irony in invoking Ravitch. Once a prominent education reformer who served in the administration of President George H.W. Bush, she later repudiated much of what she had believed. Her subsequent emphasis on concentrated poverty and racial segregation makes the comparison with Hannah-Jones all the more interesting. But Ravitch’s reversal was not simply a matter of following the evidence wherever it led. She at least demonstrated a willingness to reconsider convictions that had defined her professional identity.
Robert Pondiscio has a useful maxim: Successful movements seek converts; unsuccessful movements hunt heretics. Ravitch became a convert to one movement and a heretic to another. When Hannah-Jones says that questioning union practices is “something you can’t even talk about,” she identifies a barrier worth confronting. A commitment to integration shouldn’t foreclose serious consideration of what schools can do without it.
Even accepting Hannah-Jones’s argument that parental choices can reinforce segregation, making school improvement contingent on enough parents choosing high-poverty schools gets the problem exactly backward. Individual schools can do only so much—not much, actually—to influence demographics and poverty. But schools are responsible for effective instruction and high academic expectations, as well as identifying and addressing learning gaps—all things they can take concrete steps to improve.
