The Lessons We’re Not Learning From Nikole Hannah-Jones

Her daughter’s experience should force a reckoning with school competence and remind us what the education-reform generation got right.

I’m going to be impatient and blunt: Nikole Hannah-Jones’s daughter did not fail to learn fractions because she and her classmates were black. Her teacher did not repeatedly fail to show up to work because the school was segregated. Neither did her assignments go ungraded because affluent children attended school elsewhere. The report cards and grades she received that concealed her elementary-level deficiencies were not caused by insufficient funding. These failures—all of them—were evidence of incompetence.

The injustice in Najya’s story is not that her school enrolled mostly poor minority children. It is that a school serving these children—an astonishingly well-funded school—was permitted to function this poorly.

A competently managed school puts a qualified teacher in front of children every day. When that teacher is absent, it has a plan for maintaining instruction. Teachers are expected to assign work, examine it, and provide feedback to students. They assess what children know and can do. Grades and report cards convey meaningful information to students and parents. When a child falls behind, someone notices and intervenes. Principals are responsible for making sure those things happen.

All of this should be obvious, yet has gone almost entirely unremarked upon in the voluminous response to Hannah-Jones’s recent essay about her daughter’s education. The piece has renewed arguments about integration, school choice, hypocrisy, parenting, and whether Hannah-Jones deserves credit for admitting that the decision she defended so passionately and aggressively harmed her daughter. But we should make sure not to lose sight of two more important lessons. The first concerns the stunning degree to which debates about education take institutional competence for granted. The second concerns a generation of education reformers who, whatever their overconfident mistakes, would have recognized instantly the failures Hannah-Jones describes and refused to excuse them.

The response to Hannah-Jones’s essay has been remarkably generous. She has been praised effusively for the candor and courage required to admit that the choice she made for her daughter was a mistake. The praise is undeserved. Bravery requires more than confessing error after its consequences become impossible to ignore. Hannah-Jones did not merely make a private decision about her own child. She used her considerable influence to turn that decision into a moral argument. For years, she mocked, condescended to, or condemned parents and education reformers who believed disadvantaged children should not have to wait for some larger social transformation before receiving a decent education. She treated parents who sought out better schools for their own children as not merely making a different choice, but perpetuating inequities.

She was explicit about her moral stance. “I don’t think she’s deserving of more than other kids,” Hannah-Jones said of Najya in a 2017 NPR interview. “I think that we can’t say ‘This school is not good enough for my child’ and then sustain that system. I think that that’s just morally wrong.”

To be very clear: The revised story she now tells is not a mea culpa or an act of bravery. It seeks to be exculpatory yet is devastating to her theory of change. But avoid at all costs the temptation to take a victory lap lest you repeat her mistake.

Let me ask an awkward, impertinent question: Do you earnestly believe that America’s teachers want three-fourths of students to read and do math below proficiency? Is it your assumption that principals, superintendents, school boards, education professors, and even teachers union leaders welcome these mediocre results? This is the first lesson Hannah-Jones’s experience should force upon both her critics and admirers. We argue ad nauseum about what schools believe, what incentives they face, how much money they receive, who attends them, who governs them, and what curriculum they adopt. But all of these arguments elide a question we refuse to ask: Do the people and institutions responsible for educating children actually know how to do the work well?

Hannah-Jones had a theory of change. She believed that segregated schools suffered because well-off families took their influence, expectations, resources, and social capital elsewhere. In her original account of enrolling Najya at P.S. 307, she wrote that she had seen how “the presence of even a handful of middle-class families made it less likely that a school would be neglected.” She believed her family would help integrate the school economically and that “we would be able to make up for Najya anything the school was lacking.”

Hannah-Jones understood even then that there was a risk to her daughter. “I had moments when I couldn’t ignore the nagging fear that in my quest for fairness, I was being unfair to my own daughter,” she wrote. She worried whether she had made the right decision for Najya, but she concluded, “I knew I made the just one.”

That sentence deserves attention. Hannah-Jones consciously weighed what might be best for the child in front of her against what she believed justice required. Her theory of change resolved the conflict: Families like hers could make the school less neglectful, while her own family could compensate for whatever deficiencies remained.

She put that theory to an unusually favorable test. Her family is educated, affluent, politically sophisticated, and deeply engaged with considerable professional and social capital. They advocated, organized, complained, and supplemented. They did virtually everything the theory asked of them. And still the school failed their daughter.

Where Did You Get That Idea?

This should be a cautionary tale, not a victory lap. Every education movement becomes enamored of a theory of change and assumes that if we get the structures, incentives, resources, or policies right, results will follow. For years, at education-reform meetings and conferences, I’ve challenge this assumption with an impolite question: “You have this idea that schools and teachers know what to do and all you need to do is hold them accountable. Where’d you get that idea?”

This was the great unexamined assumption of the education-reform era. Standards would tell schools what children should know. Tests would reveal whether they had learned it. Accountability would create incentives for adults to improve. School closures would impose consequences for persistent failure.

All of these ideas had merit. Testing and accountability in particular performed an essential function: They made it harder for schools to tell parents their children were doing fine when they weren’t. Najya’s story is a vivid reminder of why that mattered. She received reassuring grades while accumulating academic deficits that became painfully obvious when she finally entered a more demanding school.

There is a bitter irony here. Hannah-Jones once characterized No Child Left Behind as an abandonment of integration. Instead of integrating schools, she said, the Bush administration had effectively decided, “We’re going to make these poor black and Latino schools equal to white schools by testing and accountability.”

Najya’s experience does not prove that testing and accountability can make a bad school good. It demonstrates something more modest but essential: Parents need honest information about whether their children are learning. Najya did not suffer because adults tested her too much. She suffered because report cards and grades told her family she was succeeding when she wasn’t. But accountability could tell us that a school was failing without telling the people inside it how to improve. It could create urgency; it could not create expertise.

More recently, I have revised this lesson in speaking to rooms full of my fellow school-choice advocates. “You have this idea that there’s all this talent and dynamism just waiting to be set free from bureaucrats and union domination. Where’d you get that idea?”

Choice changes incentives. It changes governance. It allows families to escape schools that fail them and entrepreneurs to create alternatives. These are considerable virtues. But none of it fixes the competence problem. Responding to Hannah-Jones’s essay in The Wall Street Journal, Roland Fryer described this problem clearly. “Choice advocates make the opposite mistake by assuming choice is enough,” he writes. “Choice can provide an exit from a bad school; it isn’t a production function for creating a good one.”

Precisely. Will an ineffective teacher suddenly become competent merely because we change the person who signs her paycheck? Structural reforms can create conditions for improvement, but they do not guarantee it.

The Assumption Hiding Inside Our Theories of Change

Once you notice the assumption of competence, you see it everywhere.

Social justice theory says that concentrating disadvantaged children in the same schools concentrates disadvantage. Change the mix of students and families, and resources, expectations, peer effects, and social capital should improve. Maybe so. But someone still has to teach fractions.

School-finance theory says money can purchase smaller classes, better materials, tutoring, specialists, higher salaries, longer school days, and any number of potentially useful things. But someone has to know what to purchase, whom to hire, how to organize the work, and whether it’s improving instruction and student outcomes.

Accountability theory says adults and institutions respond to incentives. Measure outcomes, make results transparent, reward success, and impose consequences for persistent failure. But someone still has to know what to do differently on Monday morning.

Even when it comes to the reforms I strongly support, the competency problem does not disappear. Take curriculum. A district can purchase an excellent knowledge-rich curriculum, deliver materials to classrooms, train teachers, align assessments, and require implementation. None of that ensures that the teacher understands the material well enough to explain it, recognize misconceptions, ask productive questions, or determine whether children have learned it. They may adapt it or even decide not to implement it at all.

Or take the science of reading. States can ban three-cueing, mandate phonics, adopt screening assessments, and require teacher training. But legislators cannot look over a child’s shoulder, hear the particular error she is making, diagnose its source, and decide what to do next. We change everything around the classroom and assume that what happens inside it will change too. Where did we get that idea?

The Black Box

What if schools don’t know how to improve? This is a less satisfying political problem or culture war issue because it implicates nearly everyone: schools of education, districts, state agencies, curriculum providers, professional-development organizations, unions, reformers, philanthropists, and policymakers. But it has one great virtue as an explanation: It takes seriously the enormous variation we see among schools serving similar children.

Fryer observed that “resources alone can’t explain disparate outcomes among schools serving similar children with similar budgets.” Right again, but that ought to make us curious. If two schools serving broadly similar children with comparable resources produce dramatically different results, we have a duty to understand what is happening inside them.

What are the teachers doing? What curriculum are they using? How much instructional time is protected? What happens when children don’t understand something? What does the principal do all day? What happens when a teacher chronically fails to perform? What information do parents receive? Does an A on a report card mean a child has mastered the material, or merely that she completed her assignments?

These questions lack the grandeur of debates about segregation, markets, democracy, and social justice. But they are where the work of education actually happens.

What the Reformers Got Right

There is a second lesson in Hannah-Jones’s story that deserves to be stated just as clearly.

For all its mistakes and excesses, the education-reform movement that arose roughly a quarter-century ago began with a proposition that now seems almost radical in its simplicity: Black and Hispanic children are capable of much higher achievement than the public education system was producing. Adults and institutions had to accept responsibility for the results.

Of course, poverty mattered. Segregation mattered. Racism mattered. Family circumstances mattered. But none of that was an excuse for giving a child a poor education.

It is difficult to read Hannah-Jones’s account of her daughter’s education without being struck by how completely the failures she describes violated that ethos. A black child from Brooklyn could not do fractions? Her teachers owned that failure. An honors student got an A in algebra without possessing elementary mathematical knowledge? The school owned it. A third-grade teacher repeatedly failed to show up and children were farmed out to other classrooms? The principal owned it. Parents were repeatedly reassured while their children accumulated enormous academic deficits? The system owned it.

To be clear, ed reformers of the bygone era did not have all the answers. They were too confident that standards, tests, accountability, choice, new governance structures, or closing bad schools and opening new ones would cause better practice to emerge. But we should not allow criticism of the movement’s solutions to obscure the moral authority of the problem it set out to solve. Education reform put student achievement—particularly the achievement of poor black and Hispanic children—at the center of the national conversation. It demanded honest information about whether children were learning. It rejected the idea that miserable academic outcomes should be accepted, contextualized, or explained away because children were poor, black, Hispanic, or disadvantaged.

The best charter schools served overwhelmingly poor black and Hispanic populations and sometimes achieved results dramatically different from neighboring institutions serving similar children. That did not prove poverty was irrelevant, segregation didn’t matter, or every charter school was good. It proved that schools matter. What adults do matters.

Hannah-Jones’s story should occasion some reconsideration of the reform era’s reputation. The failures she describes are a functional catalogue of what those reformers warned against: low expectations disguised as compassion, grades that concealed rather than communicated, adults explaining failure instead of correcting it, and disadvantaged children who paid the price.

These, then, are the two lessons I take from Hannah-Jones’s story. The first is competence. Changing a school’s demographics, increasing its funding, holding it accountable, changing its governance, giving parents choice, adopting a better curriculum, or mandating better instructional practices can all create conditions for improvement. None of it eliminates the need to ensure adults know how to teach, lead, assess, diagnose, intervene, and improve.

The second is about responsibility. In correcting the excesses and shortcomings of the education-reform era, we should not discard its most important insight: Schools have an obligation to educate the children in front of them, and poor outcomes for disadvantaged children are not inevitable facts of nature to be shrugged at or waved away. Children should not have to wait for America to solve poverty, racism, segregation, inequality, or any other social problems before receiving a decent education.

Those two lessons belong together. Responsibility without competence produces frustration, churn, and disillusionment. Competence without responsibility permits institutions to become complacent and excuses to proliferate. Good schools require both.

The next task for education reform is therefore not merely helping parents identify good schools. It is understanding what makes schools good—and figuring out how to make effective practice routine rather than exceptional. The next generation of reform should begin with two questions: Are we willing to hold schools responsible for whether children learn? And do the adults responsible for educating them know how?

The reform generation understood the first question better than its critics sometimes acknowledge. Its mistake was underestimating the second.

A theory of change needs to answer both.


Editor’s note: A shorter version of this argument appeared previously in The Wall Street Journal.