I lived in the District of Columbia for about a dozen years before moving out to the wilds of Western Maryland. I owned an 1885 rowhouse that I’d bought at the absolute bottom of the real estate market. Over time the street I lived on, a one-block-long street near U Street NW, had changed from one in which only about a third of the houses were occupied to 100% owner-occupied. The neighbor group was close-knit. We did some interesting things together, like raising money and providing the labor to build a playground on a couple of vacant lots on our street. The breakpoint for my wife and me came when our daughter turned four. DC had mandatory pre-K…they pushed it like they thought giving your kid to the DC public school system was some sort of enormous favor they were doling out. While not a dystopic hellscape, our local elementary school could be mistaken for one under the proper lighting. It was possible to apply to send your kid “out of district” to a different school, but the word was that if you opened your mouth, the principal would blackball your application the next academic year. Even with discounts and “scholarships,” parochial schools were not a viable financial option for us as we already had two kids and planned on more.

With some sadness, we decided to move. My wife told a couple of her friends that we were probably going to leave DC and the primary reason was the school system and our unwillingness to entrust our daughter to its tender mercies. The reaction she got was surprisingly hostile. If involved parents keep abandoning DC schools, she was scolded, the system will never get better. It will only improve if engaged parents stay in DC and work to improve the system.

This, of course, was lunacy from several different levels. The hubris in thinking that DC Public Schools actually gave a rat’s ass about parents or children gave us a good laugh. The idea that us caring about our kids would translate into some sort of system-wide reform, and Age of Aquarius, where the wildly incompetent and criminal staff of the DC School System would stop working for their own personal benefit and start improving the lot of the students left us sort of stunned? Were these people gaslighting us? Were they just stupid?

Long story short, we moved and have never regretted the decision. In theory, my wife’s friends might have been correct, but I really don’t care. It is not my job to reform a hostile organization and, more importantly, my kid is not a Petrie dish for your social experiment

I say this as a preface to my take on an NPR article in which Terry Gross of Fresh Air interviews fraudster and racist…I’m sorry, did I say that? I meant “journalist” Nikole Hannah-Jones.

Hannah-Jones is most famous as the intellectual engine behind the debunked and discredited “1619 Project,” pushed by the New York Times as an alt-history of the United States in which everything since the White Lion dropped anchor off Point Comfort, VA, in 1619 has been about slavery.

This time Hannah-Jones has set her sights on school choice as racism. The interview is titled How The Systemic Segregation Of Schools Is Maintained By ‘Individual Choices.’

This is the top line of the argument:

Journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross that when it comes to school segregation, separate is never truly equal.

“There’s never been a moment in the history of this country where black people who have been isolated from white people have gotten the same resources,” Hannah-Jones says. “They often don’t have the same level of instruction. They often don’t have strong principals. They often don’t have the same technology.”

Still, when it was time for Hannah-Jones’ daughter, Najya, to attend kindergarten, the journalist chose the public school near their home in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, even though its students were almost all poor and black or Latino. Hannah-Jones later wrote about that decision in The New York Times Magazine.

…

For Hannah-Jones, sending Najya to the neighborhood school was a moral issue. “It is important to understand that the inequality we see, school segregation, is both structural, it is systemic, but it’s also upheld by individual choices,” she says. “As long as individual parents continue to make choices that only benefit their own children … we’re not going to see a change.”

Hannah-Jones adds that her daughter is thriving at school. “I know she’s learning a lot,” she says. “I think it is making her a good citizen. … It is teaching her that children who have less resources than her are not any less intelligent than her or not any less worthy than her.”

It is hard to know where to even start with this legion of assertions.

First off, there are literally no segregated K-12 schools in the United States, so the “separate but equal” trope that was made illegal in Brown vs. Board of Education doesn’t really apply. Hannah-Jones goes to great lengths to conflate housing patterns that have evolved for whatever reason over the last 60 years as segregation. It isn’t. Hannah-Jones has elected to live in and send her daughter to school in a minority-majority enclave in New York City. Both of those decisions are entirely voluntary. She should have the grace to grant parents who elect to live elsewhere the same good faith assumptions of their choices. She doesn’t, but then again, she did come up with the Queen of Bad Faith Arguments, the 1619 Project.

There is really no evidence that schools with a high minority population suffer from weak principals, bad teachers, or lack of technology. If they do, parents have to ask why the school boards are willing to accept crap outcomes for the kids under their care. The problem is a lot more complicated, and it concerns a helluva lot more than skin color. Stable two-parent households with regular income, parents engaged in the child’s education, parents who see value in education, and books in the home, all have a much more significant impact on learning than skin color. But don’t rely on my judgment. Ask why DC Public Schools can spend nearly $24,000 per pupil per year and produce what it does.

Hannah-Jones comes back to this virtue signaling a couple of times. The first instance is:

“As long as individual parents continue to make choices that only benefit their own children … we’re not going to see a change.”

She hits it again in this segment:

And no, my daughter is not going to get an education that she would get if I paid $40,000 a year in private-school tuition, but that’s kind of the whole point of public schools.

And I say this — and it always feels weird when I say it as a parent, because a lot of other parents look at you a little like you’re maybe not as good of a parent — I don’t think she’s deserving of more than other kids. I just don’t. 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. If it’s not good enough for my child, then why are we putting any children in those schools?

I suppose this gets to the nub of the matter. There is nothing dearer to me than my kids. I will do whatever I can to ensure they start out on their careers prepared to succeed. I don’t know that my kids are “more deserving” than other kids, but they are deserving of 100% of the time, effort, and resources I can contribute towards their success. I can’t afford $40K/year for private school, but when it became apparent that our son was being shunted off to the back of the class with the rest of the boys by the mean-girls club that masqueraded as teachers at his elementary school, we elected to homeschool. When COVID made “remote learning” a thing, we intervened to get our youngest graduated a year early to get her out of that crap.

She also seems to miss the part where we are not voluntarily “sustaining” broken school systems. We are levied for taxes to support those systems, and we pay for them whether or not we are afraid of the product. She also seems not to realize that just because I say a school is too f***ed up for me to risk sending my kid there doesn’t mean that other parents haven’t arrived at a different decision. The fact that sh**holes like DC Public Schools exist is because the parents of students in that system are perfectly happy with its history of failure and neglect. They are as entitled to their judgment as I am to mine.

I have an obligation to my kids that I have to no other kids on the planet. They are my first and last thoughts each day. Your kids deserve the same from you. But just as I’m not going to butt into your family to tell you what your kids need in the way of education, I will kick your ass if you try to interfere in my right to make those decisions in my household. Stay in your, and we’ll all be a lot happier.

I also thought this was a bit patriarchal if not downright classist:

It is teaching her that children who have less resources than her are not any less intelligent than her or not any less worthy than her.

My kids don’t need public schools to know that poor kids aren’t less intelligent or less deserving of a fair chance than they are. I’ve told them about my father and grandfather starting to work in the mines and mills of West Virginia at age 13. They learn that lesson at Church when we do Bible study at home and volunteer work. If you can’t be bothered to personally teach your kid the basics of humanity…welp, I got nothing.

What Hannah-Jones seems intent upon doing is trying to bring the corrupt Equity part of the Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity triad to the make-up of schools. The idea seems to be that for a minority child to get an education, then a certain number of kids of various races and income quintiles must be represented. This leads, inevitably, to the bussing, to the assignment of students by race and family income. In a very short period of time, parents who can flee such a system will do so. In the current political environment, state legislatures are increasingly linking school tax money to the student, not to the school district. None of this strengthens public education as Hannah-Jones claims she wishes to do. Ironically, if I really wanted to demolish the current public education system in favor of one with greater parental choice and freedom, I’d support everything Hannah-Jones is trying to accomplish.