Education, even more than immigration, is a flashpoint in our ongoing culture war. Education has found itself tightly wrapped up with issues of parental rights, free speech, systemic incompetence, propaganda and indoctrination of children, and, of course, racial equity. It isn't a fight over who is allowed to remain in America; it is a fight for what the next generation believes about this nation and its values.

On Sunday, The New York Times posted a very curious essay by columnist Nikole Hannah-Jones. I'm not a Hannah-Jones fan. She's never found a race she couldn't bait (see 1619 Project Founder Wrote Insanely Racist Screed, Gets Exposed as the Bigot She Is – RedState) or a problem that couldn't be cured by the government throwing enough of your money to the right people. While Hannah-Jones is most famous for her totally bogus "1619 Project," which cast the founding of America as purely a story about slavery and having that noxious lie survive and win a Pulitzer Prize (see The New York Times Wins the Pulitzer Prize for Discredited ‘The 1619 Project’ as Journalism Races to Irrelevancy – RedState), because no one dared call a Black woman working for The New York Times an imbecile, the damage she wreaked on American History is nothing compared to the damage she has inflicted on the conversation surrounding public education.

The essay, titled "In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own? - The New York Times," Hannah-Jones picks up where she left off in 2022 when she gave an interview to NPR, naturally, titled "How The Systemic Segregation Of Schools Is Maintained By 'Individual Choices' : NPR Ed : NPR." Her bottom line in that interview was, “As long as individual parents continue to make choices that only benefit their own children … we’re not going to see a change.” I have a lengthy response to the idea that I need to sacrifice my child for your politics here: Author of 1619 Project Tells Us All Why We Are Bad People for Being Engaged in Our Children's Education – RedState.

Sunday's essay, reviewed by my colleague Brandon Morse (Nikole Hannah-Jones Just Wrote the Best Case for School Choice She'll Ever Publish – RedState), lets us know what happened to Hannah-Jones when she used her daughter as a test case to prove her theories. One of which was that if you are important enough, the school system will jump through its fourth point of contact to please you.

“A NYT reporter in a high-poverty school f-ing changes the school, right? There are certain things that are just not going to happen in that school. I can go to that school and say there is a problem and it gets fixed immediately.”

So how'd that work out?

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In short order, she found out that the low-income, high-minority population school she sought out for her daughter resulted in her getting As on tests and thinking she loved math, only to hit the brutal reality that she had not mastered elementary grade-level math.

Then her daughter challenges her.

“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked.

....

For a moment, Najya said nothing. Then she told me, “Sometimes I wish instead of always thinking about other kids, you would have thought about me. I never really got the education I wanted.”

The troubling part of the essay is that it isn't a story of someone who regrets using their kid as a Petri dish for social experimentation. Her apology to her daughter is not heartfelt. It is the old "I'm sorry you were offended" brush-off. At the end, she remains an adamant foe of both school choice and homeschooling; see The 1619 Project's Nikole Hannah-Jones Weighs in on School Choice, and I Have Thoughts – RedState.

To Hannah-Jones, the problem remains two-fold: lack of resources and racial segregation.

Whatever the problem is, it is not money. The Atlantic, hardly a MAGA bastion, wrote:

New York City spends more money per pupil—north of $40,000, according to one recent estimate—than any of the other 100 largest public-school districts in the country, and more than twice as much as the median district. Meanwhile, it generates educational outcomes that are average at best. According to federal data, its per-pupil spending is nearly 50 percent higher than Los Angeles’s and Chicago’s (the second- and fourth-largest districts), and 150 percent higher than Miami’s (the third-largest). 

In one of the most infamous cases of judicial fascism in American history, the court takeover of the Kansas City, Missouri School District  (see Missouri vs. Jenkins), a judge imposed taxes and all manner of judicial micromanagement of the racial composition of schools. Staff was hired on the basis of race, new facilities were constructed to achieve absolute equality. And guess what, nothing changed. Test scores stayed the same. Those areas that had scored low in the past continued to score poorly. Parents voted with their feet.

The other laser pointer dot on the wall for Hannah-Jones was desegregation. She sent her child to a highly segregated school because she opposed segregation. She concludes:

Black children in New York’s schools, and this nation’s, are as segregated now as they were a decade ago, two decades ago, three. And in profound ways, we’ve actually moved backward, with a federal government that no longer gives even lip service to integration but instead is weaponized against it.

The part that she elides over is that segregation had nothing to do with anything. The irony is that Hannah-Jones, who is "highly race conscious," if not outright Nation of Islam-style racist (check out this story if you think I'm exaggerating, In Racist Screed, NYT's 1619 Project Founder Calls 'White Race' 'Barbaric Devils,' 'No Different Than Hitler'), thinks that Black children must be around White children in order to learn.

Why am I just learning now that public schools in the New York city ghetto don't assign homework, don't grade tests, don't respond to parents emails or phone calls, don't supervise feral, fighting kids at lunch, don't know or care if their students can read or do grade level math, and give them As on their report cards when they are actually doing F level work?

Why did Nikole Hannah Jones bury this explosive lede?

Why isn't she writing emergency front page @nytimes stories about this shocking, incredible, abject citywide failure that costs people who pay taxes over $50K per student per year?

Why isn't she holding emergency all-hands on deck meetings with @NYCMayor to shut this down, rescue these kids, fire everyone involved?  

We all know why. But no one at the Times will say a word. LOL

Rather than sugarcoat Hannah-Jones's essay as the apologia of someone who has finally realized her understanding of how public education works is less than zero, we need to listen to what she is telling us. 

Her essay should be viewed as a declaration of war in a new fight over mandatory racial desegregation, a return to bussing, a jihad against private, parochial, and homeschools, a full-throated onslaught against school choice, and a regression to a racial spoils system to fund schools.

Don't underestimate her ability to make this happen. This is a woman who manufactured American history from whole cloth and then bullied the educational establishment into teaching it as though it were true.