Nikole Hannah-Jones and the Warning Signs She Missed

This week’s must-read is a long NY Times essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones about her daughter’s experience in NYC public schools. The basic gist is that Hannah-Jones and her husband picked elementary and middle schools for their daughter, Najya, based largely on racial demographics, and now she’s looking back on that experience. Najya, now in high school, has her own thoughts.

What makes the essay especially striking, though, is how many warning signs appeared along the way, and how often the schools themselves obscured them. Najya earned good grades. Her work went uncorrected. Her parents were reassured. Meanwhile, the more objective measures kept suggesting something was wrong.

It turns out that the schools they selected were disorderly places with low academic standards. When daughter and mother complained, the schools either didn’t respond or did so in ham-fisted ways. In the elementary school, the principal was absent a lot. Teachers weren’t checking or grading student work, and neither school assigned any homework, so kids had no chance to practice at home.

Hannah-Jones includes asides about broad national trends about segregation and inequity, but it’s worth noting that these schools were extremely well-resourced and yet still got terrible outcomes for kids. Whatever was going wrong at these schools, a simple lack of resources is an incomplete explanation. The public elementary school spent $52,349 per student last year. According to state data, it had class sizes of just 8-11 students. And yet the school had a chronic absenteeism rate of 57%, and just 23% of its students were proficient in math.

The middle school wasn’t much better. It spent “only” $43,975 per student. Its chronic absenteeism rate was 51%, and only 30% of its 8th graders were proficient in math.

One of the most revealing parts of the essay is the disconnect between the signals Najya’s school was sending and what she actually knew. She earned A’s in eighth-grade algebra but failed the statewide exam. Hannah-Jones initially chalked up the discrepancy to Najya having trouble with standardized tests. (For any parent reading this at home, math “anxiety” is often the result of weak math instruction, not something innate to your child.) Only later, after Najya struggled badly in high-school algebra, did Hannah-Jones realize just how far behind Najya was:

Algebra, she thought, was the one exception — this was a subject she believed she knew. She had taken it in eighth grade but had to retake it because she hadn’t passed the statewide exam. At the time, I was somewhat concerned, but as Najya had earned A’s in the class I assumed she didn’t pass because, like many children, she has trouble sometimes on standardized tests. When she had to take the course again, I thought that the concepts would be familiar to her. One night early in the semester as we were eating dinner, Najya gushed about how easy the test had been. “I know I got an A, or at least a B,” she said smiling. A few days later, she came into the house, ran to her room without speaking, slammed the door and sunk to her floor, sobbing. She’d failed it.

….

My child’s confidence wilted like an unwatered plant. She started to develop an almost debilitating anxiety around taking tests. She became sullen at school and began to act out. For the first time ever, I got messages from teachers about Najya’s behavior.

I enrolled Najya in algebra tutoring. After an assessment, the center’s director called me in and told me that Najya knew very little algebra and had huge gaps in many of the building blocks of math that she should have learned in elementary school, like mastery of long division and fractions. The intervention would need to be intense, but Najya was smart, she assured me, and with the proper support would catch up.

It’s easy to blame the test. When a child is earning A’s in class but struggling on a standardized exam, parents naturally want to believe the more reassuring signal. Maybe the test was too hard. Maybe she had a bad day. Maybe she’s just a bad test-taker.

But parents should be careful about explaining away results they don’t like. In Najya’s case, the state exam was telling her family something her A in algebra was not. She had serious gaps in her math knowledge, and ignoring that warning didn’t make the gaps go away. It merely allowed them to persist until they became much harder, and much more painful, to address.

Najya’s experience illustrates several themes we’ve been emphasizing at We’reAllSolvers. Foundational skills such as fractions and division matter for later success in algebra. Cracks in those foundational skills can develop early, compound over time, and become more painful to address later in life. And external assessments can provide crucial information when classroom grades and other signals suggest that a student is doing fine.

What makes Hannah-Jones’s essay so valuable is her willingness to reckon publicly with all of this. It would have been much easier to write a piece explaining why the system failed Najya. Instead, she also asks whether she failed to heed the warning signs along the way.

It’s a complicated and nuanced piece, and readers should take the time to read the full thing. But one lesson seems especially clear: Parents deserve honest information about what their children know and can do. Good grades and reassuring words are not enough if a child is quietly falling further behind.

I’ll let Hannah-Jones have the final words:

But now I felt overcome with regret. Najya deserved better. They all did. But she was mine. This girl, my only child, looked to me to protect her, to give her what she needed to thrive. And I had not chosen her.

I almost cannot type the words. Because when I do, an image of her in her blue school uniform, her hair in beaded cornrows that clicked when she swung them, with her sweet, baby-toothed smile springs to mind, and the tears come.