An Argument

This American Life

Nikole Hannah-Jones revisits her famous decision to enroll her daughter in a segregated New York City public school ten years after her infl

Key takeaways

• Nikole Hannah-Jones chose a neighborhood school to avoid 'gaming the system' and to advocate for resources from within.
• Nadja experienced significant academic disruptions, including teachers failing to grade math work correctly in elementary school.

Main topics

• School segregation
• Systemic racism in education

Notable quotes

All of us gaming the system is making the system worse. What if we just stop?

Conclusion

A profound meditation on the difficulty of making moral sacrifices whe

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Hey there, everybody. Ira Glass here. So our show today is something that producer Rukhanna Jaffe-Walt has been collaborating on with reporter Nicole Hannah-Jones. And Nicole's version of this story, which is in the New York Times Magazine, is something that many, many people are discussing online right now. And I just want to say that if you have seen that article, there are a lot of things in what you're about to hear that are not in the article. Particularly, you'll get to hear at length from Nicole's daughter. And there are things that commenters are raising online that get interestingly addressed in our version. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, don't worry. All of this will become clear. And with that, here's Hannah Jaffe-Walt talking with Nicole Hannah-Jones. These are recordings made as Nicole was in the process of writing that article. Speaker 4 (0:49) I'm going to make sure we're recording. All right. Has it been 10 years since you've been in here? I'm trying to think. Speaker 5 (0:55) I'm like, damn, I know it's been a long time. How long has it been? Speaker 4 (0:59) That's Nicole. And this is a ritual I find myself in with some frequency at my age, beginning social interactions with an accounting of time that inevitably leads to a conversation about the kids, where they were then and where they are now. Speaker 5 (1:15) And my child was just... getting ready to start school. Speaker 4 (1:19) And now Speaker 5 (1:19) my child is a sophomore getting ready to celebrate her sweet 16. That is wild. That is wild. Speaker 4 (1:26) Really Speaker 5 (1:26) 16. She will be 16 next month. Yeah. Time. Speaker 4 (1:31) Nicole and I spent a lot of time talking about our kids 10 years ago and talking about schools. We were reporting together on education, specifically on inequality and systemic racism in American public schools, how decades of policy choices have left public schools deeply unequal, many schools completely neglected. And meanwhile, Nicole and I had little kids. And in our own lives, the conversation among parents was, how to game the system to be sure that your children do not end up in one of those schools. Literally every Speaker 5 (2:09) middle class parent, no matter what their race was, was like, you have to put her in, you know, talented and gifted prep courses because they test that for, and you have to decide if you're going to put her in private school, but you're definitely not going to put her in the neighborhood school. And I lived in the heavily black, high poverty neighborhood. Speaker 4 (2:30) These questions, what are you going to do about school, started right out of the gate. Speaker 5 (2:35) I mean, my response was, she's one. And people would look at me like, oh, you're so naive. I remember people being like, you silly woman. And people actually felt that that was like not being a good parent, frankly. Speaker 4 (2:51) This intense, often judgmental scramble is something parents in places all over America do. But in New York City, where Nicole and I live, it's arguably the most extreme version. Parents have spreadsheets of schools, endless advice. You're going to want to avoid this school, apply to this program, maybe move to a different neighborhood. Any contortion makes sense, not even to strive for an elite school, but to avoid a, quote, bad school. What were the bad schools? Well... New York City has one of the most racially and economically segregated school systems in the country. The, quote, bad schools that families with options tried to avoid were disproportionately Black, Latino, and poor. In her reporting, Nicole had seen that Black students all over the country are concentrated in schools like this, where they're less likely to have the best teachers or curricula or facilities. And one reason that happens is that wealthy and middle-class families like hers opt out of those schools. So Nicole, who had a young Black daughter and had been a young Black girl herself, when her daughter Nadja got to be school-aged, she did not make a spreadsheet. She did not game the system. She enrolled Nadja in a regular public school, the kind of school most New York City kids end up in. The students mostly came from the neighborhood, Black and Latino kids, poor and working class. Here's how Nicole saw it. She thought if more parents with advantage like her are inside a school, they could add their weight. They'll be personally invested. They'll be paying attention and seeing when there are problems. They can advocate for a school, for funding, for more experienced teachers, for extra programming. So all the students in the school, including their own kids, have what they need to learn. Nicole wrote about all this in a cover story for the New York Times Magazine 10 years ago. And on the cover, there was little Nadja in her school uniform, Afro puffs, serious face looking right at the camera. Speaker 5 (5:01) And the headline? Choosing a school for my daughter in a segregated city. Speaker 4 (5:05) I remember seeing it. I remember seeing it and being like, oh, she did it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because we, you know, you and I, we talked a lot about it. It was an earthquake of a story. Nicole, putting the matter bluntly to parents, all of us gaming the system is making the system worse. What if we just stop? Speaker 5 (5:26) I was really, really shocked by the impact that this piece had. You know, people were both writing, but also just sharing their story with me at my public speeches. or other events that I was giving, like face-to-face, which was extremely powerful for me as well. I feel like you're underselling how much influence Speaker 4 (5:52) it had on you. Speaker 5 (5:52) Am I? What am I supposed to say? Speaker 4 (5:54) So, like, there's school districts across the country that were suddenly talking about something that they had not been talking about, not just parents, but actual people controlling school policy. Speaker 5 (6:05) Yes. Speaker 4 (6:09) In some Speaker 5 (6:09) ways, like, this was, like, my dream as a journalist. But I became a writer because I wanted society to change. So I always write in a way where I'm trying to persuade people Speaker 4 (6:25) by making a moral argument. That's what the story was, an argument. And it landed with so many people. Speaker 5 (6:33) This story just... Speaker 5 (6:36) in some ways, like never lost his legs. I was in Boston a few weeks ago, and a woman who has a six-year-old, her child wasn't even born when the story came out, said that this story guided her education decision-making for her child. Speaker 4 (6:53) In a lot of your events, there was some people who would come up to you to sort of absolve them of the choice that they had made? Speaker 5 (6:59) Almost every public event I would do, either during the... question and answer session. After the event, they would like kind of corner you and there would inevitably be a parent or parents who would explain why they really, really, really believed in what I was saying. And they believed in the power of equality, but, you know, they just, they couldn't make that choice for whatever reason. And I'd always be like, you know, okay, I'm not your priest. I cannot absolve you and I don't want to absolve you. I wanted you to be forced to be like, what about these kids? What do they deserve? Speaker 4 (7:41) So for 10 years, Nicole has talked publicly all over the country about every aspect of this article, except how it played out in her own life for her and her kid. And she decided she wanted to write about what happened and talk through it. So many months ago, Nicole reached out to me to ask if I wanted to hear everything that happened after the article was published. Yes, I did. She thought all the people who read her original essay 10 years ago and thought about it and talked to her about it and passed it on to others deserved to know how it actually turned out. And she thought her daughter, Nadja, deserved a chance to share her perspective, too. Nadja was eager to talk. She had a lot she wanted to say about this. And she has a very different take from her mom's. What you're going to hear is a series of conversations. that took place before Nicole published her recent New York Times article, as she was trying to figure out in real time what she would write about all this. I talked to Nicole, and later I talked to Nadja, and she talks to her mom. These are conversations throughout which I was so alert and on edge sometimes. It is rare to hear a person who made a big influential argument come forward and say honestly, this is how it actually played out, and then publicly face their teenager. Who subjects themselves to that? That's today's show, An Argument in Five Acts. Two people willing to talk about some of the country's most enduring problems and look at how they unfolded in their own lives as mother and daughter. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. Stay with us. Speaker 4 (9:43) It's This American Life, Act One, Nicole's Choice. Nicole had been the one to pick the school back when Nadja was little. Her husband, Faraji, had been reluctant to send Nadja there. He worried they'd be hurting her. Asked Nicole, is this us experimenting on our child based on idealism? They'd argued about it. But once they resolved to do it, Faraji was all in. He threw himself into the school. Both of them were committed to being involved, and Faraji ended up even more involved than Nicole. They reassured themselves, knowing that if there were ways the school fell short, they could get Nadja help. And they'd be there, watching. They were both constantly assessing how it was going, where the school faltered, where it succeeded, what Nadja was getting. They were tracking all of it. Including benefits that don't get factored into lists of New York City's top schools. Speaker 5 (10:39) She got to spend her first six years of education in a school where most of the kids looked like her. Where she had incredible black and... She had a Chinese-American educator. She had incredible black educators. She had Caribbean educators. Amazing Black History Month celebrations. They used to have the students do these self-portraits. And she would always, when she was young, make herself a dark-skinned black woman, which I was like, yes. Like, so you are, you know, as a black girl. seeing yourself in that lens and not in the lens of this like outside world that is saying that that's not beautiful or that's not something to aspire to. And so in her formative years, she didn't have that experience that I had of feeling less than other kids, of feeling like, is there something wrong with Black people? Feeling different. Like she didn't have that. Speaker 4 (11:47) Like all of us, Nicole's own experience raising a child is always running parallel to the memory of her own childhood. Parenting is an ongoing act of correction. Nicole grew up being bused from her Black neighborhood to a mostly white, wealthier school. She was part of a desegregation plan. She's talked about the social isolation of being one of the only Black kids in school on our show before, the psychological toll of that. And she didn't want that for Nadja. And Nadja was a different kid, growing up differently than Nicole did. Her parents had money and college degrees. Nicole wanted Nadja to be in the mix with other kids, to see what she had that others didn't, and to feel comfortable with everyone. Speaker 5 (12:32) I don't want my child to feel separate from other kids. I don't want her to feel that she's better than other kids. And she started to recognize the advantages that she had. I remember she came home. There was a classmate who's... older brother had been killed and Nadja was like, he doesn't have a coat. Can we get a coat for him? She had like empathy and humanity. And so I felt like that's why we're here. I believe in like a common good. I believe that like we have to be in it together. Speaker 4 (13:16) Nicole was prepared for some things in the school to be hard, and she and her husband Faraji were in the school often. Faraji volunteered regularly, organizing parents, talking to teachers, addressing issues. He became co-president of the school's PTA. And still, there was stuff they didn't know, until they heard it from Nadja, starting around first grade. She would come home a lot and say Speaker 5 (13:40) things like, it's hard to concentrate, it's hard to focus, that there was a lot of disruption in the classroom, like things that we know often happen in high poverty schools. Speaker 4 (13:52) And they were having an experience parents in high poverty schools sometimes have. They were having trouble getting the school to respond, even though they were so involved. In fourth grade, at a parent-teacher conference, Nicole and Faradji learned Nadja was not on grade level. which was not something they'd heard before. So they immediately emailed her teachers and principals saying, we want to see her schoolwork. Please send home all her graded tests and assignments so we can look through them and see what's going on. they wouldn't Speaker 5 (14:22) send the schoolwork home. I asked Speaker 4 (14:24) them Speaker 5 (14:24) and they wouldn't do it. I have to go to the principal. The principal instructs them to send the homework home and they say, that's extra work for us. So I'm having to like take off from work. I'm coming up to the school all the time. I'm like, I need to see her work every week. This is crazy. And finally, The principal is able to get the teachers to send, they send all this work home that Nadja had been doing. And I start going through the math and all the problems are wrong. Oh, no. Like literally almost all the problems are wrong. Speaker 4 (15:05) But the problem, the answers are wrong. The Speaker 5 (15:07) answers. Speaker 5 (15:09) Like, he's just putting a checkmark. He's not checking her math. He's not correcting her. He's not teaching her. Every single one is wrong. Yeah. Devastating parent