Quick refresher: In case you missed the headlines, Nikole Hannah-Jones, chief architect of the 1619 Project — the one that tried to convince American schoolchildren the whole country was founded to perpetuate slavery — wrote a 2016 essay about sending her daughter to a struggling Brooklyn public school instead of a better one. Her logic wasn’t humility. It was hubris. As a big-deal journalist, she figured her mere presence would fix the place. A New York Times byline walks in, problems walk out. She quite literally said, “NYT reporter in a high poverty schools f**king changes the school.”
That’s not how schools work.
It did not go well. By her own account: kids unsupervised at lunch, running wild while staff “stood by looking bored.” A teacher frequently absent, a substitute who often wasn’t teaching — or wasn’t there. Her daughter’s homework was going ungraded, so she didn’t find out her daughter was failing math until it was a crisis. By middle school, no homework at all — and her daughter wanted some. Let that sink in: the kid wanted to learn, and the system couldn’t be bothered.
Now the numbers. The school spends about $52,000 per student. Average teacher salary north of $100,000 — for nine months of work. Student-to-faculty ratio: 9-to-1, a number my generation would’ve considered a fantasy. And the result? Barely a quarter of kids are proficient in math or reading.
Daniel DiMartino from the Manhattan Institute compared that to Community Roots Charter, half a mile away, same demographics, same public-housing backdrop — spending roughly $26,000 per student, less than half as much. Over 80% proficient.
Same neighborhood, same kids, wildly different outcomes. It’s not funding. It’s not race. It’s not the zip code. It’s that one school can fire bad teachers and one can’t, because the unions won’t allow it.
Coleman Hughes nails it in the Free Press: the villains in her own story are the unstaffed classrooms, the absentee principal, the teachers who rewarded misbehavior over diligence — all protected, all unfireable. And the same politicians who claim to fight for kids like hers keep cashing checks from the union that protects the adults failing them.
Funny how it’s always the right pointing out the waste.
