An Inner-City Teacher’s Response to Nikole Hannah-Jones’s NYT Article

She wrote a brave article... but was unfair to the teachers behind her daughter’s hindered education.

Nikole Hannah-Jones’ daughter, Najya

Preface

I’ve been writing about my experience teaching in the inner city for almost four years now. Almost 200 articles written, and I can’t think of a single time I’ve responded to another person’s writing on education. However, after multiple DMs, posts on my feed, and my own mother asking for my opinion on the New York Times article, written by Nikole Hannah-Jones, I decided I should at least read it.

The article is entitled, “In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?” You can find it here, though apologies if you get slapped by a paywall. The TLDR is as follows. Nikole Hannah-Jones, an upper-middle-class black woman and influential writer at the New York Times, decides with her husband to send their daughter to one of Brooklyn’s failing impoverished elementary and middle schools. These schools are overwhelmingly Black and Hispanic.

She and her husband do this because they want to be the change they wish to see in the world. In her words, she writes:

“Faraji and I felt an obligation to make educational decisions based on the collective good and not just our individual advantage…We thought by sending Najya to a mostly low-income and Black school, we could help improve it for all the children there. From my past reporting, I knew that P.T.A.s at poor schools often can raise only a few thousand dollars, but Faraji and I could write checks that exceeded the annual P.T.A. budget. I witnessed how dismissive school officials could be to lower-income parents who lodged complaints or made demands for resources and how deferential they were to wealthy ones. I believed Faraji and I could bring some of that power with us. We had connections and time and status that should not matter, but that we all know do.”

It was a noble experiment. And one that ultimately failed. By the time Najya, the daughter, comes to an age where she can start looking up her school’s ratings, and realizes her parents purposefully avoided placing her in richer, more successful schools, she feels betrayed. When she asks her mother point blank why mom cared more for the collective good rather than her own child, Nikole Hannah-Jones gives her carefully prepared reasons… and they fall flat. Even to her own ears.

By the time Najya is in the eighth grade, she lacks basic algebraic skills despite the fact that she gets straight A’s and struggles mightily when she chooses to go to a high school with mostly white and Asian kids. The author gives herself no excuses. By the end of the article, Nikole Hannah-Jones expresses a large amount of regret for pursuing her values at the expense of her daughter’s education.

When I finished reading the article I realized I had a lot to say. Najya went to a middle school under the Urban Assembly umbrella organization. The Urban Assembly’s Mission Statement and Vision are as follows.

Mission:

“The mission of The Urban Assembly is to advance students’ economic and social mobility by improving public education.”

Vision:

“Through rigorous academic programming and a deep commitment to equity and social justice, UA schools will graduate well-prepared, caring, informed citizens who have the individualized supports and guidance they need to maximize their potential and succeed in their postsecondary academic and career paths.”

The name of the high school I work in is The Urban Assembly School for Global Commerce. I work with the student population that Najya went to school with, and I’ve been doing my damndest to improve these students’ lives for the past ten years.

There are many things I like about this article. It’s breathtakingly honest, and the author puts on full display her inner struggle to live up to the values she’s preached her entire life at the expense of the success of her daughter. But there’s one main problem I have with the article. She never delves into why Najya’s teachers failed to provide her daughter with an acceptable education. She chalks it up to racism.

And okay, racism may explain how we ended up with structurally unequal schools. But she doesn’t take much time crawling around in a teacher’s shoes. She’s frustrated her daughter’s teachers failed her, but she doesn’t explore why those teachers were as bad as they were. She doesn’t explore why the teachers are inexperienced, what the working conditions might be like for the teacher, how brutal classroom management can get, and why veteran teachers bolt from schools like these.

Let’s examine this article from a teacher’s point of view.

Why Did Najya’s Teachers Suck?

“And then Najya came home despondent one day in February. She told us that her teachers had stopped calling on her. She’d become so frustrated that, waving her hand furiously, she began to blurt out the answers. But that got her in trouble. Wrapping Najya in my arms, I reassured her she was bright and doing nothing wrong. “We will address it,” we told her, projecting confidence. But that night, after I tucked Najya into bed, I sat across from Faraji in our living room and broke down in sobs. Should we consider leaving the school? In truth, we felt utterly stuck. Our child was suffering, but all these children were — they were languishing in classrooms with educators who did not take their academic potential seriously and largely refused to teach.”

As a teacher who has survived the severe learning curve it takes to merely survive in an inner city, I take some umbrage with the statement, “with educators who did not take their academic potential seriously.” Every student who walks out of college with a degree in education makes a deal with the devil. They know they are forsaking large economic opportunities for the chance to make a difference in the world. They all think to themselves in one way or another, “the joy I will feel in changing students’ lives will be worth the monetary sacrifice.” Sometimes they’re right and sometimes they’re wrong, but let’s be clear– no one chooses the field of education because they enjoy ignoring children’s potential.

Najya went to a failing public school in Brooklyn, P.S.307. The school has lackluster testing scores across the board: reading and math levels are all severely below average. However, the requirements for teaching in a NYC public school include a bachelor’s degree in education and attainment of a master’s within five years if one wishes to continue teaching. On paper, NYC public school teachers require a fair amount of education before standing in front of a classroom, and most experience student-teaching before taking on the responsibility.

So what happened? What went wrong? People don’t choose to enter a classroom because they like ignoring kids like Najya. Furthermore, after student teaching, most teachers know the standard frustrations that come with the job: getting kids to quiet down while giving directions, dealing with bullies, ludicrous parents, never-ending grading, non-stop planning the night before. No one enters the profession with rose colored glasses.

But teaching in the inner city is different. The above problems are prevalent at any school. The RAND Corporation is a large American nonprofit, nonpartisan organization which conducts research for public policy. They report that “In 2026, 57% of American public-school teachers reported experiencing burnout, compared with 36% of similar working adults.” Those burnout rates are child’s play compared to the rates inner city school teachers face.

I’ll never forget this moment in my first year of teaching. A student was having a mental breakdown in the cafeteria. He was screaming curses at the top of his lungs while standing in front of a table full of his peers. Everyone in the lunch room was looking at him, silent, but for some reason he locked eyes with me. He ran full speed and got two inches from my face. He screamed, “STOP. FUCKING. LOOKING AT ME! STOP! STOP! STOP! IF YOU DON’T STOP I WILL BASH YOUR FUCKING SKULL IN WITH A FUCKING FIRE EXTINGUISHER!!!” My heart hammered. Adrenaline flooded my system. Every cortisol stress response screamed at me for action. It was a miracle I didn’t throw a punch.

That student now resides in Rikers Island for murder.

Now, is the point that every student in these impoverished schools deals with violent mental challenges? No. Of course not. But that student got suspended for two weeks and returned for the rest of the school year. To say I felt unsafe might be the understatement of the century. People outside of the school system, even parents, can underestimate how intense student behavior can alter a teachers ability to teach. If the first year of teaching in a regular school is like surviving Marine bootcamp, then teaching in the inner-city is like surviving Navy SEALs Hell Week.

And that analogy fails because aspiring Navy SEALs choose to go through that hellish training. Very few teachers walk into the profession choosing to combat the challenges associated with extreme poverty and mental illness. Colleges attempt to prepare students for the rigors of planning, assessing, and running a classroom. There is scant little mention of how to deal with abject disrespect and violence.

Part of the reason Najya received a lackluster education was likely because her teachers didn’t know how to survive the job in the first place. Perhaps it’s benefit of the doubt, but maybe her teachers didn’t teach because they couldn’t see any way forward. It’s difficult to see potential in kids when a third of the class screams obscenities and you flounder to control your classroom. Again, teacher preparation programs do a decent job preparing potential educators on how to communicate skills and content. They do not teach students how to manage classrooms that deal with the problems prevalent in poverty-stricken schools.

The Only Teachers Worth a Damn Are the Ones With Experience

I have long argued that the best system for training teachers would be something like a doctor’s residency program. Pay the rookies trash wages for four years, stick them under the guidance of a master teacher, and then if they survive the brutal curve that the job demands, pay them like kings for the experience they can bring to the table.

Experience is the gold standard. No college learning simulation can replace hands-on time in front of a classroom. All kids deserve to learn from someone who knows how to teach. And news flash— no one knows how to teach their first year. The three months of student teaching are like learning to paddle with floaties on in the shallow end of the pool.

Some teachers manage to tread water if they land in a school where kids don’t immediately discount their authority, but nearly all first-year inner-city teachers drown in the deep end of the pool. We only come back if by some miracle someone resuscitates us and we muster the courage to dive into murky depths again.

Nikole Hannah-Jones’ article is littered with these kinds of observations.

“The dynamic, exceptional principal who headed the school when we enrolled Najya into pre-K, a woman who had herself grown up in the public housing across the street and had turned this high-poverty school into a vibrant learning community, retired at the end of the year. It was soon clear that the new principal was not up to the task of sustaining the work of the veteran educator she had replaced.”

“She’d [Nayja] bemoan how the less experienced teachers struggled to manage their classrooms and would expend so much attention on the small number of kids acting out that they’d be unable to complete their lessons or help a student stuck on a problem.”

“The chances of success for Najya and her classmates in math were further reduced by the fact they were taught each year not by a master teacher but by a novice, a common circumstance at high-poverty schools.”

Nicole Hannah Jones claims she thought she’d be able to make up the gap by providing her daughter’s school with more money, “I knew that P.T.A.s at poor schools often can raise only a few thousand dollars, but Faraji and I could write checks that exceeded the annual P.T.A. budget.” But money isn’t really the problem.

A new computer lab does not mean the kids will write essays instead of playing computer games. More P.E. equipment doesn’t mean the gym teacher can now control his class. Healthier cafeteria food doesn’t mean kids stop hitting each other at lunch. It can help. But the real solutions lie in finding ways to keep veterans from leaving the school.

That’s a tall task. Unless a teacher enters the profession with a social justice chip on their shoulder, most teachers join the profession because they love their content, and they enjoy the process of helping kids become better versions of themselves. Most like kids, but they didn’t necessarily sign up to fix broken homes and help students who are liable to threaten them. It’s not racist to want better working conditions.

So when a teacher survives a school like Najya’s for three years and they finally have the experience necessary to apply to wealthier schools that demand teachers with experience, they usually take their chances and apply to greener pastures. They want the ability to teach their content without spending so much time focusing on classroom management. They want to teach a classroom full of Najyas, not just one kid who doesn’t cause trouble for them on the regular.

Nikole Hannah-Jones says the underlying reason that Black and Hispanic kids learn from rookie teachers is racism. I think not. I think good teachers run from the hardship poverty brings to a classroom. I remember student-teaching in Scarsdale, the wealthiest school district in the nation, before I taught in Harlem. I could raise an eyebrow and classes would go silent. I can’t begrudge any teacher for wanting that kind of classroom experience. Again, most teachers love their content. When you don’t expend half your energy managing your classroom, your content becomes front and center.

This is the reason teachers with a little experience run from a school like Najya’s. People with experience have more options. If the New York City public school system can find a way to keep veteran teachers from leaving schools that cater to poorer students, I’d bet that Najya’s education wouldn’t have been nearly as bad as it was. More money from her parents’ wallet may have helped her a little, but nothing compares to the power of an experienced teacher interested in fighting the good fight.

My first year.

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