re: Woke NYT writer sent kid to troubled schools as a sacrifice, it did not go as planned

I read the piece, She doesn't even know what she was hoping to to accomplish for her daughter by sending her there.

quote:

---

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. And more than that, we believed strongly that if families like ours went into schools like this one, it would challenge other families with similar values to do the same.
After much internal debate in our household, in 2015, we enrolled Najya in pre-K at Public School 307, a segregated, high-poverty school across from the Farragut housing projects in Brooklyn.

---

I wonder how much money they ended up donating to the school. She coincidentally doesn't discuss ever actually donating.

quote:

---

Najya adored school and seemed to be reading and doing math on grade level.

---

seemed. There are ways to measure this.

quote:

---

But this did not, I suppose could not, last. 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.
Toward the end of first grade, Najya started sometimes saying she didn’t like her school and complaining how chaotic it was at lunch. I decided to visit during the lunch period and was shocked by what I saw. Najya’s class and another class were sitting at their tables in the cafeteria with no lunch and no adult supervision. Children were running wild, chasing, hitting and pushing each other while the teacher’s aides and cafeteria workers stood by looking bored.
Several times, I had to instruct children to stop striking each other and to sit down, at one point physically pulling two boys apart. When I asked one of the aides why the children weren’t being supervised, she told me the lunch period was short-staffed. After I sat back down with Najya, she told me, “It’s always like this, and that’s why I don’t want to go to this school.”
It was not the children that horrified me — kids of all incomes are rambunctious at lunchtime. It was the callous disregard of the adults. Students respond to the high or low expectations of institutions and the grown-ups who operate them, and it was clear that these children were getting the message.
After lunch, I headed straight to the principal’s office to meet with her. Afterward, I sent a lengthy email about what I had witnessed and demanded the unsafe lunchroom conditions be addressed. In what had become a pattern when we raised concerns, it took several days before the principal responded and several more weeks of emails and calls before she announced a plan to address the lunchtime issues.

---

How she could leave her child there and continue to send there after witnessing this is absolutely inexcusable.

quote:

---

But fourth grade was the worst year. At the first parent-teacher conference in November 2019, Najya’s teachers told us that she was not performing on grade-level in any of her academic subjects and that her assessment given at the start of the school year had shown she was not a proficient reader. We were perplexed. Najya was always a good student, and her past reading assessments were always at or above grade level.

---

How could she NOT know that her kid was reading below grade level? Why wouldn't you make your kid read books at home? Or bring her to the library and notice which books she gravitated to? This is a failure of the parents on so many levels. Even moreso given their own educational accomplishments.

quote:

---

But our experience at P.S. 307 exposed the fallacy that caring families are more important than competent teachers.

---

DOES ANYONE ACTUALLY BELIEVE THIS?

quote:

---

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.
On the phone, I knew if I tried to brush off Najya’s question, she would simply keep asking. She’s like me in that way: relentless. So I told her that I’d been reading through the old emails and that I was feeling really sad that she had gone through so much and that I had not listened more to her. “I feel like you got cheated,” I said. “And I’m sorry for that.”

---

This reads so performative. I can't believe this woman has the audacity to pat herself on the back for coming to the realization that she FAILED HER ONLY CHILD.

I don't think she's deserving of credit for "walking the walk." She's a bad parent. She knew her kid went to school at a zoo and kept her there anyway. She gets no credit from me.

quote:

---

We decided to set up a meeting with Paige so Najya could express her concerns. She told Paige that her teachers often rewarded, in her words, the “problem” students for doing the littlest things right; meanwhile, the students who always did what they were supposed to went unrecognized.

---

100% chance this moron has pushed for "equitable discipline" at some point in her career.

quote:

---

It's part of the school experience. Sports and dances aren't educational, either.

---

Black History Month is a waste of educational opportunity. There isn't enough to talk about to make it worth a full month for 13 straight years.

Here's more stupid crap from the author:

quote:

---

Located in a wealthy, gentrified neighborhood, it shares space in its building with three lower-income, predominantly Black high schools.

---

She just described a school that isn't segregated.

quote:

---

She knew her kid went to school at a zoo and kept her there anyway.

---

Plus, though she frames everything in terms of "Blackness," her own 1°/2° school experience was FAR more akin to her daughter's choice of HS than the underperforming institutions she'd send the girl to previously. NHJ was bused to white schools, based on the fact they were deemed better opportunities for her.

My question is, given NHJ's pull as a woke "journalist" and author, why was she dealing with unresponsive people at the school level.

What she is describing (her intellectually capable daughter being dumbed down institutionally) is an educational atrocity. She could have had district and/or state officials coming down on those school officials like piranha to a meal. But she didn't. Why? Because in the case of the teachers/administrators involved, she was more accepting of predictable and repetitive underperformance than she was of catalyzing consequential discipline for it. I'd suggest, had those horribly underperforming individuals been of different skin color, NHJ would have tattooed them with charges of racism. She'd have done the same with anyone defending them.

Yet, what is her inaction other than a defacto defense.

She is a nasty imbecile.

quote:

---

First of all, if my kids are the top scoring in the class, they are in the wrong school. I want them surrounded by smarter people and have clawed and paid my way into some of the best in my city.

---

Oh. I've never actually asked how they perform against the other kids in their classes. I hope teachers wouldn't be sharing student rankings in 2nd and 4th grade. But kudos to you for ensuring that your kids perform worse than the other kids in their classes, I guess.

quote:

---

I don't need them to know how to interact with people not like them. I need them to have well paying jobs so they can afford to send their own kids to school since they aren't gay, trans or black.

And secondly, you sound kind of pompous. Where are we in society that we've decided that black and brown people are intrinsically "good" by virtue of their skin??? Why are we bragging about minimizing exposure to white people?

---

quote:

---

This is child neglect and abuse. Children services should remove her.

---

Yeah, take her child on the grounds that she sent her to a government run school. I’d love to see the legal arguments.

quote:

---

I don't think she's deserving of credit for "walking the walk." She's a bad parent. She knew her kid went to school at a zoo and kept her there anyway. She gets no credit from me.

---

The correct answer.

quote:

---

Stalin said no and his son died in a POW camp.

Damn - that's just cold.

---

It should be noted his son committed suicide by running at the electric fencing while begging the guards to shoot him, a request they obliged once he started frying.

This was Bozo 8 years ago

Loading Twitter/X Embed...
If tweet fails to load, click here.

I guess she found out.