I read this article in the NYT published today and I think it reflects many of the issues discussed in this subreddit: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/20/magazine/ny-public-schools-black-students-segregation.html Unpaywalled: https://archive.is/20260920095626/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/20/magazine/ny-public-schools-black-students-segregation.html Some quotes: 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. Finally, a few days before school let out for winter break, I received a folder in Najya’s backpack with the math assignments I had been requesting since our conference. Once I tucked her into bed, I sat at my dining room table and scanned one page, then another and another. None of them were graded. I started checking Najya’s work and discovered most of her answers were wrong. Najya believed herself to be good at math — it was her favorite subject. But now I understood she thought she was correctly solving all her problems because her teacher was not checking her work. Similarly, Najya’s writing assignments were rife with uncorrected punctuation, capitalization and grammar errors. I sat there silently for several minutes, conjuring the image of my little girl thinking she was soaring in class when she was failing, and my devastation morphed into hot rage. The day school reopened, Faraji and I went to the principal’s office and sat there until she found time to meet with us. That’s when the principal finally began to take us seriously and, some days later, mandated a system for assessing students and communicating with parents. By then, we had already started private tutoring for Najya, and we also got the superintendent of our district involved. He promised remediation for the entire class, including adding an additional teacher for daily small-group instruction. Still, with half the academic year over, it all felt like too little, too late. I explained our decision over and over, but my answers never satisfied her. “But what did it do?” she’d ask. “Putting me in this school didn’t change anything. I was not trying to be in this type of environment. It makes no sense.” It was draining, but I respected her growing independence and admired the way she was advocating for herself. Yet it also unsettled me. Her adamance started to seed a fear that if I continued to force her to live my values, it could haunt our relationship far past her school-aged years. That concern led me to a wrenching decision. I waited until the next time she brought it up, and then I told her I was going to let her choose her own high school. “Really?” Najya seemed incredulous, even suspicious maybe, peering at me from the corners of her eyes. I laid out what it meant. I had made the choices for her education based on my values. She was old enough now to decide what her own values would be. I would give her absolute autonomy, with the exception that she had to choose a public school. She would research them, she would decide which ones she wanted us to visit and she would choose where she applied. A few days later, Najya handed me a list. Her top schools were heavily white and screened their students, the type of public schools I had spent my career arguing against. EDIT: Another interesting piece of information about this story is that the school she sent her daughter to, PS 307, has a budget of $52,000 per pupil per year. submitted by /u/AeneasKurtz [link] [comments]
AI summary coming soon. Read the full article at the source below.
