Childhood and Education #22: Voice Without Exit

Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote a brave self-critical piece in The New York Times, centrally about how she intentionally sent her daughter to a well-funded but failing school, PS 307, in the hopes of using voice to improve it, and how that utterly failed her daughter and failed to impact the school. Ultimately her daughter recovers, but we see a completely broken system that is unresponsive to internal voice, and until now she made no attempt to blow the whistle and utilize her professional position to do so. The whole incident illustrates not only how messed up so many of our schools are despite abundant funding, it also raises the question of what the schools are even for. If her daughter can fully recover from severe deficits and be getting As and Bs at a challenging school within a year, what are the first eight years of school for? How much of the schools, grades and tests are fake? Can we somehow do better? Table of Contents • New York City PS 307. • Nikole Knew And Had Exit Ramps. • PS 307 Is Fraudulent And Indifferent. • Moving In Unison. • A Good School. • What Were Elementary and Middle School Even For? • The Project Was Ideological. • Null Hypothesis Watch. • School Spending. • Costs Are Not Benefits. • Fire The Bad Teachers And Hire And Retain Better Ones. • Teachers Unions Are Not Beating The Rumors. • Death Spiral. • Another One Bites The Dust. • Where To? • Public Schools Cost A Lot Of Money. • Schools Can Fail In Many Ways. • Results. • Grades. • They Nerfed AP Tests. • What Happens Without Academic Standards. • The Two Big Scandals. • Alpha School. New York City PS 307 Nikole sent her daughter Najya to PS 307 entirely by her own choice. She felt, by her own description, an obligation to her sense of the common good at the expense of her daughter. Her daughter began struggling. Tutors were brought in. Najya’s academics kept struggling. Then after many years her daughter looked up the school’s test scores, and oh boy was she pissed off. And this was