I could feel her looking at me. Her body slung in adolescent impertinence against the front passenger seat door, shoulders turned so she could face me fully. Usually when I picked up my daughter, Najya, from middle school, she’d tumble into the car and bombard me with the day’s escapades, chattering nonstop about her friend group or complaints about an annoying teacher or her wonder at the test she’d aced despite thinking she’d failed it. But not this day.
“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked.
My hands tightened on the steering wheel as I worked to keep my face neutral, buying a few moments to gather my thoughts.
As they neared the end of her seventh-grade year, Najya and her closest girlfriends were thinking about their futures. Honors students, they searched the nation’s top colleges, and that led to a curiosity about New York City’s highest ranked public high schools. Wondering about their chances of getting in, they decided to Google their own school and its ratings. And in doing so, Najya and her tight trio of Black girl nerds confronted not only the reality of the city’s deeply segregated educational landscape but also that the Brooklyn school they all attended existed firmly on the wrong side of the divide.
By dismissal time, Najya’s shock had turned to boiling, and the seatbelt had barely clicked before she was confronting me. I had braced myself for this moment, spent nearly a decade expecting it, preparing for it. When Najya was entering pre-K, my husband, Faraji, and I decided to send her to the type of school that wealthier families with choices uniformly avoid — one that is low-income and mostly Black. Our decision had been informed by values shaped by my years of reporting on the enduring and too often seemingly hopeless battle for school integration.
I’ve lost count of how many times I have written some version of this sentence: Nationally, a Black student is less likely to have teachers who are qualified and experienced, and to be offered rigorous and college-prep curriculum, to have up-to-date technology and attend school in modernized facilities.
In New York, a combination of housing segregation and “academic” sorting, called school choice, that begins as early as pre-K means most Black students — even middle-class ones — are forced to attend racially segregated schools with high rates of poverty. And nationally, schools in predominantly nonwhite districts receive $23 billion less in annual funding than their heavily white counterparts, according to a 2019 analysis by EdBuild. In everything that we measure, these schools have less, even though the economically struggling student bodies they serve need more. And so the test scores and poor academic performance that typify these schools reflect not just the disadvantage of the students but, more essentially, the disadvantage of the schools.
New York City is a diverse school system — there is no racial majority among its student body — and yet Black children remain the most segregated of all student groups. As the U.C.L.A. Civil Rights Project describes it, New York “is a four-race city where white and Asian students, on average, attend middle-class, predominantly white and Asian schools and Black and Latino students are increasingly going to school with each other in schools where poverty is the norm.”
Black parents put their children forth as plaintiffs in lawsuits argued by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund that ultimately ended legal segregation in the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. When the federal government refused to enforce the new law of the land, Black parents sent their children to wade through white mobs to enter white-only schools, pushing their doors open for the rest of us.
And yet decades later, integration now exists for a minority of Black children — usually those born to families like ours who have the money to pay for private schools or live in tonier ZIP codes zoned to heavily white public schools, or who can pay for tutoring that allows their children, from a very young age, to test into programs for “gifted” students. Most Black students, however, languish in the type of schools that the law was supposed to have eradicated.
So, like the generations of Black parents who came before us, Faraji and I felt an obligation to make educational decisions based on the collective good and not just our individual advantage. New York is considered one of this nation’s most liberal cities, while operating a school system that is among the most racially segregated. This segregation exists because policymakers and affluent parents — even those who profess a belief in integration and equality, — shed their advocacy at the schoolhouse door and refuse to take or support any substantial action to integrate the city’s schools. Faraji and I decided that our role in this struggle meant upending the status quo and sending our child not to a wealthy white school but to a poor Black one.
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.
But my child just shook her head, her face a mask of disbelief, and something else: betrayal.
“So you had money to send me to one of the best schools, and you chose not to?” she said, hurling her words. “Because other kids are disadvantaged, you didn’t want to put me in a great school?”
Najya was asking what I’d accomplished by not choosing the “best” school for her. And the honest answer is, I don’t know. When it comes to the choices my husband and I have made about public education, these days I feel that I failed both my values and my child.
That must have been heartbreaking to hear as a parent and a shitty and confusing discovery for the child. I hope with time she’ll understand and maybe even be thankful for who the experience shaped her into vs who she would have been in an elite private school.
My k-9 school trajectory was non-standard and I was upset as a kid that it prevented me from feeling ‘normal’ and fitting in, but now I’m thankful to be a little bit out of step with the status quo. I feel it gave me a perspective that I value which I would have had to work hard to see (or may have been impossible to see) from the standpoint of most of my classmates.
