Discrimination in the Name of Diversity

By Christian Schneider

Thursday, October 22, 2026

 

Nearly a decade ago, Maryland’s largest public school district decided it had a problem. It didn’t involve student safety or plummeting test scores. It was that too many Asian-American children were being accepted into its magnet program for exceptional middle-schoolers.

 

This week, the U.S. Supreme Court accepted a case that will decide whether Montgomery County Public Schools’ plan to rebalance the racial makeup of the program violated the Constitution’s promise of equal protection under the law.

 

By the 2013–14 school year, half the students accepted to the county’s four magnet programs were Asian-American. To “correct” this “problem,” the district commissioned a study to see how it could begin to de-emphasize traditional criteria in an effort to grant more spots to black and Hispanic children.

 

Released in 2016, the report concluded that there were “significant racial and socioeconomic disparities in the enrollment and acceptance rates to academically selective programs, which suggest a need to revise the criteria and process used to select students for these programs.” The report suggested “broadening the definition of gifted” to include “non-cognitive measures such as motivation and persistence, using group-specific norms that benchmark student performance against school peers with comparable backgrounds,” and “offering automatic admissions for students in the top 5-10% of sending elementary or middle schools.”

 

The motivations in seeking these changes were not subtle. A board member expressed concern over the “substantial underrepresentation of students of color” in the magnet programs and expressed hope that “programs will become more diverse and be more reflective of our student population.”

 

As is the case with college admissions, concerns over the inclusion of “students of color” do not apply to Asian Americans, a group once largely barred from entering the United States by the federal government. And when the Montgomery County school district began running field tests using their new criteria, they got the result they wanted. At one magnet school, the percentage of Asian-American students in the program dropped from 45.6 percent to 31.5 percent, while the proportion of black, Hispanic, and white students all rose (by 5.3 percent, 8.3 percent, and 2.7 percent, respectively). At another school, the percentage of Asian-American participants dropped by 27.9 percent and at another by 15.4 percent.

 

Asian-American parents noticed. So did the school board, whose complaint was that the field test hadn’t gone far enough. One member had already warned colleagues that “if we expand blindly we are going to end up in the same place ten years from now,” because “privilege is not going to go away.” In Montgomery County, apparently, “privilege” is what you call a ten-year-old who aces a cognitive abilities test.

 

The mechanics were clever, in the way a pickpocket is clever. The new field test’s “peer grouping” rule made it harder for kids at high-performing elementary schools to win seats. A “local norming” provision scrapped the countywide yardstick and graded children on their own school’s curve. Asian-American families in the county are clustered in a handful of high-performing schools, so the district never had to write the word “Asian” anywhere. Geography did the sorting.

 

When a group of mostly Asian parents sued in 2020, the district swapped the field test for a lottery open to students scoring in the 85th percentile on a standardized assessment. Those percentiles were locally normed, too. Data the parents later obtained showed that kids at schools with the lowest rates of poverty among their school population needed to score in the 93rd percentile countywide to qualify for the STEM lottery. Kids at the county’s highest-poverty schools needed to score in the 60th percentile. This made it even harder for Asian-American students to qualify for the STEM programs than under the field test.

 

Yet the parents lost, and not because a court found that the district had done no wrong. The Fourth Circuit had adopted a rule in a similar case involving Virginia’s Thomas Jefferson High School. Under it, a plaintiff can’t even raise discriminatory intent unless the targeted group’s share of admissions falls below its share of the applicant pool. Asian-American kids didn’t fall below that line, so the case was tossed. Intent never entered the room.

 

The current legal standard is therefore that a school board can set out to shrink a racial group’s numbers, succeed, and still walk away clean, so long as the victims stubbornly keep outperforming everyone else. Justice Samuel Alito, dissenting when the court passed on the Thomas Jefferson case, said the rule “effectively licenses official actors to discriminate against any racial group with impunity as long as that group continues to perform at a higher rate than other groups.” The crime is excused because the victims were too good at surviving it.

 

The circuit courts have now split. The First and Fourth apply the Thomas Jefferson standard. The Second and Third, in cases from New York and Philadelphia, have rejected it. So a Maryland sixth-grader’s equal protection now depends on which side of the Mason-Dixon line her parents bought a house.

 

The Supreme Court’s own precedent says this can’t stand. In the 2023 case Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that “eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it,” and that what cannot be done directly through racial quotas cannot be done indirectly through ostensibly race-neutral programs with disparate impacts. Sixteen years earlier, he put it more simply: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

 

G. K. Chesterton observed that America is the only nation founded on a creed. That creed’s first article is that government treats citizens as individuals, not as tokens of a group. Montgomery County wanted its magnet programs to “reflect the community.” The Constitution asks for something harder: that the community treat each child as a person. The justices now get to remind the district which one is the law.

Xi’s Invitation to American Students Comes with Dangerous Strings Attached

By Christopher Nye

Sunday, October 18, 2026

 

At his White House welcoming ceremony last month, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced that China would invite 100,000 young Americans to study there over the course of five years. Daniel Di Martino of the Manhattan Institute wrote on X that the program is “clearly intended to indoctrinate young Americans in China,” and a column in The Hill warned of hostage-taking and stolen lab research. These worries are reasonable but may never materialize. As for indoctrination, many Americans who have lived in China come home more critical of Beijing than when they left; Matt Pottinger reported from China for seven years before helping shape the first Trump administration’s China policy.

 

Our concern should be the data these students will unwittingly hand over through their phones. Beijing will likely keep it for years and use it as it pleases. In practice, nearly every student will need WeChat, which New York University Shanghai’s IT guide calls “an essential communication and payment platform in China.” Some programs require it outright: A Tsinghua summer program tells students to install the app and join its WeChat group before arrival because “almost all course materials and information” go out through it. WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, and Gmail are blocked in China, and few people carry cash, so students use WeChat for cabs, meals, and class chats.

 

In 2024, after reverse-engineering the proprietary protocol of Tencent, WeChat’s Chinese owner, the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab confirmed that WeChat lacks end-to-end encryption and that “WeChat’s servers can and do decrypt and read each transmitted message.” A 2023 Citizen Lab study found that activity in WeChat’s mini programs — used for everything from doctor visits to campus paperwork — is automatically logged and sent to Tencent, with no way to opt out.

 

Under Article 28 of China’s Cybersecurity Law, network operators must provide “technical support and assistance” to public and state security organs, and Article 7 of the National Intelligence Law requires every organization to assist state intelligence work and keep it secret. Tencent is bound by both. China’s police, a term covering both public security and state security agencies, need no judge’s warrant to demand data, and companies have no formal way to refuse.

 

In 2019, Gao Zhigang of Taiyuan forwarded a video to a friend in the United States and was jailed, sentenced to ten months for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” Radio Free Asia, which reviewed the case file, reported that documents in the evidence showed China’s internet regulator and the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda department monitoring WeChat chats directly. Gao said he had deleted the video right after sending it and that the police screenshots could not have come from his phone. The chat he deleted still ended up in court as evidence.

 

Tencent’s help center says an account tied to a mainland phone number counts as a Weixin account, the domestic version of WeChat, and is subject to Chinese terms and privacy rules. Students usually buy a real-name-registered Chinese SIM card in their first week, and NYU Shanghai tells those who buy one through the university to “register for both WeChat and Alipay on-site before leaving,” which puts them on Weixin from day one.

 

Anything beyond monitored chat, starting with payments, requires uploading a passport and scanning one’s face. So does buying the SIM card, under a December 2019 rule, and at most of China’s top universities students scan their faces again at campus gates, dorms, and libraries.

 

The Citizen Lab has found that accounts first registered with a mainland number stay under China’s censorship rules even after switching to a foreign number, so a U.S. number back home does little. Most students keep WeChat anyway, since it is often their only link to friends and host families in China.

 

The State Department’s China travel advisory tells Americans using Chinese apps to assume China’s security services can read their messages “even when you are in another country, including the United States.” It adds that China “has detained people even when they sent these messages outside of China.”

 

Young Americans willing to learn Chinese and live in China are the ones most likely, a decade from now, to work on China at the State Department, in intelligence and the military, on Capitol Hill, and in newsrooms. By the time they are 20, Beijing could have a file on each of them — a passport-verified identity, a face, the people they met, where they went, what they bought, and what they said in private. As long as they use WeChat, even once they’re back in the U.S., the file keeps growing. That standing access is the most dangerous part, since how Beijing might use it later is hard to predict.

 

In 2004, Glenn Duffie Shriver, a Michigan student who had studied in Shanghai, answered an ad for papers on U.S.–China relations. Chinese intelligence officers cultivated him, paid him more than $70,000, and steered him to apply to the State Department and the CIA. When he was found out, he got four years in prison, and the FBI turned his case into a cautionary film for students abroad. Finding and developing a Shriver once took time, ads, and dinners; through WeChat, the Ministry of State Security can now size up these students and spot the next one with little effort.

 

In the 2018–19 academic year, 11,639 American students earned credit in China; in 2023–24, only 1,749 did. Those still willing to go deserve protection, as do the Chinese classmates on the other end of their chats, who face greater danger. Guarding against Beijing should not mean treating Chinese Americans or Chinese students here as suspects. The Justice Department’s China Initiative against espionage and technology theft, launched in 2018, ended up targeting scholars of Chinese descent and was shut down in 2022.

 

A spare phone protects only what is on a student’s regular one, since the WeChat account and contacts live on Tencent’s servers. Deleting the account at home retrieves no uploaded records or face data and cuts the student off from friends in China. Students can do little else on their own; the rest falls to Washington.

 

The simplest step is for the State Department to tell families the truth by moving its warning about Chinese apps off a little-read web page and into every exchange program’s pre-departure material. A parents’ group counts about 80 universities and more than 20 K-12 schools in Beijing-funded programs, and every family involved should see that warning before a student leaves.

 

Reining in WeChat at home will be harder but is necessary. Trump’s August 2020 ban on the app was blocked by a federal judge on free-speech grounds after users sued, and Biden later revoked it. Congress has since supplied a sturdier tool: the 2024 law aimed at TikTok. The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, unanimously upheld by the Supreme Court in January 2025, lets the president designate foreign-adversary-controlled apps with more than a million monthly U.S. users by determining that they pose a significant threat to national security. Trump should make that determination for WeChat and force Tencent to sell its U.S. business or leave the American market. Either outcome would limit Beijing’s free hand with Americans’ data.

 

At the White House, Xi said the hope of U.S.–China relations lies with the people and its future with the young. Beijing takes that line seriously — seriously enough that the United States had to stop recruiting exchange participants in China after Chinese authorities harassed, threatened, and in some cases arrested them. As up to 100,000 young Americans arrive over the next five years, Beijing will presumably take what is on their phones just as seriously. Washington should act before the first of them board their flights.

What James Talarico Believes

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, October 16, 2026

 

I have come to believe that James Talarico, the Democrats’ Senate candidate in Texas, is generally sincere in his beliefs. I trust he won’t take that as a compliment.

 

Like most admirers of Donald Trump, like teachers who believe they are underpaid, like people who believe that the sun is a fiery chariot driven by Apollo, etc., Talarico sincerely believes things that are not true.

 

In contrast, I do not think that the new White House press secretary, Katie Zacharia, sincerely believes that the Democratic Party is secretly a cabal of cannibalistic pedophiles, though she has trafficked in that kind of conspiracy kookery. Like most people close to Trump, Zacharia is fundamentally dishonest: For example, her main job before this was pretending to be a lawyer, which she isn’t, even though she calls herself one. But I think she sincerely believes … something.

 

Let me explain what I mean.

 

C.S. Lewis argued that most sin is rooted in some good impulse gone bad, and, if one were in a charitable mood, one might observe that this applies to conspiratorial thinking, too. It is rooted in a moral impulse that has been perverted. There are very few genuine nihilists in the world—even the Marquis de Sade was a closet humanitarian—and ordinary people have a powerful need to live in a world that makes moral sense to them. The moral sensibility, particularly when expressed as the sense of “fairness,” easily overpowers such lesser powers as critical thinking and the appreciation for facts and the context of facts. That creates a kind of continuum of morally charged fiction, with conspiracy theories fitting in somewhere between traditional supernatural mythology (the world is the way it is because the gods make it so) and all of those just-so non-facts that “everybody knows.”

 

The notion that public school teachers are underpaid, for example, is an unquestioned “fact” for many Americans, something “everybody knows.” Earlier in the week, I interviewed a Democratic candidate for public office who is an elementary school teacher, and the inevitable observation about teachers’ supposedly low pay came up. We have long had pretty good economic indicators that consistently show that teachers are not underpaid at all, that their total compensation is equal to or a bit better than other workers with similar educational backgrounds, skill levels, time in the workforce, hours worked, etc. That is why you do not see a lot of teachers leaving the public schools for better-paying jobs in the private sector: In fact, census data shows that public school teachers who leave for private sector jobs typically earn a bit less, while private sector workers who take jobs in the public schools generally earn a bit more than they had been.

 

Good schools are an excellent thing to have, but our public school system is far from uniformly excellent, and even the best bits of it are part of a vast patronage network that exists as a kind of supplementary welfare state for people who tend to be Democratic voters. The myth that teachers are underpaid is a useful fiction for the people who benefit from that patronage system and, more importantly, for those who control it—but that does not mean, necessarily, that they do not sincerely believe that teachers are underpaid. Most do believe it, and they will fight for the lie: Show them the economic evidence and they will retreat into metaphysics and the vague morality of fairness. It is true because it must be true for their world to be morally legible.

 

James Talarico’s belief that U.S. politics is dominated by shadowy billionaires is a fiction, too, one that is closer to a conspiracy theory but also one that has something in common both with those “everybody knows” facts as well as with the loopier aspects of his daft progressive Presbyterianism. He believes it—he also believes that he wants to be a senator, and he probably has convinced himself that his reasons for wanting that are moral and patriotic if not downright heroic. That surely is a pleasurable thing to believe, and beliefs that provide pleasure are hard to shake, which is one reason conspiracy theories are so common and persistent.

 

Talarico is wrong, of course. The notion that our public policy would look radically different if not for the efforts of a handful of plutocrats does not stand up to rigorous analysis and also has some common-sense challenges, including the fact that billionaires do not share a single set of political views (there are right-wing billionaires, left-wing billionaires, centrist billionaires, apolitical billionaires, etc.) among themselves, the fact that the political views of the wealthy are not very different on average from those of the less wealthy, etc. As the economist Bryan Caplan observes, both high-income and low-income Americans generally support a higher minimum wage, to take one example, though support is stronger among the low-income. The views of the wealthy and the non-wealthy are generally similar when it comes to immigration, abortion, crime, etc. As Caplan reports, the preferences of the wealthy do override the preferences of the low-income in some areas where there is persistent income-correlated disagreement, the effect of which historically has been public policy that is moderately more liberal than the average American would like when it comes to issues such as free speech and gay rights. The average American, unfortunately, is a little bit of an authoritarian bigot. Americans did not elect Donald Trump twice because some nefarious rich guy put mind-control serum in their cornflakes—Americans like this stuff, and they reliably vote for it.  

 

Point out the reality of how money actually works in our politics and the conversation typically takes a markedly conspiratorial turn: “Well, yes, but what about this billionaire?” Take your issue—the deficit, fentanyl abuse, immigration, whatever—and somebody will have a “this billionaire” to blame for it. Sometimes, the two sides will settle on the same billionaire, or the same set of billionaires, as when both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders suggested that the Koch brothers were behind Washington’s lax immigration enforcement.

 

Talarico has hopped on the bandwagon opposing data centers, the supposed problems of which he blames on—surprise!—shadowy billionaires, “dark money” and all that sinister-sounding stuff. The thing is, we know a good deal about who owns data centers. The biggest operator of data centers in the world is Amazon Web Services, and while Jeff Bezos sometimes insists on acting like a sad ersatz Bond villain, there is no shadowy billionaire behind AWS.

 

Who is behind AWS? Teachers, among others.

 

Bezos owns a little more than 8 percent of Amazon, which is a publicly traded company whose shares are owned mainly by big institutional investors, many of which manage the generous retirement funds of those supposedly underpaid teachers. That’s true across the tech world: To take a prominent example, the California teachers’ retirement system is a substantial shareholder in Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, and Meta, among others. Through shareholder activism and ordinary business pressure, it exercises enormous influence over the operations of the firms in which it is invested and does so in a public way, for instance forcing Meta to adopt changes to its corporate governance. Ask Mark Zuckerberg how he enjoyed getting slapped around by the California teachers.

 

The most reliable antidote to the myth that billionaires control the government is watching one try. Do you really think that public policy in the United States today much reflects the preferences of Charles Koch or George Soros? (Or, somehow, both?) Or do you think that we have a gigantic debt problem because ordinary Americans childishly demand high levels of government spending and low taxes simultaneously?

 

If your view is that the world is the way it is because of bad people doing bad things behind closed doors—and that is what James Talarico says he believes—then your Weltanschauung has more in common with the imbecilic trash that despicable lowlifes such as Katie Zacharia traffic in than you might be comfortable admitting. What you have is simply a more respectable conspiracy theory.

 

To try to liberate ourselves from such things is part of the hard work of responsible citizenship. If the Almighty Nonbinary blesses his efforts and Talarico is successful in seeing off the contemptible Ken Paxton, then I hope he will take the opportunity—being useless, senators have a good deal of leisure time—to do the work.  

On the Education of Children

By Hannah Anderson

Friday, September 25, 2026

 

Over the course of their educational journey, my children have attended public school and private school and have been homeschooled. This means that I’ve made and agonized over more decisions about their education than I care to remember. So, when I read Nikole Hannah-Jones’ essay on the struggle to make educational choices for her daughter in keeping with her values, I immediately empathized.

 

Hannah-Jones, a long-form journalist with the New York Times whose work focuses on school and housing segregation, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning essayist and founder of the 1619 Project. But when reflecting on her own daughter’s journey over the last 10 years, Hannah-Jones confesses regret, or at least uncertainty, about her choice to keep her daughter in a struggling New York City public school as an act of solidarity with other black families—a choice she named as an attempt to “challenge New York City’s separate and unequal school system.”

 

The essay raised more universal questions, though, ones I’ve asked myself multiple times over the years: What responsibility do I have to my child? What does it mean to stand in solidarity with my neighbors? Would removing a child from public school mean I was abandoning those neighbors and betraying my own values of community? Unlike Hannah-Jones, I am a white mother in broader Appalachia who chose to remove my son from our local public school and enroll him in a prep school on financial aid. I made this decision, in part, because I became convinced that fighting for my own child’s education was not a self-serving decision but was, in fact, my moral duty within my community.

 

Still, the decision was not obvious. My son spent his elementary years very happily in a Title I school that was the heartbeat of our rural working-class community. His father and I were both heavily involved, volunteering in different capacities, serving on the PTA, and supporting a program that organized shelf-stable food for kids at risk for hunger. By middle school, however, the kids in our community transitioned to a county school about a 40-minute bus ride away. That’s when the cracks began to show.

 

The distance meant that we were less involved, both as parents and as community members. Grade size more than quadrupled, and days were spent almost exclusively indoors in an industrial-sized school building. By sixth grade, my son had also been diagnosed with Level 1 autism (a reality we overlooked, in part, because the thick community of his elementary school had supported him in ways that weren’t obvious until they were absent). Halfway through the year, he began coming home in tears, exhausted and anxious. The classwork itself wasn’t the problem. If anything, it was that the classwork was not sufficiently stimulating to justify what was required to participate in the educational process. He was leaving home early, coming home late, expending tremendous attention and  energy to cope with overcrowded hallways, windowless rooms, and sensory overload—all while his mind craved academic challenge.  He didn’t have words for it in this way, but he was quickly becoming discouraged and disengaged, disillusioned with a system that asked more of him than it seemed to be returning. He was a bright kid for whom the physical experience of school was very difficult, and if it was going to be hard, he needed a return on his investment to believe that it was worth his effort.

 

To be clear, I don’t think the school, teachers, or administration failed my son, but I do think the system as it was set up couldn’t meet his needs. I was looking at a kid whose education and love of learning were at risk. I knew I could force him to continue in the environment with promises that it would get better and that he just had to find the way through. But I wasn’t sure I believed that myself. I wasn’t confident the system would be adaptive enough to ensure that he didn’t slip through the cracks.

 

So, as a mother, I faced a dilemma not unlike Hannah-Jones’. At some instinctual level, I knew that removing my son from the public school meant more than switching educational settings. It was, in a way, removing him from a particular community—the “public” in public school. It meant charting a course that would separate him from our neighbors, and after so many years of being invested in our small community, that truth made me sick to my stomach. I knew that removing him from the system that almost everyone else participated in meant setting him on a trajectory away from them.

 

But then, wasn’t that already happening? When I put him on the bus every morning and let it take him to a school in a different part of the county, wasn’t he already leaving? Wasn’t part of the problem a crisis of community—that his community wasn’t reciprocal, wasn’t able to show up for him as much as he showed up for it?

 

Over the next few months, I scoured the internet for options. Homeschooling wasn’t possible for different reasons, and I wasn’t confident that online schooling could adequately meet his needs. I was open to the idea of a small faith-based school, but finances were prohibitive. Then I clicked on the most elite private school in the broader region, only to discover that it offered heavily discounted tuition for those who qualified. We started the process of admissions, and my son began seventh grade in a uniform.

 

I am happy to say that he thrived in his new school in much the same way he had thrived in elementary school. The smaller class size meant more dedicated attention. Students had a form of recess through middle school, so he was regularly outside and active. Because the school had an open-roster policy, he was able to be involved in team sports and discovered a love of running. He sang in choir, spent five years in Latin, and participated in Model U.N. School was still challenging, but his investment was rewarded, and that made all the difference. By the time he graduated, his interest in physics had led to the establishment of a new level of mathematics instruction—despite his being the only student in his class who wanted to study multivariable calculus.

 

While the school was racially, religiously, and ethnically diverse, it was not economically diverse—or at least, not visibly so. My son, who had once sat in class with the children of truckers and waitstaff, was suddenly surrounded by the children of doctors and lawyers. I distinctly remember the moment I realized that the children of our congressman were on my son’s cross-country team. The school also hosted a boarding program for international students, and some of my son’s peers were dropped off by private drivers.

 

The culture shock was dizzying. To this day, my son lives between worlds, never fully fitting in either the working-class community of his early education or the elite world of his prep school classmates. But the complexity of his experience also means that he is very sensitive to wealth inequality, having seen both sides of the spectrum. He also knows the truth about education in the United States—a truth that, ironically enough, can be obscured in the public school system.

 

The promise of public education is that every child has a right to learn and that democracy depends on an educated populace. The reality, however, is that the education a child receives in the United States is highly dependent on ZIP code. So much so that real estate agents sell homes partially based on “great schools.” These fault lines are predicated by a complicated history of zoning, redistricting, redlining, and gentrification. We speak of universal public education, but it is a parochial system with location too often being the primary factor in whether a school can succeed in the mission of educating every child. With a private school, that pretense is stripped away, and the cold, hard facts of the matter become clear: In the United States, education is deeply tied to wealth.

 

Perhaps it was my relative lack of resources or keen sense of powerlessness that made the stakes clear for me in a way they weren’t initially clear for Hannah-Jones. I could only afford to pay a certain amount to improve my son’s education, but I also couldn’t afford to leave him where he was. The question wasn’t whether he could survive in public school, but what survival would cost him and whether it was fair to ask him to sacrifice for a system that couldn’t reward his sacrifice. More to the point, keeping him in his public school would have had negligible effect on a problem of this scale, but it would have had a significant effect on him.

 

So, when the opportunity came, I took it.

 

It was humbling to accept that the challenges were bigger than my own will or ideals. But it was also clear that if I could not improve educational opportunities for other children, I could improve them for one child. And in some strange way, I became convinced that failing to do that would be a greater moral risk than placing him in an elite school where the inequality of the American educational system was on full display. Because at the end of the day, I was the one responsible for my son.

 

Our children are not concepts, projects, or the manifestation of our ideals. They are living souls whose first community is the family to whom they have been entrusted. Correspondingly, what distinguishes a parent-child relationship from other relationships in a community is that the primary responsibility for a child’s well-being falls on parents. This does not mean that I don’t have a responsibility to my neighbor’s children or that I can harm my neighbor’s child in order to care for my own. It simply means that when responsibilities to your child and community do not neatly align, the question of seeking a child’s well-being should not be cast in opposition to being a faithful member of a community.

 

Being a faithful member of a community includes being a faithful parent to my own child. It is also undoubtedly more than this. But at a basic level, it was no one else’s job to know my child, to see what he needed, and to move heaven and earth to make sure that he got it. It was my job to advocate for him as an individual. It was not the system’s job. It was not my neighbor’s job. It was mine—and if I failed to do it, I would fail my responsibilities to both him and my community. After all, part of my job as a parent is to care for my child in the ways I can and not pass that responsibility off to other members of the community. And hopefully, by meeting my son’s needs now, he will have a better chance of maturing into a faithful member in his own right, contributing his particular gifts and abilities to help others flourish as well.

 

Not every child or family faces the dilemma I did. For many, public schooling provides what children need to thrive. I also know that many children who need different options can’t follow the path my son took, both because of a lack of resources and because many loving parents are themselves unable to navigate the complex puzzle of American schooling. It is not lost on me that my son had parents who were educated enough to find the solutions he needed for his own education. But because we had the solutions, it was our duty to implement them.

The Underfunding Myth Is Exposed

By Inez Feltscher Stepman

Sunday, September 27, 2026

 

A rare column from New York Times staff writer and the 1619 Project author Nikole Hannah-Jones ignited a firestorm this past week around her decision to send her daughter to an academically stunted public school for social justice reasons. But in questioning how that decision affected her child (if not the rigid political beliefs that drove her to sacrifice her kid’s education), Hannah-Jones makes a tacit admission rarely encountered in legacy media: Money is not the problem at America’s many failing schools.

 

“I knew that P.T.A.s at poor schools often can raise only a few thousand dollars, but [my husband] Faraji and I could write checks that exceeded the annual P.T.A. budget,” wrote Hannah-Jones, in setting up the story of how her checks and privileged advocacy failed to make a measurable difference in the low standards, disorder, and general dysfunction of her daughter’s school.

 

Even the writer does not seem to explicitly acknowledge that her cash infusions did little. Several paragraphs later, she’s back to beating the comforting drum of systemic underfunding. Progressives also might have a ready retort to any attempt to read deeply into her anecdote: Well, surely you can’t expect a single family to make up a school-sized shortfall with a PTA check, no matter how generous.

 

Hang on to your seat, dear reader, when I tell you that the New York City Department of Education says it spent, this year at that very school, P.S. 307 in Brooklyn, around $44,000 per student — and, when including other wraparound services, a whopping $58,000 per student.

 

Hannah-Jones is not alone in her assumptions about school spending. The average American wildly underestimates how much money is funneled into the public education system. High-poverty urban districts like the one in which P.S. 307 resides, contrary to another pervasive myth, usually boast annual revenues considerably higher than the typical middle-class or even upper-middle class district. The vast majority — nearly three-quarters — of voters underestimate per-pupil spending, sometimes dramatically. The most common guess for per-pupil funding is about $5,000 per kid, which is less than half the money spent in the lowest-spending state in the union. The real national average is triple that.

 

A lot of effort has gone into circulating this pervasive lie, which looms over practically all discussions and debates about public schools across the country. Teachers’ union representatives, as one would expect, never tire of repeating it. But dissemination of the myth that we just don’t spend enough on our public schools hasn’t been limited to adults whose salaries depend on it. News outlets continually repeat the claim, and even many state courts take it as an unexamined premise that underfunding is a major problem in public education, setting floors for legislative spending justified by a misguided notion of advancing equal opportunity.

 

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the lie is reinforced by the real shortages in classrooms that parents encounter. Families reasonably assume that if their third grader’s teacher is begging for supplies at the beginning of the school year to avoid purchasing them out of her own salary, then there must not be enough in the kitty. In Hannah-Jones’s essay, for example, the tolerance for constant physical fights in the cafeteria is blamed on “understaffing” caused by a lack of funds.

 

Instead, the reality is that these shortages are produced by the education establishment’s spending decisions, which prioritize absurd bureaucratic bloat and pensions over basic classroom needs. Non-teaching positions have exploded by more than 700 percent since the 1950s, and just since the 1990s, money spent on administrative salaries has far outstripped that spent on teachers. In some states, the classroom basics-to-union-graft ratio can only be described as impressive; in Illinois, less than 10 percent of every new dollar spent on “education” goes to anything people would recognize as educational, namely school buildings, teacher salaries, and teaching materials. A popular documentary back in 2009, The Cartel, tried to chase down some of these dollars that were earmarked for a New Jersey classroom, and even found plenty of old-school corruption, like huge construction contracts going to family members of school employees.

 

Nor is the link between spending more money and school performance well supported by the data. The late Andrew Coulson of the Cato Institute famously circulated a gut-punch chart plotting federal spending increases against National Assessment of Educational Progress score changes; the former skyrockets up from the 1970s onward, while the latter is flat enough to be a Kansas skyline.

 

But the lie, unfortunately, works. Seventy-five to 80 percent of education bonds placed before voters pass; Americans are usually more willing to open their pocketbooks for schools than for other tax increases. And finding out that their estimates on school spending are wildly off has a huge impact on voter opinions, with the percentage of voters saying education spending is “too low” plummeting from above 70 percent to an underwater 40 merely by encountering the numerical fact as reported by a reputable media outlet. By remaining silent about the numbers while propagating misleading insinuations about underfunding, legacy media outlets are getting the outcome the left wants from purposely uninformed voters.

 

The worst thing about the big underfunding lie, though, isn’t the taxpayer dollars stolen from the pockets of an already-struggling American middle class, exploiting Americans’ goodwill toward “the children” with a false impression of educational impoverishment. No, it’s that “we don’t spend enough” has been a shield against reform and against outrage toward the absolutely criminal performance of the public school system across the board. It’s a shield that is finally — at long last — showing some cracks, and the post-Covid school choice explosion in many states will hopefully bear fruit for hundreds of thousands of American students.

 

But now, even the New York Times has unwittingly admitted that the crisis in American education isn’t about the money.

Against Great Books Fetishism

By Surya Gowda

Saturday, September 26, 2026

 

A wise man once said, “Whatever passes for conservative thought in the American academy usually passes through the influence of Leo Strauss.” This was no less true in the 1980s, when Strauss’ student Allan Bloom published his smash hit The Closing of the American Mind, than it is today, when Costin Alamariu—known to his vast online following as Bronze Age Pervert—promotes Nietzschean philosophy through homoerotic physique-posting. (Alamariu, for those who are unaware, was a doctoral student of the Yale Straussian Steven Smith and wrote a dissertation that engages deeply with Strauss’ work.)

 

Who exactly was this Strauss fellow, you ask? In short, he was a political philosopher who lived and worked during the 20^th century and wrote major works on ancient and medieval philosophy and natural right, among other topics. A Jew who fled Germany shortly before Hitler came to power, Strauss wound up teaching in several American universities—most prominently, the University of Chicago—and influencing a few generations of students, known as Straussians, who more or less adopted his theoretical presuppositions and pedagogy. Strauss was a critic of both historicism, a method of understanding philosophies by examining the historical conditions in which they arose, and the modern social sciences, which analyze social phenomena through empirical research methods. In his view, both failed to fully grapple with fundamental questions about the nature of goodness, justice, and human excellence. Thus, Straussians’ preferred research method involves close-reading canonical texts in pursuit of timeless, esoteric truths.

 

I fell in with the Straussians when I arrived at UChicago nearly five decades after Strauss’ death. At the suggestion of a professor and dear friend, I entered into a Great Books major called Fundamentals: Issues and Texts, where most courses focused on a single author or major work in the Western canon. I took classes on Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws and Adam Smith’s social and political thought and wrote essays on Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, and Carl Schmitt. The closest thing I took to a gender studies course was one where we read Aristophanes’ Assemblywomen, a comedy in which the women of Athens enact a sexual equality law that forces men to sleep with old and unattractive women before they can access young, beautiful ones.

 

Many conservatives today, whether they’re of the Straussian variety or not, champion the Great Books curriculum and would like to see it replace most of what passes for humanities and social science education in English, sociology, and various “studies” departments across the country. A rigorous classical education in the liberal arts can certainly seem like the antidote to the left-wing ideological excess that plagues many college campuses. But now, a little more than two years out from graduation, I feel I can say with some confidence that while a Great Books education provides innumerable benefits, it is not without shortcomings.

 

Reading the Great Books can be utterly enthralling, and studying historical works forces us to exercise our humility, as it reveals how few of our ideas, or even those of present-day “thought leaders,” are truly original. What are Peter Thiel’s ideas on creative monopolies being the drivers of capitalist progress, for example, if not a reformulation of Joseph Schumpeter’s arguments in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy? Informing ourselves of the historical antecedents of contemporary ideas not only impels us to notice certain enduring facets of human nature and social relations, but also allows us to spot these ideas’ strengths and weaknesses before we’re condemned to live out their consequences once more.

 

The problem with the Great Books approach, however, is that it risks treating the texts themselves, rather than the ideas they contain or phenomena they describe, as the sole objects of importance. I noticed that far too many individuals in Straussian academic circles were content churning out papers presenting ever so slightly different interpretations of Hobbes or Rousseau while disregarding or even disdaining historical work or empirical findings from economics, psychology, or political science that might’ve proved relevant to the topics at hand. In opening their minds to the insights of great thinkers from the past, they shut them to the treasure trove of knowledge and wisdom that can only be gained in the present. Moreover, the Straussians deemed a relatively small number of texts worth studying and didn’t stray far from Strauss himself in terms of the questions they asked about them and answers they entertained. Academic Straussians seemed to fetishize the Great Books rather than build on the big ideas they contained.

 

We should certainly attempt careful study of canonical texts—it’s worthwhile, for example, to decipher what Machiavelli really thought of Christianity and Roman paganism by drawing out subtleties in his works. But doing so should impel us to ask further questions: What does the historical record reveal about religion’s ability to produce civil obedience? And do contemporary findings show that the latter can persist without the former? We may then set out on the bolder quest of proposing our own explanations of the role religion plays within the polity.

 

The Great Books invite us to join a millennia-spanning conversation about foundational questions of social and political life, but they are not that conversation in and of themselves. The books do not call on us to be lovers of them; they call on us to be lovers of wisdom … that is, philosophers.

A Parent Should Play Favorites

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, September 23, 2026

 

About a month ago, Bridget Phetasy posted on Twitter that it’d been two years since her dog passed away.

 

This was my reply:

 

The great thing about dogs — one of the great things at least — is the rules that govern ranking other things don’t apply to dogs. I have never doubted that someone was telling the absolute truth when they said their dog was the best dog ever, even though I know for a fact that I’ve owned two of the best dogs ever and my current dogs will one day join them on Mount Rushmore as the four greatest dogs ever. It’s just not like mountains or money. There’s only one tallest mountain or richest person. But the number of obviously best dogs ever is almost infinite.

 

I bring this up not to talk about dogs, though I think you know that I am happy to be thrown in that briar patch. I bring it up to talk about something that dogs are a good illustration of.

 

So, against all my better judgment, let’s stick with dogs for a moment longer. The replies to my tweet were more edifying than most, and not just for the conspicuous absence of antisemitic bile. People got what I meant. It’s not like I persuaded anybody. They already agreed before I said anything, because people who love their dogs understand that the realm they share with them is outside of the realms in much of the rest of their lives. Indeed, that’s one of the reasons I like posting stuff about dogs—they don’t care about politics or “influence” and their indifference is contagious. I find that deeply comforting in this time of stupid, ugly politics.

 

Humans and dogs are very different in all sorts of obvious ways: number of legs, mathematical aptitude, etc. But one difference I think about a lot may not be so obvious. Telling your dog you love it is pretty futile; you have to show it. I know dog owners who will disagree with this. The ones who aren’t entirely wrong will say that dogs can pick up on your voice, mood, etc. Fair enough. But even so, that’s more showing than telling. The words alone are the “blah blah blahs” from The Far Side cartoon. We show our love in all of the mundanely obvious ways. We feed them, we play with them, and we just hang out with them. The hardest parts of dog ownership, by far, are the ones where our love seems like punishment: taking them to the vet, retrieving delicious but dangerous things from their mouths, giving them pills, and, worst of all, having to decide to say goodbye to them (though you’re doing that wrong if it seems like anyone but you feels punished).

 

Which brings me to parenthood. Children and dogs are very different, and I think it can be a mistake to be confused on this point. People frequently ask me why, in my tweets in which Pippa talks to people, she refers to me as “thumb guy” and my wife as “the special lady.” Part of it is just a long-running silly joke about how, when we’re in the park, I’m using my phone to take her picture on the thumb machine I’m always using. But the more serious reason is that I don’t want to contribute, publicly, to the “furbaby” discourse in which we talk about dogs as if they are human children. I don’t want Pippa referring to me as “daddy” or to the Fair Jessica as “mommy.” I won’t claim we stick to this rule in private, but that’s sort of the point: That’s private. You can quibble with the reasoning of my rule of thumb (guy), but I’m sticking with it.

 

For all the massively important and real differences between human children and dogs, those differences are, in some respects, narrowest when our kids are babies. That’s because when they’re babies, words don’t matter very much. Yes, talking to babies is good for their development and all that, but the imperative is to show your love more than tell it. Among the worst experiences in my life were the times I had to take my preverbal daughter to a doctor or hospital for her own good, because I couldn’t explain that it was for her own good. I had to do it anyway. Because that’s what parents have to do. Because we love our children.

 

We’ll come back to that.

 

Nikole Hannah-Jones’ values.

 

Nikole Hannah-Jones has generated a lot of buzz over her revelatory essay about deliberately sending her kid to a bad school. Some would describe her pensée as “soul searching.” I’m not inclined to do that, because I don’t think she searched as deeply as she wants to suggest. Charlie Cooke covers a lot of my thoughts on the matter.

 

He focuses, rightly, on something Hannah-Jones said in 2024: “My daughter is not worth more than any other child.”

 

This is wrong. It’s wrong in profound ways. It’s also a very old and shockingly common idea.

 

In 2013, Melissa Harris-Perry was featured in one of MSNBC’s old “Lean Forward” agitprop ads in which she said public education was underfunded “because we’ve always had kind of a private notion of children ‘your kid is yours’ and totally your responsibility. We haven’t had a very collective notion of these are ‘our children.’” Her solution: “We have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.”

 

Hillary Clinton said in 1996, “As adults we have to start thinking and believing that there isn’t really any such thing as someone else’s child.”

 

The first-wave feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman stated it more starkly. “There is no more brilliant hope on earth to-day, than this new thought about the child … the recognition of ‘the child,’ children as a class, children as citizens with rights to be guaranteed only by the state; instead of our previous attitude toward them of absolute personal [that is, parental] ownership—the unchecked tyranny … of the private home.”

 

I think this is gross. It’s no less gross if you are willing to grant that it is well-intended, something I struggle to do at times. We’re all familiar with the way good intentions can pave a path we don’t want to go down. Indeed, I find it fascinating how anyone can simultaneously treat The Handmaid’s Tale as almost a form of secular prophecy and entertain this line of thinking. After all, nationalizing, or socializing, the raising of children seems like a necessary first step down the path of good intentions leading to a kind of hell.

 

Before I get to my fundamental objection, I should offer a lesser one. This is bad public policy. One of the best ways to identify when the government is failing is not when we vote at the ballot box, but when we vote “with our feet.” There are few better examples of what social scientists call “revealed preferences” than packing up and moving someplace else—for better schools, lower taxes, or, in the case of people fleeing despotic regimes, for simple freedom. Watching a video of Germans trying to escape East Berlin, or of Vietnamese boat people, or anyone else fleeing countries with a more “collective notion” of raising children, will teach you more about those regimes than any textbook.

 

Our system works on the assumption that parents care more about their children than anyone else. I’m not saying it works great, and sometimes that’s because parents don’t care enough. But a system designed around the assumption that parents not only don’t but should not care more about their kids is a recipe for a system that would make “the tragedy of the commons” a real tragedy. Imagine a school system where parental feedback did not exist, save as some sort of sentiment about children as an undifferentiated, commodified mass of future workers.

 

But my point isn’t about public policy per se. It’s about parental policy, for want of a better word. Hannah-Jones didn’t vote with her feet, she voted with her child. She made her daughter an instrument of her politics, a flesh-and-blood virtue signal. And she did it based, at least in part, on her “values,” which take it as a self-evident truth that her child is not worth more than any other.

 

Now, seen from the perspective of an education bureaucrat or a politician, this is a more defensible claim than some are willing to concede. The job of public officials is to care about all of the kids under their supervision more or less equally. I say “more or less” because I think even here some distinctions can and should be made. The students who really care about doing the work should be rewarded with the ability to do it without having to navigate bullying, violence, or disruption by students who don’t. That doesn’t mean the bad apples should  be written off. It just means that choices always have to be made. Having a whole class held hostage to the worst-behaved troublemakers is a choice, just as removing those troublemakers is a choice. To govern is to choose. There are no policy solutions, only trade-offs, and all that.

 

But Hannah-Jones isn’t an administrator or politician. She’s a parent. And her kid is hers—and her husband’s—and no one else’s. It’s a bit like the Marine Rifleman’s creed: “This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is mine.” Except a child is not a rifle, it is a human being that is dependent upon its parents to become the best, happiest, and healthiest person possible. It’s hard. Every parent fails to one degree or another. But the failures are all relative, and with love, hard work, and, alas, a good deal of luck, the failures are modest.

 

But what is essential is the idea—no, not the idea, because ideas are just theories held in the mind—the passion, the conviction, the certainty that your child is worth more than all the others, to you. That’s the realm that children are supposed to live in. It should follow them around like a force field as they navigate the world around them. My parents are in my corner. They may get things wrong, they may make mistakes, they might “just not understand” this or that, but that they love me is unquestionable.

 

I’m trying not to cannibalize my book in advance of it (eventually) being done. But the category error that Hannah-Jones makes is importing the logic of the external order, what Friedrich Hayek called the “macrocosm,” into her “microcosm” of the family. It’s the same mistake all of the people who want our children to be raised collectively make. They think the rules of our private realm of sacrifice and solidarity, familial loyalty and collective purpose, can and should be extended to the whole of society. But the political order in a liberal system—and ours is still a liberal system, for now—is for political things. Again, a politician can and should ideally work from the assumption that all children are of equal worth, because in a liberal system all humans are of equal worth. That is the core idea of liberalism: We are all equal in the eyes of God and government. But a parent isn’t a politician. A parent is a jealous guardian of their child or children. Vast swaths of good parenting are captured by the statement, “I don’t care what the other kids are doing. They aren’t my kids.”

 

And I should say, this is true in nonliberal systems, too. No society has ever been constructed where the attachments of family have been completely erased. Many have tried, with horrific successes at the margins. But total victory has always been impossible because love of children is written on the human heart, not in law books.

 

That’s because the microcosm is the cosmos we are born into. We can be torn from it, and trained to see the state as our parents, in some real-world version of Plato’s republic or some cockamamie postliberal “common good” or “social justice” utopia. But in the real world, we call such efforts the very definition of totalitarianism. That microcosm is where children and, yes, dogs live. The difference between dogs and children is that dogs never leave the microcosm. They stay in the pack of the little platoon forever. Where all we can do is show love without being able to explain it.

 

Children always keep one foot in the microcosm, ideally. But they also learn how to live in the macrocosm by first being formed in the microcosm. And eventually, the idea is that they create a new microcosm of their own.

 

I’m not saying what Hannah-Jones did was totalitarian or a crime. I’m not saying that she doesn’t love her child. She obviously does. I’m saying her attachment to politics broke the force field that is supposed to surround her child. As the line—often misattributed to Talleyrand—goes, what she did was worse than a crime. It was a mistake.

 

When Hannah-Jones explained that she voted with her child to her child, she “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?’”

 

Hannah-Jones seems to realize her mistake: “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.”

 

But the primary mistake wasn’t that she didn’t send her child to the “‘best’ school” (there’s so much going on in those scare quotes by the way). That’s secondary. Najya’s shoddy education can be remedied, to some degree. But that’s a symptom. The real mistake, the actual betrayal, was in showing—and then telling—her child that she wasn’t worth the world, compared to all the other children in it, to her.

What Nikole Hannah-Jones Doesn’t Say

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Tuesday, September 22, 2026

 

‘My daughter,” wrote Nikole Hannah-Jones in 2024, “is not worth more than any other child.”

 

This assessment was offered as part of a reflection on a New York Times essay that Hannah-Jones had written eight years earlier on the subject of choosing an appropriate school. In tandem, she imparted two other reflections: that the school she’d made such a commotion about picking was clearly “failing”; and that, regardless, she still believed she had “made the right choice.”

 

Two years later, she has changed her mind. Or, rather: Two years later, her daughter has changed her mind for her. Having eventually learned what her mother had done to her, her daughter “just shook her head, her face a mask of disbelief, and something else: betrayal,” the writer admitted this week in the Times.

 

For penning this mea culpa, Hannah-Jones has received a good deal of praise. Well, you can count me out of all that. Her actions were morally indefensible and analytically ignorant, and her supposed metamorphosis remains invisible to the naked eye. She has always been a ridiculous zealot. Now, she’s a cautionary tale, too.

 

To propose that one’s own child “is not worth more than any other” is an ugly — perhaps even an evil — sentiment. You may call me whatever names you wish in response to this assertion, but you must understand that it will not change a thing. My job as a parent is to prioritize my children. I owe it to them, and they rely upon me to follow through with that obligation. It is true that, in a detached, cosmic sense, my children are no more important than are any others. But for me? Yes, they are. They represent the primary purpose of my existence, and, insofar as it is in my power and is consistent with the law, I intend to advance their interests without apology, embarrassment, or regret. Far from representing a societal flaw or some selfish personal shortcoming, that instinct is the most natural thing in the world — which is why, historically, the only the thing that has ever been able to break it is the entrenchment of totalitarian ideology. The fanatics who “informed” on their family members during the worst days of the Soviet Union were not admirable for their commitment to the cause; they were anti-human freaks who upset the natural balance of the universe. Nikole Hannah-Jones’s sin was far lesser than theirs, but it was still a sin. Outside of a waterboarding chamber, no parent should ever say, “My daughter is not worth more than any other child.”

 

Back in 2016, Hannah-Jones’s husband seems to have reflexively understood that what his wife was proposing was madness. And yet, having been guilt-tripped, he appears to have gone along with it anyway:

 

As I told Faraji my plan, he slowly shook his head no. He wanted to look into parochial schools, or one of the “good” public schools, or even private schools. So we argued, pleading our cases from the living room, up the steps to our office lined with books on slavery and civil rights, and back down, before we came to an impasse and retreated to our respective corners. There is nothing harder than navigating our nation’s racial legacy in this country, and the problem was that we each knew the other was right and wrong at the same time. Faraji couldn’t believe that I was asking him to expose our child to the type of education that the two of us had managed to avoid. He worried that we would be hurting Najya if we put her in a high-poverty, all-black school. “Are we experimenting with our child based on our idealism about public schools?” he asked. “Are we putting her at a disadvantage?”

 

The answer, quite obviously, was yes.

 

Some readers have responded to Hannah-Jones’s admission by proposing that the fault lay not in her instinct, but in its execution. I do not think that such a clean distinction can reasonably be drawn, but I can certainly agree with the implication that this entire experiment was built on stuff and nonsense. In her original essay, she expressed a desire to avoid “segregation.” Yet she sent her daughter to a school that hosted more students of her daughter’s race than attended the ones she eschewed. Defending her decision, she explained her belief that a profitable educational environment involved sedulous parental involvement. Yet, by her own admission, she was so neglectful of her daughter’s progress that, for years, she remained unaware that she had fallen badly behind. Her New York Times biography notes that her “journalism has tended to focus on school.” Which makes it all the more shameful that she still has no idea why schools tend to fail. Like many of her colleagues, Nikole Hannah-Jones ignores the available data and instead pins the blame on funding gaps that don’t exist, racism that cannot be identified, and attitudes that nobody in our current era actually exhibits. Perhaps, going forward, she might “focus” a little harder?

 

What does Hannah-Jones believe now? She doesn’t say. By itself, this omission prevents her essay from being “brave” or “admirable” and relegates it to the status of a humblebrag. If she had right-of-center politics, the Times would undoubtedly have forced her to spell out her mistake. The confession would have been the overture; the rest of the performance would have been a detailed explanation of how exactly she was wrong, along with an exhaustive “therefore . . .” that included hard statistics, legible arguments, and the outlining of an alternative agenda. But, of course, the Times did no such thing, and Hannah-Jones has made no such effort under her own steam. Given that she has extremely strong views about what, how, and where other American children should be taught, it would be useful to know what, having watched her assumptions fail her own child, she now thinks America’s education system should look like. She isn’t going to tell us.

 

Which, I’m afraid, is entirely typical. I do not mean to be unduly waspish here, but it ought not to be a surprise that Nikole Hannah-Jones believed that her daughter was getting A’s despite doing no homework, given that getting A’s despite doing no homework is exactly how Nikole Hannah-Jones’s own career has played out thus far. Hannah-Jones is a writer who doesn’t write; a historian who knows little history; an advocate with no mastery of her brief — and for this, she has been rewarded with extravagant public-speaking fees, a cushy sinecure at the New York Times, a Pulitzer Prize in commentary, two George Polk Awards, three National Magazine Awards, a MacArthur Fellowship, and at least ten years of the sort of detached, flighty, consequence-free existence that allows one to sacrifice the mind of one’s own child for a couple of mawkish newspaper pieces and the cheap mollification of one’s ego.

The Strange Racial Solidarity of Nikole Hannah-Jones

By Rich Lowry

Tuesday, September 22, 2026

 

The New York Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones thought she was making her educational choices to favor the interests of black people, and she was — just the wrong ones.

 

In a long essay for the New York Times Magazine, the radical African-American journalist writes about how her decision to send her daughter to dreadful New York City public schools for ideological reasons ended in tears.

 

Hannah-Jones, who achieved notoriety as the lead editor of the paper’s 1619 Project, believed that putting her daughter in rotten elementary and middle schools would strike a blow for racial equity.

 

In her view, it’s unfair that so many black kids are trapped in underperforming New York City schools, and if she trapped her own daughter in them, she and her husband — with their superior wherewithal — could make the schools better for everyone.

 

What started as a project motivated by a savior complex ended as essentially an episode of educational Munchausen syndrome by proxy.

 

Her bright young daughter fell far behind where she could have been academically.

 

Most parents who are paying attention and who have the means would immediately get a kid out of a school where there are fights during the lunch period, where there is no homework, where the principal and teachers are routinely absent, and where schoolwork isn’t graded — but Nikole Hannah-Jones persisted.

 

By the time her daughter was old enough to realize what was going on and force her mother to let her apply to better high schools, she didn’t know algebra despite getting excellent grades in math at the subpar schools.

 

Hannah-Jones should be furious at the adults who failed her daughter so abysmally, but she’s, in effect, still on their side by portraying school choice as a racist scam and complaining about a lack of resources.

 

The New York City officials, administrators, principals, and teachers who are blighting the futures of young people aren’t white supremacists; by and large, they agree with Nikole Hannah-Jones politically, and many of them are African-American.

 

You can either be with them, and their narrow interest in protecting the school system from serious challenge, or with the kids.

 

Hannah-Jones is in a version of the same conundrum as the Black Lives Matter activists who believed it was “anti-racist” to agitate against the police. Then, when they got their way and the police stepped back, more black people were killed.

 

Here, it is supposedly “anti-racist” to keep everyone in disorderly, incompetent public schools — and the victims are black children who have no idea of how little they’ve learned until it’s too late.

 

This is a strange form of racial solidarity.

 

There is no doubt that schools have a tougher job when they have a high population of disadvantaged students. But the problem is not funding, as Hannah-Jones suggests. Studies from the centrist Brookings Institution note both that high-poverty, non-white districts spend more per pupil than lower-poverty districts and that higher spending doesn’t ensure better results.

 

The Success Academy charter schools in New York City have shown that disadvantaged kids can thrive when there’s an old-fashioned mix of high expectations, strict discipline, and rigorous instruction — in other words, what the traditional public schools, mired in a self-interested, unaccountable bureaucracy, can’t deliver.

 

When she sent her daughter to failing schools, Nikole Hannah-Jones imagined herself acting in the tradition of pioneering parents during the civil rights movement who sent their children through the mobs to integrate whites-only schools. Those parents desperately wanted a better education for their kids, though, whereas Hannah-Jones fed her daughter into terrible public schools in the forlorn hope that maybe she’d be okay. If not, at least Hannah-Jones had steered her clear of competitive schools with lots of white and Asian kids.

 

That, of course, was a perverse priority. The famous line is that a neoconservative is a liberal mugged by reality. The New York City public schools mugged Nikole Hannah-Jones, and yet she still doesn’t want to press charges.

Schools Should Teach the 9/11 Heroism of the American People

By Seth Mandel

Thursday, September 10, 2026

 

The other night, we watched the brief but powerful 9/11 documentary Boatlift with our kids. Made in 2011 and narrated by Tom Hanks, Boatlift is a 12-minute film on the largest waterway evacuation in American history.

 

The story is simple: As the towers fell and people ran through the chaos of lower Manhattan looking to escape the danger without access to mass transit and with roads and bridges closed off, the Coast Guard put out a general call for a volunteer boatlift. The massive response created a civil convoy that surpassed anyone’s expectations and produced one of the better stories of American selflessness and heroism in the country’s history.

 

Yes, in the country’s history. Just to give readers an idea of what this boatlift accomplished: According to Britannica, the Dunkirk evacuation in World War II carried 338,000 British, French and Belgian troops to safety over nine days.

 

The 9/11 boatlift ferried 500,000 people to safety in nine hours.

 

It’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, of course, but hopefully it at least paints a picture of the magnitude of the ad hoc effort.

 

“I saw four businessmen lifting up an old woman with a seeing-eye dog… and they lifted her up like a surfboard and passed her over the handrails” and onto a boat, recalled one official. Sometimes spouses, separated and each unaware of the other’s fate, were reunited on these boats.

 

We talk a lot about the lessons of 9/11, of the changed world that emerged from it, of geopolitical realignment, of domestic security policy, of Islamist terrorism and the War on Terror. For my generation in particular, born after Vietnam but too young to fully appreciate the fall of the Iron Curtain, it was a defining moment.

 

And one unforgettable element of that day was the heroism. Younger Americans have no memory of that day, and what they are missing out on, aside from the terror and the grief and the anger, is the way the civilian response filled one with a deep sense of gratitude for the cosmic gift of being an American.

 

Which is why 9/11 education ought to be mandatory, and young Americans should learn not only the Big Ideas around this earthshattering event but what happened on that day itself at the granular level.

 

Here’s what I mean. The Associated Press this week produced a state-by-state summary of 9/11 curriculum requirements. Much of it is optional or flexible, and much of it misses the point.

 

Arkansas requires students to learn about the “change and continuity in foreign policy since 2001 after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.” One world history prompt for California 10th-graders states: “Since 9/11, the hopes for a more peaceful world that the end of the Cold War spawned have been displaced by a resurgence of international conflict.” In Idaho, we learn, “High school U.S. history students now must assess government responses to terrorism, ‘including those after Sept. 11, 2001, and analyze the causes, progression and aftermath’ of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.” In Missouri, high-schoolers are tasked with “unpacking post-9/11 foreign policy.”

 

After 9/11, since 9/11, post-9/11, etc. Those are important lessons! So are the ones that require students to talk about what happened before 9/11. But what about on 9/11?

 

I admit I was, at first, rather appalled at the list provided by the AP. But it is just a summary and should not be taken as the full extent of what actually goes on in classrooms around the country, where teachers and administrators have plenty of flexibility to shape students’ understanding of 9/11 and how it should be memorialized. And there is bound to be a range of differences among the 50 states.

 

But I also noticed that some states pretty much nailed it. Here is the AP’s description of Florida’s educational approach to 9/11:

 

A 2023 Florida law requires at least 45 minutes a year of 9/11-related instruction in some middle and high school classes. The statute lists points to cover: historical context on terrorism, the attack timeline, acts of heroism and charity, the ‘importance of respecting civil liberties while ensuring safety and security,’ and more. It notably mentions not only those killed and wounded but also people who fell ill after being exposed to toxins when the World Trade Center’s burning twin towers collapsed. State standards go into still more detail. It’s all intended ‘to ensure this important event in America’s history is not only remembered but also integrated into civics and resiliency education statewide,’ the state Department of Education said.

 

Exemplary. New York’s requirements are a mixed bag with plenty of potential. Pennsylvania’s aren’t bad. Both states were directly affected by the attacks themselves, so it’s no surprise to see their plans include moments of silence on each anniversary.

 

Virginia has the right idea, too. There, middle-schoolers give “special attention to the heroism displayed by passengers on the plane that went down in Pennsylvania. High school juniors analyze 9/11 and other ‘key events and conditions that have given rise to terrorism as an attack on democracy and the United States’ role in defending democracy.’”

 

Children aren’t born knowing what happened on 9/11. We have to teach them. And among the earliest lessons that are appropriate for young students is one that reminds them what that day means for Americans, including the miracles that the American people are capable of in the face of terror and tragedy.