Nikole Hannah-Jones won’t face who actually runs the schools she knows are failing

Here’s a fun fact for anyone wondering why so many New York City public schools are so awful, in the wake of New York Times scribe Nikole Hannah-Jones’ review of how the ones she chose for her daughter fell so horrible short: The District 13 superintendent who presided over those rotten Brooklyn schools was Kamar Samuels, who nonetheless now oversees the entire Department of Education.

Oh, and Stephanie Carroll, then the incompetent principal at PS 307, has risen to become the DOE’s chief of literacy.

Their failure gets rewarded because such administrators serve the interest of the system’s true master, the United Federation of Teachers, whose baneful role Hannah-Jones utterly ignores.

Failure prospers inside the DOE; that, not the (imaginary) racism and (supposed) lack of resources that Hannah-Jones insists on faulting, is why the same schools fall down on the job generation after generation, only to be rewarded with ever-higher funding.

Look back at Hannah-Jones’ arrogant brag a decade ago: “A New York Times reporter in a high-poverty school f—ing changes the school,” insisting: “I can go to that school and say there is a problem and it gets fixed immediately.”

Hah! NHJ’s essay is full of problems she saw that never got fixed — because this system is designed to ignore all criticism, even from high-and-mighty Times reporters.

Maybe she could’ve made some difference if she hadn’t waited years to write about insanely chaotic lunchrooms, teachers’ failure to correct her daughter’s homework and so on.

But Hannah-Jones instead spent her energy denouncing things she had theoretical gripes with — Gifted & Talented programs, charter schools, standardized tests — “problems” that had nothing to do what she actually saw going wrong.

(Indeed, ideologues like NHJ are to blame for those lunchrooms: They, not the unions, are who kneecapped school discipline.)

Above all, she still keeps repeating her preferred, false narrative that systemic racism perpetrated by whites is causing inequity in predominantly black neighborhoods.

Hmm: A progressive, black-led state Legislature dominates state education policy, including the laws on local governance and state funding; these lawmakers also choose the Regents who control the State Education Department (and are steadily destroying all meaningful standards).

The City Council is majority-minority; the DOE hasn’t had a white Anglo chancellor since early 2011.

Heck, NHJ’s husband Faraji is contracts-committee chief on the Panel for Educational Policy, which oversees Samuels and the entire DOE system.

These are the people who preside over the city’s dysfunctional school system, and none of them put the kids’ actual needs first.

Nikole Hannah-Jones won’t admit it because that’s true of her agenda, too.

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