On Sept. 20, journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones followed up on a piece she published in 2016 reflecting on her choice to enroll her Black daughter in an underresourced, underfunded New York public school with a predominantly Black student population.
Hannah-Jones’ journalistic focus is on the inequality of education in the United States, and her own educational experiences speak to how entrance into interracial, higher-funded schools gave her a promising education that she has leveraged to access higher education, a promising career and a middle-class lifestyle. Even so, she made the conscious choice to send her daughter to an underfunded school because, however naively, she believed that using her money to support such a school would raise educational quality for all kids in the school, not just her own.
When she published the initial article, there was a widespread reckoning with issues of individual advancement and community needs. While Black people who receive opportunities to ‘escape’ the cycle of poverty through access to better schools gain social capital, the community they have ‘escaped from’ is left to sit with the reality of continued segregation and a lack of monetary support. But Hannah-Jones’ new article shows that her rather altruistic choice did not raise the school’s quality and, according to her daughter, she made the wrong choice. Now, she goes to a predominantly white, highly-regarded public high school where she initially struggled due to gaps in her previous education.
These questions of individual versus community needs are also heavily affecting Native communities across the United States. I’ve written before about how the education system is designed for Indigenous students to fail. Indigenous students are suspended at higher rates and drop out at higher rates than any other racial group in the United States.
Like Hannah-Jones notes, segregation and isolation is a major source of educational inequality. Forty percent of Indigenous people live in rural areas, and 13% live on reservations. For Indigenous students, this might mean long commutes to a public school in their county (over 70% of Indigenous students attend a public school), or it could mean education at a school funded by the Bureau of Indian Education or a tribal-run school. In any of these scenarios, Indigenous people are largely isolated. Additionally, over one in three Native students live below the poverty line, which affects their ability to function within academic contexts.
For most students, traditional public schools are the only options in their districts. In these public school systems, 49% of Indigenous students attend a school where less than 10% of the student body is Indigenous. When a BIE school is available, they have been found by the Department of Education to have repeatedly failed their students, who are substantially behind academically. Students in the public school system generally attend schools with staffing shortages, limited funding and little to no outside support. And compared to every other race, Indigenous students have worse educational outcomes; the high school graduation rate for Indigenous students was 74% in 2022, lower than the U.S. average in every other racial category. By third grade, we see Indigenous students falling behind academically. My home county of Los Angeles, for example, sees Indigenous students averaging a grade behind where they are expected to be.
Native students also have to manage added hardships stemming from the historical development of American education. In 2020, about 2,000 schools used Native mascots; my own public high school was one of them. These mascots caricature our existence, making it clear that school is not a safe space for us. The historical use of education as a genocidal tool against Indigenous peoples has also led to intergenerational trauma surrounding education. Just one week ago, Orange Shirt Day publicized the documented history of residential school survivors and the thousands of children murdered at these institutions in Canada and the United States.
Indigenous and Black students face very similar struggles, and as Hannah-Jones has found, there is no good solution that brings marginalized populations out of this unequal system without sacrificing our own opportunities — at least not one that individuals can choose by themselves. I say this as an Indigenous student who experienced immense educational privilege. I was born to an Indigenous parent who was a generation away from poverty and two generations from the last member of our family to live on our reservation. I went to both private and public school, and I lived in a city with a well-funded school system. Like Black students who ‘got out’ of poverty, I live a privileged Urban Indian life off my reservation; I now attend Tufts University, one of the top universities in the country. I know so many Indigenous people who never had opportunities like mine because they did not have access to an education system that could help them succeed.
While it is rather useless to change this system through our individual choices, it is even more harmful to lose hope that change is possible. The lesson I’m choosing to take away from Hannah-Jones is that the interrelation of our collective educational struggles creates solidarity. As more people learn about educational inequality and fight for collective liberation, as Hannah-Jones tried to, there is a chance, however slim, that we can end educational segregation.
