898: An Argument

Hey there everybody, I have a glass here. So our show today is something that producer Konajafi Walt has been collaborating on with reporter Nicole Hanna Jones. And Nicole's version of this story, which is in the New York Times magazine, is something that many, many people are discussing online right now. And I just want to say that if you have seen that article, there are a lot of things in what you're about to hear that are not in the article. Particularly, you'll get to hear at length from Nicole's daughter. And there are things that commenters are raising online that get interestingly addressed in our version. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, don't worry, all of this will become clear. And with that, here's Konajafi Walt talking with Nicole Hanna Jones. These are recordings made as Nicole was in the process of writing that article. I'm going to make sure we're recording. All right. Has it been 10 years since you've been in here? I'm trying to think when I, I'm like, damn, I know it's been a long time. How long has it been? That's Nicole. And this is original. I find myself in, with some frequency at my age, beginning social interactions with an accounting of time that inevitably leads to a conversation about the kids, where they were then and where they are now. And my child was just getting ready to start school. And now my child is the sophomore getting ready to celebrate her sweet 16. So that is why she will be 16 next month. Yeah, time. Nicole and I spent a lot of time talking about our kids 10 years ago and talking about schools. We were reporting together on education, specifically on inequality and systemic racism in American public schools. How decades of policy choices have left public schools deeply unequal. Many schools completely neglected. And meanwhile, Nicole and I have little kids. And in her own lives, the conversation among parents was how to game the system to be sure that your children do not end up in one of those schools. Literally, every middle class parent, no matter what their race was, was like, you have to put her in, you know, talented and gifted prep courses because they test that for and you have to decide if you're going to put her in private school, but you're definitely not going to put her in the neighborhood school. And I lived in the heavily black, high poverty neighborhood. These questions, what are you going to do about school, started right out of the gate? I mean, my response was she's one. And people would look at me like, oh, you're so naive. I remember people being like, you silly woman. And people actually felt that that was like not being a good parent, frankly. This intense, often judgemental scramble is something parents in places all over America do. But in New York City, where Nicole and I live, it's arguably the most extreme version. Parents have spreadsheets of schools, endless advice. You're going to want to avoid this school, apply to this program, maybe move to a different neighborhood. Any contortion makes sense, not even to strive for an elite school, but to avoid a quote, bad school. What were the bad schools? Well, New York City has one of the most racially and economically segregated school systems in the country. The quote, bad schools that families with options tried to avoid were disproportionately black, Latino, and poor. In her reporting, Nicole had seen that black students all over the country are concentrated in schools like this, where they're less likely to have the best teachers for curricula or facilities. And one reason that happens is that wealthy and middle class families, like hers, opt out of those schools. So Nicole, who had a young black daughter and had been a young black girl herself, when her daughter Naja got to be school aged, she did not make a spreadsheet. She did not game the system. She enrolled Naja in a regular public school. The kind of school most New York City kids end up in. The students mostly came from the neighborhood, black and Latino kids, poor and working class. Here's how Nicole saw it. She thought, if more parents with advantage like her are inside a school, they could add their weight. They'll be personally invested. They'll be paying attention and seeing when there are problems. They can advocate for a school, for funding, for more experienced teachers, for extra programming. So all the students in the school, including their own kids, have what they need to learn. Nicole wrote about all this in a cover story for the New York Times magazine 10 years ago. And on the cover, there was little Naja in her school uniform, Afro Puff's serious face looking right at the camera. And the headline, "Tooting a school for my daughter in a segregated city." I remember seeing it. I remember seeing it and being like, "Oh, she did it." Yeah, because we, you know, you and I, we talked a lot about it. It was an earthquake of a story. Nicole putting the matter bluntly to parents. All of us gaming the system is making the system worse. What if we just stop? I was really, really shocked by the impact that this piece had. You know, people were both writing, but also just sharing their story with me at my public speeches or other events that I was giving, like face-to-face, which was extremely powerful for me as well. I feel like you're under selling how much. Am I? What am I supposed to say? So like, the school districts across the country that we're suddenly talking about something that they had not been talking about, not just parents, but actual people controlling school policy. Yes. In some ways, like this, this was like my dream as a journalist, but I became a writer because I wanted society to change. So I always write in a way where I'm trying to persuade people by making a more argument. That's what the story was, an argument, and it landed with so many people. This story just, in some ways, like, never lost his legs. I was embossed in a few weeks ago, and a woman who has a six-year-old, her child wasn't even born when the story came out, said that this story guided her education decision making for her child. In a lot of your events, there was some people who would come up to you to sort of absolve them of their choices that made them. Almost every public event I would do, either during the question and answer session, after the event, they would kind of corner you, and there would inevitably be a parent or parents who would explain why they really, really, really believed in what I was saying, and they believed in the power of equality, but they couldn't make that choice for whatever reason. And I'd always be like, "Okay, I'm not your priest, I cannot absolve you, and I don't want to absolve you. I wanted you to be forced to be like, 'What about these kids? What do they deserve?' So, for ten years, Nicole has talked publicly all over the country about every aspect of this article, except how it played out in her own life for her and her kid. And she decided she wanted to write about what happened, and talk through it. So many months ago, Nicole reached out to me to ask if I wanted to hear everything that happened after the article was published. Yes, I did. She thought all the people who read her original essay ten years ago, and thought about it and talked to her about it and passed it on to others, deserved to know how it actually turned out. And she thought her daughter, Naja, deserved a chance to share her perspective, too. Naja was eager to talk. She had a lot she wanted to say about this, and she has a very different take from her moms. What you're going to hear is a series of conversations that took place before Nicole published her recent New York Times article, as she was trying to figure out in real time what she would write about all this. I talked to Nicole and later I talked to Naja and she talks to her mom. These are conversations throughout which I was so alert and on edge sometimes. It is rare to hear a person who made a big influential argument, come forward and say honestly, this is how it actually played out, and then publicly face their teenager. Who subjects themselves to that? It's the day show, an argument in five acts. Two people willing to talk about some of the country's most enduring problems and look at how they unfolded in their own lives as mother and daughter. From WB Easy Chicago, it's this American life. Stay with us. It's this American life act one, Nicole's choice. Nicole had been the one to pick the school back when Naja was little. Her husband Faraji had been reluctant to send Naja there. He worried they'd be hurting her. As Nicole is this us experimenting? on our child based on idealism. They'd argued about it, but once they resolved to do it, Faradji was all in. He threw himself into the school. Both of them were committed to being involved, and Faradji ended up even more involved than Nicole. They reassured themselves, knowing that if there were ways the school fell short, they could get an edge of help, and they'd be there, watching. They were both constantly assessing how it was going, where the school faltered, where it succeeded, what Naja was getting. They were tracking all of it, including benefits that don't get factored into lists of New York City's top schools. She got to spend her first six years of education in a school where most of the kids look like her, where she had incredible black and she had a Chinese-American educator, she had incredible black educators, she had Caribbean educators, amazing black history month celebrations. They used to have the students do these self-portraits, and she would always, when she was young, make herself a dark-skinned black woman, which I was like, yes, so you are, you know, as a black girl seeing yourself in that lens and not in the lens of this like outside world that is saying that that's not beautiful or that's not something to aspire to. And so in her formative years, she didn't have that experience that I had of feeling less than other kids, of feeling like is there something wrong with black people, feeling different, like she didn't have that. Like all of us, Nicole's own experience raising a child is always running parallel to the memory of her own childhood. Parenting is an ongoing act of correction. Nicole grew up being bust from her black neighborhood to a mostly white, wealthier school. She was part of a desegregation plan. She's talked about the social isolation of being one of the only black kids in school on our show before, the psychological toll of that. And she didn't want that for Naja. And Naja was a different kid, growing up differently than Nicole did. Her parents had money and college degrees. Nicole wanted Naja to be in the mix with other kids, to see what she had that others didn't, and to feel comfortable with everyone. I don't want my child to feel separate from other kids. I don't want her to feel that she's better than other kids. And she started to recognize the advantages that she had. I remember she came home. There was a classmate whose older brother had been killed. And Naja was like, he doesn't have a coat. Can we get a coat for him? She had empathy and humanity. And so I felt like, that's why we're here. I believe in a common good. I believe that we have to be in it together. Nicole was prepared for some things in the school to be hard. And she and her husband, Fragy, were in the school often. Fragy volunteered regularly, organizing parents, talking to teachers, addressing issues. He became co-president of the school's PTA. And still, there was stuff they didn't know, until they heard it from Naja, starting around first grade. She would come home a lot and say things like, it's hard to concentrate. It's hard to focus. That there was a lot of disruption in the classroom, like things that we know often happen in high poverty schools. And they were having an experience, parents in high poverty schools sometimes have. They were having trouble getting the school to respond, even though they were so involved. In fourth grade, at a parent-teacher conference, Nicole and Fragy learned Naja was not on grade level, which was not something they'd heard before. So they immediately emailed her teachers and principals saying, we want to see her schoolwork. Please send home all her graded tests and assignments, so we can look through them and see what's going on. They wouldn't send the schoolwork home. I asked them and they wouldn't do it. I have to go to the principal. The principal instructs them to send the homework home. And they say, that's extra work for us. So I'm having to take off from work, coming up to the school all the time. I'm like, I need to see her work every week. This is crazy. And finally, the principal is able to get the parent, the teachers to send, they send all this work home that Naja had been doing. And I start going through the math and all the problems are wrong. Oh no. Like literally almost all the problems are wrong. The problem, the answers are wrong. Like he's just putting a check mark. He's not checking her math. He's not correct. He has not teaching her. Every single one is wrong. Yeah. Devastating parent moment. I'm like, what am I doing? What am I doing? What am I doing to my child? Like I, I felt like I was failing my child. Like my decision was failing my child. God, I was so worried that I had done wrong by my child in a way that was irreparable. I remember sitting at the table that night. And I was, I mean, I'm not naive, but I was in shock. Um, there was a one part of just like what she wasn't learning. But there was the other part of like this little girl as all this confidence. She thinks she is amazing at math. She is smart, but she thinks she's like academically doing well and she's not. Nicole sat at the table waiting for Faradji to get home. In Faradji and I, I remember like as soon as he got home, I think he was at a, maybe at a school board meeting or something like that. And I'm like, look at this. And it's like, what do we do? Do we, do we, do we leave? Do we like take her out of this? And so we struggled with like what to do. I mean, I, I, we felt stuck because those other kids did not deserve not to be taught either. And understanding that the consequences for them, we're going to be so much greater than for my child. These were already kids living in public housing, living in poverty, no power in our society. Faradji and I, we would have these discussions and we would be like, who are we? If like the moment it gets really rough, we give up. Then what do we do it for in the first place? And in the end, we just felt, we felt we couldn't abandon the rest of those kids. They made a new plan. They would stay in the school. They would get not just support and they were going to get the school support. Nicole asked a friend, a former math teacher to tutor Naja at home. And Nicole and Faradji threw themselves into getting help for the rest of her class. They demanded the principal provide remediation for the entire math class. They had numerous meetings with the district superintendent. He agreed to send an extra teacher into the classroom. Their teacher friend recruited other educators to come by the school and offer after school tutoring. This was a sprawling, all-consuming project that took so much more time than simply addressing the problem for their own kid. But they'd say to each other, this is why we're here in the school, not just for their own child success. Success for them was both and. Naja doing well and all the kids doing well. It's like we recommitted. Like we have to be here. Like we have to now make sure all these kids in this classroom work is getting graded. That these teachers are actually teaching all these kids, not just our child. And that's what we did. But it tested, it tested us for sure. You said it actually might have been from your article that it can feel unnatural. It can feel almost unnatural to put your child in a school that you think isn't the best most perfect school. Did it feel unnatural to you? On natural? Yes. Yeah. Same more about that. I mean, every other decision that I'm making about my child is to try to give my child the best life possible, trying to put her in the best situation to give her the best examples to protect her, you know, make life easy for her. So no, it didn't, it didn't feel natural. But a lot of things that are the right thing to do don't feel natural. So that was the balance of things at the end of elementary school. A shiki seesaw. They'd fought for better, like they knew they'd have to. They got help for Naja, like they thought. they might have to, and they stayed committed. For middle school, Nicole and Faraji chose a school in the neighborhood, who was mostly black and low-income, test scores were not great. A public school, plenty of parents would dismiss but Nicole visited and liked it. Her district superintendent had recommended it as a school with a deeply committed principal who was on the ball, responsive to parents and students. And important to Nicole, this school had never screened students, like some of them were sought after middle schools. It didn't select kids based on their grades or attendance records or anything like that. It was open to everyone. Naja made friends, joined the Food and Justice Club, did a lot of art, outside school she ran track, and then one day in seventh grade, Nicole and Naja were in the car. Naja was 12 years old. Nicole picked her up from school and Naja said she and her friends had been researching schools online and looked up their own school. She was like, "Did you know my school had test scores like this when you decided to send me here? I paused and you know like hand on the wheel, driving, I'm like looking straight ahead and I'm sitting there like, okay, what's what's what am I going to say out of my mouth? That's going to make sense to her." And you know, it's like I knew this day would come. I wouldn't say I like talked a script over in my head of what I would say, but I knew it would come. And yet it's like the words that I'm like formulating in my head to explain why I chose this really sounded really hollow. Why like what what were you? Well, you know, I'm like, yeah, I knew that the school, these test scores, but test scores are not the most important thing about a school. And it was really important to me, you know, my own values. I felt it was really important that you be in a school with like most of the people in our neighborhood. And she's sitting there and like, I see out the corner of my eye, this look like that sounds crazy. Hey, what? You mean like you had you had all these resources like you could have sent me anywhere you could have sent me to the best schools. And you're saying like you just chose not to? So your child is asking you a question that you have you've spoken about this on hundreds of stages you've written hundreds of pages about it. Like you know what to say. Why do you not know what to say? I do know what to say. And I say it. But what I'm saying is as I'm saying it, I know it sounds hollow coming out of my mouth. But I really believe that. I mean, I come from a people where I know my life literally in a literal way is only possible because people were willing to sacrifice for a larger good. I mean sacrifice like put your child through a white mob sacrifice sacrifice like get assassinated on your front lawn sacrifice sacrifice like get thrown off of the land that you worked. If everyone says why would love to do that? I believe in the concept of equality. But you know, I can't make a personal sacrifice. We don't get we don't get there. I don't live my life. So I know what I'm saying to her is right. But I also know that she is a 12 year old child who looks at you not to like give her moral clarity, but to give her a life of opportunity. So I'm just now I'm just kind of repeating what I've said and hoping that she'll move on. But she is not. She's she's angry. It hasn't been she's like it's not a good school. And I could have been at a good school. And so it's like just rounding around and now I'm like oh my god, like she's really not gonna let this go. Did you think she's gonna ask me about this sometime? I'm gonna explain to her. Did you think about just giving her your article? No. My child's not reading 10,000 words that I write. She's not. She's not. She's on the cover, though. She's on the cover. No. Really? Has she never read it? Do you think she's never read it? I don't think so. No, I don't believe that. Really? I promise. When you ask her the answer is going to be no. I am gonna ask her. That's coming up the answer to that question and so many others. I talk to Naja and then she and her mom talk. No one is a prophet in her own home. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues. It's this American life. I'm Hannah Jaffee Walt sitting in for Ira Glass. Today's show an argument act to Naja. Because of who Nicole is and what we've talked about over years, I thought about Naja more than I thought about most other children who are not my own. From when she was little, I'd heard what Nicole wanted for her young daughter. I'd read her old article where she'd written about what she hoped for and I've wondered what's this all going to be like for Naja. Somehow back then I never really imagined there would be a day when I might get to just ask her. Okay, your mom told me she didn't know if you had read the article about choosing your elementary school. Have you read that article? No, you've never read that article. No, I have not. I have never read it. I've never found myself to read it. Maybe I should because of my mom. Well, also because it's about you. Oh, yeah, but I never read it. Naja has been listening to her mom give talks her whole life. She says she knows what the article is about. Her school. She went to her school. She lived it. She didn't have to read about it. What was the school? Her mom chose, wrote 10,000 words about choosing actually like for Naja. It was just regular. Like it was fine. It was just school. Yeah, I don't really remember a lot from elementary. I was really into art. I like to draw a lot. I was, yeah, I was loud. I still am like chatty. Did you ever wonder why you were in that elementary school? No, it was just a school without she picks free. I didn't really care about it. I was it ever think you also like that. She was lonely sometimes when girls were mean regular kid stuff. Naja remembers fourth grade. They didn't do much in class and that her mom had issues with her teachers. She thought it was weird that her third grade teacher was absent a lot, but fifth grade was fun. It was all fine. What Naja wanted to talk about more was middle school. Sixth grade. That's when things got hard for her. She says in middle school, other kids made it hard to learn. There were fights. Problems all the time. Like we wouldn't even be able to play in gym because the kids wouldn't stop acting out. It would be like all the time. They would be throwing like fart bombs and stuff. There was like no punishment. It wasn't like stopped. So because that's just not fun. You can't do anything and they're ruining your chances to do things just because they can't act right. It was like really bad. I think I come home to complaining to my mom all the time. These kids are always fighting and they're always disrupting like class. I'm not trying to be in this type of environment. I wasn't enjoying it. I remember we got our report cards back. I think there was like seven kids in that class. We were like on on a roll and the rest were like they didn't. The school was so easy and like how did you not get on? I don't know. Wait, you're like how do people not get on a roll? Because it was like it was just a really easy school. Does your homework? No. No homework? No. Not zero. Like how did you feel about that? I thought it was bad. I think I complained about my friends. Like we don't get anything. We're not getting work. Like we're not getting any work going on. We did. We did. We honestly did want to get more things until we knew that we weren't learning enough. We didn't know anything. Naja was building her own assessment of her school. Drawing on what she was seeing and what she wanted for herself. For her a good school had homework. A good school was an organized school. Naja used that word a lot when we talked. Her school was not organized. And then in seventh grade, Naja's teachers and friends started talking about the next step, hey school. New York City has hundreds of high schools. The top schools, there are things you have to do. You have to apply, get good grades, you have to take a test or audition. It's a whole process. You need to do research. Go on tours. You have to engage. If you're an ambitious seventh grader or even just a kid who cares about status as nearly every seventh grader does, this is when you start to become aware if you're not already that there are quote good schools and bad schools. And you fit somewhere in that system. And if you didn't know about it till now, you were probably already behind. Naja and her friends started researching the top high schools. It was in doing that research that they looked up their own school. And we were just shocked. Test scores, I really love everything about the school is really low. What'd you think when you saw that? I was like, wow, like that's why we're not kidding anything. Like we have nothing. You see all the reviews, you see the parent reviews, you see student reviews, you see everything. And test scores. I think we looked at those scores all the time. You did? Yeah. I think we looked at them all the time. Like you kept returning? We kept looking at other sites like how the school was and it was not great. She remembers bringing this information to her mom and she remembers her mom trying to explain her thinking, but Naja doesn't remember exactly what her mom said because she says it made no sense. I didn't ever agree with her response. All I know was that I wasn't having it, I was just like, "Why? Why am I here?" Naja was mad and she wanted an answer. Act three, Naja's choice. Nicole tried to answer Naja's questions over and over, but Nicole understood things about Naja's school and the school system in general that Naja as an 11 and 12 year old did not. Nicole knew that because her middle school didn't screen students because it didn't select some students and turn others away, what that meant is the school had a high concentration of kids who showed up on day one to middle school already behind. Most kids had gone to elementary schools that were struggling. Nicole had diagnosed learning disabilities and almost all of them experienced poverty outside of school. From Nicole's perspective, Naja's middle school was doing a pretty good job of trying to serve all its students. Nicole had been inside lots of schools as a reporter and to her Naja school wasn't one that was neglecting students or lacking organization. It seemed organized and deeply caring and unlike Naja's elementary school, responsive. When Nicole brought Naja's complaints to teachers and administrators, they got back to her right away. They tried and earnest to address things. But none of that was changing how Naja felt. She kept returning to their argument about why she was at the school. Why? At sometimes random moments. She would like we'd be in the kitchen preparing food and she'd be like, I still don't understand why you did that. And I'm like, oh my god. I'm like, you know, she's not going to let, she's not letting it go. And you know what she said? Like, you were in the classroom. Right. It's not your experience. Right. It's not your education. And I deeply heard that. And she's not, you know, an eight-year-old child. She is a young woman who's done her research. And I'm like, I just don't want, I don't want this to haunt me for the rest of our relationship. That's why what I ultimately decided, this is like, I don't know, fifth, sixth conversation, slash argument where I said, you know, you're absolutely justified in feeling how you feel. You certainly, if I had made different choices, would have had very different educational experience. Because of that, I'm going to now let you make the choice for your educational experience going forward. For high school, I would let her choose. She would decide what school she wanted to visit, and she would decide what school she wanted to apply for. This is a 12, she's a 12 at the time. This is a 12-year-old. And what was her reaction? If anybody has ever parented a 12-year-old girl, then you know, her reaction was like, yeah, but you still shouldn't have did that. I still want to talk about what you did. You're trying to move on, but I'm not over that. So that was her response. But then she was like, really, like you're really going to let me, and I was like, absolutely. Okay. Great. I'm going to school that I want for myself. I'm going to school that's going to be hard to get into. That's really good. That has high scores. That's what I wanted to do. I wanted better education, just like learning more or homework, like having more curriculars or like just more subjects. I didn't want to be in a majority black school. I thought I wanted more of a diverse community. Why? I felt like if I was in a diverse community, more diverse or less black, or not less black, but more diverse community, I would get better education because that's what it seemed like. Where did you get that idea from? Like why did it seem that way to you? Because you stayed in your school, do you see all these schools prestigious, like they're mainly Asian or mainly white? And it's like, if I've been in these schools where it's majority black, it's like, I'm not getting anything from it at all. If you look at like the top schools, they're majority white. And it's like, if you want to go to a good school, you're going to have to go to a majority white school. She comes back with her list of schools and I internally cringed. Why? Well, what my daughter did was looked up the top achieving schools in the city. She found out like the best in terms of test scores, schools in the city, and that was her list. The exact opposite of your approach. Yeah. Would you do it with your face? You know, I don't think I actually, it's impossible for me to have a neutral face, but I try. I work very hard. I'm like, I can't believe this, like my child came up with like the exact opposite of my life's work. And every school on there is a school that screens and has hardly known black kids. Naja organized everything for high school. She researched the schools found out when they had tours how you get into them. The only time Nicole intervened was to insist that Naja at least tour a selective, high-achieving majority black high school. Otherwise, Nicole kept her word and let Naja take the reins. Naja began imagining more and more what she wanted from school, where she was heading in high school and beyond high school. Nicole teaches at Howard University, an HBCU, the Mecca of Black Education and Excellence. Yeah, I mean, look, I've been ingraining Howard into hers and she was like three years old. And then one day she comes back from middle school and she says she wants to go to Harvard. And I was like, we have never mentioned the word Harvard in our household. What the hell is happening? I'm like, what? But like she did for high schools. And then she looked up the top ranked school and decided that's where she wanted to go. You're literally like, where did this girl learn the word Howard? Harvard? Yes. I'm telling you, we don't even discuss PWIs as an option in our household. Predominantly, white institutions. Yes. And especially like not Harvard, like Harvard? What child? Because I'm like, did I miss hear you? Did you accidentally say Howard? I love it. Your child's rebellion is to tell her mother that she wants to go to Harvard University. Exactly. And I'm disappointed. I'm like, what is wrong with you? You have to admire that the child is like, whatever is the best, that's what I want. Yeah. I both admired it and was appalled at the same time. Like, where are you getting these ideas? Who is putting these crazy ideas in your head? Naja submitted her high school application, ranking a dozen high achieving schools. And she got into her top choice, a majority, white and Asian school, in a wealthy neighborhood, almost an hour commute by subway from her home. She started freshman year. Within two weeks, she was ready to transfer. She wanted to transfer out of the school. Wow. And I told her, no, I was like, look, we went through a whole process. You're going to stay here. And we're going to figure it out. Like, this is life. This is real life. The girls were different. I noticed that there were kids that were comfortable seeing the end word. I also experienced that there were white kids that were seeing the end word. Yeah. That's everywhere. But it was like, I never really experienced that in person. It was like kids that also came from very good homes, like kids that also came from like very rich households. And did that affect you? Or I thought they were like too bougie and had high egos, but like unaware, like don't know about anything, like social wise, like, nothing about black people or nothing about this kind of just unaware about a lot of things and a lot of things in history. Just really privileged in spoil and kind of ignorant. Right. Very ignorant. Got it. Okay. Yeah. How were the academics? That was the thing you had really wanted. Um, when I got into school and they were talking about all these things, I'm like, what are we talking about? I never learned this. So it was kind of bumpy, like it was, it was hard. really. stressful. Yeah, that sounds stressful. I've never got to see before. I never really got those grades in middle school. And when I saw that, now it was just like, well, it sucked a lot. She didn't feel like she fit in. She didn't feel like she had anything in common with most of the kids. Were you surprised that that was her experience that she weeks? No, not at all. That that experience I've had, um, that was the experience you were trying to protect her from. Exactly. One of one of them. One of them. Yeah. Probably the most devastating thing is you you spend like their whole lifetime trying to build up the sense of themselves just as a parent parenting a child, but also me trying to build my child's confidence as a black girl and the inherent intellect and worth. And then it can be destroyed like in two weeks in this school. Freshman year. It was the first time a teacher ever called about like behavior for Naja that it never happened. She had never had behavior problems. She was angry. She was really angry that for much of that year. Nicole and Fragy focused on getting Naja tutoring and support. And Naja settled in. She made new friends. She caught up academically. She stopped asking to transfer. She's doing well. This was the news status quo. And this is where they were when I started talking to Nicole and Naja toward the end of Naja's sophomore year, the second year at the high school that she chosen for herself. Nicole and Naja had come into the studio to talk, not knowing exactly what the other thought about this whole experience now. Some time had passed and it stopped fighting about it. Nicole had not written her new article about all of this yet. And she had questions. She thought now that Naja was doing so well, she'd been able to get into her top school and succeed there. Nicole wanted to know if I asked Naja what she thought of her mom's choice, which she still say it was terrible. Act 4. Nicole and Naja When they showed up together, I could tell just by watching the way they interact that Nicole and Naja enjoy spending time together. They're comfortable. Not just 16 years old now. She tells me her top pick for college is Howard, not Harvard, Howard. She likes it, she says, because it's in DC, it's got a nice campus. Plus, she says, I'd get to be with my mom. They both act like this is a completely regular thing for a 16-year-old to say and want. And that is how I know they're close, and that a lot has changed. I had talked to Nicole about all this twice on her own before she came in with Naja, and I talked to Naja alone for almost an hour and a half while her mom waited outside. I got Naja's thoughts and the experiences she'd had in the different schools. And it wasn't until the very end, when I said is there anything else you want to say, that Naja mentioned the argument with her mom. They hadn't had it for a long time, but Naja said she had brought it up again when she was feeling behind at the beginning of high school. Like, Mark, if you didn't put me in these schools, I would have been okay. What'd she say? She said the same thing. She said, I don't know what she said. I know that I complained to her. So, you know that she said the same thing that she said, the last time you had the conversation, but you don't actually know what that was. Yeah, I don't know what it was. Do you want to know? Yes. I think we could probably get the answer from her, because she's sitting right outside here. Nicole, you up for coming in? Hello, Nicole. Nicole sits next to Naja and they talk. I'm going to believe the name of Naja's high school when it comes up in this conversation. They're sitting side by side and Nicole begins laying out her case. She's clear, vulnerable. Tells Naja, this was a hard choice, the hardest choice, because Naja's still seems to be listening carefully. As Nicole says, public education is just so deeply unequal and always has been. Black kids, in particular, segregated and denied a fair and equal education. What do we then do? Do we just say, well, it's nothing I can do, or do you try in some way to make some intervention? It's like, why should my child be the one that's rescued? Like, you should escape what we consign so many other kids just like you too. I just would never feel right about that. Why? Why? It makes no sense. You're talking about, oh, I'm just going to give you the worst, just because it's not fair that you, I actually born, all you're supposed to do is just like putting in a good school like, oh, well, I don't want to put you in a great school and have you have advantages over other kids. Isn't that what you want? Isn't that what you want me to have? Is that no, no, normal thing you want me to have? You don't want me to. You do though. Okay, yeah, but you do. You have advantages. You have so many advantages. Right, okay. So, but I'm not seeing, I'm seeing him school wise. I'm in school every day. I'm going to I was in that building every single day. That doesn't make sense. I'm there more than home. Obviously, I get more in general, but school is the most important thing. Why do you imagine like you're able to do well in it? Because it's a better school, but you, you think it's possible your foundation wasn't as terrible as you think it is? No. So, you think you came in like a blank slate of and now I've learned everything there? No, but you have been able to have the same academic success as your classmates because, well, not even though like everyone last year, I had my grade come out. I remember crying because everyone else's score was so good. And it was just like, how is this so easy for everyone else but me? So, no, I don't think that I got through it. I think I just tried, tried my heart's. Yeah, I mean, I think it's fair to say you did not receive the top. Either quality middle school experience. That's fair. Even basic fractions. I mean, like I was never taught that I had to relearn everything for my tutor. That's fair. Everyone's not sure. Not sure, kid. You can't save everyone who doesn't want to be saved. That's what you think, though. You think like other kids don't want better? I'm not saying that I want it better. All the kids in my school want that one and better and one and better. There's no benefit that came out of you putting me in those schools. There's no benefit at all. Could you tell me a benefit? You want me to answer that? Benefit for the school? What benefit did you provide the school? I think that's a great question. I do think it was a benefit of us being in those schools. We brought resources. If you remember, Nicole runs through a bunch of examples. Your dad, organizing parents at the school, intervening when there were issues with teachers, making sure kids who couldn't afford field trips would still get those opportunities. The principal creating a recognition breakfast for kids who made the honor roll wouldn't have happened if you weren't in the school. Nicole goes big and specific. The benefits of kids having friends from different backgrounds are moral obligations to one another. Naja is not waiting for her to be done. She's jumping in. Opportunities for all kids, like what? You made friends with different kinds of people. Who? Dad being involved had a big impact? How? We don't have to actually agree. It's okay for us to see this in a different way. But ultimately, you got into your first choice at high school. But you could have had me with higher education. Do you feel like your life is being held back? I don't think that, but I don't want to feel like I didn't know anything because I was set back in other schools. I didn't want to feel like I was done. And ninth grade, it didn't feel like I was done. It didn't feel like I didn't know anything. It was like, oh my gosh, you're like a dumb black girl in a white school. That's what it made me feel. Why should I have to suffer with that? Why couldn't you just benefit kids in another way? There are other options. I don't think you can change. I think we have decades of people saying they were going to change a school from outside and I don't think I just don't think you do. I think New York City is full of people who write checks and people who say, I believe inequality. What we were trying to do was not just about giving some additional funds to a school. We were trying to change the power dynamics, but that doesn't connect to why why did I have to be in the school. Nicole says, okay, remember what happened in fourth grade when kids weren't being taught? Do you remember that? That wasn't just happening to you. The only way though that we know that's happening is because we're in the class and we're in the school. And have we not been in the school? We wouldn't have ever known that that was happening. There are ways as you could know that kind of stuff. But there aren't. And we've talked about like over and over like our lives are the products of people who didn't just say we think segregation is wrong, we think injustice is wrong, like they were They were willing to put themselves there. their families, their children on the line for that. - So you put me on the line to help with school, but it didn't work. - I put, yeah, I put you on the line in the hopes of making a change, yeah. - It's not like I never had any doubts about my choice. I did. And the only reason I'm okay with my choice now is I'm like, you're fine. I felt this was important. I tried to do the right thing. And I think I'm fine because I'm in the school I am now. I feel like if I picked a different choice that you wanted me to, I don't think I would be fine. - Okay, and I think this choice was good for me. And I do appreciate you for saying that. - I think your choice is good for you as well. - Yes. (upbeat music) - They done it. Nicole had committed to letting Naja have her say. She felt she owed it to her. And Nicole was committed to putting all of this out into the world. And as a final step in this whole process, she fact checked herself. And she was in for a shock. Let's give this an act, a mini act, a post script, act five, the evidence. (upbeat music) She was checking her memory on things as she wrote her story for the New York Times magazine. And Nicole looked through old emails back and forth with Naja's schools, messages to principals and teachers raising concerns. - And there's like pages of emails. I don't even remember sending that many emails. Then I'm a writer and I'm a journalist. So my emails are very detailed. Like every time I'm emailing the principal, I'm quoting my daughter, I'm listing all these details, the issues we were having, not feeling like we were getting the proper response, my worries, my concerns, my like Naja came home and said that her teacher was gone again. And this is like the fourth time the teacher was gone. And there was no sub. And Naja said she had to go in the kindergarten class, but she's in second grade, right? And not just like a record of my making complaints, but a record of like non-carry. Like the principal not responding. The teachers not responding over and over and over and over again. And I'm in Texas that day. And I'm getting ready to go, give a talk, and I'm sitting in the hotel room and I'm just reading all of these emails. And it was crushing to read them. And I was like, damn, like you really, to make this work for yourself mentally, I just forgot. I had just pushed a lot of that out of my memory, I think, to be able to live with the choices we were trying to make. And I understand my child feeling very betrayed by our choices. This is why my baby is so angry. - Did you tell her any of that? - Well, she calls me. She calls me right as I'm sitting there. I'm like sitting at my desk, just gone through all these emails. And I'm like, I'm not crying, but I'm teary-eyed. I'm just sitting there. So she calls me and I pick up and I'm trying to make my voice sound normal, but she hears that I'm upsetting my voice. And she's like, what's wrong, mommy? And I'm like, nothing, everything's good. And she's like, what's wrong? And she asked me that maybe one more time. And then I just told her I was like, I've been reading the emails. From everything that was happening with your schools. And I'm sorry. And I just told her like, I don't feel like you got the education you deserved. And I don't feel that I listened to you enough. I just said I'm sorry. - What did she say? - She was quiet for a second. And then she told me, I'm kind of glad you're seeing this now. So I don't feel like you listened to me. I don't feel like you tried to understand that. And I just apologized to get it and I said, you're right. The stakes were so high for me personally. I feel like the stakes are so high when it comes to the issue of integration and equality that I couldn't admit to her that yes, you did bear a cause. And I don't know that we made the right choice. I don't know what the right choice would be. - I was stunned by this turn. I have never heard Nicole talk like this. I've never heard most people, my closest friends, be this truthful with themselves about their choices, especially when it comes to our kids and schools. And talking about those choices in public, never. Why? So all of us can judge or feel smug or angry or vindicated or however you have felt listening to this. It's not like Nicole is the only one out here making a choice. We all live in the same world she lives in. We all live with schools that are segregated and unequal. We all make choices, imperfect, complicated choices. Nicole's just the one who's reckoning with hers. Deeply and in public. And I think the less you talk about a choice, the less you scrutinize it, the easier it is to live with. Nicole is in a strange, new and disorienting place these days. She's a person who's used to making an argument. And now she's not sure what to argue for. Not just because of her experience with Naja, also because of what Nicole's seen in her reporting over the last decade. For years, Nicole's writing pushed for systemic change. In particular, she's argued that we need to integrate public schools, racially and economically. And in her reporting, she's talked to so many people who put their lives into that fight, who sacrificed, made real life-changing sacrifices that they hoped would lead to a bigger transformation. And so little has changed. Public schools are unequal and segregated as they were 10 years ago, 30 years ago, 60 years ago. If you sacrifice to make a change but change doesn't come, all you're left with is the sacrifice. And so what am I arguing for? I don't know anymore. Whoa, Nicole. I know. A lot's happened. A lot has happened. The base of the argument is that what we are doing to black children is immoral. And that I am not wavered on. I will not waver on. I want us to understand that we choose this. I don't want us to be absolved by it, not even me. I want us to come at the end of this story, sharing my sense of devastation. I find the culmination of all my work is I'm going to force you to bear witness to what you choose and what I choose. Then that's got shall get. Then that's not shall lose. So the Bible says. And that's still his news. 'Cause my mother may have. And Papa may have long but God. You sure gonna bless the child who's got his own. Yeah, yeah, who's got his own. Our program was produced and edited today by Nancy Updake with help from Ira Glass. The people who put together today's show are Cassie Howley, Adrienne Lilly, Seth Lind, Katherine Raimondo, Stone Nelson, Nadia Raymond, Ryan Remmery, Ruby Schwartz, Alissa Ship, Christopher Swatala, Julie Whitaker, and Diane Wu. Our Managing Editor, Isara Abdurakman, our Senior Editor, David Kessenbaum, our Executive Editor, Emmanuel Berry. Nicole's article is called "Infiting for Every Black Child" did I betray my own? And you can find it on the New York Times website. It was edited by Alina Silverman. Special thanks today to Rachel Lissy. Our website thisamericanlife.org where you can stream an archive of over 800 episodes for absolutely free and there's videos and lists of favorite shows and tons of other stuff there too. Again thisamericanlife.org. This American life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the public radio exchange. I'm Khanna Jaffee Walt. Ira Glass will be back next week with more stories of this American life. Next week on the podcast of This American Life. Good. I'm dropping it too. Do you want to hear about all the works that I did for you or what? Should we move on? Connor, I wish me. There's this podcast out there where it feels like they invented something completely new. This guy Sir Kaveta recorded his personal conversations for years and the result is unlike anything I've ever heard. We played some of this show. It's called Reaching Out. Next week on the podcast on your local public radio station.