“Black parents are left deciding which cost we are willing to ask our children to bear.”
A Black mother wrote that the morning after Nikole Hannah-Jones’s essay ran, and part one of this essay attempted to address some of the layers of Nikole’s family’s experiences. Her three options are the ones most of our families know. Stay in the neighborhood school, so often under-resourced, and your child may be underserved. Leave for a whiter or more selective school and your child may carry the otherness and the racism. Or go on a journey to find the rare school that manages both, “which is more exception than option.”
In part one, I promised a fourth option: build the school down the block made excellent by the adults in and around it.
The fallout of NHJ’s article was much of the internet judging one mother. Mama Fasaha Traylor, my principal at Nidhamu Sasa, read the reactions and caught the contradiction in them: some “complained that the essay made it seem like education is an individual problem, when we all know it’s not, but then promptly criticized her for not providing her daughter with sufficient extra help.” Blaming parents one at a time, “whether poor or well-off,” she added, “will yield us basically what we’ve already gotten: a little luck for some, a whole lot of heartache for most, and lots of lost sheep.”
Black children have been burdened with adult arguments through schoolhouse doors since Barbara Johns, sixteen, walked her classmates out of Moton High in 1951 to ask for a decent school and got a desegregation case instead. My podcastmate (8 Black Hands and Freedom Friday) Chris Stewart, who has disagreed with Nikole about remedies for over a decade, set the two girls side by side in the days after: “Two Black girls, three generations apart, asked the adults for an education, and both times the adults answered with a cause.”
The system wrote those options; the parent only scrambles to choose one.
Derrick Bell supervised hundreds of school desegregation cases for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. In 1961, Black parents from Leake County, Mississippi, came to him because the school board had closed the elementary school their community had built with its own money, and they wanted it reopened. He told them the movement had abandoned making separate schools equal; the help Derrick offered was a desegregation suit, and they filed one in 1963. The parents asked for a school. The adults with the law degrees answered with a cause. Bell’s judgment: civil rights lawyers went on arguing that Black children were entitled to integrated schools “without regard to the educational effect of such assignments.”
The adults who know the buildings best have been making Nikole’s choice for decades. In the 2000 census, 44 percent of Philadelphia’s public school teachers with children in school had them in private school, against 31 percent of Philadelphia families overall, the highest share of any of the fifty largest cities. Nationally, the gap mostly closes once teachers are compared with other parents who hold a college degree, and nearly nine in ten teacher families still had a child in a public school. Voucher advocates have yelled about the Philadelphia number for twenty years as “proof” that teachers know something the rest of us do not. What it proves is that the people inside the building weigh the same three options and land where Nikole landed. The problem is the options, and we as educators know it. My activist Mama was a teacher and at various times she had all five of her children in different schools. Had Nidhamu Sasa been a K-12 school, however, we undoubtedly would not have had the kaleidoscopic experience that we did.
What the experiment showed
Nikole went into P.S. 307, by her own telling, believing that one family’s money, connections, and standing could change a school: “I believed Faraji and I could bring some of that power with us.” She and her husband could, as she writes, “write checks that exceeded the annual P.T.A. budget,” a line a teacher at a Title I school, the federal label for a school full of poor children, said “hit me in the stomach.” The gap between those two P.T.A.s says nothing about either family and everything about how this country funds schools. Districts serving children of color go without the owed $23 billion every year — just one aspect of the educational debt.
Ten years later she reports what the experiment showed:
the experience “exposed the fallacy that caring families are more important than competent teachers.“
That is a finding about systems. The fourth-grade math folder from Part 1 is what it looks like up close: nearly every problem was wrong under a check mark, and on the radio Nikole said what that meant. “He’s not checking her math. He’s not correcting her. He’s not teaching her.” A byline in the parent pickup line was never going to do what a fourth-grade teacher who grades the math and gives the reading assessment does. No individual family, however resourced, can substitute for the adults the system failed to put in the building, and a system that counts on some family doing so has decided a lot of children will go without.
Najya is likely to be fine. A MacArthur fellow for a mother, a house full of books, two parents who could write those checks: whatever P.S. 307 failed to teach her, her odds of getting to college were never in doubt. The children still in the building are the ones the three options decide for. I’m not the only one who wonders about the other students who attended P.S. 307 and how they are faring a decade later.
In Philadelphia, of the roughly 7,200 graduates of the district’s high schools in the class of 2024, about half enrolled in college the fall after graduation. At Central and Masterman, 87 in every hundred did. At Overbrook, where I graduated, 27. At Sayre and Bartram in West Philadelphia, 24, and at Edison, 14. Those are the graduates, before counting the children who never reached the stage. A decade ago a campaign called Black Degrees Matter put the four-year degree rate for Black boys from the district’s schools at under five percent. Her classmates and peers around the country pay the cost of the choice and the experiment, not the child in the essay.
Where the options get written
The decisions also happen in a school’s budget lines.
When I became principal at Shaw, the budget the district handed me charged the school the district’s average teacher salary for every teacher in the building, about $51,000 at the time. My teachers were not average. Most of them were new, from Teach For America, The New Teacher Project, and second careers, and during my years there, 2003 to 2008, a first-year teacher in Philadelphia started at $38,751 while a teacher at the top of the scale with a master’s degree made $65,322.
Across the district, the poorer the middle school, the newer its faculty, a correlation of .71, about as tight as these things get. The district was charging us for teachers we did not have and sending the difference to the veteran schools in wealthier, whiter neighborhoods, including the Northeast, whose legislators had spent the 1980s trying to secede from Philadelphia altogether. As a first-year principal trying to make sense of a budget and gather as many resources as possible for my struggling school, I naively raised it as a mistake and was told it was policy, and federal law allows it: Title I lets a district prove its poor schools get comparable resources using average salaries instead of actual ones. Shaw had 37 teachers my first year, many of them near the bottom of the scale, which means the district charged Shaw roughly $200,000 a year for salaries it never paid us, close to a million dollars over my five years. The difference, in an actual budget, would have meant four or five more teachers, every year, for a school where 99 percent of the children qualified for free lunch.
Pennsylvania does the same thing at the state level and calls it “hold harmless.” Most of the state’s basic education money is handed out on enrollment counts from the early 1990s, with a guarantee that no district loses a dollar when its students leave. Districts with more children in poverty and more children learning English split only the new money, about a fifth of the total in the year a Commonwealth Court judge ruled the whole system unconstitutional. And the one district in the state that cannot fix any of this on its own is Philadelphia. Its school board is the only one of Pennsylvania’s 500 that cannot raise a dollar in taxes. It asks City Council and Harrisburg for everything, and both can say no.
The third example is who ends up in front of the children. In 2023-24, twenty of Pennsylvania’s 499 districts employed half of all the emergency-permit teachers in the state, people put in front of children before they finished certification, and the districts leaning hardest on those permits carried a funding gap of $3,437 per pupil, against roughly $1,900 in the districts that use few or none. Title I is supposed to offset all of this. It is 2 percent of what this country spends on its public schools. The children carry all of this into buildings that average 73 years old, more than 200 of them built before lead paint was banned.
Every one of these is a choice made in Washington, Harrisburg, City Council, or at the district’s headquarters at 440 North Broad. Together they are what make the third option rare.
The people in those rooms are often ours. Mama Fasaha said as much the same week: in the North, “the obstacles are obscured,” harm just happens to Black children, and no one is responsible, “including Black people on Boards, in classrooms, in mayors’ offices.” Najya, she wrote, is Ruby Bridges in the North. The fixes above are known, priced, and sitting on the proverbial dusty shelf. “This is not a technical problem, it’s a political and cultural one.”
The bridge is the cost
An advocate who grew up in the New York system pushed back on the essay from the other direction: Black and Latinx parents “bridge gaps every day” with tutoring and enrichment and a folder checked at the kitchen table, so why did a parent with far more resources not start that much earlier?
Our people have always taught in the space the school left empty. The Saturday academy in the church basement, the aunt who checked the folder, the barber who checked the report card, the Freedom School that ran from three to five because of what the school that ran from eight to three did not do — either as a detox center or an enrichment program. Nikole’s own 1619 Freedom School in Waterloo does the same.
And it is a cost. An ordinary school year asks Black parents for all of this: “advocating in meetings, fighting unfair discipline, patching curriculum gaps at home, soothing our children’s damaged spirits each night, using our homes as detox centers from their schooling experiences.” That is the bridge. It is heroic, and it is a tax that white families in well-resourced schools do not pay. A parent who can build the bridge and does not has left her child exposed. A system that requires the bridge has left all of our children exposed. Both are true, and only the second one can be fixed by policy.
“Where would you send your child instead?” is the right question, and she left it open. The third option, the rare school that manages rigor and belonging both, is rare because adults decided it would be.
What the fourth option is made of
The fourth option is neither stay, nor leave, nor search like Abubakari II. It is build. Najya asked for it in a radio studio, sitting next to her mother: “Why couldn’t you just benefit kids in another way? There is other options.” A Chicago mother who writes as “Uppity Negress” asked it of her own childhood, in which the 99th percentile carried her out of a neighborhood school in West Englewood and into a private school in Wilmette: “Why couldn’t the extraordinary education I deserved have been built and resourced where I already lived?” What she questions now is “the system that made extraction look like opportunity.”
Opposing a bad school is resistance. Leaving one is survival. Building a good one on the block where the children already live is what the NAACP’s Derrick Johnson calls the construction of justice itself.
Najya also said where she learned that a good school is a white one. Asked why it seemed that way, she answered, “Because you see it in your school… If you look at 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.” The response online called that anti-Blackness and aimed it at a sixteen-year-old. She was describing a lesson, and she did not write it.
Every city that tests children out of one building and into another and then publishes the scores teaches it to whoever is watching, and Black children have been watching. Philadelphia’s children once refused it. On November 17, 1967, 3,500 of them walked out of a dozen high schools and marched to the Board of Education at 21st and the Parkway to demand Black history taught by Black teachers, and Frank Rizzo’s police beat them on the sidewalk.
Matthew Countryman’s Up South traces how this city’s movement turned from a liberalism that treated Black exclusion as a blind spot in an otherwise fair system toward institutions the community built and controlled, and it was working-class Black Philadelphians whose lives that turn was meant to change. The fourth option inherits that turn. A school built on the block has to teach the children on it that the deficit was never in their minds and that Black people have run excellent schools before, in this city, within living memory.
We need far more neighborhood schools that take every child on the block, with no test and no application, and that do not depend on a parent who can write a check bigger than the P.T.A. budget. What makes them work is the adult I described in part one: a teacher who believes her own effort will move a child, who has mastered what she teaches, and who understands racial justice and educational justice as one fight, inside a building that expects as much of its staff and its families as it does of its students. The belief comes first and is not enough on its own. An educator who believes in a child and cannot teach her to read has left her where she found her.
Stephanie Ries, who taught in Black and Brown schools where the supplies ran short and now teaches at a predominantly white institution, described the same kind of person from the teacher’s side of the desk. “We refused to confuse limited resources with limited ability,” she wrote, and the students from those rooms are excelling today “not because resources did not matter, but because educators refused to allow inequity to determine their possibilities.” And this: “Black children do not need lowered expectations disguised as care.” In her words, “The setting may change. My standard does not.”
Chris Stewart, from the other side of the choice debate, names the same standard: judge any reform for Black children “by the standard Black educators set long before Brown v. Board, which means rigorous teaching, honest assessment, and adults who answer to families, rather than by the racial makeup of the room.”
His four questions are the fourth option’s test:
Does the school expect Black children to master hard material? Does it know what they have and have not learned? Do its adults answer to the families they serve? Does it treat Black children as heirs to an intellectual tradition rather than deficits to be managed?
Brittany Packnett Cunningham, who taught years before she helped organize in Ferguson, stood at Shoemaker’s commencement in 2019, the last year I was there, and answered that last question for our graduates: “I’m not here to tell you to prove anybody wrong. I’m here to tell you to prove your ancestors right.”
Dr. Charles Cole, our other brother from 8 Black Hands, put a number on the second question the same week. His institute worked with more than 500 high-achieving Oakland students, and eight in ten believed they were reading at grade level; the data put the real number closer to three in ten. “These are the kids with the good grades,” he wrote. “Somebody told them they were fine.” Najya’s middle school, the one with no homework, “none, zero,” struck her mother, a reporter who has spent years inside schools, as organized, caring, and responsive.
Charles came up through eleven elementary schools, and the one in Paducah, Kentucky, that made him master reading is the reason a Read Out Loud Day in West Oakland moved him from a special education referral to the gifted track in a week. A lying report card is not a Brooklyn problem, and the children it costs most are often the ones whose parents cannot pay a tutoring center to find out.
Too many educators talk as though schools have communities. It runs the other way: communities have schools within them, and those of us who work inside the building are guests. Andre Perry of Brookings said it for the parents: “Children don’t live in schools; they live with families in communities.”
At Shaw, when the district moved to take the school back and undo what the families had come to trust, our leadership team, the instructional coaches from Edison Schools, and the community’s own hand in running the building, hundreds of parents filled the auditorium to say so. They were overruled. That is the limit of the fourth option. It cannot outvote a district or print money. Erica Jordan-Thomas, a former teacher and principal, drew the same limit from Nikole’s essay: it reminds us that “we can often underestimate the power of systems,” and where a public school works for Black children, it is usually because a teacher, a principal, and a district administrator were all pushing through walls at once.
People speak of systems as though they were fragile. Anti-Black systems are among the most durable things human beings have built in the past five centuries. They morph, they resist, and they camouflage better than almost anything else this country has built; the system that sold our ancestors learned to lease convicts, draw redlines, and screen children out of the good school across town. What the fourth option can do is refuse the choice between rigor and belonging, which is the only choice the three-option world offers a Black child.
What it does for the parents
The fourth option is also the only one that lowers the cost for the whole family.
A parent whose child has an excellent teacher is not fighting the school and the world at the same time. I know this as an educator and I know it as a parent. By the time my son had Ms. Joyce Abbott for sixth grade at Hamilton, I was already a seasoned educator, and it was still a sigh of relief to know my back was covered because my child was being taught brilliantly. Ms. Brenda Morton at Penrose did the same for him. They loved him, advocated for him, and held expectations that honored his brilliance, and our house ran on trust that year.
The Black mother’s “which cost” question comes back here. A great teacher moves a child’s reading level and hands the parent back the evening. If every Black child had that caliber of teacher every year, the lie that our children are deficient and our families do not care could not survive, despite the perfected, age-old propaganda.
Who builds it, and what it costs them
The fourth option is rare because it is expensive to the adults, and this country has organized its schools so that the adults who could build it leave.
Teacher turnover is 50 percent higher in Title I schools than in schools that serve fewer poor children, and twenty-one percent of principals in high-poverty schools leave every year, with an average tenure of about four years, less time than it took Shaw to meet every one of its federal targets. P.S. 307 came apart, in Nikole’s account, the year its principal retired. The fourth option lives and dies on whether the adults stay, which makes it fragile in a way the systems it resists are not.
And it matters who they are. Black children randomly assigned to at least one Black teacher in kindergarten through third grade were 13 percent more likely to graduate from high school and 19 percent more likely to enroll in college, and the effect was concentrated among Black boys from poor families, the children who were half of every building we ran. We have been rebuilding that pipeline since Brown, one Black teenager invited into teaching at a time.
Getting them back is the fourth option’s hardest labor, because integration as practiced took them first. In the two decades after Brown, more than 38,000 Black teachers and principals in the South and border states lost their jobs as Black schools closed and white districts declined to hire the adults who had run them. The ones teaching now have told us what keeps them. In focus groups we ran with Teach Plus, 105 Black teachers named five conditions of a school that lets them be who they are, starting with leaders who build the inclusive culture themselves and a curriculum they are trusted to shape, and 103 high school students of color told us they weigh how their teachers are paid and treated when deciding whether to become one.
Black teachers report the highest morale in the profession, plus five on a scale where white teachers sit at minus thirteen, and still leave at higher rates, which is what happens when people who love the work are asked to do it in buildings that tax them for their race, three times as likely as other teachers of color to be made the building’s disciplinarian.
The bill has always come to us first. Black tenant farmers paid once in taxes for schools their children could not enter and again, in cash and labor, for the ones they raised themselves, what James Anderson named double taxation. The Leake County school was built that way, and so were nearly five thousand Rosenwald schools. The first people to build the fourth option were sharecroppers with the one copper cent many had to their name.
The fourth option has a price, and specific adults pay it.
From teachers: the assessment given, the work graded and returned, the homework assigned because practice is how anybody learns anything, and the decision to stay a fifth year and a tenth.
From principals: the best teacher in the building placed in front of the children furthest behind, not the children with the loudest parents. A vision of the school that the families would fill an auditorium to defend.
From districts: keep the leaders of classrooms and schools who are working. Empower and compensate them to coach and develop others. Charge every school for the teachers it has, not the teachers across town. Put the money where the children are, and stop pretending that the $23 billion gap is anybody’s fault but the adults who vote on budgets.
From the state: end hold harmless, and fund the children who are in the buildings now.
From families: organize, the way the parents of Memphis Lift, Mama Sarah Carpenter’s organization, and the parents of Oakland REACH organize, so that the demand for competent teaching comes from a hundred families and not one with a byline. Come as the experts on your own children, and expect to be received that way. And ask the questions Charles gives parents: what should my child know by the end of this year, what does mastery look like, and what does this A actually mean?
And from Nikole, our sister, one thing. Keep writing. At the end of the radio hour she said, “And so what am I arguing for? I don’t know anymore,” and then named what she has not wavered on: what we are doing to Black children is immoral, and “I want us to understand that we choose this.”
The fourth option stands on that same base, and it needs a voice as loud as the one she has given integration. A parent choosing the neighborhood school should not have to be a hero or a martyr, and when the adults in the building fail her child, she should have somewhere to say so that the whole country reads.
Which cost?
Najya sat in her principal’s office and asked, “What about us?” Emily Paige heard it as “Will you honor my academic self?” and could have cried, because the answer, for years, had been no.
The three options ask a Black family to pick which part of their child to protect and which to expose. The fourth option refuses the question. It says the child does not have to leave to be taught, and does not have to stay to be loved, because the adults on this block will do both. It exists wherever enough adults have decided that the children in front of them are capable, necessary, and accountable to somebody, and have organized the building around that.
Najya is sixteen. What she makes of her mother’s choice at sixteen may not be what she makes of it at twenty-two or forty-five. Our mothers made the same kind of choice. Nikole chose Najya’s elementary and middle schools on her own values and then handed her the high school decision, with public school the one condition. My mother chose Nidhamu Sasa, a Pan-African school in Philadelphia, and then Tabataba’i, our middle school in Qom, Iran, on hers, and when we came home and I was accepted to Saul, the agricultural high school across the city, she handed me the decision too. I chose Overbrook, the neighborhood school, at the last minute, because sports mattered to me at that age more than almost anything and the ride to Saul was too long, even though I adored animals and Saul would have been the pets she never let us have. I never disagreed with any of it, and I understood it more deeply with every year God gave me.
The difference was in what counted as a resource. Nidhamu Sasa had none of what passed for resources in the 1970s and early 1980s, no technology and no athletic fields. What it had was community, pedagogy, rigor, and Africans and Muslims taught as full human beings, and my mother either decided the other resources be damned or defined the word differently from the people who ranked schools. I love that she did. Not every one of those schools managed both. Michelle Strongfields came to Philadelphia as a young parent, chose a Council of Independent Black Institutions school over the district, and remembers the trade: uneven academics for “culture, knowledge of self, pride and community,” and children who “watched, judged, disputed,” came home called weirdos, and grew into adults whose choices for their own children are, she can see now, “informed by what was lovingly poured into them.” “We didn’t all make it,” she wrote. “Of course not. It was all calculated risk-taking.” Nidhamu Sasa gave us both, which is the whole of the fourth option in one building. Whether Najya comes to see her mother’s choice the way I see mine is between the two of them. Why the schools made the choice so expensive is on the rest of us.
Mama Fasaha, who ran that school, spent that week on Nikole’s essay and the response to it. “Under conditions of oppression,” she wrote, “every child is both a miracle and a sacrifice,” and then she compared the choice back through every generation that faced it: whether to jump from the slave ship pregnant or hope the chains would melt, whether to keep a child in the sharecropper’s field or send him to school, whether to let a daughter walk past the people spitting at the newly integrated school, whether to “fight and scrap to get my child in the lottery for a charter school, knowing that my neighborhood school made me feel stupid,” and what to say to “my child’s Black teacher, who doesn’t send her own kids to public school.” Then she gave us the assignment, one I hope we all grow to understand and complete.
The work is “to mobilize all those who believe that all children can, and deserve to learn in an atmosphere where much is expected, where the future is open.” Not by title. By belief. A principal who believes it, a teacher who believes it, a barber and a board member and a mother who believe it, recruited across every line the three options draw. And, in her words and Malcolm’s, by any means necessary.
Build the school Najya should have had, on the block where she lived. We must build the fourth option. For our children, and ultimately for all of us and our children’s great-grandchildren.
