Apparently Nikole Hannah-Jones, the mastermind behind the 1619 Project that propelled critical race theory into our nation’s public schools, is more of an advocate for school choice than you’d think. On Wednesday, she took to Twitter to complain about school choice and, ironically, ended up making a strong case for it.
Hannah-Jones’s journey from flaming critical race theory advocate to unwitting school choice fan is a bit of a winding tweet-maze of snark and ignorance, but it’s worth going along for the ride to understand just how little she knows about what school choice advocates believe and how that ends up demonstrating just how important school choice really is.
In her response to Mike Pompeo’s tweet that parents should “decide what their children are taught in schools,” Hannah-Jones tweeted:
Believe it or not, it’s not just parents who pay for public schools and not just parents who have a vested interest in public schools. Public schools are a common good designed to create an informed citizenry in a multiracial democracy — two things I know you abhor. pic.twitter.com/yvsJpjfb10
— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) October 6, 2021
Neil McCluskey, director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom responded to Hannah-Jones:
She’s right: Public schools are about collective shaping of minds through government power.
Why we need #schoolchoice now. https://t.co/bMZlj6gMgl
— Neal McCluskey (@NealMcCluskey) October 7, 2021
Hannah-Jones responded with what I’m sure she thought was a doozy:
You already have choice: Homeschool or pay tuition. https://t.co/7LNyUIqomv
— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) October 7, 2021
Hannah-Jones’s snarky comment that parents who don’t like public school can just either homeschool or pay tuition to a private school is both surprisingly ignorant and elitist. Many parents, no matter how much they might love the idea of homeschooling, simply can’t do it due to work or other obligations. Private school tuition is astronomical. It’s a choice most parents cannot make. This is why upwards of 90% of children attend public schools and why parents need to have the right to choose.
Here, Billy Binion, an assistant editor at Reason, jumped in:
Nikole Hannah-Jones has written convincingly on school segregation & its lingering effects. But the greatest contributing factor to segregation today is that kids without choice are trapped in schools based on a zip code. “Pay for private school” is quite the classist response. https://t.co/SkYp7zP66m
— Billy Binion (@billybinion) October 7, 2021
Hannah-Jones, still unaware that she’s forming a Twitter trail making one of the strongest cases for school choice by a liberal in Twitter history, tweeted back:
Why do “school choice” advocates never advocate eliminating school district boundaries/funding schools by local property tax and allowing poor, Black students to attend white, wealthy schools in neighboring municipalities? They don’t really want choice, just privatization. https://t.co/fKi39Xsc64
— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) October 7, 2021
Conservatives who have advocated for school choice with gusto collectively shook their heads:
That is literally what school choice supporters advocate for https://t.co/kiGeKPuFZY
— Emily Zanotti (@emzanotti) October 7, 2021
The portability of school choice, and the benefits of that specifically for black kids in poor neighborhoods, has been a major part of arguments in its favor for decades. https://t.co/tatT4mBjL2
— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) October 7, 2021
The very premise of school choice is that parents, regardless of district, boundaries, or anything else, should be able to choose the kind of school that works best for their family, be it a school 30 minutes away that focuses on math and science or a school down the street that specializes in something else. When it has been implemented in some areas, black students are better served and do better in school. School choice actually helps eliminate racism and segregation because it eradicates the physical boundaries of school districts, enabling children in traditionally poor inner-city schools potentially to attend wealthier, suburban schools if that’s what their parents choose.
It’s unusual that a stalwart liberal who opposes an idea will make the case for it, but we observed this, thanks to Twitter, last week with Hannah-Jones and school choice. Liberals rarely seem to know what conservatives think about hot-button issues. This was no different.
Nicole Russell is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is a journalist in Washington, D.C., who previously worked in Republican politics in Minnesota. She was the 2010 recipient of the American Spectator’s Young Journalist Award.
