Families Do Not Have to Choose Between Community and Excellence
By Shavar Jeffries
In a remarkable new interview, 16-year-old Najya Hannah-Jones challenged the choice her parents made about her education. After years in neighborhood schools that affirmed her identity but left significant gaps in her academic preparation, Najya asked why she had been required to bear the cost of trying to change an unjust system.
“There’s other options,” she said.
She is right.
In reality, the choices available to families are more dynamic than the binary set laid out in Hannah-Jones’ New York Times essay.
In deciding where to educate our children, my wife and I faced a set of considerations that mirrored the ones described in that essay. We lived in the South Ward of Newark, and our schools reflected the residential segregation inherent to our neighborhood — and, perhaps most perniciously, the traditions of disinvestment that historically have marked racially segregated public institutions.
Alongside this history of resource disinvestment, our neighborhood schools also were characterized too often by administrative incompetence, where rigorous curricula, effective instruction and performance-based accountability were in short supply.
As Black parents, we wanted our children to attend schools that reflected their community and affirmed who they were. We also wanted them to be safe, challenged academically and prepared to pursue their highest aspirations.
When we weighed our options, we chose neither an underperforming neighborhood school nor a highly selective, overwhelmingly white school.
We chose KIPP Spark Academy — a school whose student population reflected the residentially segregated reality of the community in which we lived but where our children were loved, pushed and educated by teachers who believed deeply in them.