Writer Peachy Keenan has pointed out something important about New York Times commentator Nikole Hannah Jones's long piece about how she failed her daughter by forcing her to attend bottom-of-the-barrel public schools in New York City to prove that America is racist.
Much to her surprise, all she proved was that she could stiff her daughter out of a decent education, leaving her unprepared for college -- and quite angry at her parents for doing this to her.
And Peachy lists the ugly details:
Why am I just learning now that public schools in the New York city ghetto don't assign homework, don't grade tests, don't respond to parents emails or phone calls, don't supervise feral, fighting kids at lunch, don't know or care if their students can read or do grade level…
— Peachy Keenan (@KeenanPeachy) September 22, 2026
As Keenan noted, Hannah-Jones buried the lede.
She could have been writing for years, and for the New York Times, no less, on the outrageous state of public education in New York City -- schools that don't teach, teachers who don't show up, principals who have better things to do than be at school, cafeteria workers who stand around and do nothing as children fight, homework that never gets graded, emails that never get answered, and kids who can't read, do fractions, or master long division, yet take home straight A's.
That was the lede, and Hannah-Jones sat on it, for years, possibly thinking of how to protect her AFT union buddies who were out promoting her error-filled 1619 Project, while at the same time, forcing that kid to go to those bad schools for eight long years. Just the first year ought to have been enough to pull the kid and put her in a decent learning environment. Instead, she had eight years of notes which could have become some exceptional news-making.
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