断层线 妮可·汉娜-琼斯曾将女儿送入一所陷入困境的当地学校，如今她对此感到后悔。但将问题个人化并非解决之道。
Fault Lines Nikole Hannah-Jones sent her daughter to a struggling local school and has come to regret it. But personalizing the problem is the wrong approach.
十年前，记者妮可·汉娜-琼斯在《纽约时报杂志》上发表了一篇文章，讲述了她为即将上幼儿园的女儿纳吉亚寻找合适学校的经历，这在教育界引发了一场小小的革命。经过一番深思熟虑，汉娜-琼斯选择了位于布鲁克林、她家附近的一所低收入且陷入困境的公立学校——P.S. 307。自文章发表以来的这些年里，她多次重申了自己的逻辑：好学校之所以好，是因为它们拥有资源、资金以及积极参与——有时甚至咄咄逼人——的家长。
Ten years ago, the journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones started a small revolution in education when she wrote an essay for the about finding the right school in New York City for her daughter, Najya, who was about to enter kindergarten. After some deliberation, Hannah-Jones picked P.S. 307, a struggling low-income school near where her family lived, in Brooklyn. Her logic, which she has repeated many times in the years since the essay was published, was simple: good schools were good because they had resources, funding, and engaged—sometimes pushy—parents.
而差学校之所以举步维艰，部分原因在于缺乏足够的富裕家长来监督这些机构。她相信，作为《纽约时报》明星记者的相对特权和地位，可以提升她孩子所在学校的水平。“一名《纽约时报》的记者在贫困程度很高的学校里，绝对能改变这所学校，对吧？”汉娜-琼斯在2018年的一次小组讨论中说道。“有些事情在那所学校里是绝不会发生的。我可以去学校指出问题，问题就会立即得到解决。”我们这些拥有一定金钱、人脉或白人身份的人，可以利用我们的特权来拯救这些学校。
Bad schools foundered in part because there weren’t enough wealthy parents holding the institutions accountable. She believed that her relative privilege and standing as a star reporter for the could elevate her child’s school. “A New York reporter in a high-poverty school fucking changes the school, right?”Hannah-Jones said, during a panel discussion in 2018. “There are certain things that are just not going to happen in that school. I can go to that school and say there’s a problem and it gets fixed immediately.”Those of us with some money or connections or whiteness could save these schools with our privilege.
其中一个令人动容的场景是汉娜-琼斯与纳吉亚所在中学的校长进行的一次谈话。这位家长问校长，为什么她的孩子显然什么都没学到，却能拿到最高分。校长的回答很长，但归根结底是：像这样的学校存在的目的，并不是为了给聪明的上中产阶级孩子教授代数；它们的作用是止损，以应对当地小学带来的问题，而那些小学存在的意义是帮助那些在课堂之外面临严重问题的孩子。
One of these moving scenes involves a conversation that Hannah-Jones has with Najya’s middle-school principal. The parent asks the principal why her child was given top grades while evidently not learning anything. The answer is long, but what it boils down to is that schools like this one do not exist to teach algebra to bright, upper-middle-class kids; they serve to stanch the losses resulting from the local elementary schools, which are there to help kids who are dealing with severe problems outside the classroom.
如今，汉娜-琼斯将自己的行动呼吁视为一种失败，但她似乎仍在个体家庭的层面上思考。“只要我们继续把自己的孩子从那些失败的学校中拯救出来，而任由别人的孩子在其中受苦——仅仅因为这些孩子出生在这个充满种族主义和财富的国家里，是黑人和穷人，”她写道，“这里就没有赦免可言。”再一次，教育和不平等的问题被简化为个体的、种族化的选择。
Today, Hannah-Jones presents her call to action as a failure, but she still seems to be thinking on the level of individual families. “As long as we continue to rescue our own children from the failing schools where we allow other people’s children to languish simply because those children have been born Black and poor in a nation of racism and riches,” she writes, “there is no absolution here.”Again, the question of schooling and inequality is reduced to individual, racialized choices.
汉娜-琼斯在她自己关于一个理念兴衰的故事中是主角，尽管她的悔恨深深触动了我，但我离开时更加确信，在改善公立学校体系方面，父母的德行最终毫无意义。正如汉娜-琼斯的乐观、正直、金钱和影响力未能将P.S. 307变成一所能妥善教育纳吉亚的学校，她的个人反思同样不会改变任何事情。
Hannah-Jones is the protagonist in her own story about the rise and fall of an idea, and although I was deeply affected by her regret, I came away even more convinced that the virtue of a parent is ultimately meaningless when it comes to improving the public-school system. Just as Hannah-Jones’s optimism, integrity, money, and influence did not turn P.S. 307 into a school that could properly educate Najya, her personal reckoning will not change things, either.