Nikole Hannah-Jones’ recent NYT Magazine essay – "In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?" – in which she offers her mea culpa for enrolling her daughter in poorly performing, mostly minority public schools in order to demonstrate her commitment to her systemic racial equity principles, has caused a huge stir online. The questions it raises – and to a significant degree, avoids answering – about how best to provide a high quality public education to children in a nation riven with racial and class divides, are at the heart of our latest episode.
Jack Despain Zhou, better known by his social media moniker Tracing Woodgrains, in February 2025 launched the Center for Educational Progress, a nonprofit think tank focused on advocating for excellence in public education. CEP’s Substack page not only published Sandeep’s recent piece about the decline of Seattle’s public schools, but also publishes a wide range of insightful thinking about how to refocus public education on excellence, which Jack defines as in tension with the pursuit of equity that has driven American education for the last half century.
We asked Jack to join us on BCB to talk in more detail about what excellence in public education actually entails, and why those concepts and approaches are so controversial. Jack contends, forcefully, that children enter schooling with different aptitudes and learn at different rates, and that any truly effective and excellent pedagogical effort needs to be built foundationally on that reality.
Over the conversation, we discuss why the push over the last decade plus in progressive jurisdictions to unravel advanced learning opportunities and “detrack” students has produced poor results for students across the learning spectrum. We then dig into Hannah-Jones’ essay: while Jack praises her candor in describing her daughter’s unhappy educational experience in low performing schools, he argues that her explanation puts too much emphasis on the impacts of structural segregation and too little on the schools’ instructional choices, like eliminating homework in middle school or adopting equity grading policies.
“You can teach people, and you should teach people, and it matters that education does, in fact, work to raise the absolute level of students,” Jack tells us. “That is what I think schools should focus on: not equalizing people, but how far can we push people?”
OUTSIDE SOURCES:
Tracing Woodgrains Substack page
Jack Despain Zhou, "Schools Should Pursue Excellence," Center for Educational Progress. Feb. 10, 2025.
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