Nikole Hannah Jones
I watched this over and over. A police officer has just killed her oldest child. It has to be the worst moment of her life, but of all the ways she could have expressed her grief and outrage, this is what was on her mind- school, getting her son through school.
Michael Brown became a national symbol of the police violence against black youth, but when I looked into his education, I realized he’s also a symbol of something else, something much more common. Most black kids will not be shot by the police but many of them will go to a school like Michael Brown’s.
It took me all of five minutes on the internet to find out that the school district he attended is almost completely black, almost completely poor, and failing badly. The district is called Normandy. It’s made up of one high school, the one that Michael Brown attended, a middle school, and five elementary schools. It’s in a town also called Normandy that borders on Ferguson.
Each year, the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education puts out a report that shows how each of its 520 school districts is doing. It’s a numeric snapshot of the type of education students are receiving. Districts get points for academic achievement, for how many students graduate, for how well they’re prepared for college.
In 2014, Michael Brown’s senior year, here’s how the Normandy School District was performing. Points for academic achievement in English- 0, math- 0, social studies- 0, science- 0, points for college placement- 0. It seems impossible, but in 11 of 13 measures, the district didn’t earn a single point. 10 out of 140 points, that was its score. It’s like how they say you get points on the SAT just for writing your name. It’s like they got 10 points just for existing. Normandy is the worst district in the state of Missouri.
Maybe Michael Brown’s mom knew these scores. Or maybe she just knew her son’s school didn’t graduate about half of its black boys. I don’t know. I reached out to her several times and she didn’t want to talk. But in the Normandy district, mothers who are worried about the quality of the schools aren’t hard to find.
Over the last couple of months, I spent a lot of time with one of them, a Normandy mother named Nedra Martin. And it was through her that I learned the story of something that happened in this district, something that almost never happens anymore. Nedra grew up in Normandy and works in human resources. Her daughter, Mah’Ria, is a star student. Still, Nedra found herself worrying about Mah’Ria’s education all the time.
