By Dr. Keith Adams, Ed.D., CMAA
President & Founder, CKA SAVE Project, Inc.

I read Nikole Hannah-Jones' essay the way I read most things that touch on education and young people — as a practitioner first, not as a commentator.

For those who haven't followed the story, Hannah-Jones is the journalist behind the 1619 Project. She and her husband made a deliberate choice years ago to send their daughter to a high-poverty, predominantly Black and Hispanic public school in New York, believing that if families like hers stayed invested in those schools, the schools themselves would improve for every child inside them. It was an idea rooted in something I actually respect: the belief that we are all tied together, and that opportunity shouldn't be something a family purchases and takes with them.

But this fall, she wrote something harder to say than any op-ed she's written before. Her daughter, now a teenager, had strong grades for years — and still arrived in high school without the math foundation she needed to keep up. The daughter, by her mother's own account, wanted to know what all of it had actually accomplished. And Hannah-Jones admitted she didn't have a clean answer.

That essay set off a wave of reaction — some of it sympathetic, much of it sharp. People weighed in from every direction: writers who felt she'd used her own child to make a point about the world, advocates who used her story to argue for school choice, and others who pointed out that most families making these decisions aren't debating ideology at all — they're doing the best they can with what's in front of them.

I'm not going to wade into that debate here. Reasonable people can disagree about school choice, integration, and what parents owe their ideals versus their children. That's not my lane, and honestly, it's not the most important part of the story to me.

Here's what stopped me:

A student had good grades. And she still wasn't prepared.

That is the Resume Gap. I've been writing and talking about it for years, and I usually describe it in the context of student-athletes — the young person who compiled a strong transcript or an impressive athletic résumé but still couldn't demonstrate the skills that actually determine whether they thrive once the spotlight moves. Hannah-Jones' essay is a reminder that the Resume Gap isn't confined to any one kind of school, any one zip code, or any one family's income level. It can happen anywhere. It can happen to a journalist's daughter in Brooklyn just as easily as it can happen to a three-sport athlete in a rural county or a first-generation college student in a suburban district.

Grades tell you what a student completed. They don't always tell you what a student can actually do.

That gap is exactly why I founded CKA.

Not Which School — What Systems

The conversation around Hannah-Jones' essay keeps circling back to a single question: did she choose the right school for her daughter? I understand why people want to litigate that. But I think it's the wrong question, or at least an incomplete one.

The better question is this: what systems of support was that student surrounded by, regardless of which building she walked into every morning?

Because here is something thirty years in classrooms, athletic departments, and mentorship has taught me: no single school — public, private, high-performing, or under-resourced — automatically produces a student who is ready for what comes next. Readiness isn't a byproduct of an address or an admissions letter. It's the result of intentional structure, consistent discipline, and support systems that follow a student even when a single teacher, coach, or parent can't be everywhere at once.

That is the entire premise behind Educational Management, the framework I've spent the last several years building out through CKA. It doesn't ask whether a student is in the "right" school. It asks whether that student has:

• A structure that gives them systems, expectations, and measurable goals.

• Discipline that helps them consistently execute those systems, even when no one is watching.

• Support from mentors, educators, and advocates who help them recognize gaps before those gaps become permanent.

Hannah-Jones' daughter, from everything her mother has written, was surrounded by people who loved her. That was never in question. What seems to have been missing wasn't love or intention — it was a coordinated system built to catch a gap like the one in math before it compounded year after year. That's not a failure unique to one school or one family. It's a failure of disconnected systems, and it's happening in schools across the entire spectrum of American education, in zip codes rich and poor, public and private.

What This Means for Student-Athletes

I think about this constantly with the young people CKA serves.

I've watched student-athletes with strong GPAs struggle to write a professional email. I've watched kids with elite athletic résumés freeze the first time they had to introduce themselves in a room without a coach standing next to them. None of that means those students weren't talented, or that their schools failed them outright. It means no one had built the bridge between what they were achieving on paper and what they could actually demonstrate in the moment that mattered.

That's the whole reason the 100/100 Standard exists at CKA — 100% Academic Excellence and 100% Athletic, Professional, and Personal Development, held at the same time, not traded off against each other. It's why we built the Career Launch Academy around career mapping, professional branding, and financial literacy instead of assuming those things will just show up somewhere along the way. It's why CKA VIP exists — because a résumé line means far less than evidence a young person can actually point to.

A Crossroads I Know Personally

I didn't just study this question from the outside. I lived a version of it.

My son came up through a public school French Immersion Program from kindergarten through eighth grade. And despite having spent over thirty years teaching in public schools myself, I wasn't satisfied with the experience he was having. So as a family, we made a hard call: we moved him into the private school world, ultimately an all-boys Catholic high school.

That decision didn't come free. It meant added tuition, longer travel time, higher athletic expenses, and giving up pieces of the traditional public high school experience — the version most of his peers were living. There were real trade-offs on that side of the ledger.

But what we gave up on one end, we got back on the other, in the form of increased discipline and personal accountability. My son is set to graduate this year, and looking back on the road that got him here, he has no regrets about the path we chose or how it prepared him for what's next. My Aunt Denise, who spent my entire life pushing the importance of education on me, has been part of that journey with him too.

I share that not to argue our choice was the "right" one in some universal sense — that's exactly the trap I want to avoid falling into with Hannah-Jones' story. I share it because it's the same fundamental question every family in this essay is wrestling with: not which school is correct, but which systems will actually get your child ready for what's ahead.

A Lesson Bigger Than One Family

I'll be honest — I don't know what the "right" answer was for the Hannah-Jones family, and I don't think it's my place to grade a parent's decision from the outside. Every family is weighing something the rest of us can't fully see.

But I do know this: the story resonated with hundreds of thousands of readers because it touched something universal — the fear every parent and every coach carries, that we might be preparing a young person for the wrong thing, or not preparing them at all, without realizing it until it's too late to simply fix it with better intentions next semester.

That fear is exactly what Educational Management is built to address. Not by picking the "correct" school. Not by promising a shortcut. By building the structure, discipline, and support that make sure a good transcript and real preparedness are finally telling the same story.

Because in the end, the goal was never simply to get a young person into the building.

The goal is to make sure they're ready for what happens once they're inside it.

Building Better Students. Developing Better Athletes. Creating Better Futures.
One Goal: Balance. One Result: Success.

— Dr. Keith Adams, Ed.D., CMAA
President & Founder, CKA SAVE Project, Inc.