When a company fails to deliver products that satisfy the customers who are paying for them, the customers stop showing up. The company loses its revenue, people get fired, and the whole thing eventually shuts down. It can be a stressful system to operate in, but it works beautifully to align incentives and create real accountability. In NYC Public Schools, that beautiful system gets completely inverted. When a school fails to deliver quality education, the customers (taxpayers) are forced to pay more into it through additional funding measures that get triggered to help lift up the underperformers. The highly-political, aggressively-unionized nature of the operation shields responsible parties from consequences, and the grift just continues on forever. Despite her experiences and the vulnerability she showed in her essay, Nikole Hannah-Jones still doesn't appreciate any of this.