In 2016, the educational writer Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote a long piece for the New York Times about how she had deliberately chosen a Black, low-income public school for her daughter, who was then six. She had done this because she wanted her Black daughter to be among other Black students. She also wanted to practice what she preached. For years she had covered educational systems across America, and for years she had dealt with parents who proclaimed to want integrated, equal-opportunity schools for everyone, only to have those same parents send their own kids to magnet public schools, or worse yet, expensive private schools that effectively ensure a homogenous student body of means and privilege.
The article, naturally, provoked quite the response. Some read it in admiration, seeing a high-profile public intellectual standing by her principles. Others were shocked. Not sending your child to a private school is one thing, but deliberately choosing the worst public school in the area, rather than the better public school your neighbors are sending their children to, is quite the decision. Many questioned whether Hannah-Jones was using her kid as a social experiment, trying to prove that one can still succeed in an underperforming school.
In the years that followed, Hannah-Jones never gave any indication that she had made the wrong choice. Around eight years ago, at a talk at the Iowa City Public Library, she said, “A New York Times reporter in a high poverty school, fucking changes the school. There are certain things that just are not going to happen in that school. I can go to that school, and say there’s a problem, and it gets fixed immediately.”
In 2024, as her daughter was graduating from eighth grade, she posted, “By test-score metrics many would label this school a failing school, but just as I write in the piece, we judge these schools AND their students without ever stepping foot inside. My daughter is not worth more than any other child. Eight years later, I still know we made the right choice.”
So it was quite a surprise when she recently published a follow-up article titled “In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?” The subtitle was equally provocative: “A decade ago, I made a decision about my daughter’s education that I hoped would challenge New York City’s separate and unequal school system. Now 16, she thinks I made the wrong choice.”
The thesis was simple. Her daughter, Najya, had been failed by the schools she was deliberately placed in. Despite the confidence in interviews and online posts, her daughter was now struggling at a highly selective public high school. Even algebra, Najya’s strongest subject, was difficult. A private tutor told Hannah-Jones that, "Najya knew very little algebra and had huge gaps in many of the building blocks of math that she should have learned in elementary school, like mastery of long division and fractions."
The accusations from Najya, when she realized what had happened, are hard to read. They include: “Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?”, “So you had money to send me to one of the best schools, and you chose not to? Because other kids are disadvantaged, you didn’t want to put me in a great school?” And, most damaging, “Sometimes I wish instead of always thinking about other kids, you would have thought about me. I never really got the education I wanted.”
Ouch.
First, Nikole Hannah-Jones deserves a lot of credit. She wrote and published this piece knowing that her detractors, of whom there are many, would jump all over it. And they have. The internet erupted with people taking victory laps over this woke journalist who doomed her child to a subpar education. This wasn’t a single bad decision, but a re-up against social norms for an entire decade in order to prove a point that can’t be proven by a single child, no matter what their outcome.
So credit where credit’s due. This was one of the most gutsy articles written by one of the most polarizing journalists in America. That said, it’s worth incorporating the individual story of the journalist and her daughter into some of the larger issues that have made Hannah-Jones such a controversial writer, as well as issues plaguing American education. Because this is personal for Hannah-Jones, it reads differently than some of her other writings. With any polemical public intellectual, whether on the right or the left, it can be hard to tell where the delusions end and the mendacity begins — that is, how much is “true believer” and how much is “shameless propagandist.” Because this article is clearly heartfelt and exposed Hannah-Jones to attack from all sides, some seems like the former.
For instance, take the following passage:
But fourth grade was the worst year. At the first parent-teacher conference in November 2019, Najya’s teachers told us that she was not performing on grade-level in any of her academic subjects and that her assessment given at the start of the school year had shown she was not a proficient reader. We were perplexed. Najya was always a good student, and her past reading assessments were always at or above grade level…
…Then one day in December, Najya came home and excitedly informed me that she had suddenly jumped three grade levels in reading in one month. Knowing that this was virtually impossible, I reached out to the school’s literacy coach and learned that after we began asking for the reading assessment, Najya’s teacher had instructed the coach to perform the evaluation and that she found Najya was reading just fine. What became clear to me was that Najya’s teacher had most likely never performed the school’s mandatory reading assessments for Najya or any of her classmates but instead had assumed the flagging competency of these mostly low-income Black children.
Given that Najya would struggle mightily later on in school, a biased teacher probably was not the cause of the low assessment. Rather, as Hannah-Jones crows, she had become "a thorn in the principal's side." She openly admits to using her status as a New York Times journalist to make sure Najya was given good grades… and Najya did… right up until some poor teacher didn't get the message and accurately assessed Najya as not meeting standards. This becomes more obvious as Hannah-Jones reports:
Once I tucked her into bed, I sat at my dining room table and scanned one page, then another and another. None of them were graded. I started checking Najya’s work and discovered most of her answers were wrong. Najya believed herself to be good at math — it was her favorite subject. But now I understood she thought she was correctly solving all her problems because her teacher was not checking her work. Similarly, Najya’s writing assignments were rife with uncorrected punctuation, capitalization and grammar errors.
One can easily imagine a colleague coming up to Najya’s fourth-grade teacher and saying, “You told Najya Hannah-Jones’ mother that Najya wasn’t meeting standards? You idiot! The mom is a reporter for the New York Times. She’s on the phone with the principal every week complaining about something. Just say Najya’s doing fine and spare us any additional hassle. It’s not like the mom ever checks her homework anyway.”
The reality was, as in so many schools, teachers were simply passing students along. Najya was getting good grades, but she was not learning. Hannah-Jones had drunk the Kool-Aid for so long that she honestly believed her daughter, who had supposedly met standards so far, was learning. None of Najya’s homework was ever checked, no attempts were made to verify.
In another bit of the delusion so common on the left, Hannah-Jones implies that standardized tests, even in subjects like math, are untrustworthy. Najya failed a statewide math test in middle school. This wasn’t seen as a problem, however, because she was getting As in her class. These are the types of conclusions that make one realize it isn’t just an act: people have been told standardized tests are bad for so long that they honestly believe it. If their child is getting As in class, then they must be learning. Who cares that she crashed out on a standardized test with transparent scores? The teacher with subjective assessments would have no incentive to lie, right?
On the mendacity end of the spectrum, however, the biased reporting that has drawn Hannah-Jones so much ire repeats itself. She goes out of her way to say that Black schools are underfunded and under-resourced. As an education writer, she knows this claim is now decades out of date. Of course, she has no problem finding a study that looks at “white” and “nonwhite” students and finds the latter receive less funding. Never mind that “nonwhite” is not the same as “Black,” or that the study she cites ignores federal funding. Accounting for federal funding, as this study does, compensates for those disparities. The reality is that income and race are no longer clearly correlated with per-pupil spending.
One can quibble with national details, but Hannah-Jones makes a dishonest argument by drawing so much attention to a flawed national study while ignoring the specifics of her daughter’s school. Najya attended P.S. 307, a school that received a gobsmacking $52,000 in funding per student and has a 10:1 student/teacher ratio. By any measure, this is one of the most well-funded and well-resourced schools in the country. Whatever issues P.S. 307 has, it isn’t a lack of money or staff. Not mentioning this is a considerable omission.
Beyond that, her narrative about the racial breakdowns of various schools doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. P.S. 307 was low-income and majority Black. The alternative, P.S. 008, was not some exclusive, all-White enclave. In 2016–2017, the first year for which data is provided, P.S. 008 was 61 percent White — so White-majority, but there was still a good number of nonwhite students. The real gap, however, between the narrative and the facts has to do with Najya’s eventual public high school, which had to be applied for and rejected many prospective students. Hannah-Jones’ hand-wringing is intense:
Could I spare myself the judgment I had meted out to others when they justified why they — despite believing in integration — sent their own children to schools that entrenched segregation? Across the country, I’d lectured about how educational inequality is systemic, but that this fact did not absolve each of us of our individual choices. And in the end, I could not even sustain the cause within my own family.
But the school Najya attends, which is left anonymous in the article but based on its description is likely Millennium Brooklyn High School, is also not a homogenous enclave. Far from it. 26 percent of the students are Asian. 18 percent are Black. 18 percent are Hispanic. 33 percent are White. For someone who fights against school segregation and wants opportunities for all children, Millennium Brooklyn High School seems like a mission accomplished — certainly not a school that should be avoided. It’s representative of all races. There is a moderate economic need and a normal number of students with IEPs. There’s a fundamental disconnect here that never gets addressed.
Hannah-Jones claims multiple times that her daughter isn't worth more than other daughters. From a societal view, she's right. No child should be valued above another. But that conclusion only holds from a neutral vantage point. A person should believe that one child has the same value as another. A parent should believe their child is worth the most of all.