The Knicks home opener against the 76ers wasn’t the only highly anticipated matchup playing out in Manhattan on Tuesday evening. Less than 20 blocks away at the Washington Irving Campus, about 800 education advocates, students, and parents packed an auditorium to watch journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones face off with New York City schools chancellor Kamar Samuels in a contentious one-on-one. “While they said it’s going to be a conversation, it’s about to be an interrogation,” Hannah-Jones said at the start, drawing applause from the crowd. It was an accurate description of what followed.

The conversation was the marquee event of a town hall co-hosted by the school-integration advocacy group New York Appleseed and the Bell, a student-journalism organization.

A month ago, Hannah-Jones reignited the school-integration debate with a New York Times Magazine essay detailing the challenging aftermath of her decade-old decision to send her daughter to a segregated public school in Brooklyn. When Mayor Zohran Mamdani was later asked about the essay and his plan to address the problems it illustrated, he signaled that his administration was in the process of developing a plan but provided slim details as to what it might be. Samuels didn’t seem to have more news to share at Tuesday’s town hall either — a fact that didn’t go over very well onstage or in the seats.

Hannah-Jones thanked Samuels for agreeing to take part in the event and for his past work tackling segregation when he........

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