Education

Nikole Hannah-Jones' Experiment Accidentally Undercuts Her Case Against School Choice

The New York Times writer credits her own adult success with attending a wealthier school outside her neighborhood. So why does she blame New York City's education problems on choice?

Billy Binion | 9.23.2026 10:40 AM

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Nikole Hannah-Jones (Wiki Commons)

Almost exactly a decade ago, Nikole Hannah-Jones, a writer for The New York Times Magazine, published a piece on enrolling her daughter, Najya, in a "segregated, low-income" elementary school. It was not for lack of options. This was a calculated response, she wrote, to the fact that New York City public schools are heavily segregated by race and socioeconomic status. Hannah-Jones, who is black and middle class, felt that placing her daughter in a higher-achieving school with more white students would perpetuate the flaws of an unequal system and be tantamount to abandoning other black children. She could not integrate the school racially. But she would try to do so socioeconomically, by bringing her middle-class resources to a low-income environment. She would try to live her values through her daughter.

"Are we experimenting with our child based on our idealism about public schools?" she said her husband, Faraji, asked when she presented the idea. "Are we putting her at a disadvantage?"

It seems the answer was yes. In an essay for the Times published Sunday, Hannah-Jones provides an agonizing retrospective of her daughter's—and, by extension, her own—experience navigating school. It is a difficult thing to (very) publicly admit you may have failed your own child, and for that she legitimately deserves grace. Yet while Hannah-Jones is right that many U.S. schools are segregated by race, her antipathy to school choice would very likely make that worse. Paradoxically, this becomes clear as she unintentionally exposes quite a bit of common ground with her ideological opposites. The story is a particularly sensational snapshot of the misconceptions pervading a highly fractured debate—as well as an unexpected illustration that many of those fractures are superficial.

Hannah-Jones' full essay offers a painstaking account of her daughter's troubles. But some of the highlights include: noncommunicative or outright absent teachers; neither the elementary nor middle schools assigning homework; fights breaking out in the hallways and in the cafeteria; at least one elementary school teacher simply not checking Najya's classwork; and her middle school grading on such a steep curve that she received A's in algebra despite not grasping fundamentals like long division.

The most disturbing part, though, is how these knowledge gaps reveal themselves—not just to Hannah-Jones but to Najya herself. In seventh grade, Najya takes to the internet and discovers how poorly her school is........

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