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Education

Exit, Voice, and Nikole Hannah-Jones

Nikole Hannah-Jones' controversial article about her daughter's schooling is a testament to the importance of exit rights.

Ilya Somin | 9.21.2026 6:54 PM

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Prominent journalist, academic, and anti-racism activist Nikole Hannah-Jones recently wrote a controversial New York Times article, in which she expresses regret for her and her husband's decision to place her daughter in underperforming majority-Black public schools in New York City. Hannah-Jones hoped that putting her daughter there would help improve education for disadvantaged minority children, as her family's wealth and skills as political activists might stimulate reforms. Instead, her daughter ended up bitterly bemoaning the poor quality of the education she got, and Hannah-Jones' well-meaning efforts to improve the public schools she attended accomplished very little. Eventually, at her daughter's request, Hannah-Jones acknowledged error, and sent her daughter to a higher-quality selective high school.

Hannah-Jones' story is a testament to the value of exit rights and choice. Although she does not seem to recognize it, the best way to help students from less advantaged families than her own is to expand exit and choice opportunities for them. That is what social science shows. Her story also resonated with me because of my own experience as both a struggling student and (later) a parent. That experience also highlights the value of exit rights and choice, even if in a slightly different way.

While I think Hannah-Jones hasn't fully drawn the right lessons from her experience, I commend her for her willingness to acknowledge error. Few public intellectuals do that, and especially not on issues close to the heart of their ideological and personal commitments, as this one is for her.

Exit vs. Voice

Hannah-Jones initial decision to send her daughter to a poorly performing public schools was motivated by an argument associated with the great economist Albert Hirschman (though I don't know if that's where she got the idea). In his classic work, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States, Hirschman argued that exit rights can be harmful if it leads people to leave a flawed institution that they could instead stay and successfully reform using "voice." He specifically applied this to the issue of school choice, arguing that the most savvy and politically influential parents might take their kids out of badly-performing schools, instead of staying and successfully reforming them.

In my book Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom, I outlined some key limitations of Hirschman's argument. I summarize my key points here:

It is important to recognize that Hirschman's argument applies only in a narrow range of circumstances. In order for it to hold true, a subset of........

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