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Over the weekend, the New York Times Magazine published a piece by journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, in which she grapples with the decision to send her daughter to a low-income majority-Black poorly rated public school in her Brooklyn, New York, neighborhood. Hannah-Jones has made her career writing about race, class, and school segregation, and a decade ago she wrote about the choice to forgo the quote-unquote better school options those in her educational and economic cohort generally chose. “Saying my child deserved access to ‘good’ public schools felt like implying that children in ‘bad’ schools deserved the schools they got, too,” she wrote back in 2016. “I understood that so much of school segregation is structural—a result of decades of housing discrimination, of political calculations and the machinations of policy makers, of simple inertia. But I also believed that it is the choices of individual parents that uphold the system, and I was determined not to do what I’d seen so many others do when their values about integration collided with the reality of where to send their own children to school.”

Ten years later, her daughter is 16, and old enough to have a say. And for high school, she made about as different a choice as possible, opting into one that is highly rated and selective—and majority white and Asian. And as she’s realized just how behind she is at her new school, and all she hadn’t learned at her previous ones, she flat-out told her mom that she feels betrayed.

For elementary school and middle school, Hannah-Jones’ daughter, Najya, went to schools where the lunchroom was a chaotic scrum, hallway fights happened often, teachers spent an enormous amount of time on disruptive students to the neglect of those who were there to learn, homework wasn’t assigned, in-class assignments weren’t corrected, and even though she got A’s in math, it turns out she couldn’t do basic algebra or even long division by high school. When she made the decision to put her daughter in a troubled school, Hannah-Jones wrote that “I also knew that we would be able to make up for Najya anything the school was lacking.” That turned out not to be the case.

Intensive math tutoring seems to have gotten her up to speed. But that came after failing a state math exam, something Hannah-Jones wrote off as her daughter simply struggling with standardized tests. And it came with tanking confidence and growing anxiety from a kid who is clearly bright, curious, and highly capable.

The response to Hannah-Jones’ update has been overwhelming. Many people (myself included) applauded her for her honesty and her ability to look quite critically at how her own choices—made in accordance with strongly held and admirable principles—may have harmed the one person in the world she’s supposed to most ferociously protect. Others picked apart her parenting choices, mocked the very principles that informed her decisions, or turned the problems in some public-school classrooms into ones caused by their own pet theories. There were grosser reactions, which I suspect stem from some conservatives’ continued obsessions with battling another Hannah-Jones endeavor, the 1619 Project, that are well worth ignoring entirely.

At its core, though, Hannah-Jones’ article is as much about the shameful realities of too many American public schools (especially those that........

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