Nikole Hannah-Jones’s sobering and provocative column in The New York Times Magazine — where she agonized over the decision to send her daughter to a low-income, predominantly Black public school in Brooklyn — spawned a tsunami of commentary.

Many public officials saluted her for her candor and her ability to look critically at how her own decision — made with dedicated and altruistic principles — may very well have hurt her own daughter. Others have critically analyzed what they saw as bizarre and careless parenting choices, ridiculed the sincere principles that resulted in her decisions, and launched into a litany of theories that they have seen as wrong with the majority of public-school systems.

“The daughter is correct. I called this at the time,” wrote The Atlantic’s Thomas Chatterton Williams. “This is an absolutely wild story about the serious cost and downside of virtue signaling,” wrote Republican communications professional Matt Whitlock. “One of the best things about being conservative is that you don’t feel obliged to destroy your children’s lives by inflicting terrible education on them as a matter of egalitarian principle,” conservative pundit Niall Ferguson said. “Public schools fail Nikole Hanna Jones’ daughter,” wrote Brittany Bernstein in National Review.

Such virile attacks were unsurprising for a plethora of........

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