Author and activist Nikole Hannah-Jones published an emotional essay in The New York Times Magazine last week titled "In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?" In the piece, Hannah-Jones writes about the consequences of having deliberately selected a school for her daughter, Najya, that was "low-income and mostly Black" as a way of advancing "the collective good," not Najya's "individual advantage."

Hannah-Jones and her husband thought they could improve conditions at the school. Indeed, there's a video making the rounds on X that shows Hannah-Jones confidently asserting, "A New York Times reporter in a high-poverty school f*****g g changes the school, right? There are certain things that are just not gonna happen in that school. I can go to that school and say, 'There's a problem,' and it gets fixed immediately."

But it didn't turn out that way. And Najya became progressively more unhappy as time went on.

In seventh grade, after seeing how low her school ranked — and fully understanding what that meant for her own future academic prospects — Najya asked her mother, "Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?" When Hannah-Jones tried to explain the basis for the decision, Najya retorted, "So you had money to send me to one of the best schools, and you chose not to? Because other kids are disadvantaged, you didn't want to put me in a great school?"

Well before Najya reached seventh grade, Hannah-Jones knew how poor her daughter's education was. In first grade, Hannah-Jones visited Najya's school — P.S. 307 — during lunch and was horrified to see Najya and her little classmates sitting at a table in the cafeteria with no lunch, as other children ran wild around the room hitting each other while the adults in the room did nothing.

Hannah-Jones admits that "all but one of the White children and nearly all the........

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