Ten years ago, in The New York Times Magazine, journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones explained to an incredulous public why she and her husband chose to send their upper-middle-class Black daughter to a high-poverty urban public school filled with less-advantaged Black children.

At the time, Hannah-Jones – who had written extensively about how public schools remain segregated by race and class long after the courts outlawed segregation – believed that the presence of educated, professional parents would help to integrate the school socioeconomically, if not racially, and so benefit all its students. Unlike many advocates of public education, who send their children to private schools while consigning other people’s to underperforming public ones, Hannah-Jones walked the walk.

A decade later, she admits that the school her daughter attended was truly awful. It committed academic malpractice and tolerated utter anarchy. Her daughter, now a teenager, wishes she’d gone to a better elementary school – as Hannah-Jones herself did, through a busing program that integrated schools in Waterloo, Iowa.

Nikole Hannah-Jones' parenting isn't the problem

Now, critics are piling on Hannah-Jones, accusing her of using her daughter as a........

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