It is a sad reality of the modern era that when an ideological opponent admits they made a terrible mistake, most people are tempted to kick them while they’re down. This exact situation has arisen with Nikole Hannah-Jones’ latest essay in The New York Times Magazine, which returns to a decision she wrote about a decade ago in a viral piece called “Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City.” In it, she explained why she was sending her black, 4-year-old daughter Najya to a bad public school when she could have sent her to a good one, or even to a private school. Now she’s telling a different story about how that choice played out.
At the time, Hannah-Jones’ rationale was that bad schools are caused by a lack of upper-middle-class parents. Those parents, she argued, have the resources and connections to lobby on behalf of the entire student body (including poorer students from dysfunctional families), raise additional funding, and generally improve the quality of the education for all. As an upper-middle-class parent herself, Hannah-Jones—best known as the face of the Times’ 1619 Project—felt she had an obligation to be part of the solution, which meant sending Najya to a bad school. On the progressive left, her experiment read as noble. To everyone else, it was madness.
Ten years later the results are in, and the skeptics have run the table. By Hannah-Jones’ own account, her presence didn’t lift up the Brooklyn school; the school dragged down her daughter, and barely seemed to notice she was there.
When Najya was in third grade, Hannah-Jones decided to visit her school at lunchtime and found that kids were sitting there with “no lunch and no adult supervision.” Other kids were “running wild, chasing, hitting, and pushing each other while the teacher’s aides and cafeteria workers stood by looking bored.” At a private school this would be an emergency that led to immediate firings. At a dysfunctional public school, it’s just another day. Hannah-Jones was left trying to lobby an absentee principal who “regularly wouldn’t engage with [her] or wasn’t in the building at all.”
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