Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the 1619 Project, has written a New York Times op-ed admitting that she and her husband knowingly kept their daughter, Najya, in a public school that failed her academically — even though they had the money and connections to send her somewhere better.
Hannah-Jones writes that she and her husband chose “the type of school that wealthier families with choices uniformly avoid — one that is low-income and mostly Black.” Her stated reasoning: their donations, connections, and advocacy could help fix the school for every child there, with Najya as part of the effort.
Najya did not sign up for that role. She told her mother directly: “Sometimes I wish instead of always thinking about other kids, you would have thought about me. I never really got the education I wanted.”
“I acknowledge to you that I didn’t do the best for you, and I am so sorry,” Hannah-Jones wrote she told her daughter.
The problems Najya faced were not minor. Hannah-Jones describes a lack of supervision, missing teachers, ungraded assignments, and a fourth-grade math class where Najya’s work went uncorrected — leaving her convinced math was her best subject when she in fact hadn’t learned it. Hannah-Jones says she and her husband raised these issues with teachers, principals, and superintendents, but kept their daughter in the school anyway, worried about what would happen to the other children if they pulled her out.
“Our child was suffering, but all these children were — they were languishing in classrooms with educators who did not take their academic potential seriously and largely refused to teach,” Hannah-Jones wrote. “What would happen to those children if we abandoned them as everyone else with power had?”
The school wasn’t underfunded
Hannah-Jones has long framed her daughter’s school situation as a product of systemic racism and underfunding. But according to figures cited from the Manhattan Institute, the school Najya attended, PS 307, paid teachers an average of over $100,000 a year, spent roughly $50,000 per student — above the city-wide average — and had a 9-to-1 student-to-teacher ratio. By the numbers, the school was well resourced. The academic failures Najya experienced happened anyway.
Eventually Najya looked up her own middle school’s record and confronted her mother again: “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?”
Hannah-Jones’s answer, by her own account, came up empty. “Najya was asking what I’d accomplished by not choosing the ‘best’ school for her. And the honest answer is, I don’t know,” she wrote. “When it comes to the choices my husband and I have made about public education, these days I feel that I failed both my values and my child.”
After that confrontation, Hannah-Jones let Najya pick her own high school. Najya chose a predominantly white, higher-ranked school — and promptly discovered she was failing algebra. A tutor told Hannah-Jones her daughter “knew very little algebra and had huge gaps in many of the building blocks of math that she should have learned in elementary school, like mastery of long division and fractions.” Hannah-Jones says she was “overcome with regret.”
Hannah-Jones traces her original decision back to a 2016 essay in which she wrote that New York City’s schools reflect “stark racial and socioeconomic divisions,” and that sending Najya to one of the whiter, better-resourced schools would have meant “accepting the inevitability of this two-tiered system.” She has said that when she first went public with her decision, she received praise from outside observers for it.
The episode is drawing sharp reaction from critics who argue it illustrates a broader pattern on the left of treating children as instruments for political causes. One widely shared response on X, from an account called Oilfield Rando, put it this way: “If they will intentionally harm their own children to advance their cause, imagine what they’ll do to YOUR children.”
Hannah-Jones’s own account leaves the outcome undisputed: years of struggle for her daughter, a well-funded school that still failed to teach her, and, in her own words, no clear answer for what any of it accomplished.
