For years, Nikole Hannah-Jones told herself she was doing the right thing by enrolling her daughter in high-poverty public schools in Brooklyn to boost the education system.
But today, the New York Times reporter is “overcome with regret” over not giving her 16-year-old daughter the education she wanted.
“Parents should put their children first. They should not sacrifice them to a failing government school system in the name of ideology,” Corey DeAngelis, a research fellow at The Heritage Foundation and longtime school choice advocate, said about Nikole’s decision.
Nikole Hannah-Jones admitted she regrets putting her daughter through struggling public schools
Nikole Hannah-Jones is an NYT writer and creator of the controversial 1619 Project, a journalism and education project aimed at bringing slavery and racism to the forefront of discussions surrounding American history.
In a newly released NYT essay, the writer spoke about how she sacrificed her daughter’s education for the sake of putting her in predominantly Black, struggling public schools.
The decision was part of her personal commitment to the larger fight for educational equality.
She wanted her daughter, Najya, to attend the same kind of public schools available to other Black families in the community rather than using her family’s finances, status, and resources to opt out.
“We thought by sending Najya to a mostly low-income and Black school, we could help improve it for all the children there,” Nikole wrote about her and her husband’s decision.
She said they strongly believed that if “families like [theirs] went into schools like this one, it would challenge other families with similar values to do the same.”
“I felt an obligation to make educational decisions based on the collective good and not just our individual advantage,” she added.
The well-known journalist believed keeping her daughter in struggling low-income Black schools could help improve things for other children
Since the beginning of 2015, Najya was enrolled in two struggling public schools and was breezing through her grades until she and her friends searched for the nation’s top colleges.
The group of Honors students then got curious about their school rankings, which made them pull up a list of New York City’s highest ranked public high schools.
They soon made the unfortunate realization that their school was on the wrong side of the rankings, thus giving Najya a big shock.
“So you had money to send me to one of the best schools, and you chose not to?” the daughter asked her mother during a heated confrontation. “Because other kids are disadvantaged, you didn’t want to put me in a great school?”
Feeling a sense of betrayal, Najya asked her mom what she had achieved by not choosing the “best” for her education.
“Sometimes I wish instead of always thinking about other kids, you would have thought about me,” the mother recalled her daughter saying on one occasion. “I never really got the education I wanted.”
“So you had money to send me to one of the best schools, and you chose not to?” her daughter asked during a tense confrontation
In her essay, Nikole spoke about how Najya’s high grades in middle school didn’t mean much.
Her favorite subject was math, and Nikole was under the impression that she was good at it.
But she recalled one occasion where, after tucking her daughter into bed at night, she pulled out her math assignments from her backpack to find that none of them were actually graded.
She then realized that most of Najya’s answers were wrong.
They had falsely believed she was good at math because her teacher wasn’t checking her incorrectly solved problems.
There were similar problems in her writing assignments, where Nikole found capitalization, punctuation, and grammatical errors everywhere.
“I sat there silently for several minutes, conjuring the image of my little girl thinking she was soaring in class when she was failing, and my devastation morphed into hot rage,” the journalist wrote.
Nikole discovered her daughter’s math assignments hadn’t even been graded, and many of her answers were wrong
In the same essay, Nikole said she now regrets making choices for Najya’s education based on her values.
“I felt overcome with regret. Najya deserved better. They all did. But she was mine,” she wrote. “This girl, my only child, looked to me to protect her, to give her what she needed to thrive. And I had not chosen her.”
When it was time for Najya to join high school, Nikole told her daughter that she could choose whichever school she wanted.
“Really?” the daughter responded, suspicious about the autonomy suddenly given to her.
Nikole told her daughter that she could do her research and choose from any public school she wanted.
Eventually, when Najya handed over her list, her top choices were schools known to be heavily white and would put students through a screening process.
Basically, they were the type of public schools that Nikole spent her entire career in journalism advocating against.
The teen wound up joining the school that was her first choice, which was one of the hardest public high schools to get into in the city.
Everyone was proud of her achievement, including Nikole. But “by letting Najya make the decision, I was allowing my child to attend a school that was a beneficiary of the inequality that defined the city’s educational landscape,” Nikole wrote.
As someone who had given lectures across the country on how educational inequality is systemic, Nikole said she struggled to spare herself from the same judgment she gave others when they sent their children to schools that seemed rooted in segr*gation.
After choosing a high school for herself, Najya struggled with getting homework for the first time
When Najya started ninth grade, she found herself being part of a minority group in school for the first time.
The teen not only dealt with the cultural struggles but also was getting homework for the first time, along with pages of nightly reading for her classes.
Najya didn’t know how to manage the wave of assignments, and she realized the same effort she put earlier into her A’s were just not enough.
“Suddenly the child whose identity had been the nerdy honors student was working harder than she ever had and barely keeping up,” her mother wrote in the essay.
It took a lot of hard work, extra tutoring, and plenty of help from Najya’s teachers to get her back to a position where she was getting nearly all A’s and B’s.
Now, 16-year-old Najya, who has spent the last two years in classrooms full of privileged kids, said it taught her something important.
Her current classmates were not smarter or necessarily better behaved than the kids she had gone to school with before. They just had more in comparison.
Nikole believes the bigger problem is that so many families from minority groups don’t have the resources her family had to escape struggling schools
Following the release of her essay, Nikole said the broader focus should be on families who don’t have the same resources to give their kids better educational options.
“I hope people concerned about the choice my husband and I made for our daughter will have equal or more outrage for the thousands of Black children whose parents don’t have the resources to send them to better schools,” the reporter told Fox News. “As I write in the piece, there is no absolution to be had for any of us.”
Nikole also admitted apologizing to Najya for her choices, saying: “I feel like you got cheated. And I’m sorry for that”
Corey DeAngelis, a research fellow at The Heritage Foundation and longtime school choice advocate, commented on Nikole’s choices and said it’s important for parents to put their child’s individual educational needs above their own ideologies.
He felt Nikole’s admission of regret over her choices was “long overdue.”
“Maybe she will start to understand that pulling her daughter from the failing school system would have done more to improve those schools — through competition — than the status quo ever did,” Corey told the outlet.
He said locking kids up in public schools without accountability wouldn’t fix them. “You fix them by giving them a reason to change their ways,” he added.
“Send your kid to the best school you can afford,” one commented online
