Nikole Hannah-Jones, the journalist behind The New York Times’ controversial 1619 Project, once described sending her daughter to underperforming New York City public schools as a personal sacrifice intended to support broader efforts to improve the education system.
Now, in a candid essay, her teenage daughter says she is angry about that decision and feels academically unprepared after finally being allowed to attend a more demanding high school.
Hannah-Jones, 50, enrolled her only child in two struggling Brooklyn schools beginning in 2015. In a Sunday essay for The New York Times Magazine, she said the choice was part of her effort to confront what she viewed as systemic racism in public education, even though she had the “connections and time and status” to secure a place for her daughter at one of the city’s top schools.
She also had the personal resources to make that choice. Hannah-Jones had received an elite education and, along with her husband, purchased a $1.5 million brownstone in Bed-Stuy in 2018. Still, she chose to prioritize what she believed would benefit Black students across the city rather than pursue the strongest possible academic option for her own child.
According to Hannah-Jones’ account, her daughter, Najya, understands that she believes her parents made her give up educational opportunities.
“So you had money to send me to one of the best schools, and you chose not to?” Najya shouted during one argument, the essay says. “Because other kids are disadvantaged, you didn’t want to put me in a great school?”
“We thought by sending Najya to a mostly low-income and Black school, we could help improve it for all the children there,” Hannah-Jones wrote of the decision.
“We believed strongly that if families like ours went into schools like this one, it would encourage other families who shared our values to do the same,” she added.
Hannah-Jones said she felt obligated to make education choices with the broader community in mind, rather than focusing solely on her family’s individual advantage.
But after several years at PS 307 and Urban Assembly Unison, a specialized middle school, she said it became clear that her academically capable daughter was missing some of the foundational skills needed to succeed in high school.
Najya was also deeply upset that her family had placed what they saw as the needs of the community ahead of her own educational goals.
“Sometimes I wish instead of always thinking about other kids, you would have thought about me,” Najya, now 16, said during a confrontation over the summer.
“I never really got the education I wanted,” she said.
Hannah-Jones said she could not dismiss her daughter’s criticism. During the conversation, she told Najya, “I feel like you got cheated,” and acknowledged in the essay that she may have failed her.
“Najya was asking what I’d accomplished by not choosing the ‘best’ school for her,” Hannah-Jones wrote. “The honest answer is, I don’t know. 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.”
Hannah-Jones attended a below-average high school in her Iowa hometown before going on to study at the University of Notre Dame and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, two highly regarded universities.
PS 307, located near DUMBO in Brooklyn, had a student body that was 56% Black. In 2016, only 19% of students met state English-language standards, compared with roughly 40% citywide, according to Department of Education data. Nearly 40% of students were identified as having special needs.
At Urban Assembly Unison, located between Clinton Hill and Bed-Stuy, 69% of students are Black. In 2024, 40% met state standards, compared with 55% across New York City middle schools, while approximately one-third of students had special needs.
The new essay follows a 2016 piece in which Hannah-Jones first explained why she had chosen Brooklyn’s public schools for her daughter. At the time, she described the schools as highly segregated and said they lacked the resources and capacity to effectively educate and supervise a largely low-income student population.
That earlier essay drew national attention and fueled debate over race and education in America. It also helped raise Hannah-Jones’ profile as a prominent voice on Black studies before she went on to help create The 1619 Project, a widely debated and commercially successful collection of books, podcasts and other media that placed slavery at the center of the nation’s historical story.
Ten years later, Najya found herself in schools so overwhelmed that they’d stopped assigning homework or providing basic supervision during the school day.
In one shocking revelation during Najya’s 4th grade, Hannah-Jones discovered the girl’s teachers hadn’t been grading her schoolwork — and that her supposed proficiency was complete nonsense.
“Najya believed herself to be good at math — it was her favorite subject. But now I understood she thought she was correctly solving all her problems because her teacher was not checking her work,” the distraught mother wrote. “Najya’s writing assignments were rife with uncorrected punctuation, capitalization and grammar errors.”
“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,” she said.
Despite that fury, Hannah-Jones kept her daughter enrolled in local public schools once she reached the 6th grade — and even though Najya was sent to a middle school with an admired and sympathetic principal, the girl was soon complaining that studious kids were neglected while misbehavior would get attention.
Najya’s complaints came to ahead as she neared high school and found her schools’ struggling scores online — sparking an explosive fight between mother and daughter.
“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” Najya said, before her mother explained her reasoning.
It wasn’t long before Najya insisted she be allowed to choose her own high school, and Hannah-Jones finally agreed — only for Najya to get there and teachers to discover she was woefully behind in fundamental skills, requiring close personal tutoring for her to catch up and finally thrive.
And the experience left Hannah-Jones doubting the wisdom of the convictions she held to so dear for nearly a decade — and foisted upon her daughter to fight against racial inequality.
“I wanted my child to see it my way, to see the struggles she was having as part of a lineage and a mandate,” she wrote. “To understand the tremendous privilege that I believed inoculated her against the worst consequences of the dysfunction and at times educational malpractice that she and her classmates experienced.”
“But now I felt overcome with regret. Najya deserved better. They all did. But she was mine. 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,” she concluded.
Reponses to the extensive essay were varied — with some accusing Hannah-Jones of foolishly imperiling her own daughter’s future to in a stunning act of virtue-signaling.
“The most thoughtful thing I can say in response to this very predictable follow-up essay is that when I discussed your first article with my own black father who grew up under segregation and fought tooth and nail for an education.” Atlantic writer Thomas Chatterton Williams wrote on X.
“He was gobsmacked.”
Others, however, praised Hannah-Jones for extending her morals to her family in an attempt to change the world through them.
“There is nothing contemptible about living by your principles and trying to uplift your community,” writer Helen Andrews said on X.
“Her failure was not moral but analytical. She thought the schools were failing from not enough money, parental involvement, or administrative attention — all of which she was in a position to provide,” Andrew added.
“If her diagnosis had been correct, her decision would have been laudable.”
