The writer behind the New York Times’ controversial 1619 Project deliberately sent her daughter to poor New York City schools as a “sacrifice” in an attempt to help the struggling education system.
But now the teen is “boiling” angry — and badly behind her peers after finally being allowed to enroll in a more rigorous high school, her mother revealed in a bombshell essay.
Nikole Hannah-Jones, 50, enrolled her only child in two struggling Brooklyn public schools beginning in 2015 — as part of a battle to change what she characterized as systemic racism, despite having the “connections and time and status” to get the girl into the city’s best schools, she wrote in the Times Magazine Sunday.
That status included top-notch education of her own and financial security — she and her husband bought a $1.5 million Bed-Stuy brownstone in 2018 — but she still decided to offer up her daughter’s education for the cause of bettering the experience of black students in city schools.
By her own account, Hannah-Jones’ daughter Najya knows she was cheated by her parents.
“So you had money to send me to one of the best schools, and you chose not to?” the girl yelled in one fight, according to the essay. “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 said of her decision.
“We believed strongly that if families like ours 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.
But after years at the schools — PS 307 and Urban Assembly Unison, a specialty middle school — Hannah-Jones discovered her sharp-witted daughter lacked the basic skills to keep up in high school.
And the girl was furious her own family put the community’s needs before hers.
“Sometimes I wish instead of always thinking about other kids, you would have thought about me,” Hannah-Jones’ now-16-year-old daughter, Najya, said during a confrontation over the summer.
“I never really got the education I wanted.”
And Hannah-Jones had to agree, telling her daughter, “I feel like you got cheated” during that conversation and admitting in the essay she may have “failed” her daughter.
“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 herself benefited from parents who put her education first — beginning in the second grade she was enrolled in a busing program that sent her to a less segregated school near her Iowa home town, and then went on to the University of Notre Dame and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
PS 307, near DUMBO in Brooklyn, had a 56% black student body, and just 19% of students met state standards on English — well below the citywide average of about 40% of students in 2016, according to Department of Education figures. Nearly 40% of students had special needs.
Urban Assembly Unison, between Clinton Hill and Bed-Stuy, has a 69% black student body and 40% of students met state standards in 2024 — compared to 55% for middle schools city-wide. About one-third of students have special needs.
The extensive essay was a follow-up to one she wrote in 2016 first explaining her decision to enroll Najya in local Brooklyn public schools, which she described as being deeply segregated and lacking both the funding and ability to competently teach and supervise their largely-impoverished student body.
That essay went viral and sparked national dialogues about race in American schools, while also helping establish Hannah-Jones’ career as a leading name in black studies before she helped created the 1619 Project — a hotly-debated and massively successful series of books, podcasts and other media which argued slavery was the most importnat throughline of all American history.
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 a head 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.”
