Nikole Hannah-Jones Just Wrote the Best Case for School Choice She'll Ever Publishhttps://redstate.com/joesquire/2026/09/20/nikole-hannah-jones-best-case-school-choice-n2207153Over at the New York Times, Nikole Hannah-Jones’ wrote an article that is meant to be a damning indictment on the American public education system. She tears it down, using her daughter's plight as proof. This new Times Magazine essay actually reads completely different if you understand the American education system.
It is an argument for school choice, made unintentionally by the author of the incredibly flawed and discredited 1619 Project and one of school choice’s fiercest critics. Here’s the timeline, in her own words.
In 2015, Hannah-Jones and her husband enrolled their daughter, Najya, in pre-K at a “segregated, high-poverty school” in Brooklyn. It wasn’t the best option available to them. They had the money for private school. They had the standing to land in a well-resourced, zoned public school. They chose the Brooklyn school anyway, deliberately, as an act of ideological advocacy, hoping other well-off families would follow their example into struggling schools.
By first grade, Hannah-Jones is describing a lunchroom with no adult supervision and children fighting unchecked. By third grade, a teacher missing so many days that students were parked in the second-grade or kindergarten classroom to fend for themselves. By fourth grade, the year she calls “the worst,” teachers who (by her own account) had stopped grading her daughter’s work entirely and had likely never administered the reading assessments they were required to give. Najya believed she was acing math. Most of what she’d turned in was wrong. Nobody had checked.
The neighborhood school system in New York is atrocious. She knew this before sending her child to one. This is a mother who visited the cafeteria herself, who pulled fighting kids apart, who sat down and read through the ungraded homework page by page. She saw it happen, in real time, year after year. And she kept her child in that system anyway, all to make a point.
Middle school didn’t fix it. At Urban Assembly Unison, the school eliminated homework outright and adopted an “Algebra for All” policy that pushed advanced math onto students, Najya included, before they’d mastered the material underneath it. An outside tutor later found Najya hadn’t even mastered long division or fractions, the building blocks the algebra was supposed to rest on. Najya got A’s at Unison. She also, by her own account years later, “didn’t know anything.”
Hannah-Jones wants readers to see this as evidence of a broken, racially rigged system that owes her daughter something it never delivered. ...
Nikole Hannah-Jones knowingly chose put her daughter into dangerous, failing, schools. She had the ability to do better for her child, but sacrificed her daughter in her personal race-baiting mission. That is appalling!
The daughter eventually got to choose a school with standards, and with hard work, got on track academically. Meanwhile, to Hannah-Jones, parents who keep or take their children out of failing schools are complicit in those schools' failures.
