NYT writer Nikole Hannah-Jones sent daughter to – Business News
The writer behind the New York Times’ controversial 1619 Project intentionally sent her daughter to poor New York City colleges as a “sacrifice” in an attempt to help the struggling training system.
But now the teenager is “boiling” indignant — and badly behind her friends after lastly being allowed to enroll in a more rigorous high college, her mom revealed in a bombshell essay.
Nikole Hannah-Jones, 50, enrolled her solely baby in two struggling Brooklyn public colleges starting in 2015 — as half of a battle to change what she characterised as systemic racism, regardless of having the “connections and time and status” to get the woman into the town’s best colleges, she wrote within the Times Magazine Sunday.
Nikole Hannah-Jones’ 2016 article about sending her daughter to struggling public colleges made her a family identify. Getty Images for ESSENCE
That standing included top-notch training of her own and financial security — she and her husband purchased a $1.5 million Bed-Stuy brownstone in 2018 — however she nonetheless determined to offer up her daughter’s training for the trigger of bettering the expertise of black college students in metropolis colleges.
By her own account, Hannah-Jones’ daughter Najya is aware of she was cheated by her dad and mom.
“So you had money to send me to one of the best schools, and you chose not to?” the woman yelled in a single struggle, in accordance 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 stated of her resolution.
Nikole Hannah-Jones turned broadly recognized for the hotly debated 1619 project, which rewrote American historical past. Getty Images for ESSENCE
“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 on the colleges — PS 307 and Urban Assembly Unison, a specialty center college — Hannah-Jones found her sharp-witted daughter lacked the essential abilities to keep up in high college.
And the woman was livid her own household put the neighborhood’s wants earlier than hers.
Public School 307 in Brooklyn, the place Hannah-Jones first sent her daughter to college regardless of understanding its struggles. Google Maps
“Sometimes I wish instead of always thinking about other kids, you would have thought about me,” Hannah-Jones’ now-16-year-old daughter, Najya, stated during a confrontation over the summer season.
“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 dialog and admitting within the essay she could 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 dad and mom who put her training first — starting within the second grade she was enrolled in a busing program that sent her to a much less segregated college close to her Iowa hometown, after which went on to the University of Notre Dame and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
PS 307, close to DUMBO in Brooklyn, had a 56% black scholar physique, and simply 19% of college students met state requirements on English — nicely beneath the citywide average of about 40% of college students in 2016, in accordance to Department of Education figures. Nearly 40% of college students had particular wants.
Urban Assembly Unison, between Clinton Hill and Bed-Stuy, has a 69% black scholar physique and 40% of college students met state requirements in 2024 — in contrast to 55% for center colleges city-wide. About one-third of college students have particular wants.
The intensive essay was a follow-up to one she wrote in 2016, first explaining her resolution to enroll Najya in native Brooklyn public colleges, which she described as being deeply segregated and missing each the funding and talent to competently train and supervise their largely-impoverished scholar physique.
That essay went viral and sparked national dialogues about race in American colleges, whereas additionally serving to set up Hannah-Jones’ profession as a main identify in black research earlier than she helped create the 1619 Project — a hotly debated and massively profitable collection of books, podcasts, and different media which argued slavery was probably the most important throughline of all American historical past.
Ten years later, Najya discovered herself in colleges so overwhelmed that they’d stopped assigning homework or offering primary supervision during the varsity day.
In one surprising revelation during Najya’s 4th grade, Hannah-Jones found the woman’s academics hadn’t been grading her schoolwork — and that her supposed proficiency was full nonsense.
K351 The Urban Assembly Unison School. Google Maps
“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 mom 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 stated.
Despite that fury, Hannah-Jones saved her daughter enrolled in native public colleges as soon as she reached the sixth grade — and regardless that Najya was sent to a center college with an admired and sympathetic principal, the woman was quickly complaining that studious children had been uncared for whereas misbehavior would get consideration.
Nikole Hannah-Jones attends the world premiere of the HBO authentic documentary collection “Jay Z in 8” on the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, Sunday, September 13, 2026. ZUMAPRESS.com
Najya’s complaints got here to a head as she neared high college and located her college’s struggling scores online — sparking an explosive struggle between mom and daughter.
“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” Najya stated, earlier than her mom defined her reasoning.
It wasn’t long earlier than Najya insisted she be allowed to select her own high college, and Hannah-Jones lastly agreed — just for Najya to get there and academics to uncover she was woefully behind in basic abilities, requiring close personal tutoring for her to catch up and eventually thrive.
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And the expertise left Hannah-Jones doubting the knowledge of the convictions she held to so pricey for almost a decade — and foisted upon her daughter to struggle in opposition to 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.”
Nikole Hannah-Jones speaks onstage during the 2026 ESSENCE Festival of Culture offered by Coca-Cola on the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans, Louisiana, Friday, July 3, 2026. Getty Images for ESSENCE
“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 intensive essay had been diverse — with some accusing Hannah-Jones of foolishly imperiling her own daughter’s future in a gorgeous 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.
Nikole Hannah-Jones sent her daughter to a struggling center college even after she barely made it by way of elementary. Getty Images for ESSENCE
“He was gobsmacked.”
Others, nevertheless, praised Hannah-Jones for extending her morals to her household in an attempt to change the world by way of them.
“There is nothing contemptible about living by your principles and trying to uplift your community,” writer Helen Andrews stated 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.”
