Nikole Hannah-Jones, the journalist behind The New York Times’ 1619 Project, has published a personal essay in The New York Times Magazine describing how her decision to send her daughter to a struggling New York City public school left the girl with severe academic gaps despite years of top grades.
The essay, titled “In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?”, recounts how Hannah-Jones and her husband enrolled their daughter, Najya, in what Hannah-Jones describes as “a poor Black one” elementary school, a decision that was profiled in a 2016 New York Times Magazine cover story. Najya went on to earn straight A’s in math and a spot on her middle school honor roll.
But when Najya later transferred to a more demanding high school, an academic assessment revealed serious problems. According to the essay, the school’s director told Hannah-Jones that Najya “knew very little algebra and had huge gaps in many of the building blocks of math that she should have learned in elementary school, like mastery of long division and fractions.”
Hannah-Jones writes that classroom conditions at the earlier schools were often chaotic. She describes unsupervised lunch periods as early as first grade: “Children were running wild, chasing, hitting and pushing each other while the teacher’s aides and cafeteria workers stood by looking bored.” She says similar disorder, including hallway fights and a lack of assigned homework, continued into middle school.
Hannah-Jones also writes that after repeatedly requesting graded work, she eventually received a folder of Najya’s ungraded math assignments. Checking them herself, she found most answers were wrong, even though Najya believed she was excelling because her teacher had not been correcting her papers. Her writing assignments, Hannah-Jones says, were also full of uncorrected grammar and punctuation errors.
In the essay, Hannah-Jones attributes the failures her daughter experienced to racism within the school system. “In the outside world, my choice had earned me valor,” she writes of her original decision to enroll Najya in the neighborhood school.
Critics Point to Accountability and School Choice
The essay has drawn sharp criticism from commentators who argue the story illustrates the opposite of what Hannah-Jones concludes. The Federalist, a conservative outlet, published a column arguing that the breakdowns Hannah-Jones describes reflect failures of institutional accountability rather than racism, and noted that federal data show schools with high shares of black students also tend to have high shares of black teachers and staff.
Critics of Hannah-Jones’ framing point out that it was ultimately standardized testing and the family’s decision to seek out a different school — tools Hannah-Jones has elsewhere criticized — that surfaced Najya’s academic gaps and led her parents to arrange tutoring and a school transfer.
New York eliminated its previous teacher certification test in 2017, a change advocates said was intended to help diversify the teaching workforce. Some observers have pointed to that policy shift, along with broader disputes over how schools should evaluate discipline and academic standards, as part of the backdrop against which Hannah-Jones’ essay should be read.
Hannah-Jones’ essay does not name specific teachers, administrators, or schools beyond describing them broadly, and The New York Times Magazine has not issued additional comment on the piece beyond publishing it.
