Nikole Hannah-Jones' Experiment Accidentally Undercuts Her Case Against School Choice

Almost exactly a decade ago, Nikole Hannah-Jones, a writer for The New York Times Magazine, published a piece on enrolling her daughter, Najya, in a “segregated, low-income” elementary school. It was not for lack of options. This was a calculated response, she wrote, to the fact that New York City public schools are heavily segregated by race and socioeconomic status. Hannah-Jones, who is black and middle class, felt that placing her daughter in a higher-achieving school with more white students would perpetuate the flaws of an unequal system and be tantamount to abandoning other black children. She could not integrate the school racially. But she would try to do so socioeconomically, by bringing her middle-class resources to a low-income environment. She would try to live her values through her daughter.

“Are we experimenting with our child based on our idealism about public schools?” she said her husband, Faraji, asked when she presented the idea. “Are we putting her at a disadvantage?”

It seems the answer was yes. In an essay for the Times published Sunday, Hannah-Jones provides an agonizing retrospective of her daughter’s—and, by extension, her own—experience navigating school. It is a difficult thing to (very) publicly admit you may have failed your own child, and for that she legitimately deserves grace. Yet while Hannah-Jones is right that many U.S. schools are segregated by race, her antipathy to school choice would very likely make that worse. Paradoxically, this becomes clear as she unintentionally exposes quite a bit of common ground with her ideological opposites. The story is a particularly sensational snapshot of the misconceptions pervading a highly fractured debate—as well as an unexpected illustration that many of those fractures are superficial.

Hannah-Jones’ full essay offers a painstaking account of her daughter’s troubles. But some of the highlights include: noncommunicative or outright absent teachers; neither the elementary nor middle schools assigning homework; fights breaking out in the hallways and in the cafeteria; at least one elementary school teacher simply not checking Najya’s classwork; and her middle school grading on such a steep curve that she received A’s in algebra despite not grasping fundamentals like long division.

The most disturbing part, though, is how these knowledge gaps reveal themselves—not just to Hannah-Jones but to Najya herself. In seventh grade, Najya takes to the internet and discovers how poorly her school is rated. “Because other kids are disadvantaged, you didn’t want to put me in a great school?” she asks her mom. Hannah-Jones, to her credit, tells Najya she can apply to whichever high schools she chooses, as New York City employs a school choice framework that allows students the chance to go somewhere outside of their zoned assignment. “Her top schools were heavily white and screened their students,” Hannah-Jones writes, “the type of public schools I had spent my career arguing against.” Najya applied and was admitted to her top choice.

Then things begin to unravel. Concepts her daughter thought she had mastered, it turns out, she did not actually understand at all. “One night early in the semester as we were eating dinner, Najya gushed about how easy the test had been,” Hannah-Jones recounts. “‘I know I got an A, or at least a B,’ she said smiling.” In reality, she had failed, in what the author says “became an unbearable pattern.”

The essay is more personal than policy. But Hannah-Jones gestures at what she sees as the root issues: school choice and lack of financial resources. Though she is refreshingly transparent about how her experiment shortchanged her daughter, the disappointing results do not appear to readjust her worldview in a meaningful way.

Hannah-Jones’ own story is directly at odds with this experiment. It is clear she deeply values education. As a child, she notes, she was the beneficiary of a program in Waterloo, Iowa, which allowed children in high-poverty neighborhoods to attend more well-off schools on the other side of town. “I have no doubt my parents’ decision to pull me out of my segregated neighborhood school made the possibility of my getting from there to here—staff writer for The New York Times Magazine—more likely,” she wrote in her 2016 piece. “Integration was transformative for my husband and me. Yet the idea of placing our daughter in one of the small number of integrated schools troubled me.”

This is difficult to stomach. Hannah-Jones is correct that schools in New York City—and elsewhere—are often divided by race and class. She experienced it firsthand, about 1,000 miles away in the Midwest. The difference, however, is that she was permitted to traverse school boundaries—the very reason she says she achieved success and affluence as an adult. So she gave her daughter the opposite experience? The one Hannah-Jones readily acknowledges would likely have stunted her growth and held her back in life?

She concedes in her recent essay that this sounds like a contradiction. But she thought this was circumventable. “From my past reporting, I knew that P.T.A.s at poor schools often can raise only a few thousand dollars,” she writes, “but Faraji and I could write checks that exceeded the annual P.T.A. budget.”

This is a theme in Hannah-Jones’ work. She does not incorporate data when making this point, and it is not hard to see why when you drill down into the numbers. During the 2025–26 school year, the government allocated $43,972 per student for those at Public School 307, the elementary school where Hannah-Jones sent her daughter, according to the finance division of the NYC Department of Education. The Urban Assembly Unison School, Najya’s middle school, received $32,418 per student. (DistrictFacts, a nonpartisan organization tracking government spending at NYC public schools, calculates the most recent cost per pupil at $52,349 for the former and $43,975 for the latter, based on actual expenditure reports.)

Compare that to P.S. 8, the wealthy elementary school about three-quarters of a mile from P.S. 307, which serves as a foil in Hannah-Jones’ 2016 piece. According to the NYC Department of Education, it was allotted $15,860 per pupil.

It isn’t the case that funding plays no role in student success. But the fact that the higher-performing school in her story—the one held up as a model of access and privilege—vastly outperforms where Hannah-Jones sent her daughter, despite receiving far less per-pupil funding, should complicate the idea that the solution is a cash infusion.

This is not a new point. “On average, an additional $1,000 in per-pupil spending is associated with a trivial annual gain in achievement of one-tenth of 1 percent of a standard deviation,” concluded researchers in a 2012 report published by Harvard University and Education Next. That amounts to, they noted, “no statistical or substantive significance.” Americans have continued to pour increasing amounts of taxpayer dollars into education for middling returns. Though it’s not only taxpayer dollars. In the 2013–14 school year, not long before Hannah-Jones’ daughter would start, the richest PTAs in the country spent an average of just $867 per student. However counterintuitive it may be, the problems plaguing high-poverty schools—defined in the public consciousness by students’ lack of financial resources—cannot be remedied by writing a check.

But the bigger enemy presented here is school choice. “The stark educational apartheid of New York City schools subverts, and sometimes perverts, the efforts of even the most dedicated educators,” Hannah-Jones writes. She then quotes Emily Paige, the principal of Unison, whom Hannah-Jones holds in high regard. “It’s not just segregation by race and class, it’s by ability,” Paige says. “This is the reality of school-choice systems.” Many NYC schools have admissions standards, Hannah-Jones clarifies, which some students do not pass. So they “instead find themselves in schools that have no enrollment criteria.” Those who need more attention thus end up concentrated together.

Her concern is genuinely well taken. But it is not clear how giving families fewer choices would solve, as opposed to exacerbate, that very issue. “Integration now exists for a minority of Black children—usually those born to families like ours who have the money to pay for private schools or live in tonier ZIP codes zoned to heavily white public schools,” she notes. This is true. Robust school choice, meanwhile, allows families who are less well off than Hannah-Jones’ to educate their children in tonier ZIP codes, even when they do not have the means to move there.

Yet for all the twists and turns in Hannah-Jones’ piece, what’s perhaps most striking is how much she appears to share with those whom she’d ostensibly not consider fellow travelers. “Race and class divisions exist in public schools all over America, 62 years after the Supreme Court ruled against ‘separate but equal,’” Reason‘s Jim Epstein said in a 2016 documentary about the zoning showdown between P.S. 8 and P.S. 307—the very same tug-of-war that set the scene for Hannah-Jones’ original cover story that same year. (As it turns out, she can be seen in Epstein’s documentary at the 2:41 mark.) “School lines are drawn in a way that keeps kids rich and poor, black and white, apart.” What is the source of this? “Residential assignment,” notes Epstein. It is, in effect, the same foundational argument Hannah-Jones makes.

I’d been down a similar road before. About five years ago, she and I had a testy debate about school choice on what was then called Twitter. “Why do ‘school choice’ advocates never advocate eliminating school district boundaries/funding schools by local property tax,” she asked, responding to a pro–school choice comment I had made, “and allowing poor, Black students to attend white, wealthy schools in neighboring municipalities?”

My answer, of course, was “I do.” That is essentially the case for school choice, distilled into a tweet: allowing children to attend schools outside of their ZIP codes, as well as pooling tax funds at the state (as opposed to the local) level. “Both state levers disadvantage poorer, minority students,” I wrote at the time, “a position that school choice supporters, regardless of political persuasion, do indeed embrace.”

Hannah-Jones does not see it that way, even as her daughter concludes that the experiment kept her from getting “the education I wanted.” But this latest piece still reinforces, at a minimum, that the education debate may be much less polarized than meets the eye, even if the people debating it are doing so in different languages.

She is not alone. “It is important to not, in our pursuit of being antiracist, lower expectations,” Paige told Hannah-Jones, as the two discussed how Unison’s lack of rigor had let down her daughter. “Because this is what happens, right? It’s racism under the guise of antiracism.” You’d be forgiven for briefly wondering if the speaker was George W. Bush.

The post Nikole Hannah-Jones’ Experiment Accidentally Undercuts Her Case Against School Choice appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Source: https://reason.com/2026/09/23/nikole-hannah-jones-experiment-accidentally-undercuts-her-case-against-school-choice/