1619 Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones has proven the case for school choice

The controversial 1619 Project burst back into the news last week because its creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, published an essay in New York Times Magazine conceding a harsh truth no school choice advocate could have written better.

The nonprofit Pulitzer Center has been sending the 1619 Project’s classroom lessons into public schools since 2019, when the 1619 Project was published. With the controversy resurrected, I went back and reviewed some of the lessons. What I found was, thankfully, mostly boring: standard reading comprehension worksheets, timeline activities, discussion questions that would put most fourteen-year-olds to sleep.

However, not all the lessons were neutral. For example, one lesson, “Exploring ‘The Idea of America’ by Nikole Hannah-Jones,” hands students her essay as the reading assignment. The essay opens by declaring democracy in this country “has been born on the backs of black resistance” and argues black Americans, not the men “cast in alabaster in the nation’s capital,” are this nation’s true founding fathers. Students are asked to track her evidence, consider why she calls plantations “forced-labor camps” instead of plantations, and decide whether America was founded “not as a democracy but as a slavocracy.”

The same leftist talking point runs through it all: America as we know it exists because of black suffering alone. The myopic focus on only black suffering and contributions is tired and frankly weird. I don’t think many teachers are actually using these lessons, so that’s one small mercy.

Back in 2015, Hannah-Jones and her husband enrolled their daughter Najya in pre-K at PS 307, a high-poverty, majority-black public school in Brooklyn. They are far from low income. They had other options. They could afford private school. They also had the standing to land a seat in a well-resourced, zoned public charter school.

Instead, they chose PS 307 as an act of ideological advocacy (and/or stupid arrogance), hoping their family’s presence would “improve” the school from the inside and challenge what Hannah-Jones calls New York City’s segregated school system. She gets that last fact right: New York’s school segregation is the worst in the nation for black students. California ranked among the worst in the nation for Latino students.

It’s easy to guess what they both have in common.

Hannah-Jones’s decision to sacrifice her daughter’s education to liberal activism didn’t work out well. Ten years later, Najya is sixteen. According to Nikole Hannah-Jones’s recent essay, Najya told her mother directly, “So you had money to send me to one of the best schools, and you chose not to?”

In other words: “Mom, you had one job!”

The experiment is over now, ideological penance has reached its limit, and Hannah-Jones has decided to pull her child from PS 307. One of the more extreme examples of leftist education activists over recent years has thrown in the towel. She has done what school choice advocates have been asking the power to do for decades: make their own decision on where their child goes to school.

Talk about an endorsement for school choice!

Najya is now attending one of New York City’s selective, academically screened public high schools, admitted on the strength of her grades. Every NYC student can technically apply to a school like hers. Getting in is a different matter entirely. Screened schools admit on academic merit, and a student with poor grades and a parent who is not fighting for them through a complicated, once-a-year application process simply does not have the same access Najya did, even though the door was, on paper, open to both of them.

No doubt, public school apologists will blame lack of funding as the reason for the failure of schools such as PS 307, but they’d have to ignore a lot of dollar signs to do so. PS 307 received $43,972 per student for the 2025-26 school year, according to the NYC Department of Education’s finance division. Manhattan Institute economist Daniel DiMartino visited the school and found teachers there average more than $100,000 in salary, with a student-to-teacher ratio of 9 to 1.

According to the most recent federal data, the average American public school spent only $17,619 per student. So PS 307 spends nearly two and a half times the national average per child, with a teacher for nearly every 9 kids in the building. And yet Hannah-Jones’s own daughter still came out the other side, in her own words, without the education she deserved.

This was never a funding problem. I have said this for years as a former classroom teacher, and I will keep saying it: you cannot pour more money into a broken system and expect a different outcome.

The 1619 Project was a multi-essay New York Times Magazine project released in the Fall of 2019. The group that pushes its curriculum into K-12 classrooms runs through the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, a 501(c)(3), unrelated to the Pulitzer Prize despite sharing the name. According to the Pulitzer Center’s announcements, Meta (formerly Facebook) is the lead donor behind the 1619 Project Education Network, joined by Open Society Foundations, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, and other towers of left-wing philanthropy. The Capital Research Center has documented the money trail.

So the lessons the 1619 Project puts in front of American kids are not neutral history worksheets funded by nobody in particular. They are fueled by America’s richest advocates of left-wing policy. Yet the woman who helped build the lessons they paid for admitted last week she could not make that ideology of supreme trust in government and government schools work in the real world, even for her own daughter.

Here is what separates the Hannah-Jones family from most parents whose children are still trapped in academically anemic schools such as PS 307. Najya got out, but only because New York City runs a public school choice system at the high school level, letting students apply to screened, selective schools outside their zoned assignment.

Millions of children across this country attend elementary and middle schools in districts and states with no equivalent choice mechanism at any grade level. No seat is open and waiting for them at a better school across town, unless it comes with a high tuition price tag. Nobody will rescue them with an application to go somewhere better.

They have no choice but to be stuck in the same mad policy experiment Hannah-Jones chose to run on her own daughter for a decade.

The 1619 Project may be misinforming students about the impact of historic slavery on modern Americans, but its characterization of black folks stuck in a cruel system with no escape describes perfectly what is happening with public education today. For Najya, her mother’s “2026 Decision” will be far more valuable than the 1619 Project ever could be.

Every American child deserves the same choice.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/1619-project-creator-nikole-hannah-jones-has-proven-the-case-for-school-choice/