Attacks on Excellence is a series from Education Progress featuring critical coverage of the education policies and research paradigms that are holding students back.
The recent piece by Nikole Hannah-Jones has laid bare a problem at the heart of The New York Times and the entire industry of public intellectuals working on projects in education.
In 2016, Hannah-Jones wrote about her decision to send her daughter, Najya, to a highly segregated, low-income public school, rather than one of the magnet schools or private schools they would have been able to afford. “True integration, true equality, requires a surrendering of advantage,” she argued, even “when it comes to our own children.” While “much of school segregation is structural … it is the choices of individual parents that uphold that system.”
Now in 2026, Hannah-Jones reflects on the consequences her convictions have had for Najya’s education. Her efforts to improve the school for others had come to nothing. Year after year, her daughter suffered under educators who neglected her potential and “largely refused to teach.” Today, Najya begrudges her mother for her choice:
“Sometimes I wish instead of always thinking about other kids, you would have thought about me. I never really got the education I wanted.”
As a former teacher and administrator, current researcher, and someone from a minority background, I have many thoughts. First and foremost, I will acknowledge that it took courage to publish this article with The New York Times. Recently I have reflected on my own complicity in uncritically adopting ed-tech in classrooms and in our institutional failure to present domain knowledge in K-12. My current work in academia is, in part, an effort to atone for the consequences of those choices and contribute to better institutional decision-making.
Yet while Hannah-Jones is rightly credited for the candor of her piece, and the Times is rightly credited for publishing it, we also need a public correction of the record. Hannah-Jones has apologized to her daughter for prioritizing moral convictions ahead of scholastic achievement, but she has yet to apologize to the thousands of parents and children who followed, or were pressured to follow, the model she continued to preach without voicing her doubts. It is not enough to print one’s diary. The more consequential act, for both Hannah-Jones and the Times, would be to state plainly the steps that schools, administrators, and policymakers can take to remedy the damage their ideas wrought.
Hannah-Jones acknowledges that her essay influenced others:
“The essay spurred community meetings in places near and far; and in New York City, it helped ignite parent and student activism around a subject that had largely disappeared from public discourse. Even a decade later, parents still share with me how my essay led them to make similar educational decisions for their children.”
Our most respected institutions played a central role in fueling this influence. As a nationally-renowned education writer and tastemaker, Hannah-Jones’s choices and writings influenced policymakers, educators, families, and school communities across the country, and her ideology became entrenched in our public systems. Her story was valorized in our most vaunted public square and recognized with awards. Her ‘moral clarity’ came to embody the good faith and seriousness she brought to our evolving public discourse about education. Countless families, whether they read The New York Times themselves or encountered her ideas through educators and institutions, came to believe that racism and segregation were the drivers of poor conditions and outcomes in low-income schools. Hannah-Jones, aided by the Times, has perpetuated a falsehood on a broad scale that neither has yet acknowledged.
Yet while Hannah-Jones is rightly credited for the candor of her piece, and the Times is rightly credited for publishing it, we also need a public correction of the record.
Her public writing since 2017 has also been explicit about the moral priority she assigned to the common good embodied in public education, frequently at the expense of educational choice. She treated those who provided alternatives to public schools as threats to that common good, and framed families who chose to pull their children out of public schools as perpetuating educational inequality and segregation.
Yet this new piece does not address how that framework may have affected parents who sought different or better schools as options for their own children. It does not contend with those who made the opposite choice for their own children, or with the disdain she and others expressed toward educational structures that would reward excellence, prioritize discipline and routines, or reflect the various other hallmarks of “privileged behavior.”
What is most galling is that, across her numerous writings over the past decade, racial solidarity functions not only as a commitment to justice, but as a test of moral loyalty. As a mixed-race black teacher, I became a confidant for many minority parents who left “bad schools,” who felt profound guilt over their choice to pursue higher-achieving or more specialized programming. Parents who chose a different school, curriculum, or body of knowledge for their children were routinely made to feel as though they were abandoning the community; they were leaving “the village.”
Hannah-Jones and her husband were wholly entitled to enroll their daughter in the neighborhood public school. Whether or not they had the means to look elsewhere, it was their right to choose the environment that aligned with their values. Every child deserves access to a school that serves their unique needs, learning, and development. Every family should be able to seek the best option and have the flexibility to change institutions when a local option is not working.
By her own account she persisted with these choices, even when her daughter was not thriving. She persisted even as she became dissatisfied with changes in her local school’s organization and administration. Only her daughter can fully describe and reflect on the opportunities and costs of that choice. Through her writing, Hannah-Jones exercised a form of public agency that gave a private decision significance beyond the family. Over the past decade, she championed choices solely in the interest of advancing the public-school community, many of which yielded nothing better, while also promoting a broader effort to limit the choice available to other families. Her deeply personal decision thus evolved into an ethical litmus test, one elevated by her influence and standing with our national paper of record.
This is what has bothered me most: not simply that she made these choices for her family, which is every parent’s right, but that her writing has had such tremendous influence in shaping national conversations on what children deserve.
But today, we must move beyond Hannah-Jones’s personal choices to the platform she commanded. The New York Times did not simply publish her writings as mere commentary, but repeatedly presented her as an authoritative interpreter of education, segregation, history, race, schooling, and community transformation. Her work was widely disseminated, adopted by educators and institutions, and reinforced through national recognition.
The public question is not whether her choice served her daughter; it is what happens when one of our standard-bearing institutions transforms a family’s choice into a national educational template. How many times did administrators and principals nationwide excuse failing schools or ineffective teachers, thinking that if such a high-profile family appeared to find success in these conditions, they must be worthy of continued investment and support? How many schools were kept open in the name of community identity when they should have been closed for diminished proficiency, inconsistent discipline, or subpar achievement? How many effective programs were denied expansion in the name of racial equity? How much knowledge did this country’s children lose out on? How often, in following her example and recommendations, did parents and educators privilege ideology, identity, or symbolic justice over academic excellence and strong educational outcomes for students?
As Hannah-Jones has revealed the serious consequences of her educational ideal for her own child, we must consider whether she deserves continued platforming and authority in our public conversations about how other people’s children should be educated.
This is what has bothered me most: not simply that she made these choices for her family, which is every parent’s right, but that her writing has had such tremendous influence in shaping national conversations on what children deserve. Hers is a story about our attitudes toward educational choice, our willingness to tolerate institutional dysfunction in the pursuit of solidarity, and the meritocratic American ideal that was rejected because it became ideologically disfavored.
In the weeks and months ahead, will she accept responsibility for her thought leadership across our educational institutions? Will the New York Times apologize to the families and children who may have been materially disadvantaged by the narratives it advanced?
It is a small tragedy that her choices harmed her daughter. It is a bigger tragedy that her words pushed others to do the same. It will be a catastrophe if we allow this to go uncorrected and unacknowledged in the future.
I have a lot to say about the issue, but I always have trouble figuring out where to start because everything is so tangled. But here is one point: the Nikole Hannah-Jones article shines a light on a lie at the heart of progressive education reform.
This lie stems from how activists have interpreted a central finding of the 1966 Coleman Report. It noted that minority students achieved higher standardized test scores when attending integrated schools, while finding no statistically significant decline in performance for white students. Though subsequent studies have replicated these results, the conclusions have been twisted.
While the Coleman Report did not find statistically significant harm to white students, its methodology never ruled it out using a non-inferiority test or equivalence test. NHJ and other commentators misinterpret the absence of evidence as evidence of absence*. They comfortably claim that integration poses zero academic risk to affluent children, thereby concluding that any parents who flee the same kind of school NHJ just fled are just racist.
Progressives understand that highly involved, affluent parents are the ones who keep public schools accountable, get involved, volunteer, and their children foster positive peer effects. Reformers need to cajole these families into staying, so they lie: their children lose nothing by attending an impoverished school, and parental hesitation is a moral failing.
* Note: I do not think this is a conscious lie, but rather that they do not understand the details of statistical testing and this is a favorable conclusion.