Hannah-Jones' Essay Sparks Debate Over Segregation and School Choice

In an essay for New York Times Magazine (Lean Left bias), Nikole Hannah-Jones, author of the 1619 Project, described how her choice to enroll her daughter in a high-poverty Brooklyn school backfired after her daughter discovered it was intentional.

The Essay: Hannah-Jones said she and her husband made the decision to enroll her daughter, Najya, in Public School 307 – a segregated, high-poverty school in New York – when Najya was in pre-K as part of an effort to help "dismantle educational inequality." Hannah-Jones wrote that she realized she'd "failed both my values and my child" after Najya, now 16-years-old, discovered her school's test scores were below-state average. According to Hannah-Jones, she believed by enrolling Najya in this school, she could help invest in the school and encourage improvements from within. Hannah-Jones compared her efforts to previous challenges against racism, segregation and inequality in educational institutions by black parents since the 1950s, but ultimately concluded that her daughter's "sacrifice could not transform a system" that remains apathetic to improving equality.

Race Isn't the Problem: An opinion in New York Post (Right) by Sam Munson argued that Hannah-Jones was wrong in assuming "whiter and wealthier schools are necessarily better ones." Munson described his kids' educational experience at a Title I, majority-Latino school as "good to excellent" and said "nebulous racists" aren't the problem with educational failure. He argued the solution is for New York to increase the number of screened schools and "raise and harden academic standards." Munson said one aspect of Hannah-Jones' assessment was correct: "The wealthy liberals who spent a decade beating their breasts about their own alleged complicity in 'white supremacy' will bear any burden and pay any price to avoid educating their children in the same schools as lower-income black and Latino kids — no matter how high-quality those schools may be."

School Choice: Billy Binion (Center) sympathized with Hannah-Jones in his Reason (Center) opinion piece, but argued she came to the wrong conclusion on school choice. Binion wrote that her "antipathy to school choice" makes racial segregation in US schools worse and that despite Hannah-Jones describing issues of school choice and lack of financial resources, the results of her experiment didn't "appear to readjust her worldview in a meaningful way." He challenged the idea that funding is the primary reason for low performing schools, instead saying it's how schools are organized, the incentives within them and the concentration of disadvantaged students. A National Review (Right) opinion writer also argued for school choice, saying that Hannah-Jones is still on the side of educators who "failed" Najya by "portraying school choice as a racist scam and complaining about a lack of resources."

Challenges of the Education System: In an opinion for Salon (Left), Alex Galbraith highlighted debates that followed Hannah-Jones ' essay, including on school choice, and pushed back against assertions that wanting the best for your child is "a betrayal of egalitarian ideals." Galbraith argued that it's easy to point fingers and claim hypocrisy, but that thinking about "the advantages and disadvantages baked into the system" that Hannah-Jones described "strays too far from the preferred framework of school choice advocates and other conservatives." An MS NOW (Left) opinion writer furthered this argument by writing that NYC public schools have "deep, relentless and intentional segregation." The writer contended that black parents are "presented with false 'choices' from the start" by having to choose in a system that "maintain[s] at least one of the three tiers of school segregation."

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