1619 Project Author Nikole Hannah-Jones Criticized Over School Choice

The 16-year-old daughter of 1619 Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones has criticized her mother’s decision to enroll her in underperforming public schools that reflected Hannah-Jones’s beliefs about equity and school integration.

In a New York Times opinion essay published this month, Hannah-Jones, 50, acknowledged that she and her husband had the means to send their daughter, Najya, to one of New York City’s elite private schools. Instead, they chose poorer, predominantly Black public schools in Brooklyn.

Hannah-Jones said she believed the presence of affluent families could strengthen public schools. She wrote that she “felt an obligation to make educational decisions based on the collective good and not just our individual advantage.”

According to Hannah-Jones, Najya ultimately fell years behind her classmates and was struggling with basic math and writing by age 12. The journalist also said her daughter recently confronted her after realizing that the schools had been selected deliberately despite better options being available.

During an interview with This American Life, Hannah-Jones said Najya was so unhappy with the decision that she later presented her mother with a list of schools she wanted to consider for the remainder of high school.

“She comes back with her list of schools, and I internally cringed,” Hannah-Jones said.

“I’m like, I cannot believe this. My child came up with the exact opposite of my life’s work… And every school on there is a school that screens and has hardly no Black kids.”

In a follow-up interview, Najya accused her mother of turning her education into a social experiment. She said Hannah-Jones had “put me on the line to help a school, but it didn’t work.”

Hannah-Jones became nationally known through the 1619 Project, a New York Times initiative that says it seeks to “reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of the national narrative.”

In her Times essay, she wrote that she and her husband, tech specialist Faraji, 50, could afford better schools for Najya but instead “decided to send her to the type of school that wealthier families with choices uniformly avoid — one that is low-income and mostly Black.”

“Our decision had been informed by values shaped by my years of reporting on the enduring and too often seemingly hopeless battle for school integration,” she wrote.

But during the conversation with This American Life, Najya said her mother’s reasoning did not make sense. In her view, receiving a weaker education had done little to improve conditions for other students who were struggling.

“You put me on the line to help a school, but it didn’t work,” she told her mother.

“I didn’t want to feel like I didn’t know anything because I was set back in other schools. I didn’t want to feel like I was dumb. In ninth grade, I did feel like I was dumb. It did feel like I didn’t know anything.”

“Why should I have to suffer with that? Why couldn’t you just benefit kids in another way? There’s other options.”

“You didn’t want me to have advantages over other kids, isn’t that what you want?” Najya asked during the discussion. “Is that not a normal thing to want me to have?”

Hannah Jones told her daughter that she had ‘many advantages’ in her life, and pushed back: ‘We don’t have to actually agree. It’s OK for us to see this in a different way. But ultimately, you got into your first choice of high school.’

‘But you could have had me way higher in education,’ Najya responded.

Hannah-Jones said her school choice ‘was not just about giving some additional funds to a school’, as she believed she could ‘change the power dynamics’ by being a wealthier family attending a poorer school. 

The author also defended sending her daughter to public schools in her early years because ‘most of the kids looked like her.’

‘She had a Chinese American educator. She had incredible Black educators. She had Caribbean educators. Amazing Black History Month celebrations,’ she said.  

But after Hannah-Jones told an anecdote about enjoying seeing Najya create self-portraits in school as a black woman and ‘seeing yourself in that lens and not in the lens of this outside world’, the teenager said the experience did not help her.

‘Yeah, I don’t really remember a lot from elementary,’ she said. 

‘It was just regular. It was fine… It was just a school that she picked for me. I didn’t really care about it. I wasn’t ever thinking about stuff like that.’

Hannah-Jones said she kept Najya at the school even when she realized in her daughter’s fourth-grade that she had fallen far behind in her education after looking through her error-filled homework. 

‘I felt like I was failing my child, like my decision was failing my child. God, I was so worried that I had done wrong by my child in a way that was irreparable,’ she said, saying she sat with her husband and briefly considered moving Najya. 

‘We felt stuck because those other kids did not deserve not to be taught either and understanding that the consequences for them were going to be so much greater than for my child. These were already kids living in public housing, living in poverty, no power in our society,’ she said.

‘We would have these discussions. And we would be like, who are we if the moment it gets really rough, we give up? Then what did we do it for in the first place? And in the end, we just felt we couldn’t abandon the rest of those kids.’

Hannah-Jones said she ultimately apologized to her daughter, but said she still believes her intentions were good in her daughter’s schooling.

‘The stakes were so high for me personally. I feel like the stakes are so high when it comes to the issue of integration and equality that I couldn’t admit to her that, yes, you did bear a cost,’ she said.

‘And I don’t know that we made the right choice. I don’t know what the right choice would be.’