Nikole Hannah-Jones Regrets Sending Her Child to Failing Schools to Make a Point
“Because other kids are disadvantaged, you didn’t want to put me in a great school?”
Nikole Hannah-Jones, the creator of the historically inaccurate 1619 Project, has just written a piece for The New York Times Magazine in which she laments sending her daughter to failing public schools to make a point.
Her daughter apparently wasn’t too happy about the decision either.
The piece is behind a paywall, but the New York Post has details:
Woke NYT, 1619 Project writer deliberately sent daughter to troubled schools as a ‘sacrifice’ — and it backfired spectacularly
The writer behind the New York Times’ controversial 1619 Project deliberately sent her daughter to poor Big Apple schools as a “sacrifice” to try to boost the education system — and no one is angrier than the kid.
The teen is now “boiling” mad — badly behind her peers after finally being allowed to enroll in a more rigorous high school, her mother revealed in a bombshell bizarre essay.
Nikole Hannah-Jones, 50, enrolled her only child in two struggling Brooklyn public schools beginning in 2015 — as part of a battle to change what she characterized as systemic racism, despite having the “connections and time and status” to get the girl into the city’s best schools, she wrote in the Times Magazine on Sunday.
That “status” included top-notch education of her own and financial security — she and her husband bought a $1.5 million Bed-Stuy brownstone in 2018.
But she said she still decided to offer up her daughter’s education for the cause of bettering the experience of black students in city schools.
By her own account, Hannah-Jones’ daughter Najya knows she was cheated by her parents.
“So you had money to send me to one of the best schools, and you chose not to?” the girl yelled in one fight, according to the essay. “Because other kids are disadvantaged, you didn’t want to put me in a great school?”
Hannah-Jones wrote of her decision, “We thought by sending Najya to a mostly low-income and Black school, we could help improve it for all the children there…
“Sometimes I wish instead of always thinking about other kids, you would have thought about me,” Hannah-Jones’ now-16-year-old daughter, Najya, said during a confrontation over the summer.
“I never really got the education I wanted.”
One Twitter/X user has pulled some of the most interesting excerpts:
The daughter is correct. I called this at the time. pic.twitter.com/RDyLe6yuCd
— Thomas Chatterton Williams (@thomaschattwill) September 20, 2026
— Thomas Chatterton Williams (@thomaschattwill) September 20, 2026
This is insane pic.twitter.com/oqrXBOxlN5
— Thomas Chatterton Williams (@thomaschattwill) September 20, 2026
Just wow pic.twitter.com/1IMYfcXqjV
— Thomas Chatterton Williams (@thomaschattwill) September 20, 2026
Oh, man pic.twitter.com/WcErTSy5ir
— Thomas Chatterton Williams (@thomaschattwill) September 20, 2026
You have to give Hannah-Jones at least credit for admitting all of this.
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Comments
The daughter can be mad at herself, too. Her mom actually has the means so that she can get extra education after school if she wants. She played down to her curriculum. This will just end up as another excuse on the scrap heap.
Her daughter didn’t understand she wasn’t actually being graded on her work. She was lied to by the school system and her mother was too lazy to make sure her kid was actually learning.
She was simply an egg being used to make the lefty omelet.
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/387699/explanation-of-you-cant-make-an-omelet-without-breaking-a-few-eggs
Poor delusional leftist family. When their biases are affirmed (of course I deserved this A), they don’t bother to question. The daily affirmation is just so soothing.
I don’t see this. It’s not the daughter’s responsibility to handle her own education. Nobody rational expects her to demand extra tutors to make up for her own school’s failings as a pre-teen. Nobody wants children to decide their own fates because THEY ARE CHILDREN.
It’s her mother’s job to make the hard decisions and ensure her daughter gets a good education and she failed at it.
Poor delusional leftist family. When their biases are affirmed (of course I deserved this A), they don’t bother to question. The daily affirmation is just so soothing. You’ve never seen a child (old enough to drive in this case) overachieve or do more than enough to reach the bar?
It could have been worse. She could have home schooled them.
Then where would she have found the time to write her best-selling fantasy novel to dumb down everybody else’s kids?
Or the time to keep up that “Raggedy Ann” look…
Or, as Phyllis Diller described her own hair, “Styled by Mixmaster”.
I thought immediately, “Bozo the Clown LIVES!”
Please don’t compare her to Bozo. Bozo wasn’t that biased.
Tell me you know NOTHING of the work and dedication it takes to homeschool without coming right out and saying it. We homeschooled our children through high school. Two graduated at 16, one at 15. Clearly too young to go to college. We continued teaching them college level courses and also sent them to a local university. At 18, all three went to private Midwest prestigious universities. Mostly on scholarship because of their transcripts.
Today, all three are very successful in their chosen fields.
Yes, her poor daughter would have been in a terrible position had she been homeschooled (by her mother). By most dedicated homeschooling parents, she would have been wildly successful had she chosen to go to a private school for high school.
Inform yourself before you write such an ignorant and uneducated statement.
I think the point was what this woman would teach her child. Not that it’s home schooling.
I am sure you child did very well. I know many home schooled people that also did very well.
Nicole Hanna-Jones is an evil idiot that know less that nothing since she knows so much that isn’t real.
As the Gentle Grizzly said I am not talking down home schooling generally but this particular person should not be teaching anyone anything ever.
Yahbut, the ACTUAL point of the comment was that being homeschooled by NH-J in particular would have been worse than being interned to Jim Jones.
This comment is a clear demonstration of the Michael Malice quote “the average human mind is like a bunch of mousetraps, which are set off when they encounter certain phrases regardless of any broader context”
He got got.
She did her first round of talk shows being the supporter of public schools.
Now, her second round of talk shows she is supporting private schools.
I think she just wants to be in front of the camera.
All to keep her grift going…
The daughter deserves better than the racist self-hating douche she has for a mother, Imagine sacrificing your only child to virtue signaling and your own narcissism. I can’t.
Absolutely, it takes a lot of sacrifice to educate a child, whether in private school or home school.
The word sacrifice implies that she gave up something. In her narcissistic world, she comes first and no one else matters.
in a way it’s admirable. shows a weird integrity. most elites make sure everyone else’s kids are trapped in miserable hell-holes while sending their kids to great schools. we rightly criticize the process.
otoh it’s really dumb and she has a super-inflated view of her influence, seeing her virtue so grand, to be able to remotely fix a disastrous fail just because her kid goes there?
She could have made a difference but make the wrong calculus. Her child merely attending the school did not make a difference. IF she had GONE to the school early on, seen the mayhem, and started working to eliminate the people allowing the mayhem, she COULD HAVE made a difference. But she sent her daughter to War without any support.
“So you had money to send me to one of the best schools, and you chose not to?”
You’re 100% right, kid. Count your blessings that you evaded abortion.
“We thought by sending Najya to a mostly low-income and Black school, we could help improve it for all the children there…”
What a stupid collectivist bint. Wasn’t she aware of how her soulmates were quietly handing the same problem?
Some of the lefty wokiestas will happily sacrifice their children on the alter of their ideology/ego …they won’t blink an eye about sacrificing others. As one example releasing illegal alien criminals onto the streets, sneaking them down the back stairs, refusing entry/access instead of safely and securely handing them to ICE. Then doubling/tripling down when these same illegal aliens go out to commit more crimes in their community.
Exactly the way some woke parents will boast and preen because two of their three children (imagine the actual odds) are trans. Sacrificing their flesh and blood for woke bona fifes.
fides
Our company of 50,000 put a DEI promotion black woman in charge of the Training Division. She had no qualifications and was put in the position purely as a show piece – what could she do in training? What made me think of her in relationship to this article was a poster she had printed and distributed across all our locations:
“ If one bad apple can spoil the whole bunch, think what one good apple can do?
Well, that poor daughter found out exactly what happens to that good apple.
“If one bad apple can spoil the whole bunch, think what one good apple can do?”
OMG, how appallingly ignorant.
Anyone with the brains of a fifth grader doesn’t even have to do the experiment.
tell me you have never actually seen a full bushel of fresh apples….
Yes, but the trick is they all need to be good — not just one.
One bad one turns the rest. One good one… just gets turned bad.
For heaven’s sake, if you’re going to argue by analogy (which I admit I love), at least use an analogy that supports your point, not one that refutes it.
The collective noun for apples is not a bunch. It is a barrel or bushel. Did this woman ever take and English course or an elementary science class?
Well what do you expect for the writer of the 1619 project. Just show how stupid and narrow minded she really is.
You’re shocked that your kid is dumb? Look in the mirror sister, you’re a delusional liar.
“I used to have three theories about raising children. Now I have three children and no theories.” 1940s joke
You can’t fix stupid.
I’m sure somehow the spin will be to blame not enough finding for inner city schools even though places like NYC and DC spend way more per student than anywhere else in the country. The real lesson should be to stop hating on charter schools and homeschooling parents, who make this choice to do the opposite of this deadbeat mom; help their children out of a horrible school. Most don’t have the financial means like this woman does, but they still find a way to give their child a real chance at learning and with that a future. Her daughter has every right to be angry, her mother chose ideology over love and logic. But hardly surprising when your mother is the author of a complete fabrication of US history, one in which she force fit her world view into a history that doesn’t support it. Apparently she has a talent for seeing only what she wants to see and ignoring the rest.
Further up, I posted a blurb about congressmen and the DC Public School System. At the time those studies were done, I do believe that DC was ranked #1 in the amount of money “spent” per student.
Another adult pursuing her own desires at the expense of her child. She should have a chat with Randi Weingarten.
She probably did.
Just wonderful. A sociopath racist mother using her child for a social engineering experiment. Sounds like Leftist 101.
Conservative media, in its eagerness to diss Hannah-Jones, unfortunately has fallen into the trap laid to “prove” that black schools and students — in a school district using the same textbooks and hiring the same teachers under the same superintendent — suffer from lack of funds and “systemic racism” and hence inferiority.
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More likely what has happened is that this socio-economically advantaged child of midwit affirmative-actioned parents with all the enrichment opportunities of living in NYC, suddenly discovered upon moving into a different school with different students that she was not one of the best and brightest. Has nothing to do with the school.
Hmmmm…
Have you looked up the performance rankings of those two schools? Terrible. In the case of the grade school near the absolute bottom of NYC and state rankings.
Schools essentially are ranked by the measurable achievements of the students in them. It’s the student body, not the facilities, not the extracurricular programs, not the accutrements. A bright child who can read and write well, which can and should be mastered by age 12, and knows the basics of math through a decent handle on algebra and geometry, needs nothing else except access to books. Where were the parents? This small part of it is always within the parents’ control.
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Isn’t the school. I homeschooled my children until community college at age 16, following which they went to Ivy League universities through grad school. It took maybe two hours a day in between conducting a full-time law practice.
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Childen’s academic success is a function of the culture of the home, love of learning and reading, parental involvement (with the children, NOT the school), which can be as simple as discussions around the dinner table, and reading the classics to them, as much as innate abilities.
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Look at the schooling histories of some of our greatest achievers: Sir Isacc Newton, Einstein, Sowell, Clarence Thomas, Presidents Garfield and Andrew Johnson, many of our great “industrialists”, even to some of our “Big Tech” guys how. Many others. Got access to libraries? Got paper and pens? Got a computer? Live in a city in which you don’t even have to travel to go to museums? No excuses.
The majority of the problems at these schools isn’t due to a lack of funding and it’s definitely not “racism”. It’s that the parents and the students simply don’t give a shit. When you have nearly an entire demographic who has convinced themselves that the world is out to get them and they’ll never be able to succeed regardless of effort, or that doing well in school is considered trying to be “white” so they purposely do poorly, teachers will stop caring. After all why should they waste time and effort, and be disappointed over and over by parents and students? It’s easier and mentally safer to stop being the only one who cares about the kids education.
Does it take ten years to realize your child is poorly educated?
Consider the source.
Zero interest in what this lefist bint did to her kid. Zero.
I wonder if her kid will go into a rage and dress up as the Hamburglar and attack her mother?
It’s all the rage among leftist meatheads — that’s for sure.
She blames everyone except the two most at fault. Herself and the New York teachers union.
The daughter lived with her parents all her life. How could they not notice she never did homework every night. Did they ever ask to see her tests or written work? It sounds like they didn’t care much about what was covered in school. Most families follow the progress of their child. Not this one.