Just two years after Nikole Hannah-Jones claimed she “made the right choice” in sending her daughter to a social-justice-oriented Brooklyn middle school, the race activist is back in the New York Times admitting she “failed both my values and my child.” But don’t expect any true introspection from the leader of the divisive 1619 Project about how her ideology failed her. Instead, Hannah-Jones continues to blame racism and imagined underfunding for her daughter’s deficient education, not government unions, which are the real cause of New York City’s persistent failure to educate public school students.
In a 2016 New York Times Magazine essay, Hannah-Jones explained why she sent her daughter, Najya, to P.S. 307, a low-income, black Brooklyn elementary school. Convinced that segregation caused educational inequality, Hannah-Jones believed that families such as hers could improve a school by enrolling their children in it.
Her new account shows how little influence a well-connected parent had.
In first grade, her daughter complained that lunch was chaotic. Hannah-Jones visited and found children running, hitting, and pushing one another while two classes sat without lunches or supervision. Aides and workers watched. The principal did not answer her email until Hannah-Jones contacted the superintendent.
Her daughter’s third-grade teacher was chronically absent. Hannah-Jones discovered that reading and math assessments were going ungraded. She complained, but the system failed to respond effectively.
When standardized tests suggested her daughter was failing to master the material, Hannah-Jones nevertheless persisted in her distrust of the tests. She preferred classroom grades and teacher assessments, even after discovering that some assessments were not graded and that the school’s internal measures could not be trusted.
The reckoning finally arrived in middle school. Her daughter received A’s and B’s, including an A in algebra, but failed New York’s Algebra I Regents examination. Hannah-Jones initially questioned the exam. Only after hiring a tutor did she confront the truth: her daughter knew little algebra and lacked elementary foundations such as fractions and long division.
The standardized test had done what objective testing is supposed to do. It had pierced the fiction created by generous grades and exposed years of educational neglect. Remarkably, Hannah-Jones does not credit it, nor does she credit the annual state tests that had long signaled trouble in revealing the truth.
Instead, she returns to racism and inadequate funding. Neither explanation survives scrutiny.
New York City is projected to spend $41,000 per K-12 student this year, more than any other big American district. P.S. 307 receives roughly $44,000 per student at the school level and about $58,000 when central services are included. These are not impoverished institutions but expensive ones producing manifestly unacceptable results.
The problem is accountability. New York’s government unions fight against being held responsible for their failures at every stage. Tenured teachers can be dismissed only for cause after a formal proceeding before an arbitrator. They ordinarily remain paid during reassignment and receive union-provided legal representation. Seniority rules can force schools to release newer teachers who may be good rather than ineffective veterans who either cannot or will not do their jobs. Excessed teachers can be placed in other district schools rather than removed from the system.
Most tellingly, teachers unions have fought to sever student test results from teacher evaluations. In 2024, New York State United Teachers celebrated legislation eliminating the requirement that evaluations include student performance measures, severing the connection to tenure, and making evaluation systems subject to collective bargaining. It also eliminated mandatory annual evaluations for tenured teachers.
No teacher should be fired because of one test score. But clear, objective, multiyear evidence about whether students are learning must matter. Otherwise, schools can award A’s, administrators can ignore parents, teachers can remain absent, and everyone employed by the system can prosper while children fall behind and fail.
THE FED JUST ENDED WASHINGTON’S CHEAP MONEY ERA
Racism did not leave Hannah-Jones’s daughter’s assessments ungraded. Underfunding did not give her an A in algebra she had not earned. Those were failures of adults protected by a system designed to serve their interests rather than those of the children they are supposed to serve.
New York’s schools do not lack money. They lack accountability, and government unions have worked relentlessly to keep it that way.