REALITY BITES

A decade ago, Nikole Hannah-Jones made an astonishing choice. She would not send her daughter to kindergarten at one of New York’s selective elementary schools. Instead, Najya would attend a segregated, high-poverty school. Parents usually claw at every possible advantage for their children. But Nikole argued in an essay for The New York Times Magazine that the only way to lift up the city’s segregated schools was to enroll in them.

Najya Hannah-Jones Wayne Lawrence for The New York Times

The idea made a big impression on me. My family had sent our oldest child to an unremarkable D.C. public school, and we planned to stay. We were part of the community, and that was our civic obligation. We got involved, we lobbied for better instruction, we helped raise money. Maybe you can’t improve a system by leaving it, but it turned out that joining it didn’t work either: By the time our son was in fourth grade, he was on level with his peers — and well behind where my wife and I had been growing up. We’d just had a third child. We moved to a nearby suburb feeling like we’d betrayed an ideal.

Nikole stuck with it, though — until Najya began wondering, in middle school, why her education was subpar. What happened next is the subject of today’s cover story in The Times Magazine. I spoke to Nikole about it.

Adam: After your 2016 piece, some readers said you were sacrificing your daughter’s future on the altar of your principles. I wondered if I was doing the same thing.

Nikole: I didn’t agree with that critique. My child had many advantages, and I believed she’d be OK.

Over the years, you pushed her schools to keep high standards, sometimes with frustrating results. Then your daughter confronted you in seventh grade. What did she say?

She was thinking of high school and college, so she’d looked up her middle school and saw its test scores and ranking. She asked: Did I know that it was bad when I chose to send her there? Why would I do that?

Was she right?

It’s very hard for a 12-year-old to put her experience in a larger context of inequality and injustice. That middle school serves the kids who show up at its doors, even if they have disabilities, behavior problems or academic gaps. Educators were doing their best in an immorally unequal system.

Did she get your argument?

In her mind, just because other kids are suffering and there’s inequality doesn’t mean she has to suffer. She told me: “I had to live through the school. You didn’t.” She believes I was trying to help all these other kids when she should have been my primary interest. She is, and has been! But she doesn’t see it that way, and I understand why.

- Author: Adam B. Kushner, The New York Times

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