I’ve avoided the Nikole Hannah-Jones pile-on, in which conservatives (and other sane people) have trashed the former New York Times columnist and liberal icon for condemning her daughter to a poor education in order to score political points.
I didn’t do so because I didn’t have thoughts. I did. Plenty of them. I just wasn’t certain I had anything to contribute to the pile-on beyond “What a bad mother, that lefty.” I was pretty certain that my colleagues would step up to the plate, and they did, beautifully.
Ten years ago, New York Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote a viral essay explaining why she sent her daughter to a failing public school on principle.
By Hannah-Jones’ own account, her daughter’s presence didn’t lift up the Brooklyn school; the school dragged her down and… pic.twitter.com/2lWhWLxa9q
— The Free Press (@TheFP) September 23, 2026
Ten years ago, New York Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote a viral essay explaining why she sent her daughter to a failing public school on principle.
By Hannah-Jones’ own account, her daughter’s presence didn’t lift up the Brooklyn school; the school dragged her down and barely seemed to notice she was there.
@coldxman wrote about what this whole episode can teach us about progressives and how we can give kids the education they deserve.
Still, the commentary Jones made about her daughter’s justified anger at being dumped into a bad school to satisfy Hannah-Jones’ ideological virtue signaling has stayed with me.
New from Nikole Hannah-Jones: In fighting for every Black child, Did I betray my own?
‘A decade ago, I made a decision about my daughter’s education that I hoped would challenge NYC’s unequal school system. Now 16, she thinks I made the wrong choice’https://t.co/sSArNymYo8
— philip lewis (@Phil_Lewis_) September 20, 2026
The basic theme of Hannah-Jones’ column is that she sent her kid to a bad inner-city school because she believed that her kid was no more important than any other, and the only way to change schools for the better is to ensure they aren’t only filled with kids from bad backgrounds. Her kid being there might change the culture for the better. That’s the abbreviated version.
“A NYT reporter in a high-poverty school f-ing changes the school … I can go to that school and say there is a problem and it gets fixed immediately” – Nikole Hannah-Jones pic.twitter.com/Dk7wuIsPEK
— Marc Porter Magee 🎓 (@marcportermagee) September 21, 2026
Nikole Hannah-Jones, obviously, misdiagnoses the reasons why our education system sucks, as well as the best methods to improve it, but that is a well-understood phenomenon with liberals. They always do. It’s in their DNA. The New York Public Schools mostly suck for a lot of reasons, but at least some of them have to do with the fact that the schools suck.
Toward the end of first grade, Najya started sometimes saying she didn’t like her school and complaining how chaotic it was at lunch. I decided to visit during the lunch period and was shocked by what I saw. Najya’s class and another class were sitting at their tables in the cafeteria with no lunch and no adult supervision. Children were running wild, chasing, hitting and pushing each other while the teacher’s aides and cafeteria workers stood by looking bored.
Several times, I had to instruct children to stop striking each other and to sit down, at one point physically pulling two boys apart. When I asked one of the aides why the children weren’t being supervised, she told me the lunch period was short-staffed. After I sat back down with Najya, she told me, “It’s always like this, and that’s why I don’t want to go to this school.”
The bottom line was simple: her daughter eventually rebelled after getting a horrible education despite good grades — nobody graded the actual work — and demanded to go to a better high school. Jones finally acceded and wrote about it.
I wondered what new I could say that others haven’t. And it occurred to me that Hannah-Jones’ reasoning mirrored a larger one often found on the left: the failure to understand the difference between the general and the specific.
As Coleman Hughes points out, one of the biggest problems is that liberals focus all their efforts on the “victims” or troublemakers, rather than ensuring that the majority are able to thrive. That is obviously true; whenever a fight breaks out over one issue or another, it always centers on a tiny minority, not what is good for the vast majority of people.
Take that lesbian bar fiasco, where an entire controversy and eventual collapse of an institution centered around N95 masking in 2026. Allowing a single night a week for unmasked partying was a “genocide” because some person somewhere sometime might catch a disease.
FFS. If you are that delicate, just don’t go to the bar that night. Instead, everything collapses to accommodate the person who is paranoid or has a genuine problem, destroying everything for everybody else. It’s a common theme.
But there is another liberal-coded failure of thinking here, embedded in Hannah-Jones’ frequent repetition of the idea that her daughter is not more valuable than anybody else. Now, in some grand scheme of things, one could argue about the proposition, but for a mother? There is something inherently sick about that idea.
So, like the generations of Black parents who came before us, Faraji and I felt an obligation to make educational decisions based on the collective good and not just our individual advantage. New York is considered one of this nation’s most liberal cities, while operating a school system that is among the most racially segregated. This segregation exists because policymakers and affluent parents — even those who profess a belief in integration and equality — shed their advocacy at the schoolhouse door and refuse to take or support any substantial action to integrate the city’s schools. Faraji and I decided that our role in this struggle meant upending the status quo and sending our child not to a wealthy white school but to a poor Black one.
Morally and evolutionarily, the family developed precisely because this should not be true for parents. People are individuals, and love of one’s own also happens, writ large, to be a pro-social attitude. We know that intuitively because we experience love, rather than fellow-feeling, for some people and would sacrifice for them over others. And we know that societally because of the well-known phenomenon called the “tragedy of the commons,” where people take care of things they own better than things owned in common.
We don’t just expect parents to advocate for their own children; we consider it unnatural and immoral because kids need advocates and protectors, and turning somebody into an avatar for society as a whole is perverse. It is not just perverse because it is unnatural; it is unnatural because societies that treat children as common property create a tragedy of the commons, where no child is special to anybody, and hence gets neglected.
In the outside world, my choice had earned me valor. And yet that day, under the withering glare of my daughter, the words that I was formulating sounded hollow to my ears even before they passed my lips.
“Your school is not bad,” I told her, modulating my voice. “What are you talking about?”
Najya grew agitated. “You know what I am talking about. We looked up our school! We saw the test scores. We saw the ratings.” She ticked off the school’s below-state average reading and math scores, and that it ranked poorly on a popular school-rating website. I said I was aware of her school’s academic rankings, but that test scores alone do not define a school.
Glancing between her and the road, I told her everything that I had said a hundred times on stages, in interviews, in discussions since I had made her a symbol of how the choices we make can help sustain — or dismantle — educational inequality. I talked about the deep inequality in New York’s schools and how, like those Black families who came before us, we had an obligation to be part of the struggle of our larger community. Even if her schools were not academically the strongest, I explained, her father and I knew that we could provide for her tutoring and any other assistance to make up for what her school may have lacked.
This is one of the reasons why welfare systems are excessively bureaucratic and fail to achieve the goals they were created to fulfill. Everybody is a number, and nobody especially cares about numbers or will sacrifice for them.
People aren’t cogs in machines, and treating your own child as a cog means that the only person you love is yourself. You are special; not even your child is.
If you look around at places in America where people with these attitudes run things, they tend to be one large tragedy of the commons. Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago. The people who run these places are doing great; everybody else? Not so much.
Here, have a drug needle and some Narcan.
Hannah-Jones may have finally pulled her kid out of the nasty situation she put her in, but she obviously hasn’t learned her lesson because the underlying ideology is still there. She did it because her kid complained enough to make life difficult.
That’s not just a Hannah-Jones problem. That’s indicative of a mindset that doesn’t understand that real love is a much more positive social force than abstract caring about “principles” and a belief in systems.
Parents should do anything they can for their kids because it is morally right, and it reflects a biological system that selected for this behavior for a reason.
Caring for the good of others and for society as a whole is great to layer on top of those impulses, but unless you realize that charity begins at home, you just make things worse.
Editor’s Note: The mainstream media continues to gaslight, spin, and lie about President Trump, his administration, and conservatives.
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