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 New York City’s separate and unequal school system. Now 16, she thinks I made the wrong choice. (Nikole Hannah-Jones, Sept. 20, 2026, NY Times Magazine)
We thought by sending Najya to a mostly low-income and Black school, we could help improve it for all the children there. From my past reporting, I knew that P.T.A.s at poor schools often can raise only a few thousand dollars, but Faraji and I could write checks that exceeded the annual P.T.A. budget. I witnessed how dismissive school officials could be to lower-income parents who lodged complaints or made demands for resources and how deferential they were to wealthy ones. I believed Faraji and I could bring some of that power with us. We had connections and time and status that should not matter, but that we all know do. And more than that, we believed strongly that if families like ours went into schools like this one, it would challenge other families with similar values to do the same.
After much internal debate in our household, in 2015, we enrolled Najya in pre-K at Public School 307, a segregated, high-poverty school across from the Farragut housing projects in Brooklyn. […]
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.
But my child just shook her head, her face a mask of disbelief, and something else: betrayal.
“So you had money to send me to one of the best schools, and you chose not to?” she said, hurling her words. “Because other kids are disadvantaged, you didn’t want to put me in a great school?”