We’ve seen some wild parenting moves in this city, but using your kid as a pawn for a social justice experiment takes the cake. It’s one thing to have strong opinions about the classroom, but it’s another thing entirely to force your child into a failing school just to prove a point. Now, the daughter is finally speaking up, and she’s not holding back on how much that choice nearly ruined her.
The New York Post recently detailed a confrontation between NYT writer Nikole Hannah-Jones and her 16-year-old daughter, Najya. According to the reporting, Najya credits her current success to her decision to buck her mother’s wishes. “I think I’m fine because I’m in the school I am now,” Najya told her mother during an interview on WBEZ’s This American Life. She even went further, saying, “I feel like if I picked a different choice that you wanted me to, I don’t think I would be fine.”
A Failed Social Experiment
The whole situation started because Hannah-Jones wanted to use her status to help struggling, predominantly Black schools. In a recent essay for the Times, she admitted that her daughter struggled with basic writing and math by age 12 because of this choice. The Post reports that the girl was “boiling” with anger when she realized her education was being used as a tool for her mother’s social mission.
When Najya presented her own list of high schools, Hannah-Jones wasn’t happy. The journalist told This American Life, “She comes back with her list of schools, and I internally cringed.” She even remarked, “I’m like, I cannot believe this. My child came up with the exact opposite of my life’s work,” noting that the schools on the list were those that “screens and has hardly no black kids.”
Leadership Failures in Brooklyn
It wasn’t just a family drama; it was a disaster for the students. The Post reports that during this time, the school in question, PS 307, was struggling immensely. When Kamar Samuels was the superintendent for District 13 in 2019, only 28% of students were reading at a proficient level. By the time he left in 2022, that number dropped to just 13.6%.
While parents were begging to have Principal Stephanie Carroll removed, officials allegedly did nothing. One former DOE source told the Post that Samuels let “problems fester until they explode.” Instead of being let go, Carroll was eventually “fired upwards” in 2024 to become the citywide director of literacy. It’s hard to see how someone in that position leads the city when their own students couldn’t read.
The Real Cost of Ideology
This is what happens when you prioritize a political narrative over actual results. We see it in the schools and we see it in the bureaucracy. You can’t claim to be fighting for equity while sending your own kid to a school where teachers aren’t even grading properly. It’s easy to talk about “sacrifice” when it’s not your child’s future on the line. If the daughter hadn’t fought back, we’d be reading about a tragedy instead of a success story. New York deserves better than leaders who promote failure and call it progress.
This is opinion and commentary from the RapForMayor team.
