By New York Post (Opinion) | Created at 2026-09-21 23:07:36 | Updated at 2026-09-21 23:42:14
46 minutes ago
Nikole Hannah-Jones speaks on stage during the 137th Commencement at Morehouse College on May 16, 2021 in Atlanta, Georgia.
Getty Images
One-trick monomaniacs don’t just bore their audience, they hurt those closest to them with their narcissistic need to prove themselves right.
That’s the unwitting admission that Nikole Hannah-Jones, the 1619 Project rewriter of history and race obsessive, made in a new piece about her daughter Najya’s educational journey.
In The New York Times Magazine, Hannah-Jones reveals that Najya had confronted the wealthy writer about her decision to knowingly send her to underperforming public schools in New York City (“So you had money to send me to one of the best schools, and you chose not to?”) as a kind of political statement.
“We thought by sending Najya to a mostly low-income and Black school, we could help improve it for all the children there,” mused Hannah-Jones, citing her ability to cut checks and use her “connections and time and status” to change things on the ground.
It was a choice that Hannah-Jones first wrote about a decade ago and previously taken a victory lap over.
“By test-score metrics many would label this school a failing school,” declared Hannah-Jones about her Najya’s middle school in June 2024, “but we judge these schools AND their students without ever stepping foot inside. My daughter is not worth more than any other child. Eight years later, I still know we made the right choice.”
Two years after that, however, Hannah-Jones has regrets.
In between detailing the dismal environments she had subjected her offspring to, the writer admits: “Najya deserved better. They all did. But she was mine. This girl, my only child, looked to me to protect her, to give her what she needed to thrive. And I had not chosen her.”
Indeed — but Hannah-Jones is the kind of sinner who attends confession only to make a mockery of it after leaving the booth.
Her lament of her betrayal of Najya is accompanied by all the same boogeymen she’s built her career on: racism, “school segregation,” “educational apartheid,” school choice.
Hannah-Jones somehow still believes that these malign, vacuous forces are to blame.
Yet the apparently nightmarish elementary school Najya attended spends more than $52,000 per year on each pupil and boasts a student-to-teacher ratio of 9.8:1.
For some perspective: The decidedly-not-failing, predominantly white district I graduated from in 2016 spent $27,831 per pupil as of two years ago and has a nearly identical ratio.
This is where the hard truths come in.
No amount of money or personal clout of the kind Hannah-Jones thought she was bringing to the table is going to turn bad schools around.
Only accountability can.
As a Manhattan Institute report published this month observed, the members of New York state’s Board of Regents are appointed by a Democrat-dominated state Legislature that’s in bed with the teachers’ unions.
The result? An unaccountable body operating “largely independent of executive oversight” that continues to disappoint.
Rather than try to hold schools and teachers to higher standards, the board spends its time getting rid of anything resembling accountability.
Its latest move will remove the requirement that students pass certain Regents tests to graduate.
New York deserves a system built for its students, not for the low-performing, no-show teachers and administrators described by Hannah-Jones.
Administrators must hold their teachers accountable for poor performance.
The Board of Regents must demand more of administrators.
The Legislature ought to take more pride in the board’s performance.
And if they won’t, voters ought to throw the bums out.
But it doesn’t stop there.
Parents must hold themselves accountable for their children’s behavior and level of academic commitment.
And students themselves must take responsibility for their own lives.
Hannah-Jones presents her own daughter’s conclusion that she wouldn’t be able to get into one of the Big Apple’s elite schools as a failure of the “system.”
But they’re actually indictments of the parents who sanctioned such a defeatist, self-destructive worldview.
Students and schools fail not because there’s a vast conspiracy to deprive them of what they need to thrive.
They fail because administrators, teachers, policymakers and parents fail them — usually by expecting too little of them.
In the comments section of her piece, Hannah-Jones divulged that Najya had deemed her self-reflection insufficient.
It was yet another devastating, spot-on assessment of her mother.
