{"id":353306,"date":"2026-09-22T08:16:17","date_gmt":"2026-09-22T08:16:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/353306\/"},"modified":"2026-09-22T08:16:17","modified_gmt":"2026-09-22T08:16:17","slug":"1619-project-writer-blasted-for-purposely-sending-daughter-to-struggling-nyc-school","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/353306\/","title":{"rendered":"1619 Project writer blasted for purposely sending daughter to struggling NYC school"},"content":{"rendered":"

Critics lambasted New York Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones for using her own daughter as a prop to virtue signal<\/a> about alleged systemic racism by deliberately sending her to poor-performing Big Apple schools \u2013 scolding the mother for treating her education as a sick \u201cgame.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hannah-Jones<\/a>, 50, who helped craft the outlet\u2019s controversial 1619 Project, said she and her husband \u2013 who purchased a $1.5 million Bed-Stuy brownstone<\/a> in 2018 \u2013 \u201cthought by sending Najya to a mostly low-income and black school, we could help improve it for all the children there.\u201d<\/p>\n

But after years of attending mostly low-income schools like PS 307 and Urban Assembly Unison, Hannah-Jones found her bright now-16-year-old daughter lacked the basic skills to keep up in high school, and was hopping mad that she had put \u201cother kids\u201d before her.<\/p>\n

Nikole Hannah-Jones speaks onstage during the 2026 ESSENCE Festival of Culture presented by Coca-Cola at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, Friday, July 3, 2026, in New Orleans. Getty Images for ESSENCE<\/p>\n

P.S. 307 Daniel Hale Williams is located at 209 York St. in Brooklyn, New York. Google Maps<\/p>\n

Gob-smacked readers were also quick to bring the author to task for putting activism before her own daughter\u2019s future.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am so thankful my dad wasn\u2019t trying to prove any points to himself or the world and just wanted to send my brother and me to the safest and best schools he could afford (which were not the best around and it tormented him that he couldn\u2019t do more, so he taught us and our friends at home),\u201d The Atlantic writer Thomas Chatterton Williams, who is also a faculty member at Bard College, wrote on X.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe did this because he\u2019d been forced into segregated, under-resourced schools before civil rights and knew you have one shot at an education and this isn\u2019t a game,\u201d he seethed.<\/p>\n

Jack Despain Zhou, founder of Center for Educational Progress, a nonprofit think tank, said Hannah-Jones failed her child.<\/p>\n

Hannah-Jones, 50, who helped craft the New York Times\u2019 controversial 1619 Project. Getty Images for ESSENCE<\/p>\n

\u201cYou have a duty to your children. It is wrong to use them as vehicles for activism instead of fighting for their interests,\u201d he wrote on X.<\/p>\n

Still, Zhou praised the controversial writer for coming clean.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t want to take a victory lap here, because NHJ could have simply never written this article, and it\u2019s incredibly important that she did,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

Author Evan Barker shared her own experience of struggling academically after coming up through inner-city schools, which she notes she attended because her mother had no other choice \u2014 not for vanity reasons.<\/p>\n

Nikole Hannah-Jones attends the world premiere of the HBO original documentary series, \u201cJay Z in 8\u201d at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, Sunday, Sept. 13, 2026. ZUMAPRESS.com<\/p>\n

\u201cI fell behind on math during these years and never caught up, taking remedial math throughout most of college. But my mom didn\u2019t send me here for political reasons, it was out of necessity, because my mom was broke and we moved in w my great grandma and this was the closest free public school,\u201d she shared on X.<\/p>\n

She said her mother later married \u201cwith the sole mission\u201d of enrolling her in a better school, and that Hannah-Jones\u2019 playing activism with her daughter\u2019s future was a damning indictment of modern progressivism.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cTo purposefully subject your children to this environment distills progressivism to its core, and is the same reason blue cities are full of homelessness and crime. They truly believe antisocial behavior is ok, and to enforce any kind of rules is oppressive.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Hannah-Jones\u2019 reflective\u00a0essay published Sunday in the New York Times Magazine, she admitted that her decision, made despite having the means to send her daughter to top schools, left her feeling like she \u201cfailed\u201d her child.<\/p>\n

\u201cNajya was asking what I\u2019d accomplished by not choosing the \u2018best\u2019 school for her,\u201d Hannah-Jones wrote. \u201cThe honest answer is, I don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen it comes to the choices my husband and I have made about public education, these days I feel that I failed both my values and my child.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Critics lambasted New York Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones for using her own daughter as a prop to virtue…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":353307,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[67,57,9,980,56,63,65,64,5271,58,10403],"class_list":["post-353306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-education","tag-metro","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-times","tag-ny","tag-nyc","tag-nyc-headlines","tag-nyc-news","tag-schools","tag-us-news","tag-woke-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=353306"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353306\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/353307"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=353306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=353306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=353306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}