{"id":361248,"date":"2026-09-30T22:56:16","date_gmt":"2026-09-30T22:56:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/361248\/"},"modified":"2026-09-30T22:56:16","modified_gmt":"2026-09-30T22:56:16","slug":"mamdani-says-nyc-public-schools-failed-nikole-hannah-jones-daughter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/361248\/","title":{"rendered":"Mamdani Says NYC Public Schools \u2018Failed\u2019 Nikole Hannah-Jones\u2019 Daughter"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mayor Zohran Mamdani has acknowledged that New York City\u2019s public education system \u201cfailed\u201d Nikole Hannah-Jones\u2019s daughter<\/a> after the Brooklyn-based civil rights journalist reflected on her choice of enrolling her child into a high-needs school.<\/p>\n

The mayor revealed little, however, about his plan to truly integrate the nation\u2019s largest school district<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Hannah-Jones sparked a national debate over school segregation with her personal essay in 2016<\/a> about her selection of a low-income school, where the majority of students were Black, for her daughter. <\/p>\n

But writing a decade later for a follow-up feature in The New York Times Magazine, she revealed her daughter, Najya, feels she made the \u201cwrong choice.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like the original story, Hannah-Jones\u2019s Sept. 20 article went viral and reignited the conversation on racial and economic inequality in the city\u2019s public schools. <\/p>\n

In the story, Najya questioned whether her mom\u2019s decision to enroll her in the category of school that, as Hannah-Jones wrote, \u201cfamilies with choices uniformly avoid\u201d deprived her of a higher quality education.<\/p>\n

\u201cI read her piece, and it was a devastating piece,\u201d Mamdani told WNYC\u2019s Brian Lehrer<\/a>. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt is an articulation \u2026 of the systemic \u2026 way that the public school system in our city failed her child. And the sad truth is that she is not alone in that. That there are families across our city with similar stories.\u201d<\/p>\n

Story described a series of educational choices and disappointmentsts<\/p>\n

Lehrer had Hannah-Jones as a guest on his show on Monday, in which the radio host offered to relay a school integration question on the writer\u2019s behalf.<\/p>\n

The second essay made a number of devastating claims about local schools, including absent teachers who failed to check their students\u2019 work, an unresponsive elementary school principal, and a chaotic school climate where her daughter struggled.<\/p>\n

In one of the most gut-wrenching anecdotes, Hannah-Jones recounted staying up late at the dining room table to check Najya\u2019s assignments for math\u2014her daughter\u2019s favorite subject\u2014at P.S. 307 in Brooklyn\u2019s District 13, only to discover that they were ungraded, and most of her answers were wrong.<\/p>\n

The city\u2019s current schools chancellor, Kamar Samuels, is a former superintendent of District 13<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, Hannah-Jones let Najya choose her own high school, and she applied to a list of majority-white and selective programs. <\/p>\n

She received an offer from her first choice, but at first struggled to keep up with her classmates, who did not experience the same educational gaps at their elementary and middle schools.<\/p>\n

Mamdani said the piece demonstrated an urgent need for change: \u201cWe know that Black and Brown students are not being adequately served,\u201d in what he continued to call, as he did on the campaign trail, \u201cthe most segregated school system in the United States of America\u201d<\/a>\u2014a system he now controls as mayor.<\/p>\n

\u201cMayor Mamdani went back on his promise to end mayoral control<\/a> of the schools,\u201d Hannah-Jones said during her WNYC appearance on Monday. \u201cHe\u2019s the mayor. I want to know when we\u2019re going to see a plan to address and dismantle school segregation in the city.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe could eliminate middle school screens.<\/a> We could actually zone children to schools,\u201d she said. \u201cThere are many levers we can pull.\u201d\u2019<\/p>\n

Mayor says he and schools superintendent will push for improvements<\/p>\n

On Tuesday, when Lehrer posed Hannah-Jones\u2019s question, Mamdani said he and Samuels are developing a plan to deliver a high-quality education across the system.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt should not be that a child or a family can only come to expect that if they are in the right school,\u201d he said. \u201cEvery school should be the right school.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the mayor did not say when that plan will be released. He repeatedly pointed to a first cohort of school integration working groups<\/a>. For now, those are only in five districts across the city, and their early work has not been shared publicly. Samuels has set the goal of expanding the task forces citywide by 2028.<\/p>\n

Mamdani also did not take a position on Hannah-Jones\u2019s policy proposals to end selective admissions in middle schools and enroll kids in schools based on geographic \u201czones.\u201d<\/p>\n

The mayor and his schools chancellor have previously signaled their vision for school integration will not start with a focus on admissions reforms<\/a>, but will also include students with disabilities or who speak multiple languages.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are exploring every single tool that we have at our disposal to ensure that this is going to be a very different school system moving forward than the one that we have inherited,\u201d the mayor said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mayor Zohran Mamdani has acknowledged that New York City\u2019s public education system \u201cfailed\u201d Nikole Hannah-Jones\u2019s daughter after the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":361249,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[9,56,63,65,64],"class_list":["post-361248","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-new-york","tag-ny","tag-nyc","tag-nyc-headlines","tag-nyc-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/361248","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=361248"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/361248\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/361249"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=361248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=361248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=361248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}