Nikole Hannah-Jones on Hard School Choices

Brian Lehrer (0:10)

Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Ten years ago, Nikole Hannah Jones of The New York Times came on this show to talk about a story she wrote at that time, 2016, that set off arguments at dinner tables and school tours, you might say, across New York City. She had spent years already reporting on the fight for school integration. And when it came time to choose a school for her daughter, Nadja, she made a choice that many parents with her knowledge of the system would have avoided.

In her new essay, she writes, our decision had been informed by value shaped by my years of reporting on the enduring and too often seemingly hopeless battle for school integration. That's from her new piece, which is definitely passed around, being passed around a whole lot on parents' social media and elsewhere. She and her husband back then enrolled Nadja in a mostly low income, mostly black neighborhood school in Brooklyn where she lives. And as she puts it now, we thought by sending Nadja to a mostly low income of black school, we could help improve it for all the children there. Here's 30 seconds of what she said on the show 10 years ago.

Nikole Hannah-Jones (1:22)

I didn't intend this story as moralizing to other parents. I did intend this story to say that the personal choices we make have much larger ramifications. And I think that what is clear is that while the segregation we see in the city is in many ways socially constructed, it is in many ways a result of policy, it also is a result of the individual decisions that parents make. And that as long as we all throw our hands up and say the problem is too large, the system that falls and we make decisions that privilege our own children, then we uphold that system.

Brian Lehrer (1:57)

Nikole Hannah Jones here in 2016 Nadja is now a high schooler with College on the Horizon. And Nikole has gone back to ask what happened to that hope? New York schools, by the way, remain among the most segregated in the country.

This article is very personal, very vulnerable. I think she deserves a lot of credit for that, and asked some very tough questions. Nikole Hannah Jones is a domestic correspondent for The New York Times Magazine, founder of the Literacy Program, the 1619 Freedom School, and founder of the Center for Journalism and Democracy at Howard University.

Nikole, thanks for joining us. Welcome back to WNYC.

Nikole Hannah-Jones (2:38)

Thank you, Brian. It was interesting to hear my voice from 10 years ago. Wow, it's been a journey.

Brian Lehrer (2:45)

Yeah. Yeah, it's been a journey. You know, first, I want to just express my appreciation for the courage it probably took to publish the new article. In the service of a greater good, you made yourself vulnerable by going public with your conflictedness this time around, including some regret about the most intimate and heart-wrenching of things, parenting in the face of competing risks and virtues, if I can put it that way. So I hope a lot of people read the article and appreciate that too.

Was it at all a difficult decision whether to go public with this?

Nikole Hannah-Jones (3:21)

Not really.

My biggest concern was, of course, my daughter and she was the first one that I asked. I felt honestly an obligation to revisit the piece 10 years later. I felt an obligation to be honest about how it went, and I felt an obligation to let my daughter have a say, because clearly she was the one who had to live our decisions day-to-day within her schools. I asked her, would it be okay? I asked her did she want to participate, and she did. Once I got her consent, it wasn't a hard decision.

I just felt to have integrity. I had to come back and tell people how it went.

Brian Lehrer (4:16)

And the new article is called In Fighting For Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own? For people who haven't read it or heard you, you've been a few other places on the station, certainly this American life that you have a long relationship with. Looking back at Nadja's earliest years at PS 307, what were the first signs that the school might not be delivering for her and her classmates?

Nikole Hannah-Jones (4:42)

So one, let me just say like you don't make this decision and expect you're going to go into schools that are providing the absolute highest of standards of education, right? I mean, if that was happening, there would be no need for me to be writing about school inequality, and there would have been no need for me to try to go into a school.