On Sunday, Sept. 20, journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones published a deeply vulnerable article in The New York Times Magazine questioning her family’s educational choice to enroll her child in a segregated, high-poverty New York City public school. Reading every phrase felt like an emotional roller coaster. I found myself seeing the humanity of Nikole, her daughter, and her partner in unanticipated ways while also giving myself permission to see my own.
It is easy to question Nikole’s choice for her child to attend a low-income, predominantly Black school. I want to challenge readers to question the systems that put her in that position. Many people will read the essay and think about it in terms of binaries: Black or white, wealthy or poor, atypical or typical learners. But the evolving public discourse around the Jones family’s choice also reflects America’s unfinished commitment to desegregating public schools after the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education U.S. Supreme Court ruling. Since that decision, school systems have found new ways to produce the same result: segregated schools.
As a Black dyslexic woman, a mother of school-age children, and someone who has dedicated much of my life to educational equity, I understand firsthand how challenging it is to disrupt educational systems that repeatedly fail children who are Black or atypical learners. I once thought that by serving on a school board, my perspective as a successful Black woman who had been born into poverty would make a difference in public education. In some ways, it did. But largely, it didn’t.
Serving as vice chair of my city’s school board during the COVID pandemic made this painfully clear. In Cambridge, Mass., we were among the first urban school boards in my state to vote to reopen schools, well before our governor required it. As a member of the bargaining team, I sat across from the teachers’ union via Zoom to negotiate that return. District survey data showed that parents wanted their children back in school, while the union opposed reopening at that time.
I was on the front lines of that battle while also watching remote learning affect my own kindergartner. To this day, parents thank me for my leadership. But I had to reconcile myself to a painful question: How much of myself could I keep giving to fight a system on behalf of others before I need to direct that same energy toward my own children?
Very few school communities are willing to do the true work it takes to change our school systems. In progressive communities that share similar values, in particular, there is often a resistance to pointing a finger at the problem that everyone is complicit in creating. Meanwhile, people with means seek other options. The dozens of endowed independent schools across my state bear witness to a fundamental truth: Families with privilege often have access to alternatives when public systems do not meet their children’s needs.
There is a deep history of “othering” in American education, based on race, privilege, and ableism. We have created a system that sorts children based on perceived capabilities, beginning at birth. Access to wealth, coupled with perceived learning abilities and the enduring legacy of school segregation, has created a remarkably narrow definition of a successful learner.
This is where I grapple with the complexity of public education: We act as though children arrive at the schoolhouse door with equal access to opportunity. They do not. Black and Indigenous children, children living in poverty, and children who learn differently have carried particularly heavy consequences of those inequities. As a child raised in the segregated South, I lived one version of this truth. As a parent and advocate now living in the North, I have experienced another version in liberal educational systems.
Despite the many obstacles I have faced, I have built a strong, good life for myself. I have served as an elected education leader in Cambridge, sat as a trustee on numerous boards, and achieved a successful professional career. Most of the people I have worked with over the years hold me in high regard, and I hold that same respect for many of them. But it is not lost on me that many of their parents, Black or white, might not have wanted their child educated beside me when I was a Black, dyslexic child born into poverty.
I have proved my worth as an adult. But a child should never be placed in the position of having to prove theirs.
And, yet, this is exactly what we ask children to do before they have had the chance to grow into themselves. Their innocence is stripped away, and they are asked to carry the burden of society’s failures.
That’s why I find myself defending Nikole Hannah-Jones. Not because every choice she made was right or because her family’s experience should become a blueprint for anyone else. I defend her because she was willing to publicly wrestle with a contradiction that is particularly familiar to many Black families: the tension between wanting to build a more just public education system and wanting to protect the child standing directly in front of you.
We ask parents, particularly Black parents, to sacrifice their children in service of an American promise that institutions have repeatedly failed to keep. That is an unreasonable burden.
The lesson from Nikole’s story should not be that she stayed in her neighborhood school too long or left too soon. It should be that no child should have to become an experiment in whether America is finally ready to fulfill the promises embedded in Brown v. Board of Education and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act: Race should not determine a child’s access to education, nor should learning differently.
The little, poor, dyslexic girl in me who struggled and the parent in me raising a Black child who learns differently thank Nikole Hannah-Jones for seeing value in learning beside the children too many people disregard.
