Reality Bites

Good morning. One of the most challenging decisions parents face is where to enroll their child in school. Today we look at how one mother approached that choice.

A decade ago, Nikole Hannah-Jones made an astonishing choice. She would not send her daughter to kindergarten at one of New York’s selective elementary schools (largely populated by wealthy, white children). Instead, Najya would attend a segregated, high-poverty school. Parents usually claw at every possible advantage for their children. But Nikole argued in an essay for The New York Times Magazine that the only way to lift up the city’s segregated schools was to enroll in them.

The idea made a big impression on me. My family had sent our oldest child to an unremarkable D.C. public school, and we planned to stay. We were part of the community, and that was our civic obligation. We got involved, we lobbied for better instruction, we helped raise money. Maybe you can’t improve a system by leaving it, but it turned out that joining it didn’t work either: By the time our son was in fourth grade, he was on level with his peers — and well behind where my wife and I had been growing up. We’d just had a third child. We moved to a nearby suburb feeling like we’d betrayed an ideal.

Nikole stuck with it, though — until Najya began wondering, in middle school, why her education was subpar. What happened next is the subject of today’s cover story in The Times Magazine. I spoke to Nikole about it.

Adam: After your 2016 piece, some readers said you were sacrificing your daughter’s future on the altar of your principles. I wondered if I was doing the same thing.

Over the years, you pushed her schools to keep high standards, sometimes with frustrating results. Then your daughter confronted you in seventh grade. What did she say?