When Nikole Hannah-Jones writes that her daughter finally told her, “Sometimes I wish instead of always thinking about other kids, you would have thought about me,” every parent who works in education should stop and sit with those words.
I did.
Hannah-Jones’s essay about her daughter’s education is remarkably candid. She describes choosing schools that reflected her commitment to racial equality, watching them fail to educate her child, and confronting the possibility that she had sacrificed her daughter to her principles. That is difficult for any parent to admit, especially a public figure whose professional identity is bound up with those principles.
I admire her honesty, and I understand the conflict. I chaired the New York City Council’s Education Committee and, in 2006, founded Success Academy, the public charter school network I still lead. I am also the mother of three children. I wanted to do what was best for them while reflecting what I publicly urged other families to do. But what happens when those goals collide?
I faced that dilemma in 2008. Two years earlier, I had moved to Harlem to be near the school I had founded and because we could afford a home there. On the Upper East Side, which I represented in the City Council, we had been raising three children in a one-bedroom apartment.
Harlem had affordable housing but weak public schools. When my son Dillon reached kindergarten age, we had him tested for Hunter College Elementary School, but he didn’t get in. For years, I had railed against the lack of good schools in poor neighborhoods. Suddenly, I was one of those parents without a good option.
As it happened, I was opening three new schools in Harlem. I had deliberately set about creating schools to which I would send my own children. But having that goal was one thing; betting my children’s education on achieving it was another.
For me, as for Hannah-Jones, decisions about where to educate my children were never entirely private. I had spent years asking other families to trust these schools. Now I had to decide whether I would place that same trust in myself.
We had no state test results yet, and our curriculum and culture were works in progress. There was also a social concern: Dillon, who had attended a Jewish nursery school, would be the only White child in the school. Despite these concerns, I enrolled him at Success.
I knew the transition would be a culture shock for him but did not know what to say. After his first day, he observed that they had not sung any Jewish songs. “I don’t think there are many Jewish kids,” he added.
Dillon had no other White children in his class from kindergarten through twelfth grade, but he fit in. His first friend was a Latino boy who spoke virtually no English. Soon they were visiting each other’s homes. Now a college graduate, Dillon keeps up with about a dozen Success classmates.
My daughter, Hannah, had a harder time. Whether because of gender, personality, or the particular children in each grade, she felt racial tension and resentment more acutely. Some girls were unkind. She sometimes occupied the uncomfortable position of the “teacher’s pet,” compounded by suspicion that she was the founder’s pet, although we never wanted her treated differently.
I worried that I was asking Hannah to endure too much to make a point and considered private high school. My husband reminded me that children there could also be cruel. There was no socially risk-free choice.
Both children remained at Success Academy through high school. Here my story diverges from Hannah-Jones’s: I do not believe I sacrificed their education. There were social costs, but academically, I believe they received an education better than the one available at even New York City’s most celebrated district schools.
That difference matters because Hannah-Jones and I draw different lessons from remarkably similar parental conflicts.
What her daughter experienced
The failures Hannah-Jones describes are devastating. Her daughter sat in a chaotic cafeteria without adequate supervision. Teachers and administrators ignored parental inquiries. Math assignments came home ungraded, most answers wrong, while her child believed she was doing well. In middle school, she earned A’s in algebra but failed the Regents exam and later discovered gaps in fractions and long division. Her school eliminated homework, leaving high-performing children neither challenged nor prepared to work independently.
Then she arrived at a selective high school and initially floundered—not because she lacked intelligence or determination, but because years of positive grades had concealed years of inadequate instruction.
These are not small imperfections in an otherwise sound system. They are institutional failures: failures of curriculum, teaching, assessment, classroom management, grading, leadership, and basic adult responsibility.
Hannah-Jones concludes that her daughter’s experience reflects a profoundly unequal and segregated system. In part, she is unquestionably right. Educational failure falls far more heavily on children in poor Black and Latino communities. Schools serving affluent families generally have an easier time recruiting and retaining experienced teachers. Families with money and social capital can purchase tutoring, move to a desirable zone, master a byzantine admissions process, or leave the public system entirely. Concentrated poverty makes the work of educators more difficult and the consequences of weak instruction more severe.
But segregation is not an adequate explanation for educational failure. And integration, however desirable for other reasons, will not solve the profound problems of our educational system.
Success Academy schools are overwhelmingly Black and Latino because we opened in low-income, predominantly minority neighborhoods and admitted children by random lottery. Once enrollment becomes overwhelmingly Black and Latino, most White parents, unfortunately, will not seriously consider a school. Segregation can perpetuate itself without a formal barrier.
Yet our students learn at the highest levels. Our academic results rival—and often exceed—those of New York City’s most selective district schools. Our Black and Latino students dramatically outperform not only Black and Latino children in the district system but all district school students. They also outperform students in virtually all of the state’s wealthiest suburbs.
If racial composition were the principal determinant of school quality, those results should not be possible.
They are possible because adults determine what children are taught, how carefully their work is examined, how much help they receive when they struggle, whether classrooms are orderly and whether anyone responds when the evidence shows that learning is not occurring.
Hannah-Jones’s daughter did not need more White classmates to have her math work checked. She needed a teacher who checked it. She needed honest assessment, so that an A represented mastery. Learning fractions, long division, and independent study habits required a school that treated teaching those things as its nonnegotiable responsibility.
As Hannah-Jones herself noted, “Students respond to the high or low expectations of institutions and the grown-ups who operate them, and it was clear that these children were getting the message.”
Academic standards and results
New Yorkers often speak as though the city has two systems: excellent schools serving the affluent or academically selected, and weak schools serving everyone else. I would draw the line differently. Some district schools are plainly much better than others. But even many of the schools considered excellent remain constrained by a system that discourages innovation, rewards compliance and defines rigor downward.
I saw this when I attended Stuyvesant High School, which is considered by many to be the crown jewel of the New York City public school system. Many of the teachers I had were completely incompetent but protected by tenure rules. Students did well because they were intelligent and hardworking, not because the school was great. For example, I learned calculus not because I had a teacher who taught it well but rather because a bunch of Russian kids in my class who were math whizzes taught it to me.
So when my children reached the eighth grade, I didn’t have them take the Stuyvesant Test. I gave them a much better option: my high school.
Don’t believe me? Let’s look at Success’s performance compared to the performance of district schools. New York scores its elementary and middle school exams on four levels. Level 3 is deemed proficient. In 2026, about half of city district students reached proficiency in English and 57 percent in mathematics. At Success, the figures were 91 percent and 97 percent, respectively.
The more revealing measure is Level 4, the state’s highest designation, which means a student excels at the standards. Only about 24 percent of city district students reached Level 4 in each subject. At Success, 64 percent of our English test takers—roughly 6,000 children, most of them low-income children of color—earned a Level 4. In mathematics, 74 percent of test takers scored Level 4.
No district school has ever had all of its students earn a Level 4 on state tests, no matter how affluent or selective the school. Not Hunter. Not Andersen. Not NEST. Not PS 6. But this past year, all of the students at two Success Academies earned Level 4 scores on both their ELA and math tests. One of these schools was Success Academy Bronx 4. At this school, 98 percent of the students are children of color, 83 percent are economically disadvantaged, 11 percent are English language learners, 15 percent have learning disabilities, 10 percent are homeless, and 100 percent—every one of the 195 children who sat for these exams—earned a Level 4.
As for district high schools, they still organize much of their academic program around Regents examinations, which have become increasingly undemanding. We administer Regents exams only to middle school students. In high school, we have substituted Advanced Placement exams. Our students take approximately 18 to 20 AP courses, beginning in eighth grade. Externally scored and nationally comparable, AP exams make it harder for schools to mistake reassuring grades for mastery.
In 2026, more than 3,000 Success students took 7,810 AP examinations across 18 subjects. They earned passing scores on 68 percent of them. This advanced work begins before high school: 1,200 of our eighth graders took AP World History that year, and 70 percent passed. At Success Academy Harlem West Middle School, every eighth grader passed, and 89 percent earned a 4 or 5. Among that year’s seniors, 95 percent had passed at least three AP exams, 79 percent at least five, and 60 percent at least seven. On nine AP examinations, Success students outperformed both New York and global test takers.
These are not children selected by an academic entrance examination. They entered our schools through a random, public lottery. Most are from low-income families, and we educate them with less public funding per pupil than district schools receive.
Nor is rigor reserved for a small elite. Every child is expected to undertake serious intellectual work. For nine consecutive graduating classes, all Success Academy graduates have been accepted to four-year colleges. In 2026, 99 percent received a college offer meeting their full financial need as defined by the college.
Academics are only part of the story. Success offers more than 80 electives and clubs, approximately 330 travel and school athletic teams, and more than 60 free dual-enrollment and summer fellowships. Students have attended programs run by universities, independent schools, and organizations that ordinarily serve far more affluent families. They compete nationally in chess and debate. At one national chess championship, Success teams placed second or third across several grades. Two Success debaters reached the quarterfinals of the Tournament of Champions, competing against students from elite schools including Hunter and Stuyvesant. Students perform in choirs and theater, exhibit visual art, row, run track, and play in an intensive soccer program modeled on elite youth development. Our schools disprove the fatalistic idea that schools serving poor Black and Latino children cannot provide an education equal to or superior to that received by affluent White children unless the demographics change first.
They can, and we do.
How schools improve
Hannah-Jones’s theory was that the district schools would improve if influential, intelligent people like her sent their children to regular public schools. However, her efforts appeared to have little effect on the school her daughter attended. If even a parent as informed, persistent, and influential as Hannah-Jones couldn’t make a difference, what chance does a parent with less time, confidence, and public standing have?
Hannah-Jones’s other argument is that the issue is inequality due to segregation. But suppose New York could eliminate residential segregation tomorrow and randomly distribute children among schools throughout the city. That might distribute experienced teachers, challenging students, and influential parents more evenly. It might produce worthwhile social benefits. It might reduce some of the stark inequalities among schools.
However, it would do so merely by spreading mediocrity around more evenly. Some schools that are now dreadful would improve; some schools now considered desirable would decline. But the underlying system would retain the same weak incentives, bureaucratic rigidity, diluted standards, labor rules, aversion to measurement, and resistance to fundamental change.
What is the solution to that problem? How can we actually get rid of mediocrity and failure rather than just spreading it around more evenly? Through rigor, freedom to innovate, accountability for results, parent choice, and above all, competition—the principles behind charter schooling.
When parents have choice, they can compare schools and leave institutions that do not meet their needs. Charter operators have incentives to create programs parents want, and unsuccessful schools can lose enrollment or close. District schools can no longer assume every neighborhood child will appear each September.
That competition is contributing to real improvements in New York City. Across New York City in 2025, charter students outperformed district students by more than 11 percentage points in English and math. Black charter students’ math proficiency rate was 68.7 percent, compared with 43 percent for their district peers.
Unfortunately, state law is preventing the establishment of a truly competitive market. There is a cap on the number of charter schools that can be created, and we’ve reached that cap. As a result, it will be hard to push past the 15 percent of students we currently serve in New York City. This leaves the City’s district schools with about 85 percent of the market. The Justice Department has observed in the antitrust context that a sustained market share above two-thirds, combined with barriers that prevent erosion of that position, can support a presumption of monopoly power. And here the barrier to entry is the best one you can have: a ban on charter school expansion that the district schools have secured through their considerable political power, which stems principally from the teachers union that benefits from this monopoly. It’s as if McDonald’s had convinced the legislature to ban any more Burger Kings.
Choosing for our children
I do not fault Hannah-Jones for choice. I admire the seriousness with which she tried to align her family’s life with her belief in a common public good. She put her money where her mouth was.
I also understand why she stayed after the failures became apparent. Leaving can feel like abandonment—of the school, of the other families, and of the convictions that brought you there. When you have publicly defended the decision, changing course can feel like an admission that your critics were right.
Hannah-Jones is also giving voice to a broader moral argument, one made by many advocates of district schools: that parents with privilege have an obligation not to use their money, addresses, connections, or knowledge of the admissions system to separate their children from everyone else’s. According to this view, they should send their children to ordinary public schools, contribute their influence and resources, and refuse to benefit from an unequal system.
I understand that argument, but I disagree with it. No child should be required to absorb years of inadequate instruction so that adults can demonstrate solidarity. The goal of education policy cannot be to persuade families with options to tolerate failure alongside families without them. Rather, it must be to give every family a genuinely good option.
And there is a way to support educational quality for all students without sacrificing your own child’s education: send them to a charter school. That’s what I did, and that’s what many other families are increasingly doing. Many families who live in affluent areas or who could easily afford private schools send their children to Success. Some have even withdrawn their children from private schools to enroll with us. They have done so because they believed Success could provide their child with a high-quality education.
Yet some New Yorkers would deny parents that opportunity, arguing that charters undermine public schools. And unlike Hannah-Jones, they generally don’t send their children to the kinds of schools most families are stuck with. They choose private schools, screened schools, or schools in expensive neighborhoods. Then, from this perch of privilege, they criticize charter schools for giving other parents good choices. They demand every advantage for themselves while opposing a lifeboat for families with fewer resources.
New York City already has many strong charter schools to which I would send my own children. Families should consider them. Do it not just because it’s the right thing to do for other families’ children but also because it’s the right thing to do for your own child. That’s why I did it. I wasn’t trying to sacrifice my child to a greater cause. I was trying to build schools where nobody’s child had to be sacrificed.
Editor’s note: This was first published by Success Academy.
