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 12th 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.
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% of test takers scored Level 4, and two of our schools had every tested student earn a Level 4. At Success Academy Bronx 4, that meant all 195 children who sat for the exam. To our knowledge, no New York City public school, no matter how affluent or selective, had ever achieved that result. In 2026, two Success schools did.
District high schools 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.
I list these facts not to suggest perfection. Success has made mistakes. We have changed practices when they did not work, and we will make more changes in the future. No school should be immune from scrutiny, including mine.
But our experience disproves 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. We do.
How Schools Improve
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.
But would it produce excellent schools?
I see little reason to think so. More likely, it would spread mediocrity more evenly. Some schools that are now dreadful might improve; some schools now considered desirable might 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.
Hannah-Jones is right that schools like her daughter’s middle school face a far harder task than screened schools. When nearly every child arrives with substantial academic gaps, even excellent teachers struggle to provide remediation while moving students toward grade-level and advanced work. When only a few students need intensive help, a school can surround them with support without slowing the whole class.
But that observation leads back to the question her essay does not answer: How do we prevent those gaps from being created in the first place? What mechanism will ensure that a fourth-grade teacher actually grades the math work, that a middle school does not award an A in algebra to a child who has not learned algebra, and that a principal responds before a determined parent must wage a campaign to obtain basic information?
It is not enough to call the system unequal. The challenge is to identify a plausible engine of improvement.
My answer is competition, choice, rigor, freedom to innovate and accountability for results—the principles behind charter schooling.
Traditional school districts were designed as geographically protected monopolies. Charter schools have introduced competition, but they still educate only a little more than 15 percent of New York City public school students. The district system retains roughly 85 percent, while state law caps the number of charters that may open. Public education is not a conventional commercial market. But institutions sheltered from competition have weaker incentives to respond to dissatisfied families or change a failing approach.
Families now compare schools and leave institutions that do not meet their needs. District schools can no longer assume every neighborhood child will appear each September. Charter operators have incentives to create programs parents want, and unsuccessful schools can lose enrollment or close.
Choice alone is not magic. Some charter schools are mediocre, and some are bad. Authorizers must close persistently failing schools rather than protect them. Parents need transparent, comparable information. Schools must be held accountable for serving children with disabilities, English-language learners and students whose behavior or academic needs make them more difficult to educate. A system that merely creates more providers without distinguishing success from failure will reproduce many of the same problems under different governance.
But a system with real choice and consequences has something the district monopoly lacks: a mechanism for allowing effective models to grow and ineffective ones to disappear.
The evidence extends beyond Success Academy. 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. Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes has likewise found stronger average academic growth in charter schools nationally, especially for Black, Hispanic and low-income students, although charter quality varies greatly.
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.
I was fortunate. I could “eat my own cooking”—send my children to the schools I led—without sacrificing their academic future. Their experience was not always easy, and sending Hannah elsewhere might have spared her some painful moments. But my children received a demanding education, built enduring friendships and emerged prepared for college and adult life.
Other families with substantial means have made the same calculation. Some Success parents could readily afford private school. A few have withdrawn their children from private schools to enroll with us. They have done so because they believed Success could provide their child with a better education than any other school could.
Yet some New Yorkers deny other parents that opportunity, arguing that charters undermine public schools. Unlike Hannah-Jones, they do not send their children to the kinds of schools most city children attend. They choose private schools, screened schools or expensive neighborhoods with desirable school zones. They demand every advantage for themselves while opposing a lifeboat for families with fewer resources.
Hannah-Jones has performed a public service by exposing failures that privileged families often never see. But I draw a different conclusion. She tried to fix her daughter’s school, with little apparent effect.
If even a parent as informed, persistent and influential as Hannah-Jones could not compel reliable instruction, what chance does a parent with less time, confidence and public standing have? We cannot simply tell that parent to remain, organize more energetically and wait. We must give parents the power to leave. That will benefit children and create pressure for systemic change.
The solution is not to abolish selective schools, redistribute mediocrity or ask privileged families to make a sacrifice that leaves the underlying institution unchanged. It is to create far more excellent schools, particularly in the communities that have been denied them; to give educators the freedom to build and innovate; to give parents the power to choose; and to impose consequences when schools fail.
New York City already has many strong charter schools—not only Success Academy—that I would trust with my own children. Families should consider them. Policymakers who care about inequality should remove the arbitrary limits on their growth. And those of us who lead schools should be willing to subject our claims to the most personal test possible.
I sent my own children.
The point was never that they should sacrifice for everyone else. The point was to build schools where nobody’s child had to be sacrificed at all.
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