New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones spent a decade sacrificing her own daughter's education on the altar of ideology, and the bureaucrats who oversaw those failing Brooklyn schools didn't get fired — they got promoted. That's the story Hannah-Jones still refuses to tell, and it's the one that matters for every working family trapped in America's government school monopoly.
The facts are damning enough that both the New York Post and Slate agree on them. Hannah-Jones sent her daughter Najya to low-rated, majority-Black public schools in Brooklyn's District 13, insisting that individual parents' choices uphold segregation. For years, the lunchroom was a chaotic scrum. Hallway fights were routine. Teachers spent their time on disruptive students instead of teaching. Homework wasn't assigned. Classwork wasn't corrected. Najya got A's in math — and couldn't do long division or basic algebra by high school. She failed a state math exam, which Hannah-Jones wrote off as a standardized-test problem. Intensive tutoring eventually got her up to speed, after tanking confidence and mounting anxiety. When Najya switched to a selective, majority-white-and-Asian high school, she told her mother she felt betrayed.
Slate framed this as a brave personal reckoning with "fundamental questions" about the purpose of public education and applauded Hannah-Jones' honesty. The Post named names.
The District 13 superintendent who presided over those rotten schools was Kamar Samuels. He now oversees the entire Department of Education. Stephanie Carroll, then the principal at PS 307, was incompetent by any reasonable measure; she now serves as the DOE's chief of literacy. Failure, in this system, is not a career-ender. It's a stepping stone.
The Post reported that these administrators serve the interest of the system's true master: the United Federation of Teachers, whose baneful role Hannah-Jones utterly ignores. Instead, she keeps repeating that systemic racism and lack of resources are to blame — even though a progressive, black-led state legislature dominates education policy, the City Council is majority-minority, and the DOE hasn't had a white Anglo chancellor since early 2011. Hannah-Jones' own husband, Faraji, sits on the contracts committee of the Panel for Educational Policy, which oversees Samuels and the entire DOE apparatus.
Hannah-Jones spent her energy denouncing Gifted & Talented programs, charter schools, and standardized tests — "problems" that had nothing to do with the chaos she actually witnessed. As the Post noted, ideologues like Hannah-Jones are the ones who kneecapped school discipline in the first place.
A decade ago, Hannah-Jones bragged: "A New York Times reporter in a high-poverty school f—ing changes the school." She was wrong. Nothing got fixed. The system is designed to ignore all criticism, even from high-and-mighty Times reporters. And the people who run it never lose their jobs.
The question isn't why Hannah-Jones' daughter fell behind. The question is why Kamar Samuels, Stephanie Carroll, and every other bureaucrat who presided over that failure is still collecting a paycheck — and a bigger one than before. Follow the money to the union. Follow the promotions to the incompetence. And ask why no one is ever held accountable.
