Nikole Hannah-Jones accidentally gave us a vital lesson on school choice

In 2016, New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones and her husband, Faraji, made a much-publicized decision: Despite having the means and connections to send their daughter, Najya, to a more selective school, they enrolled her in a “mostly low-income and black” public school in Brooklyn.Now she’s expressing doubts about her choice, but her experience leaves a valuable lesson — about the importance of school choice.The couple had framed their choice as solidarity: Individual educational decisions should serve the collective good, not merely a family’s private advantage.Then came a crucial confession: “I also knew that we would be able to make up for Najya anything the school was lacking,” the journalist admitted.That was the truth hiding in plain sight.The most important advantage they gave their daughter was not a ZIP code or rhetoric around equity.It was a stable, married, two-parent home with time, money, contacts and the confidence to intervene with school leadership if they were unsatisfied.I wrote at the time that no amount of anti-black racism, poverty or school disorder could easily overcome the advantage of a supportive household helmed by married parents.Ten years later, the record has not contradicted that observation.Najya is now a 16-year-old high-school sophomore who was admitted to “her first choice, one of the city’s hardest public high schools to get into.”Hannah-Jones describes years of intense parental advocacy to improve their daughter’s elementary and middle schools: observing a chaotic cafeteria in which children chased, hit and pushed one another while aides looked bored; physically separating two boys; pressing the principal to remedy unsafe conditions; hiring private tutors; going to the superintendent when homework was not assigned and classrooms were unmanaged.In other words, she and her husband did exactly what she predicted they would do: They made up for what the school lacked.That is why it is so striking that ...