Mayor Mamdani on Tuesday acknowledged that New York City’s public education system “failed” Nikole Hannah-Jones’s daughter after the Brooklyn-based civil rights journalist reflected on her choice of enrolling her child into a high-needs school — but the mayor revealed little about his plan to truly integrate the nation’s largest school district.
Hannah-Jones sparked a national debate over school segregation with her personal essay in 2016 about her selection of a low-income school, where the majority of students were Black, for her daughter. But writing a decade later for a follow-up feature in The New York Times Magazine, she revealed her daughter, Najya, feels she made the “wrong choice.”
Like the original, Hannah-Jones’s Sept. 20 article went viral and reignited the conversation on racial and economic inequality in the city’s public schools. In the story, Najya questioned whether her mom’s decision to enroll her in the category of school that, as Hannah-Jones wrote, “families with choices uniformly avoid” deprived her of a higher quality education.
“I read her piece, and it was a devastating piece,” Mamdani told WNYC’s Brian Lehrer. “It is an articulation … of the systemic … way that the public school system in our city failed her child. And the sad truth is that she is not alone in that. That there are families across our city with similar stories.”
Lehrer had Hannah-Jones as a guest on his show on Monday, in which the radio host offered to relay a school integration question on the writer’s behalf.
The second essay made a number of devastating claims about local schools, including absent teachers who failed to check their students’ work, an unresponsive elementary school principal, and a chaotic school climate where her daughter struggled.
In one of the most gut-wrenching anecdotes, Hannah-Jones recounted staying up late at the dining room table to check Najya’s assignments for math — her daughter’s favorite subject — at P.S. 307 in Brooklyn’s District 13, only to discover that they were ungraded, and most of her answers were wrong.
The city’s current schools chancellor, Kamar Samuels, is a former superintendent of District 13.
Ultimately, Hannah-Jones let Najya choose her own high school, and she applied to a list of majority-white and selective programs. She received an offer from her first choice, but at first struggled to keep up with her classmates, who did not experience the same educational gaps at their elementary and middle schools.
Mamdani said the piece demonstrated an urgent need for change: “We know that Black and Brown students are not being adequately served,” in what he continued to call, as he did on the campaign trail, “the most segregated school system in the United States of America” — a system he now controls as mayor.
“Mayor Mamdani went back on his promise to end mayoral control of the schools,” Hannah-Jones said during her WNYC appearance on Monday. “He’s the mayor. I want to know when we’re going to see a plan to address and dismantle school segregation in the city.”
“We could eliminate middle school screens. We could actually zone children to schools,” she said. “There are many levers we can pull.”
On Tuesday, when Lehrer posed Hannah-Jones’s question, Mamdani said he and Samuels are developing a plan to deliver a high-quality education across the system.
“It should not be that a child or a family can only come to expect that if they are in the right school,” he said. “Every school should be the right school.”
But the mayor did not say when that plan will be released. He repeatedly pointed to a first cohort of school integration working groups. For now, those are only in five districts across the city, and their early work has not been shared publicly. Samuels has set the goal of expanding the task forces citywide by 2028.
Mamdani also did not take a position on Hannah-Jones’s policy proposals to end selective admissions in middle schools and enroll kids in schools based on geographic “zones.”
The mayor and his schools chancellor have previously signaled their vision for school integration will not start with a focus on admissions reforms, but will also include students with disabilities or who speak multiple languages.
“We are exploring every single tool that we have at our disposal to ensure that this is going to be a very different school system moving forward than the one that we have inherited,” the mayor said.
