The debate over Nikole Hannah-Jones school choice policy has taken a personal turn, after the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist published a New York Times essay acknowledging that her decade-long experiment in keeping her daughter enrolled in low-performing, majority-Black public schools in New York City ultimately failed the child she had hoped to help.
Hannah-Jones had earlier written that placing her daughter in those schools was ‘the just’ decision, even as she admitted uncertainty about whether it was the right one. Her now-16-year-old daughter, she now reports, reached the opposite conclusion: the quality of education she received was poor, and her mother’s efforts to improve it from within accomplished very little. Hannah-Jones eventually conceded the point and enrolled her daughter in a selective high school.
For a journalist whose career was built on documenting the persistence of school segregation, the public reversal carries weight. Hannah-Jones was named a 2017 MacArthur Fellow, one of 24 recipients that year, recognised specifically for chronicling racial segregation in American education and reshaping national conversations around reform. She has also won a National Magazine Award, a Peabody Award, and a George Polk Award for related work.
The Nikole Hannah-Jones School Choice Argument and Its Origins
Her original decision drew on a framework associated with the economist Albert O. Hirschman, whose book Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, published by Harvard University Press in 1970, argued that exit rights can be counterproductive. Where capable, influential participants leave a failing institution rather than staying to reform it, the institution loses the very people best placed to fix it. Hirschman applied this directly to school choice, warning that politically savvy parents might abandon struggling schools rather than press for improvement.
The difficulty is that the preconditions for Hirschman’s argument to hold are demanding. A subset of participants must be able to force through reforms that others could not achieve alone, must prefer exit despite a realistic chance of success through voice, and must possess exit options unavailable to others. Hannah-Jones’ experience suggests those conditions did not apply. She and other engaged parents were not, in practice, positioned to fix the schools her daughter attended.
The resource argument is harder still to sustain. New York City public schools spend over $40,000 per student per year, among the highest averages in the country. P.S. 307, where Hannah-Jones initially enrolled her daughter, spends over $52,000 per pupil annually. For context, the New York City Independent Budget Office recorded per-pupil expenditure at $23,877 in the 2014-2015 school year, itself 8 per cent higher in real terms than five years earlier, and spending has risen substantially since. The problem, as economist Alex Tabarrok has argued, is not the quantum of money but the incentive structure: school staff are paid irrespective of pupil outcomes, which blunts the drive to deliver quality education.
Teacher retention compounds the issue. The NYC Independent Budget Office found that 41 per cent of teachers left the city’s Department of Education within five years of starting, as of 2008-2009, a churn rate that makes sustained school improvement through parental activism particularly difficult.
Why Exit Rights Tend to Outperform Voice in Failing Systems
Peer-reviewed studies of school voucher programmes consistently find that competition improves outcomes in the public schools that families leave behind, not just in the schools they choose. Expanding exit options appears to give policymakers and administrators an incentive to reform from their own side, in order to retain funding tied to enrolment.
Hannah-Jones is right to observe that exit options are distributed unequally: the relatively affluent, disproportionately white, can move to better catchment areas or pay for private schooling, while poorer families are locked in place. Exclusionary zoning is a principal mechanism of that lock-in, and it carries a well-documented racist history. Universal school choice schemes, which decouple school access from residential location, are one policy lever that could extend exit rights to lower-income families.
New York City operates a limited school choice system that excludes private schools and imposes various additional constraints. Even that restricted system has been shown to generate measurable gains for poor Black and Hispanic students. A more expansive model could do considerably more.
Hannah-Jones’ career has not been without its own institutional battles. Her lawyers alleged that a powerful anonymous donor influenced the University of North Carolina board of trustees’ refusal to grant her tenure when she was appointed to a professorship there, a dispute she pursued through legal representation. The irony is not lost: a journalist who spent years arguing that voice and engagement could reform resistant institutions found, in her own professional life, that exit was ultimately the more effective option.
Before joining the New York Times Magazine, Hannah-Jones held an investigative reporting role at ProPublica, where she developed racial inequality as an investigative beat, and began her career covering a majority-Black school system in North Carolina. Her credentials on the substance of school segregation are extensive. That makes her willingness to revisit, and revise, a decade-old public commitment all the more instructive for the policy debate.
Subject to any further commentary from Hannah-Jones herself, the episode will sharpen arguments on both sides of the school choice debate ahead of renewed legislative efforts to expand voucher and charter programmes in several US states.
