Nikole Hannah-Jones’s sobering and provocative September 20 column in The New York Times Magazine - in which she agonized over the decision to send her daughter to a low-income, predominantly Black public school with numerous challenges in her Brooklyn, New York, neighborhood - spawned a tsunami of commentary from all corners of the intellectual sphere, from think tanks to journalists to pundits to online media scholars. Ms. Hannah-Jones has long been known for engaging in intensive debates about race, class, and school segregation. A decade ago, she commented on her decision to reject the more advantageous school resources that many parents who are part of her educational and economic group tend to gravitate toward. “Saying my child deserved access to ‘good’ public schools felt like implying that children in ‘bad’ schools deserved the schools they got, too,” she commented in 2016. “I understood that so much of school segregation is structural - a result of decades of housing discrimination, of political calculations and the machinations of policy makers, of simple inertia. But I also believed that it is the choices of individual parents that uphold the system, and I was determined not to do what I’d seen so many others do when their values about integration collided with the reality of where to.”

Ms. Hannah-Jones’s daughter is currently sixteen years old and is able to reason and make certain decisions independent of her parents. Therefore, Ms. Hannah-Jones has made a starkly different choice by entering her into a school that is highly rated, well-regarded, and selective - and majority White and Asian. Additionally, the young lady has realized just how unprepared she is in her new environment, given the glaring deficiencies that were considerable in her previous school, and she has made it clear to her mother that she feels her parents have betrayed her. When she made the decision to put her daughter in a troubled school, Hannah-Jones wrote that “I also knew that we would be able to make up for Najya anything the school was lacking.” That turned out to be wishful thinking.

The response to Hannah-Jones’s update has been nothing short of intense and overwhelming. Many public officials have saluted her for her candor and her ability to look critically at how her own decision - made with dedicated and altruistic principles - may very well have hurt her own daughter. Others have critically analyzed what they saw as bizarre and careless parenting choices, ridiculed the sincere principles that resulted in her decisions, and launched into a litany of theories that they have seen as wrong with the majority of public-school systems. Some of the reactions have been downright callous. Much of the acrimony has been due to the ongoing and lingering resentment from some conservatives, who are still emotionally jilted by Nikole Hannah-Jones’ previous effort, “The_1619_Project”. Indeed, this monumental exercise in grandly displaying American history from a distinct lens promoted many on the political right to go on the warpath to attack and find fault with pretty much anything Hanna-Jones does.

The essay resulted in a torrent of perverse satisfaction online. “Woke NYT, ‘1619 Project’ writer deliberately sent daughter to troubled schools as a ‘sacrifice’ - and it backfired spectacularly,” wrote the New York Post on X. “The daughter is correct. I called this at the time,” wrote The Atlantic’s Thomas Chatterton Williams. “This is an absolutely wild story about the serious cost and downside of virtue signaling,” wrote Republican communications professional Matt Whitlock. “One of the best things about being conservative is that you don’t feel obliged to destroy your children’s lives by inflicting terrible education on them as a matter of egalitarian principle,” conservative pundit Niall Ferguson said. “Public schools fail Nikole Hannah-Jones’ daughter,” wrote Brittany Bernstein in National Review. Such virile attacks were unsurprising for a plethora of reasons. Hannah-Jones has a reputation as a fiercely combative person online. She has previously insinuated that White parents who elect not to send their kids to schools like P.S. 307 are racist. There is no doubt that it made her detractors deliriously and perversely satisfied, watching her relent from her previous position and enroll her daughter, Najya, in the type of competitive, majority-White high school that she had spent considerable energy denouncing. But the assumption that Hannah-Jones ruined her daughter’s future in the name of progressive politics is nonsense. The young Najya has immediate access to all the crucial resources she needs to recover from her subpar primary and middle-school situations. Many other kids who are trapped in the same under-performing type of schools will not be as fortunate.

As it relates to many on the conservative right, the issue with Hannah-Jones isn’t that she harbored a “we are the world” mindset toward the public school system. Truth be told, parental control over schools has always been a hallmark of conservative ideology in the past and certainly even more so in the present. It is rather the case that she would even have the audacity to consider engaging in such compassionate behavior. Hannah-Jones committed the cardinal sin of “neglecting” her child, thus she deserves public scorn.

To many conservatives (but not all), you only have one personal obligation, and that is to your own children. Your obligation to others is minimal at best, and your level of autonomy over your own offspring is supreme. The state should have only a limited role in educating children. Pretty much all decisions, in fact, must be made by the parent. Thus, it is ironic that pro-family conservatives routinely oppose basic child protection laws, like having social workers monitor homeschooling families or bar convicted child predators from homeschooling. They have viciously combated efforts to ban child marriage and to criminalize the practice of teachers hitting or otherwise abusing children in the classroom, including students who are physically challenged. Granted with newfound power by the Trump administration, they have wasted precious little time to embark on dismantling the Department of Education and nullifying America’s long, proud, and immensely progressive tradition of publicly educating all of its residents.

Hannah-Jones’s assumption was that she was obligated to assist all children in the public school system, which was more important than any obligation to her own child. There is a segment of liberals and progressives who adhere to this belief. However, many of these same liberals, although applauding those who follow such a path, are often the same parents who enroll their own children in the upscale, well-performing, and exclusive schools. This is the exact hypocrisy that many conservatives routinely deride. Let’s be honest: The “shortchange your children’s education; they are not unique, and there are other kids who need your support more” argument is far from persuasive to many parents. Who could blame them? Such a notion runs counter to most parents’ instincts, which is to sufficiently prepare their children for life and to expand their smorgasbord of opportunity.

Ms. Hannah-Jones is correct when she argues that American education is demonstrably unequal. She is right on target when she publicly lauds the supreme values of racial integration, as it is a policy that has provided Black children access to resources and opportunities that were previously off-limits to them. During the 1960s, Black and White children in the same district often attended schools with dramatically different funding, facilities, teachers, and curricula. The same situation is largely true more than six decades later. But the big-picture reality is that Americans have largely abandoned racial integration and class equality as societal ideals. This is largely due to the fact that many White Americans never really believed in integration in any sustained way. There was only one decade in the twentieth century when both races had any notable contact with one another - the 1960s - and the circumstances and situation were complex at best.

Hannah-Jones and her husband’s major misstep was the naïve trusting of collective action. By sticking to poor local schools, regardless of their immense failings, Hannah-Jones assumed that she could help reconstruct them from within and that those in similar circumstances would soon follow. She has more recently come to the realization that she has experienced an educational Waterloo. In a nation with vast abundance of resources like America, no public school should be failing. A failing school should be an oxymoron. The problem facing many urban and rural schools - in addition to a lack of financial resources - is a lack of attentive administrators and, in a number of cases, indifferent teachers, failure or unwillingness to impose increasingly rigorous standards, lack of effective counseling, low salaries, etc. These are issues that are not insurmountable and can be rectified. As the old saying goes, “Where there is a will, there is a way.”