It’s easy to play Russian roulette with your child’s education when you have a safety net to escape the worst consequences. Nikole Hannah-Jones is a prime example.
In a recent essay for The New York Times Magazine, the creator of the 1619 Project admitted that a decision she made a decade ago regarding her daughter, Najya, had backfired. Despite having the wealth and social capital to enroll Najya anywhere, Hannah-Jones chose an underperforming, high-poverty public school in Brooklyn. She believed that affluent families, especially black ones, have a moral duty to send their children to struggling schools, insisting that their presence alone could help uplift them. As the writer put it in 2018: “A New York Times reporter in a high-poverty school f-ing changes the school. I can go to that school and say there is a problem, and it gets fixed immediately.”
Not only was Hannah-Jones wrong, but her hubris–and the disastrous education policies she has long championed, from calling for the elimination of standardized testing to opposing school discipline–ultimately ended up harming her own child. She details, for instance, how Najya failed the state math proficiency exam despite earning straight A’s in algebra, while also falling behind in reading. All the while, Najya complained of teachers who rarely assigned homework and who refused to hold accountable her more disruptive peers.
For this, Hannah-Jones has faced sharp criticism from across the political spectrum–and rightfully so. Many have pointed out that given her status as a wealthy columnist for the Times, the fact that her daughter received a poor education in elementary and middle school did not mean her future was stunted. After all, as Hannah-Jones detailed in her essay, she was able to hire tutors for her daughter to help fill in learning gaps that would inevitably cripple any child lacking such means. This intervention allowed Najya to gain admission to a selective public high school, which, in turn, has placed her back on track for college.
One criticism that has yet to be made is that Najya’s resilience also stems, in large part, from growing up in a stable, married-parent home. The same may not be the case for her low-income peers, some of whom may have been raised by a single-parent or non-married parents.
This dynamic reflects the “success sequence,” a three-step pathway to avoiding poverty popularized by researchers Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill in Creating an Opportunity Society: graduate high school, secure full-time employment, and marry before having children. Though family structure appears last in that order, it plays a foundational role in achieving the first two steps, as children raised in two-parent, married homes are far more likely to achieve educational success. Indeed, 97 percent of millennials who follow the success sequence avoid poverty, and a majority enter the middle class or beyond.
A new study by economists Melissa Kearney, Phillip Levine, and Aldon Barson underscores this point. Using data from the 2023 Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), they find that while the long-standing poverty gap between children of married and unmarried mothers has narrowed for children born in more recent decades (thanks largely to rising living standards for unmarried mothers), the gap in college completion by age 25 persists and actually widens. Although college completion rates for children of unmarried mothers grew over time–by four percentage points for mothers with a college degree and 13 percentage points for those without–it still lags behind the rates for children of married mothers. For children born in the 1990s, the “marriage premium” for college completion stands at 19 percentage points for mothers without a degree and 17 percentage points for those with one. In other words, growing up with married parents serves as an exceptionally powerful safety net for achieving higher-level educational success.
This safety net is an advantage that Hannah-Jones would do well to acknowledge, celebrate, and promote to her readers. However, much like her defense of failed education policies, she has long railed against the success sequence and the benefits of marriage. For example, in a 2020 Times essay on reparations, Hannah-Jones rejected the claim that single parenthood contributes to black poverty, writing: “To summarize, none of the actions we are told black people must take if they want to ‘lift themselves’ out of poverty and gain financial stability–not marrying, not getting educated, not saving more, not owning a home–can mitigate 400 years of racial plundering.” Encouraging low-income black Americans to adopt these behaviors, she argues, merely shifts the blame from systemic racism to individual choices.
No one, however, is claiming that single parenthood is the only reason low-income Americans–whether they be black, white, Hispanic, or Asian–find themselves in a difficult situation. But as the data show, it does play a large role.
In fact, research suggests that being raised by married parents is a greater predictor of academic achievement than race or family income. A report by Ian Rowe of the American Enterprise Institute and Brad Wilcox of the Institute for Family Studies found that children aged six to 17 who lived below the federal poverty line were 10 percent less likely to receive A’s and B’s or better than those 400 percent above the federal poverty line. Black children were seven percent less likely to receive good grades than white children. By contrast, children who grew up in non-married parent homes were 13 percent less likely to thrive academically than their peers who grew up with married parents.
Not only did Hannah-Jones fail Najya by risking her future to make a political point, but she failed all the children whose parents followed her false, discredited ideas. Chief among them is the view that growing up in a married-parent home–a privilege Hannah-Jones has afforded her own daughter–has no real bearing on a child’s educational success and well-being.