My Daughter Gets One Childhood
I have spent twenty years believing families like mine can help transform public schools. Motherhood has forced me to ask how long a child should be expected to wait.
“So what are you going to do?”
Someone asked me that on Threads after several days of arguing about public education, school choice, and what families with resources owe the schools and children they can afford to leave behind.
I had plenty to say about what parents, schools, and communities should do. But when someone asked what I would do with my own child, I had no answer.
My daughter was 11 months old.
I did not know.
At the time, I was preparing for her first birthday. I should have been thinking about cake and decorations and marveling at how much she had changed in a year. Instead, I was lying awake worrying about where she would go to kindergarten, trying to solve a school decision that was still four years away.
This question should not be so hard for me. I have spent more than twenty years as an education reporter, a state education department official, and a policy analyst. I have helped open schools, served on independent school boards, and counted numerous schools and school systems among my clients.
I know the research. I know that a school’s sector, reputation, and rating are not necessarily reliable indicators of educational quality. I know how race and class become embedded in the language of “good” and “bad” schools. I know that public schools can provide extraordinary opportunities, just as I know they can fail the very children they are supposed to serve.
I am a public school person. I have been one all my life.
Now I am somebody’s mother, and the questions I have examined professionally have become deeply, unavoidably personal.
For the first time, I am confronting a question that twenty years of professional experience cannot answer: How much of my daughter’s one childhood can I reasonably stake on the possibility that a school might become what it should already be?
The question became especially difficult after reading Nikole Hannah-Jones’s September 2026 New York Times Magazine essay, “In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?”
A decade earlier, Hannah-Jones wrote about enrolling her daughter in a segregated, high-poverty Brooklyn public school despite having the means to go elsewhere. She was acting on a belief I have long held: families with resources, influence, and a willingness to engage can help transform a school. Their presence brings money, attention, advocacy, relationships, expectations, and eventually other families prepared to invest.
She was not wrong about what families like hers could offer a school. But her daughter earned good grades, even loved math, and still reached high school without mastering fractions and long division. The grades said one thing. The learning said another.
Much of the public debate has focused on what Hannah-Jones should have known and what she should have done differently. Some of those questions are fair. But they also let the institutions responsible for educating children disappear from the story. Children should not need parents with enough money to hire tutors, enough time to monitor every worksheet, or enough expertise to independently audit their education in order to receive competent instruction.
Still, her daughter’s experience exposed the limit of a theory I have believed for decades. Institutional change operates on one timeline. Children move through school on another.
I am a public school person, and I come by it honestly. I attended eight public schools between kindergarten and graduation. I was born to a teen mom and raised primarily by my grandmother. Several of my elementary schools were inner-city neighborhood schools where most students were Black and economically disadvantaged. On paper, I was a textbook case of academic risk.
Public schools gave me the foundation for college, graduate school, and the career I have now. But I have to be honest about how. By middle school, somebody identified me as “smart,” and I was routed into honors programs, early high school credit, and college credit — advantages that most other students did not have. In my core classes, I sat mostly with middle-class white and Asian students. My middle and high schools were diverse. My classrooms were sorted.
I have long told my story as proof of what public schools can do. It is also a reminder that many families who “stay” in public schools are quietly securing or navigating a school within a school.
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When I try to think through my own choice, the organizational strategist in me takes over. I start with the desired outcome and try to reverse engineer it. How many families like mine would it take to transform a school? How much PTA money? How much advocacy? How many supplemental resources? How much time?
The last question is the one that breaks the math. Systems can take years, sometimes generations, to change. Children get about 13 years in school. Parents can transfer schools, hire tutors, and try to repair gaps later. But children cannot rerun elementary school. They do not get another childhood while adults wait for a theory of change to succeed.
My baby, my only child, the child I fought to have, will have one childhood.
One.
There is a great deal of “somebody’s baby, but not my baby” politics in education. Somebody’s child should attend the neighborhood school. Somebody’s family should remain, invest, advocate, and patiently wait for improvement.
Just not mine.
I am writing this knowing that when the time comes, I may choose a private or a public magnet or charter school instead of our zoned school. I may make the very choice I am asking other parents to interrogate. I may cry when I make it. I may feel guilty. I may even feel like a hypocrite.
But the real hypocrisy would be pretending my choice carries no social cost, or condemning other parents for a choice I may make myself. If I grieve, it will be because the decision set two parts of me against each other: the education advocate who knows schools need families like mine, and the mother who knows Aasiyah only gets one shot. The grief would not mean I made the wrong decision. It would mean the decision required me to give up something I value.
That possibility does not invalidate the argument.
It is the argument.
Systems of stratification frequently persist through individually rational decisions that produce collectively destructive outcomes. Parents do not have to be malicious, racist, elitist, or hypocritical. They only have to look at the child they love and decide they cannot risk waiting.
That is the horror of it.
And the cycle feeds itself. Affluent families cluster in particular schools, carrying money, time, connections, advocacy, political influence, and children who already possess advantages. The outcomes are then credited entirely to the school, as though the sorting played no role. Meanwhile, families withdraw those same assets from another school and point to its deteriorating conditions as proof that leaving was wise.
So when the time comes, I will not let tuition, whiteness, selectivity, reputation, or a website rating make the decision for me. I will look for competent instruction, high expectations, responsive leadership, safety, belonging, and evidence that children are actually learning. Above all, I will ask whether a school tells parents the truth.
That is the lesson I take from Hannah-Jones’s story, and she is hardly the only parent who has learned it the hard way. Every spring, when test scores come out, parents discover that their honor-roll child is two grade levels behind in math or cannot pass the Algebra I end-of-course exam. I have watched it happen up close since I began reporting in 2005. Standardized tests are imperfect, but imperfect does not mean meaningless. When a child’s grades and demonstrated skills conflict, parents deserve an honest explanation.
If public schools want families like mine to stay and invest, the least they owe us is honest information: grades that reflect what children actually know, student work that comes home checked, and early warning when a child is falling behind. No amount of parental volunteering, fundraising, or private supplementation releases a school from its obligation to provide competent instruction and give parents the facts about how well their children are learning.
It is a false choice to suggest Black parents must choose between belonging and rigor. It is a false choice to assume excellence lives only in private, magnet, or charter schools, or that a quality education requires a predominantly white one. And yet parents are forced to make real choices inside the unequal system we have built.
I have said before that the schools need us.
But my daughter needs me.
A just education system would not force me to experience those as competing obligations.
I will make the best choice I can for my baby. I will also try to remember that my baby is not the only baby who deserves a good one.
This essay was also published on AshleyNorthington.com.
