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Choice is powerful, but it brings no guarantees. Sometimes we learn that the hard way.

That’s the undercurrent of an eye-opening recent essay in the New York Times Magazine by Nikole Hannah-Jones. I’ve never been one to praise Hannah-Jones, best known as the creator of the 1619 Project, and there are some material problems with her latest work as well. But it does offer proof of the power of choice, particularly for education. Just not the way she intended.

The gist of the story is this: Hannah-Jones and her husband, Faraji, have strong beliefs about racial segregation and fiscal disparities among New York City’s public schools. So strong are their beliefs that they choose to send their only child to P.S. 307, which she describes as “the type of school that wealthier families with choices uniformly avoid – one that is low-income and mostly Black.” Their own parents made different choices for them, and Hannah-Jones credits those choices for setting them up for success. Nevertheless, they send their daughter, Najya, to P.S. 307 in the belief that all of the school’s students would benefit from their “connections and time and status,” the example they would set for others, even their donations to the P.T.A.

By the time Najya reaches first grade, she complains of chaotic scenes at P.S. 307. The story continues through academic neglect in the elementary years, leading her parents to doubt (but not change) their decision. Middle school seems a breath of fresh air, until one day Najya confronts her mother:

“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?”

Wrestling with the consequences of the choice she had made for her daughter, Hannah-Jones decides to let Najya choose her own high school. To her chagrin, Najya opts for one that is “heavily white and (academically) screen(s) their students, the type of public schools I had spent my career arguing against.” Now a junior, Najya has spent her high school years trying to make up for what she missed along the way.

A reader’s first reaction may be to scorn the parents and feel sympathy for the daughter. That reaction is not wrong, but it is too limited.

In reality, the most sympathetic figures in this story go largely ignored except in the abstract and in aggregate. They are the hundreds of other children at P.S. 307 whose parents might have chosen differently if they’d only had the same opportunities as the Hannah-Jones family.

Those other parents did not sacrifice their children on some altar of ideology. For the most part, they simply lacked the economic means to make a different choice. And most of their children will not get the second chance that one suspects Najya will end up getting.

Nothing was ever going to be different for their children just because they were classmates of a New York Times reporter’s daughter. The arrogance it takes to believe otherwise is staggering. But even if it had been enough: What then? What then for the students who came after the would-be saviors moved on? And what then for the hundreds of such schools in New York City alone that lacked such a beneficent presence? Are we back to “Waiting for Superman,” as another account of educational choices – and the lack thereof – in New York City was titled?

The notion that we will fix our public schools by insisting that fewer parents do what’s best for their own children is not only misguided but dangerous. We do not advance the “collective good” by ignoring what’s to our “individual advantage,” to use Hannah-Jones’ phrases. Quite the opposite: All of us will be better off when every parent has the agency to maximize each child’s potential.

That requires more choice, not less. Left out of Hannah-Jones’ piece, in which she laments that schools like P.S. 307 “have less” of everything, is how much money that school actually had. Last year, P.S. 307 spent almost $44,000 per pupil, not even including “central services” that tacked on another $14,000 – so, about $58,000 per pupil in all. So much for insufficient resources.

How does this relate to choice? The only reason a failing school can spend that much and survive is that lower-income families have nowhere else to go. With funding tied to enrollment, school administrators know plenty of money will remain in their budgets when parents lack choices.

Given real opportunity and high expectations, many disadvantaged students have beaten long odds. That makes privilege alone, or the lack of it, a poor excuse. Some families still face obstacles that make new choices hard to use. But every child who seizes an opportunity today will one day be a parent with more to give the next generation.

If systemic challenges still plague us, the answer is to let more students escape the system, not impound more of them within it. seizes opportunities now represents an expansion of privilege in the future, when they become parents themselves.

If systemic challenges still plague us, the imperative should be to let more students escape the system, not impound more of them within it.water, electricity and land use.