Ted Cruz Turns Nikole Hannah-Jones's School Regret Into Case for His Tax Credit

Senator Ted Cruz spent the final third of Wednesday's episode of Verdict with Ted Cruz reading aloud from Nikole Hannah-Jones's new essay about her daughter's education, presenting the 1619 Project creator's account of regret as an argument for the federal school choice tax credit he authored.

The essay, published Sunday in The New York Times Magazine under the headline "In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?", revisits Hannah-Jones's 2015 decision to enroll her daughter, Najya, in P.S. 307, a high-poverty, predominantly Black public school in Brooklyn. Now 16, Najya tells her mother she made the wrong choice.

Cruz, a Texas Republican, called the piece "one of the most astonishing and sad admissions of just the failure of the left." He added: "I don't think she fully understands what she was writing, but these words are a more damning indictment than anything I could say about the failure of left-wing ideology."

What Nikole Hannah-Jones Wrote About Her Daughter

Cruz read the essay's central confrontation, a car ride home from middle school after Najya and her friends looked up their school's ratings online. As Cruz read it on air, the daughter says: "So you had the money to send me to one of the best schools and you chose not to."

Hannah-Jones writes that she and her husband, Faraji, chose the school deliberately, believing a family with money and connections could help improve it for every child there. The essay describes an unsupervised lunchroom, a fourth-grade teacher who did not grade math homework, and a reading assessment that appeared never to have been administered.

"When it comes to the choices my husband and I have made about public education, these days I feel that I failed both my values and my child," Cruz read. The essay closes with Najya telling her mother by phone: "Sometimes I wish, instead of always thinking about other kids, you would have thought about me. I never really got the education I wanted."

Cruz's co-host, Ben Ferguson, summed up his reading of the essay in three words: "Activism over child."

The $23 Billion School Funding Gap

One line Cruz read on air was Hannah-Jones's data point that "nationally, schools in predominantly non-white districts received $23 billion less in annual funding than their heavily white counterparts, according to a 2019 analysis by EdBuild."

That figure comes from EdBuild's own "$23 Billion" report, released in February 2019 using 2015-16 school year data. The nonprofit found that districts where more than 75 percent of students were nonwhite received an average of $11,682 per student, compared with $13,908 in districts where more than 75 percent of students were white — two groups of districts that served roughly the same number of children overall. The report covered 34 states, since the rest lacked enough districts of both types to compare, and it excluded charter schools and schools on Native American reservations.

Education Week reported that some state policymakers objected to those exclusions and said the study did not account for differences in district size.

What Ted Cruz Left Out

Cruz acknowledged on air that Hannah-Jones has not changed her mind on policy. "Nikole Hannah-Jones is still a left-wing ideologue. She still passionately opposes school choice. She opposes giving scholarships to kids and failing schools to attend better schools," he said, before adding: "I will commend her for writing this essay. This was not an easy essay to write. Very few people in public life ever say I was wrong."

"She takes no lessons from it that are the lessons one should, which is we should be fighting for school choice and scholarships for kids so they can get great education," Cruz said. "She doesn't take that. But it is the inevitable logical conclusion of what she said."

Hannah-Jones has pushed back on that reading of her work. In a post on Threads responding to the reaction, she wrote that the focus on her "sacrificing" her child "with absolutely no concern for, nor mention of, all the other children in these schools my daughter went to, is breathtakingly sad. Appalling really. I don't regret, and won't ever regret, caring about more than my own child. There is nothing self-righteous about that."

[instagram: https://www.threads.com/@nikolehannahjones/post/Ddh1WtzEV47]

Her long-standing view of private school choice is also on record. In an October 2021 post on what was then Twitter, she asked why school choice advocates "never advocate eliminating school district boundaries/funding schools by local property tax" and concluded: "They don't really want choice, just privatization." Fox News covered the post at the time.

Cruz is not alone in reading the essay as a case for his side. Billy Binion argued in Reason on Wednesday that "robust school choice, meanwhile, allows families who are less well off than Hannah-Jones to educate their children in tonier ZIP codes." Alex Galbraith took the opposite view in Salon the same day, writing that wanting the best for one's own child while fighting an inequitable system does not make a parent a hypocrite.

Cruz's Federal School Choice Tax Credit

Cruz tied the essay directly to the tax credit he wrote into last year's Republican tax law. "In 14 years in the Senate, the single thing I'm most proud of doing is authoring the federal school choice tax credit that will kick in next year that is going to unleash tens of billions of dollars in new scholarships," he said, adding that "school choice is the civil rights issue of the 21st century."

The credit, formally the Education Freedom Tax Credit, gives individuals a dollar-for-dollar federal income tax credit of up to $1,700 for contributions to certified scholarship-granting organizations, beginning January 1, 2027, according to Cruz's office. States must opt in, and the IRS said in June that 27 states, including Texas, had elected to participate. New York, where Hannah-Jones's daughter attends school, was not among the states listed in that announcement.

The Treasury Department has said proposed regulations for the program are expected by the end of this month. Whether the remaining states, including New York, join before the credit takes effect next year is still an open question.