On the Education of Children

By Hannah Anderson

Friday, September 25, 2026

 

Over the course of their educational journey, my children have attended public school and private school and have been homeschooled. This means that I’ve made and agonized over more decisions about their education than I care to remember. So, when I read Nikole Hannah-Jones’ essay on the struggle to make educational choices for her daughter in keeping with her values, I immediately empathized.

 

Hannah-Jones, a long-form journalist with the New York Times whose work focuses on school and housing segregation, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning essayist and founder of the 1619 Project. But when reflecting on her own daughter’s journey over the last 10 years, Hannah-Jones confesses regret, or at least uncertainty, about her choice to keep her daughter in a struggling New York City public school as an act of solidarity with other black families—a choice she named as an attempt to “challenge New York City’s separate and unequal school system.”

 

The essay raised more universal questions, though, ones I’ve asked myself multiple times over the years: What responsibility do I have to my child? What does it mean to stand in solidarity with my neighbors? Would removing a child from public school mean I was abandoning those neighbors and betraying my own values of community? Unlike Hannah-Jones, I am a white mother in broader Appalachia who chose to remove my son from our local public school and enroll him in a prep school on financial aid. I made this decision, in part, because I became convinced that fighting for my own child’s education was not a self-serving decision but was, in fact, my moral duty within my community.

 

Still, the decision was not obvious. My son spent his elementary years very happily in a Title I school that was the heartbeat of our rural working-class community. His father and I were both heavily involved, volunteering in different capacities, serving on the PTA, and supporting a program that organized shelf-stable food for kids at risk for hunger. By middle school, however, the kids in our community transitioned to a county school about a 40-minute bus ride away. That’s when the cracks began to show.

 

The distance meant that we were less involved, both as parents and as community members. Grade size more than quadrupled, and days were spent almost exclusively indoors in an industrial-sized school building. By sixth grade, my son had also been diagnosed with Level 1 autism (a reality we overlooked, in part, because the thick community of his elementary school had supported him in ways that weren’t obvious until they were absent). Halfway through the year, he began coming home in tears, exhausted and anxious. The classwork itself wasn’t the problem. If anything, it was that the classwork was not sufficiently stimulating to justify what was required to participate in the educational process. He was leaving home early, coming home late, expending tremendous attention and  energy to cope with overcrowded hallways, windowless rooms, and sensory overload—all while his mind craved academic challenge.  He didn’t have words for it in this way, but he was quickly becoming discouraged and disengaged, disillusioned with a system that asked more of him than it seemed to be returning. He was a bright kid for whom the physical experience of school was very difficult, and if it was going to be hard, he needed a return on his investment to believe that it was worth his effort.

 

To be clear, I don’t think the school, teachers, or administration failed my son, but I do think the system as it was set up couldn’t meet his needs. I was looking at a kid whose education and love of learning were at risk. I knew I could force him to continue in the environment with promises that it would get better and that he just had to find the way through. But I wasn’t sure I believed that myself. I wasn’t confident the system would be adaptive enough to ensure that he didn’t slip through the cracks.

 

So, as a mother, I faced a dilemma not unlike Hannah-Jones’. At some instinctual level, I knew that removing my son from the public school meant more than switching educational settings. It was, in a way, removing him from a particular community—the “public” in public school. It meant charting a course that would separate him from our neighbors, and after so many years of being invested in our small community, that truth made me sick to my stomach. I knew that removing him from the system that almost everyone else participated in meant setting him on a trajectory away from them.

 

But then, wasn’t that already happening? When I put him on the bus every morning and let it take him to a school in a different part of the county, wasn’t he already leaving? Wasn’t part of the problem a crisis of community—that his community wasn’t reciprocal, wasn’t able to show up for him as much as he showed up for it?

 

Over the next few months, I scoured the internet for options. Homeschooling wasn’t possible for different reasons, and I wasn’t confident that online schooling could adequately meet his needs. I was open to the idea of a small faith-based school, but finances were prohibitive. Then I clicked on the most elite private school in the broader region, only to discover that it offered heavily discounted tuition for those who qualified. We started the process of admissions, and my son began seventh grade in a uniform.

 

I am happy to say that he thrived in his new school in much the same way he had thrived in elementary school. The smaller class size meant more dedicated attention. Students had a form of recess through middle school, so he was regularly outside and active. Because the school had an open-roster policy, he was able to be involved in team sports and discovered a love of running. He sang in choir, spent five years in Latin, and participated in Model U.N. School was still challenging, but his investment was rewarded, and that made all the difference. By the time he graduated, his interest in physics had led to the establishment of a new level of mathematics instruction—despite his being the only student in his class who wanted to study multivariable calculus.

 

While the school was racially, religiously, and ethnically diverse, it was not economically diverse—or at least, not visibly so. My son, who had once sat in class with the children of truckers and waitstaff, was suddenly surrounded by the children of doctors and lawyers. I distinctly remember the moment I realized that the children of our congressman were on my son’s cross-country team. The school also hosted a boarding program for international students, and some of my son’s peers were dropped off by private drivers.

 

The culture shock was dizzying. To this day, my son lives between worlds, never fully fitting in either the working-class community of his early education or the elite world of his prep school classmates. But the complexity of his experience also means that he is very sensitive to wealth inequality, having seen both sides of the spectrum. He also knows the truth about education in the United States—a truth that, ironically enough, can be obscured in the public school system.

 

The promise of public education is that every child has a right to learn and that democracy depends on an educated populace. The reality, however, is that the education a child receives in the United States is highly dependent on ZIP code. So much so that real estate agents sell homes partially based on “great schools.” These fault lines are predicated by a complicated history of zoning, redistricting, redlining, and gentrification. We speak of universal public education, but it is a parochial system with location too often being the primary factor in whether a school can succeed in the mission of educating every child. With a private school, that pretense is stripped away, and the cold, hard facts of the matter become clear: In the United States, education is deeply tied to wealth.

 

Perhaps it was my relative lack of resources or keen sense of powerlessness that made the stakes clear for me in a way they weren’t initially clear for Hannah-Jones. I could only afford to pay a certain amount to improve my son’s education, but I also couldn’t afford to leave him where he was. The question wasn’t whether he could survive in public school, but what survival would cost him and whether it was fair to ask him to sacrifice for a system that couldn’t reward his sacrifice. More to the point, keeping him in his public school would have had negligible effect on a problem of this scale, but it would have had a significant effect on him.

 

So, when the opportunity came, I took it.

 

It was humbling to accept that the challenges were bigger than my own will or ideals. But it was also clear that if I could not improve educational opportunities for other children, I could improve them for one child. And in some strange way, I became convinced that failing to do that would be a greater moral risk than placing him in an elite school where the inequality of the American educational system was on full display. Because at the end of the day, I was the one responsible for my son.

 

Our children are not concepts, projects, or the manifestation of our ideals. They are living souls whose first community is the family to whom they have been entrusted. Correspondingly, what distinguishes a parent-child relationship from other relationships in a community is that the primary responsibility for a child’s well-being falls on parents. This does not mean that I don’t have a responsibility to my neighbor’s children or that I can harm my neighbor’s child in order to care for my own. It simply means that when responsibilities to your child and community do not neatly align, the question of seeking a child’s well-being should not be cast in opposition to being a faithful member of a community.

 

Being a faithful member of a community includes being a faithful parent to my own child. It is also undoubtedly more than this. But at a basic level, it was no one else’s job to know my child, to see what he needed, and to move heaven and earth to make sure that he got it. It was my job to advocate for him as an individual. It was not the system’s job. It was not my neighbor’s job. It was mine—and if I failed to do it, I would fail my responsibilities to both him and my community. After all, part of my job as a parent is to care for my child in the ways I can and not pass that responsibility off to other members of the community. And hopefully, by meeting my son’s needs now, he will have a better chance of maturing into a faithful member in his own right, contributing his particular gifts and abilities to help others flourish as well.

 

Not every child or family faces the dilemma I did. For many, public schooling provides what children need to thrive. I also know that many children who need different options can’t follow the path my son took, both because of a lack of resources and because many loving parents are themselves unable to navigate the complex puzzle of American schooling. It is not lost on me that my son had parents who were educated enough to find the solutions he needed for his own education. But because we had the solutions, it was our duty to implement them.