Make New York Post a Preferred Source Activist and reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones and her husband crusaded against allowing more students from affluent backgrounds into their daughter’s struggling, mostly-black Brooklyn elementary school — while decrying New York’s hopelessly “segregated” public school system, a Post investigation reveals.
In a 2016 fight against the “yuppie invasion” of Brooklyn’s PS 307 school, as local reports dubbed it, the Hannah-Joneses stood firmly against a Department of Education rezoning initiative, which seemed poised to flood their kid’s school with local tots from wealthy backgrounds.
This despite the couple themselves being well-off non-native New Yorkers living in Bed-Stuy in a completely different school district.
At the time, nearby public school PS 8 was overflowing with students, at 148% capacity and had a multi-year waitlist.
PS 307 Daniel Hale Williams school, located in Vinegar Hill, was underutilized, at just 50% capacity. The re-zoning plan carved out the gentrified Dumbo neighborhood from PS 8 and assigned it to PS 307 Daniel Hale Williams school in Vinegar Hill.
In a Sept. 20 New York Times Magazine story, Hannah-Jones described how she and husband Faraji purposefully sent daughter Najya to a “mostly low-income and Black school” which “wealthier families with choices uniformly avoid” because they thought they could “help improve it for all the children there,” she wrote. Around 90% of PS 307’s students were black at that time.
Iowa-born and raised Hannah-Jones chose PS 307, across from a Brooklyn housing project, as a public stand against “segregation,” she claimed.
“We had connections and time and status that should not matter, but that we all know do. And more than that, we believed strongly that if families like ours went into schools like this one, it would challenge other families with similar values to do the same,” she wrote.
After the local board voted in 2016 to pass the school integration initiative, irate husband Faraji — who had been elected PS 307 PTA co-president — demanded limits on how many new kids the school could take in.
The newly assigned Dumbo neighborhood was roughly 70% white and 11% Asian.
Referring to quotas of kids from the neighboring housing projects he fought to secure, Faraji said at the time: “When we said 50%, we didn’t say 50% with conditions. We said 50%, period.
“We want the opportunity to sustain our equity for that neighborhood. We don’t want PS 307 to become PS 8,” he said at a 2016 community meeting, referring to the school which had rapidly become one of the borough’s best and most desirable, partly through benefits from gentrification. At that time 85% of the school’s pupils were white.
“When those affluent parents come in, we do not want to alienate the parents who live across the street in the Farragut [housing project],” Hannah-Jones, himself among the affluent, noted.
David Goldsmith, president of the Community Education Council for District 13, which voted to approve the rezoning, told The Post that PS 307 was a standout, magnet school at the time Najya enrolled, thanks to former principal Roberta Davenport.
“Roberta had built an amazing school,” Goldsmith said. “[The Hannah-Joneses] sent their kid to 307 probably because they heard what she was doing. She had a lot of funding, wouldn’t take no for an answer, had all sorts of program and grants.”
But Davenport suddenly retired in June 2015, one year into Najya’s enrollment, and everything the principal built crumbled under her replacement, Goldsmith said.
At the same time the war against the “yuppies” had reached fever-pitch and PS 307 had become a citywide lightning rod for one of the most divisive topics of the 2010s: Brooklyn’s gentrification.
But it never happened at PS 307. The year after rezoning, fewer than 10 white kindergarteners enrolled, according to a Politico article. Today, the school remains about 6% white, according to DOE data, suggesting Dumbo parents opted for other options, including gifted-and-talented programs, charter or private schools.
In an email to The Post, Hannah-Jones said she and Farraji “never” opposed integration of the school and they “were fighting that the decision was being made without input from PS 307 and Dumbo parents.”
She said their aim was to “slow the process down to ensure parents had input and the rezoning came with a certain percentage of seats that would remain for low-income students to try to prevent the possibility of the school completely flipping, like PS 8 did, and losing any chance for stable integration.”
In her essay, Hannah-Jones — author of the “1619 Project,” which attempted to recast America’s founding through the lens of chattel slavery — was scathing in her assessment of PS 307.
She described children “languishing in classrooms with educators who did not take their academic potential seriously and largely refused to teach,” and a principal prone to long absences, while ungraded work mounted and students received high marks, despite lacking basic proficiency.
She felt the school failed her daughter, now 16, and Najya said she felt her education had been sacrificed for a sociological experiment in her article.
Past and current members of that school’s community told The Post the controversial scribe only has herself to blame.
“They were trying to take over the school . . . Things that couldn’t go their way, they felt, ‘We’re going to write it down and start trouble.’ They were imposing their will on the school,” Ebony Richardson, a former PTA chair and current volunteer at the school, told The Post.
Current parents who spoke to The Post rejected Hannah-Jones’ characterization.
“When I read it, I was confused. I think it’s horrible. I would never use my child like that,” a 46-year-old stay-at-home mom who sent three kids to the school told The Post, referring to sending Najya to the school. “If her child was failing, that’s on her.”
A 27-year-old father dropping his child off for school at PS 307 on Tuesday morning called Hannah-Jones’s stunt “selfish.”
“Do you want the best for your child or just to prove yourself right?” the man, who identified himself as “Mr. Jones,” told The Post. “If you were using your daughter as an experiment and it failed, don’t blame the school. I think that’s selfish.”
Data shows PS 307 performing well below the city average, with just 17% reading proficiency and 27% in math — compared to 50% and 57% citywide.
The Post discovered Hannah-Jones at the time lived one block from an all-black public school that really could have used the star power and national attention she thrust upon PS 307.
In 2015, their local elementary school, Bedford-Stuyvesant’s PS 25, was struggling and desperately needed more students. Called Brooklyn’s “tiniest” school due to low enrollment, most students lived in poverty but still wildly outperformed expectations, with DOE data ranking it the fourth best elementary school in the city.
“Achievement levels of PS 25 students have steadily climbed over the last three years, and the school now exceeds the city average in state test scores, despite the fact that a large percentage of students are homeless, economically disadvantaged, and/or have disabilities,” the education nonprofit Class Size Matters wrote in 2018, with the school’s principal, Anita Cooley, receiving high praise.
But because not enough parents were sending their students to the school, it closed permanently in 2025. Existing students were sent to a charter school.
Hannah-Jones told The Post that, “It’s been 12 years so my recollection may not be correct, but we started school the first year of universal pre-K and I don’t remember [PS 25] having pre-K seats that year. We picked a school where we could start at pre-K and stay through 5th grade.”
On Monday, Faraji — who grew up on a military base in Germany and has a current post of Contracts Committee Chair for the NYC Department of Education — defended his wife, comparing her to civil rights icon Martin Luther King, Jr.
“When history looks back on this, she’s going to be one of our civil-rights leaders,’’ Faraji told The Post, referring to his 50-year-old spouse, outside the family’s more than $1.5 million home in trendy Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn.
However, for all their plans to make a difference at PS 307, Richardson noted the pair have never returned.
“Everybody that graduated or left the school always comes back, but not them,” she said.
Additional reporting by Daniel Bates
