The saga of New York Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones and the subpar education of her daughter in a lower-rated New York City public school is no doubt going to generate a lot of discussion and analysis from the right. You just wish that, after realizing that teachers were not correcting her daughter’s math and writing mistakes, Hannah-Jones had been able to reach out to someone with influence in the New York City public school system. If only she had been able to contact someone like the contracts committee chairman of the New York City Public Schools Panel for Educational Policy. Let’s see who that is . . .
Oh.
Faraji Hannah-Jones.
Nikole Hannah-Jones’s husband.
If you write a piece denouncing the poor performance of a city’s public school system, that’s one thing. If you write a piece denouncing the poor performance of a city’s public school system where your husband works (in an unpaid, volunteer position) . . . well, that suggests a different subtext to that article, now doesn’t it?
While Hannah-Jones refers to her husband six times in her essay, at no point does she mention that he is the contracts committee chairman of the city’s Panel for Educational Policy.
But at least he’s using his position to raise standards and . . . oh, wait:
Panel for Educational Policy Contracts Committee Chair Faraji Hannah-Jones used his official speaking time at the July 29 meeting at the High School for Fashion Industries in Chelsea to advertise that he and his wife Nikole are planning to open a bookstore in Bedford Stuyvesant that will push “banned” books.
Hannah-Jones, who joined the panel in 2025, promised that North Star Books would be a “huge bookstore” and would sell “all the books that are banned” while his fellow PEP members looked on.
“Using official speaking time and a public position to promote one’s own private commercial venture appears to violate the prohibition against using public office to obtain a direct or indirect private advantage for oneself,” Wong wrote.