Beyond One Family’s Choice: What It Takes to Change the System

By Manuela Arciniegas

In September, The New York Times Magazine published an essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones that sparked conversations among parents, educators, and organizers across the country. A decade ago, she and her husband enrolled their daughter, Najya, in a segregated, “high-poverty public school” in Brooklyn. They believed that families with resources had an obligation to stay and fight for the children who had no options. Now 16, Najya tells her mother plainly: “I never really got the education I wanted.”

It is a painful piece, and an honest one. In a companion episode of This American Life, Najya speaks for herself, and mother and daughter talk through the choices each made. Together, the essay and the episode name a tension that caregivers across this country know intimately: the pull between doing right by your own child and doing right by all children.

That tension is not new. Hannah-Jones recounts the story of Leona Tate, who, at six years old, was among the first Black children to desegregate white elementary schools in the Deep South, in New Orleans in 1960. Generation after generation, the cost of an unequal system has been carried by children and the families who love them.

But I want us to sit with a different question than the one the essay leaves many readers asking. The question is less about which parent chose rightly. It is about why any parent should have to make that choice at all.

I know this dilemma personally. I was raised in the South Bronx and attended public schools until a nonprofit program called Prep for Prep gave me the opportunity to engage in an 18-month intensive academic preparatory program following rigorous screenings including an IQ test. Selected middle schoolers then attended two summers and a school year of additional schooling to catch up on the two to three years of academic gap they faced compared to their wealthy independent school counterparts.

Off I went to prep school in the North Bronx — having been deemed fit based on my IQ score, while my equally brilliant sisters, who weren’t selected, finished off their education with less support in underfunded public schools. The disparities in access — to arts and sport opportunities, holistic supports including guidance counselors, college advisement and college trips, leadership development weekend camp trips — drove stark wedges in our sisterly bonds. Unequal opportunity divided us. Although grateful for a better education, I lost my sense of belonging and love from a community of my own, and faced fewer family and cultural connections. I was always different, treated as the shining hope, yet burdened with the responsibility to do so well that I could lift myself, my family and entire community out of poverty.  A single person tasked to make her life a testament to transcending a broken system — but never reorganizing it at its core.

My mother, an immigrant sweatshop seamstress, wanted the best for her four girls, and opportunities were not equally extended to all of them. 

Caregivers are forced into this choice by a system built to produce it. It sorts children into schools resourced to care for them and schools that are not, through housing segregation, academic screens, and “school choice” policies that offer real options mostly to families who already have the most. No family should have to choose between their child and their community. That choice is a symptom. The system is what we are organizing to change.

That is the work of the grassroots organizations across the Communities for Just Schools Fund network; young people, parents, and caregivers organizing in their own communities to transform the systems that create these conditions. They do so because they fundamentally love their families and communities, and they own their power to design the futures their beloved communities deserve.

The way we fund education reflects the same priorities. Over the past 20 years, philanthropic support for K-12 education has more than tripled, from $11 billion to $37 billion, according to Grantmakers for Education. Most of that money has gone to market-driven reforms like charter schools and school choice. Meanwhile, annual funding for community organizing focused on education is estimated at roughly $35 to $50 million nationally. That is a tiny fraction of that investment, even though organizing is the work that addresses who holds power in our schools.

Our report with the Equity Research Institute at USC, Roadmaps to Power, drawn from interviews with 20 CJSF network partners, demonstrates what organizing makes possible. The report illustrates how youth, caregivers and educators build co-governance through community organizing — by building communities of leaders who get in there and reshape government because they love their communities and want real power to transform them.

In Los Angeles, a coalition led primarily by Black youth, including Students Deserve, Labor Community Strategy Center, Youth Justice Coalition, and CADRE, won a significant reduction to the school police budget. They then pushed for a Black Student Achievement Plan funded with the newly available dollars. That plan has since seen more than $175 million, supporting mental health services, restorative justice staff, and affirming spaces across the district. In Chicago, years of organizing by Community Organizing and Family Issues, Communities United, and others helped lay the groundwork for the 2024 Whole School Safety Framework, shaped by a steering committee of district staff, community organizations, students, families, and educators. In San Francisco, Coleman Advocates partnered with unions and allies to win $790 million in school improvement bonds through Proposition A, approved by 75% of voters. None of these wins happened overnight. Each was the culmination of years of base-building, relationships, and campaigns.

This is the work of the 67 grassroots organizations CJSF supported across the United States and Puerto Rico in 2025. Young people, parents, and caregivers are organizing in their own communities to transform the conditions that force these choices in the first place.

It is also why our network gathered in Raleigh this September to mark ten years of CJSF and its partner network. We came together as a community, building toward a world where no caregiver faces the choice Hannah-Jones describes, because every child has a school that sees them, cares for them, and honors who they are. To create the future we deserve, we can’t keep asking children to leave their home communities to succeed. We want those who live in those communities to have power, to invest in their young people, and support their leadership and transformative visions — from the ground up. 

All of us have choices to make in the pursuit of this future. Our choices do matter, and yet that world will not come from individual families making better choices inside a broken system. It will come from communities organizing together to redesign the system from the ground up — rooted in their lived experience, collective meaning making, and aspirations.

Manuela Arciniegas is the Executive Director of Communities for Just Schools Fund.