Nikole Hannah-Jones’ contested op-ed in the New York Times, which turns on her decisions about her daughter’s schooling, serves as a pointed reminder of how crucial exit rights can be.
A prominent journalist, scholar, and anti-racism advocate, Hannah-Jones recently drew attention with a piece in which she laments the choice, shared with her husband, to enroll their daughter in New York City’s underperforming public schools, where the student body was predominantly Black. Her aim was twofold: to use their family’s resources and their history as policy activists to spur reforms that would lift the quality of education for disadvantaged minority children, and to challenge the assumption that leaving a failing school was the only practical response. In the end, her daughter ended up expressing strong dissatisfaction with the educational experience she received, and the well-intentioned efforts to improve the public schools she attended yielded limited results. After her daughter asked, Hannah-Jones acknowledged the misstep and arranged for her to transfer to a higher-quality, selective high school. This sequence of events, taken together, foregrounds the importance and potential power of exit rights and the freedom to choose.
The core message of her story points to a broader truth that often goes unspoken: the most effective way to assist students from weaker economic backgrounds is to expand their opportunities to exit and to exercise choice. That conclusion aligns with what social science has long suggested. The narrative also struck a chord with me personally, given my own history as a student who faced challenges and, later, as a parent trying to navigate schooling choices for my child. My reflections share a similar thread about the value of exit rights and choice, albeit in a somewhat different light. While I do not believe Hannah-Jones has fully distilled the right implications from her experience, I commend her for the candor with which she admits mistakes. It is a rare quality among public intellectuals, particularly on issues that touch deeply on their own beliefs and commitments.
Exit versus Voice
Hannah-Jones’ original impulse to enroll her daughter in a low-performing public school was framed by a line of thinking associated with the celebrated economist Albert Hirschman, at least in spirit, even if I cannot confirm the exact source of her reference. In his foundational book, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States, Hirschman argued that exit rights can backfire if they cause people to abandon a flawed institution rather than stay and push for reform through “voice.” He specifically connected this idea to school choice, suggesting that the most astute and politically influential parents might remove their children from poorly performing schools instead of remaining to effect change from within.
In my own work, Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom, I have outlined several essential limitations to Hirschman’s argument. Here is a concise synthesis of my main points: first, Hirschman’s logic applies only in a narrow set of circumstances. For exit to be a better option than staying to advocate for reform, three conditions must be met: 1) a subset of participants must be able to push through meaningful reforms that others cannot achieve on their own; 2) those participants must prefer exiting to voicing, even when voicing would likely lead to improvements; and 3) those who can exit must have options not available to the rest. If the first condition holds true, it’s hard to see why the second would hold, since those individuals could secure their goals without leaving.
Second, the broader availability of foot voting weakens the third condition. The more opportunities there are for people to vote with their feet, the less compelling it becomes to maintain a system where only some can exit. And third, even if all three conditions are satisfied, the act of foot voting by some participants could pressure policymakers to enact reforms on their own to retain tax revenue from those who might otherwise leave. This dynamic appears to have occurred in the iconic context that sparked Hirschman’s theory: school vouchers, which provide families with funds to move their children to higher-performing schools.
A robust body of peer-reviewed research shows that vouchers can actually raise the quality of public schools that remain in operation after families depart. By contrast, simply boosting the funding of traditional public schools without expanding exit rights tends to yield little, if any, educational advantage. The first point—restriction 1—holds particular significance for Hannah-Jones’ experience: she and others like her were not necessarily well-positioned to drive meaningful reforms inside the failing schools her daughter attended.
More fundamentally, the core challenges facing those schools are not simply about resources or activism; they are about incentives. As economist Alex Tabarrok notes, New York City public schools spend well over $40,000 per student each year—one of the highest averages in the country—while PS 307, the school where Hannah-Jones initially enrolled her daughter, spends more than $52,000 per student. Yet the incentive structure for school officials and staff does not tie compensation to student outcomes in a way that would motivate them to prioritize effective teaching. In such a system, the situation can deteriorate even as spending climbs. The “voice” route is unlikely to repair this.
By contrast, when parents can choose schools—when exit becomes a real option—families can seek out institutions that are a better match for their children’s needs. Schools that depend on funding through parental choice have a strong incentive to actually educate students well. And, as noted in my own work, expanding exit rights and fostering choice tends to yield particular benefits for the poor and for disadvantaged groups, including minorities. Hannah-Jones rightly notes that such options are often more accessible to the relatively affluent, most of whom are white. Yet there is substantial room to broaden access to exit rights for others. In a series of articles coauthored with Josh Braver, I outline several pathways to do so, including dismantling exclusionary zoning that, among other things, prevents poor and minority families from relocating to neighborhoods with higher-quality schools. Exclusionary zoning carries a long and troubling racist legacy, and removing it can open doors for many families.
Another major policy lever is universal school choice, which could, to a large degree, sever the direct link between where a family lives and which school a child attends. This approach is particularly geared toward benefiting low-income and disadvantaged students. In a recent article, I explain how this measure—along with other steps to broaden “foot voting” opportunities—could help realize more fully the promise of Brown v. Board of Education. In contrast, New York City’s current framework offers only a modest school-choice landscape, with no provision for private schools and various other constraints still in place. Even so, the limited options that do exist yield tangible gains for low-income Black and Hispanic students. Expanding choice and competition could render the system more effective.
A Student’s—and a Parent’s—Experience
Parts of Hannah-Jones’ narrative echoed aspects of my own life, both as a student and as a parent. I did not begin as a model learner, and I did not set out to be a perfect parent, either. Yet those flaws underscored the importance of exit rights and choice, which would have left me and, later, my daughter, in a far less precarious position.
My family immigrated to the United States from the Soviet Union when I was six years old. Almost everything I have achieved since then owes to that decision—a contrast between the opportunities offered by a relatively free society and those available in a socialist regime that later became a nationalist dictatorship with limited regard for individual advancement.
More immediately, my parents took advantage of exit options once we reached American shores. I did not excel as a student initially; I did not learn to read until I was eight, a result of a combination of low motivation and what may have been undiagnosed dyslexia. When I was eleven, my parents moved us to Lexington, Massachusetts, precisely because it offered better schooling that could better align with my needs. Like Hannah-Jones’ daughter, I initially struggled after relocating to a stronger school, but I ultimately improved. The shift wasn’t as transformative as the move from Russia to the United States, yet it mattered.
I have described these experiences in my 2010 immigration memoir written for HIAS. While a student at Lexington High School, I witnessed another example of the benefit of school choice. The Boston area hosts a program called METCO, which enables many inner-city students—predominantly Black and Hispanic—to apply to attend higher-quality suburban schools such as Lexington High School. Studies show that METCO participants achieve substantial educational gains and are more likely to pursue college. Like Hannah-Jones’ daughter, many METCO students initially faced a difficult adjustment in new environments, and there is sometimes a gap between grades and test scores relative to their suburban peers. When I was a junior in high school, I even wrote an article about this gap for the school paper, which sparked some local controversy. Nevertheless, the program yields real educational progress for disadvantaged students, and unlike mandatory busing in earlier decades, METCO has not provoked widespread opposition.
Many years later, my own daughter Lydia faced her own educational hurdles. When the Covid-19 pandemic struck in 2020, my wife and I recognized that remote schooling in Arlington, Virginia, would not suit Lydia’s needs, given her requirement for occupational therapy and what we later learned was a significant case of dyslexia—likely more severe than my own. We chose to enroll her in a private school that continued in-person instruction throughout the pandemic. Lydia’s performance improved as a result. Had we instead pursued “voice” to reform the local public schools, progress would likely have been limited and Lydia might have suffered unnecessarily.
Even so, the path was not flawless. Like me as a child, Lydia did not read by age eight. After extensive consultations with school specialists and other experts, we discovered a practical approach: teach her to read by memorizing “sight word” flashcards. Lydia struggles with visual learning but excels when information is learned through repetition and memorization. For several months, Lydia and I spent 15 to 30 minutes each night drilling sight words, starting from kindergarten-level terms and advancing to fifth-grade vocabulary. By the end of this sometimes tedious process, Lydia read at grade level, and the first book she read independently was Ender’s Game, a science fiction novel intended for adults. Today, Lydia is described by her school’s principal as an “academic superstar.”
In hindsight, I wish I had arrived at this relatively simple, low-cost solution much earlier, given my own experiences. I bear responsibility for that delay. This episode demonstrates that even high-quality schools and teachers cannot fully substitute for attentive parental judgment about a child’s individual needs. Yet the school environment remained an invaluable support that allowed progress to continue in the interim. And ongoing discussions with teachers and other specialists helped us find the right course over time.
The takeaway is clear: no school is perfect, and parents must stay attentive to their children’s unique circumstances. This reality creates real difficulty for poorer families, single parents, and others who lack comparable resources. Yet exit rights, choice, and competition can do a great deal to improve the outcomes for disadvantaged and minority students.
