By Tresha Ward | September 25, 2026
Like so many other educators, I spent Sunday morning making my way through Nikole Hannah-Jones’s latest piece. I have long admired the fierceness of her work, including her first essay about the start of her daughter’s school journey a decade ago. So it was heartbreaking to read the hopelessness in her words; “Instead of fortifying our determination to fight for integration, we have instead chosen to succumb to a collective apathy in the face of a system so devastatingly unequal that it puts at odds trying to be a good person with trying to be a good parent.”
Reading Hannah-Jones’ piece, I kept coming back to what felt like a false choice: send your child to an under-resourced, racially segregated public school, or a highly selective, overwhelmingly white one. Why were those the only options?
Hannah-Jones shared in both brilliant and painful detail the chronicle of her daughter Najya’s experiences. As I read, I wanted to tell her that right here in Brooklyn, in neighborhoods near where Najya went to school, there is a network of charter schools already delivering the exact option she wanted.
More than 150,000 students and families in this city have gone looking for another option in charter schools, and roughly 3,000 of them have chosen Prospect Schools, the city’s first intentionally diverse charter network. Prospect Schools is neither private nor a traditional district school, we are a K-12 public charter school network. Our promise is twofold: every student gets a well-resourced school and excellent educators for their entire K-12 journey, and every student learns from and alongside peers who don’t look, pray, or live like them. We exist to create a different option for families disillusioned by what may feel like a binary choice: private or public; culture or academics; under-resourced or selectively exclusionary and segregated. We believe this model of education is good for our students and, ultimately, society.
We are not alone, nationally there are 200+ charter school networks that have cultivated racially integrated school environments and are serving more than 100K+ students and are connected through the Diverse Charter Schools Coalition.
As a Black female educator, a first-generation college student, and the daughter of immigrants born in the Bronx who came up through NYC public schools, Najya’s story hit close to home. As a freshman Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN, scholarships in hand, I nearly failed out of school. My K-12 experience had left me completely unprepared and underskilled to compete. I fumbled through pre-med classes I had no business being in and encountered the culture shock of sitting next to peers who all seemed to have a playbook to the school that I didn’t have.
That experience is what pushed me into teaching, then leadership in schools serving nearly 100% Black and brown students, steadfastly focused on giving kids who looked like me the playbook I never got. I feel both proud of the students we educated and the foundation we gave our students in those school environments. Black and brown children don’t need to be proximate to whiteness to receive an amazing education and this is proven time and time again by top charter networks including KIPP, Success Academies, Uncommon, Achievement First, Harlem Children’s Zone and others.
As the Chief Executive Officer of an intentionally diverse charter school network with a wealth of excellent educators, and a focus on building relationships across lines of difference, I have seen the power of this diverse learning environment is in the relationships, empathy and exposure to different perspectives and people that enables all students from a variety of backgrounds to function in a diverse society. Something our current nation needs more of given the polarization that has cemented itself in almost every facet of our lives.
Our model’s results speak for themselves: four straight years of more than 95% of our high school students graduating on time, 100% applying to and being accepted to a college of their choosing, 3rd-8th grade student proficiency in ELA and math above 75%. Our high school, Brooklyn Prospect High School, is ranked #5 among all NYC high schools, above Stuyvesant mentioned in Hannah-Jones’ article, and #10 in the state, on the strength of our International Baccalaureate program. We offer this to every one of our students as a non-selective, free, and open enrollment “IB for All” high school.
Through strategic recruitment across a diversity of neighborhoods in Brooklyn, we have cultivated a student body that is 29% White, 29% Black, 27% Hispanic and 10% multi-racial; currently 44% of our students qualify for free and reduced priced meals. This is despite the policy enabled, long standing geographic segregation in NY neighborhoods.
At our schools, the history of integration and segregation in New York City isn’t a topic confined to textbooks. It’s the opening session of new-employee orientation every summer, and it sets the foundation for everything we do. Our elementary schools engage in annual studies of different global regions for 6-8 weeks learning about the culture, language and people. They transform our schools into those places in a capstone experience. Our middle schoolers learn about the rich culture and history of global societies and our high school students have opportunities to put their feet on the ground in some of these actual places. For 17 years, we’ve been running richly diverse schools that are academically excellent and give students robust extracurricular learning experiences putting them on a life path filled with choice and opportunity– and ensuring they leave us better community stewards.
Now is not the time to give up hope. The stated goals of Mayor Mamdani’s School Chancellor, Kamar Samuels, a proponent of school integration have me optimistic but I know that progress will be slow. I look forward to the day when a richly diverse, culturally affirming, academically rigorous K-12 school experience is so commonplace that a network like Prospect won’t need to be an outlier. Until that day comes, we’ll keep proving that in Brooklyn parents won’t have to choose between an academically excellent and an inclusive school community.