Neo-Apartheid + Neo-Colonialism = The Disappointing Moral Leadership Failure of South Africa

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I am rereading The Odyssey sixty years after my first teenage reading of it, now with the excitement, perspective, and insights that come from six additional decades of life experience.

And so, Spoiler Alert!

There is one part of the story-poem in which its hero, Odysseus, is told by the sorceress Circe that he must journey to the Underworld, where the dead reside, and consult with the blind prophet Tiresias (a possible symbolic stand-in for Homer, the traditionally described blind poet-author?) in order to successfully complete his journey home.

After performing the proper rituals that allow the dead to speak with him, Odysseus is able to meet and converse with his mother and other cherished souls who have departed from this world.

That scene made me wonder:
What if I could travel to another world and speak with Kwame Nkrumah and Nelson Mandela?

What would they say about the terrible acts of anti-African solidarity and disunity presently on display in South Africa—ironically, a nation whose own liberation struggle benefited enormously from the sacrifices, advocacy, material support, political pressure, and moral solidarity of Africans continent-wide and of the worldwide Pan-African community?

I suspect those two great advocates for the freedom and dignity of African people everywhere would offer weeping words of disappointment:

“Is this what we worked so hard, sacrificed so much, and suffered for?”

Reading the horrific recent news reports coming out of South Africa concerning African immigrants from many different nations being threatened, intimidated, denied access to public services, targeted by vigilante organizations, and subjected to demands that they leave the country is deeply disturbing.

Anti-immigrant organizations and movements have increasingly portrayed African “foreigners”—particularly undocumented migrants—as people who are stealing jobs, overwhelming public services, committing crimes, and depriving native-born South Africans of economic opportunities.

The ugliness of that political strategy should be painfully familiar to anyone paying attention to what is happening elsewhere in the world—including in our own nation.

Call it the Make South Africa Great Again—MSAGA—strategy.

The great political lie promoted by movements like MSAGA—and by politicians anywhere who find scapegoating more convenient than governing—is that if we can just punch down hard enough on some politically and culturally despised “other,” our gullible followers will believe that their lives will get better.

So, let’s go after:

Immigrants.
Refugees.
Muslims.
LGBTQ people.
Black women playing in the WNBA.

Whoever today’s designated “hated and despised other” happens to be.

The formula is ancient and always fails:
Identify an economically, politically, racially, religiously, or culturally vulnerable population. Blame them for complicated national problems they did not create. Direct the people’s legitimate anger downward instead of upward toward the governmental institutions and ineffectual leaders who are actually responsible for solving those problems.

But scapegoating has never been a good economic-development plan.
Just ask Germany how that 1930s-and-1940s experiment in national purification worked out for them.

South Africa certainly has legitimate immigration challenges. Every sovereign nation has both the right and responsibility to control its borders, enforce its immigration and labor laws, and establish lawful standards governing who may enter, reside, and work within the country.
But immigration enforcement is the responsibility of a lawful government—not citizen mobs.

And there is an enormous moral, constitutional, and political difference between enforcing immigration laws and unleashing—or tolerating—a social climate in which African people are treated as less human because they were born on the other side of an African border—borders themselves that were exploitatively and fraudulently drawn by European colonial powers. But that’s another lesson for another day.

South Africa’s own government has publicly acknowledged this distinction, condemning violence, intimidation, xenophobia, Afrophobia, and the blocking of foreign nationals from clinics, hospitals, schools, and other public services.
Yet those official condemnations have not been followed by the full and effective force of governmental power necessary to stop these abuses. And proclamations alone do not relieve the nation’s political leadership of its larger responsibility to protect foreign nationals residing within its borders and to uphold the international human-rights obligations to which South Africa has committed itself.

There is also an irony here that is impossible to avoid.

The South African government correctly joined many other nations around the world—and, in fact, assumed a significant international leadership role, in condemning Israel’s apartheid practices and genocidal treatment of the Palestinian people.
That moral position makes South Africa’s responsibility at home even more consequential.

A government cannot persuasively demand that the world recognize the humanity, dignity, legal rights, and physical safety of vulnerable people elsewhere while failing to use the full force of its own lawful governmental authority to protect vulnerable people within its own borders.

Political leaders must understand that words have powerful consequences. And bad actions—or governmental inaction in response to bad behavior—can weaken the moral power of your words even when those words, as in the case of the Palestinian people, are expressing a great moral truth.

When desperately poor and unemployed citizens are repeatedly encouraged to see migrants as the principal explanation for their suffering, lawful immigration enforcement can easily become entangled with something much uglier: the political legitimization of the immigrant as national enemy.

And that is where the moral leadership test begins.

I have to believe that South Africa’s government ministries, universities, economic institutions, and policy organizations have access to highly qualified economists capable of providing detailed, data-based explanations of the country’s economic problems.

Those economists can surely explain that foreign-owned businesses can create jobs; that immigrant workers and families pay rent, purchase food, clothing, transportation, and other goods and services; that legal migrants contribute economically; and that removing migrants cannot magically repair failing municipalities, reopen factories, eliminate corruption, improve public education, rebuild infrastructure, or create millions of sustainable jobs.

Indeed, South Africa’s present circumstances make the scapegoating argument particularly difficult to defend.
After intensified immigration enforcement and large-scale deportations, South Africa’s official unemployment rate did not miraculously collapse.

It rose—from 32.7 percent in the first quarter of 2026 to 33.6 percent in the second quarter.

Of course, that does not prove that deportations caused unemployment to rise.

But it does demonstrate something politically important:

Removing immigrants is not an economic-development policy.
You cannot deport your way to national prosperity.
You cannot intimidate your way to industrialization.
You cannot mob-rule your way to technological advancement.
And you cannot blame African migrants into creating millions of well-paying jobs for native South Africans.

At some point, the citizens of South Africa must be permitted to ask the people actually governing them:
Where is our nation’s economic-development plan that does not require expulsion marching mobs?

That question becomes especially urgent after decades of post-apartheid governance.

South Africa inherited grotesque racial inequality, deliberately engineered educational deprivation, massive wealth disparities, severe spatial segregation, and an economy constructed under colonialism and apartheid to benefit a white racial minority. No serious analysis should pretend that those structural inheritances disappeared when Nelson Mandela walked out of prison or when Black South Africans finally entered the voting booth as free citizens.

But historical explanation cannot become a permanent exemption from present-day governmental accountability.

There eventually comes a time when liberation movements that become governing parties must be evaluated not simply by the heroism of the struggle they once led, but by the quality of the society they subsequently build.

And that is where the ANC must face some extremely uncomfortable questions.

How many decades of political power must pass before corruption, governmental incompetence, inadequate economic growth, deteriorating infrastructure, unemployment, failing public services, and profound inequality can no longer be explained primarily by pointing backward?

At what point must a liberation movement transform itself into a governing institution that accepts full responsibility for governing?
Because blaming African immigrants for South Africa’s economic problems begins to resemble the oldest colonial political playbook—only now with a disturbing Black-on-Black African, neo-apartheid twist.

Divide people who should recognize their shared interests.

Encourage one struggling group to blame another struggling group.

Redirect anger away from concentrations of wealth and governmental failure.

Turn neighbors into unethical and unfriendly zero-sum game combatants.

Turn people suffering from poverty against other people suffering in poverty.

And most importantly:
Keep the collectively exploited people engaged in horizontal conflicts so that they “Don’t Look Up” (a great movie) vertically to identify the real source of their problems.

That is colonialism’s ancient political magic exploitation trick.
And African leaders should know better.

Which brings me to the place where, if you follow my writings over the years, you probably already knew I was going.

The Real Long-Term Economic Liberation Strategy—Education

The key to building substantial and sustained economic development for South Africa—and for its continental neighbors—is not chasing fraternal Africans across borders.
It is to strategically build African human capacity through major national educational initiatives.

That means investing massively in free, universal, rigorous, high-quality K–12 education and preparing young people not merely for yesterday’s occupations, including fields that artificial intelligence and automation may rapidly transform or eliminate, but for the emerging economy they will actually inherit.

That means dramatically expanding high-quality Career and Technical Education (CTE) programs in areas such as advanced manufacturing, electrical technology, construction technology, renewable-energy systems, automotive and electric-vehicle technology, aviation maintenance, robotics, mechatronics, cybersecurity, computer networking, telecommunications, plumbing, HVAC, welding, precision machining, agricultural technology, food science, logistics and supply-chain management, medical technology, and other skilled professions essential to a modern national economy.

And simultaneously, African nations must make enormous investments in STEM education—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
Build the educational pipelines that produce physicians, nurses, pharmacists, medical researchers, engineers, architects, computer scientists, mathematicians, biotechnology researchers, artificial-intelligence specialists, cybersecurity professionals, renewable-energy engineers, agricultural scientists, and other professionals essential to national development.

And then politically create integrity-driven, honest economic structures capable of giving those highly educated African youth compelling reasons to remain, work, prosper, and build up their own African homelands, rather than continuing to lose enormous portions of Africa’s intellectual capital to Europe, North America, and elsewhere.

Imagine if African nations approached economic development not merely as fifty-plus separate national projects, but as a continental undertaking.

Imagine an All-African Economic Union and Development Plan organized around cooperation, and the coordination of infrastructure, transportation, communication, energy, agriculture, defense, education, research, technology, manufacturing, healthcare, trade, and human-capital development.

Imagine:
African universities conducting joint applied and appropriate STEM research.

African engineers building transnational African infrastructure projects.

African physicians strengthening continental African healthcare systems.

African scientists solving African agricultural and environmental problems.

African entrepreneurs manufacturing products for African and international markets.

African nations trading more extensively with one another rather than continuing economic relationships shaped overwhelmingly by former colonial powers and external economic interests.

African countries uniting to implement a comprehensive strategy for recruiting and resettling highly skilled CTE/STEM educators and practitioners from the global African diaspora—particularly those who, regardless of their citizenship and professional status, are marginalized or treated as second-class citizens in their home countries.

That would be Pan-Africanism transformed from inspirational rhetoric into a strong, foundational, and sustainable economic architecture.

But that kind of enlightened national and continental vision requires governments genuinely committed to serving their people rather than exploiting them.

It requires leaders who understand that public office is a public trust—not a private family wealth-building enterprise.

It requires governments capable of designing meaningful, measurable, workable, long-term national economic-development plans rather than relying on frightened citizens, political scapegoats, racialized resentment, and mob anger to conceal failures of governance.

Most of all, it requires moral leadership.

Because South Africa occupies a unique place in the moral imagination of the African diaspora and the world.
Millions of people who never set foot in Johannesburg, Soweto, Durban, or Cape Town nevertheless believed that South Africa’s liberation struggle belonged partly to them. I am one of those individuals.

We marched.

We protested.

We organized boycotts.

We demanded divestment.

We raised money for liberation movements.

We even pressured our own governments to do the right disengagement thing in relation to South Africa.

And, in South Africa itself, many gave their lives or suffered long years in brutal prisons to uphold the principle that Black South Africans were human beings entitled to freedom, dignity, equality, and justice.

That history creates a special moral obligation on the ANC leadership.
A nation liberated through international solidarity should be extraordinarily reluctant to deny other people the right to exercise and experience the fullness of their own humanity.

And there is an especially painful historical irony here.

A people once subjected to passbooks should understand the danger of citizens demanding another African person’s papers.

A people once told where they could live, work, travel, study, and receive services should recoil when vulnerable human beings are threatened with exclusion from homes, workplaces, schools, clinics, hospitals, and communities.

A nation whose liberation movement asked the entire world to recognize the universal humanity of Black South Africans should be among the first nations to recognize that same humanity in vulnerable Africans who arrive at its borders.

Which brings me back to Odysseus and his journey into the land of the dead.

If somehow I could make that journey—if I could cross that impossible boundary and sit for just a few minutes with Kwame Nkrumah and Nelson Mandela—I think I know the question I would ask them:

“Is this the Africa you imagined?”

And I suspect there would be a long silence before either man answered.

Perhaps there would even be tears.

But I also suspect that eventually they would remind me that the African liberation project was never supposed to end when the colonial flag came down, when apartheid laws were repealed, or when Black leaders entered presidential offices.

Political liberation was supposed to create the conditions for something greater:

Human liberation.

Educational liberation.

Economic liberation.

Intellectual liberation.

Spiritual liberation.

And ultimately, the liberation of African people from the terrible colonial inheritance that taught us to see artificial borders more clearly than we see one another.

South Africa can—and must—do better.

All of Africa can—and must—do better.

The answer to vile colonialism cannot be neo-colonialism—changing the pigmentation of exploitation while keeping exploitative systems firmly in place, now operating under a new national flag and anthem.

And of course the answer to the historical evil of apartheid cannot be neo-apartheid—with other Africans cast in the role of the new despised and unwanted Black people.

That cannot be the destination of the All-African and Pan-African liberation journey. And I can’t believe that is what Messrs. Nkrumah and Mandela imagined.

The Invisible Black Leadership Man

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The Invisible Black Leadership Man

No heart-harming institution, regardless of how prestigious the title or position it offers, should ever convince you that your presence no longer matters—or, worse, that your very life has somehow become void of mattering.

When I was a principal, I remember standing in the school entrance lobby talking with my Custodial Engineer, a great guy, who happens to be white, about something I can no longer recall.

While we were talking, a Caucasian deliveryman entered the building pushing goods on a hand truck, clipboard in hand. He walked directly up to the two of us: me, in my usual shined Rockport shoes, shirt, and tie—my principal uniform—and my Custodial Engineer, who was clearly dressed in custodial work clothes and was not even wearing a collared shirt.

“I need the principal to sign for this.”
And he handed him the clipboard.

My Custodial Engineer, clearly pained and embarrassed, pointed in my direction.
“He’s the principal.”

I signed for the delivery, and the man left.
What stayed with me was not simply what the deliveryman had done. I had already accumulated enough experience as a Black man in America to understand what had just happened—I was invisible.

What struck me more deeply was how badly the incident made my Custodial Engineer feel. He was very sad and apologized to me profusely.

And suddenly I found myself drawing upon one of the lessons I had learned during my twelve years of attending Children’s Sunday School: When you are hurting or feeling bad, one Christian response is to do something that helps to relieve someone else’s suffering. In doing so, you may discover that some of your own pain has been lifted.
And it worked.

I realized how deeply the incident had affected my Custodial Engineer, and so I spent the next few minutes consoling him, assuring him that I would be all right.
After all, this was not my first encounter with America’s racialized reality. My personhood did not suddenly become vulnerable to racial diminishment because I had become a NYC principal.

The principalship had not provided me with some magical protective shield. I was still the same Black man who, the moment I stepped outside my Bed-Stuy door, entered an American social reality in which other people could make assumptions about my intelligence, authority, professional standing, social position, or even my right to occupy certain spaces—all before I had spoken a single word.
Being the principal did not make me immune from being rendered invisible.

Years later, when I became a superintendent, I engaged in an important Black group-self-care affirming exercise that stood in opposition to society’s professional and personal dehumanizing behaviors.

A group of us Black superintendents would meet on designated weekends each month. We deliberately chose out-of-the-way restaurants and met in secluded back rooms.
It was a kind of superintendent’s underground railroad ride to mental health.
Nothing about these meetings was publicized.

My executive assistant did not know about them. My deputy superintendents and other senior district staff did not know. Nothing was placed on an electronic calendar. Nothing was committed to paper.

We created a confidential space where Black superintendents could talk honestly with one another—without translation, without performance, without having to carefully calculate how every word might be interpreted outside the room.

We talked about the work.
We talked about educational leadership.
We talked about what was happening inside our districts.
But we could also talk about what was happening inside of us.

We could talk about how the work of the superintendency was affecting us at a deeply personal and distinctly Black human-experience level.

We provided one another with professional advice, personal encouragement, emotional support, and, when necessary, a safe place to say what could not safely or productively be said anywhere else.

I found those gatherings amazingly therapeutic and spiritually uplifting. I suspect others did as well.

There is a larger leadership lesson here.

Being appointed to a high-profile, influential, impactful, or prestigious position does not shield a Black American—or a Black British, French, German, or other Black professional—from the painful slings and arrows of racial dehumanization.

The title may sound impressive.
You could even be told that “you are in charge.”
You may be paid a really nice salary and enjoy many of the “perks of the office.”

But all of the degrees, publications, awards, professional accomplishments, and public accolades cannot automatically grant you immunity from being racially diminished, stereotyped, excluded, underestimated, ignored, or rendered invisible.

And you do not necessarily receive a racial-experience exemption because you have entered one of the world’s highly exalted, liberal, progressive-minded institutions of higher learning—or any other prestigious professional space.

Indeed, in such environments, the racism may not always announce itself loudly. The exclusionary practices may become more sophisticated. The downgrading of your presence may become more subtle. The disrespect may arrive wrapped in impeccable professional language.

In these sophisticated, heart-harming spaces, the racial diminishment may not be as simple, open, and immediately recognizable as watching a clipboard that should have been handed to you being placed into someone else’s hands. But it can be just as painful.

The exclusion may occur through an invitation never extended, a conversation that somehow takes place before you enter the room, a decision effectively made before your voice is solicited, an idea ignored when you offer it and enthusiastically embraced when someone else repeats it, or the persistent assumption that despite your title, credentials, accomplishments, and demonstrated expertise, someone else in the room must surely possess the greater authority.
The racial insult may become more eloquent.
But eloquence does not make it less injurious.

And so, I especially implore Black professionals working in these highly exalted spaces: Do not allow yourself to become merely the “spook who sits by the door”—physically present, institutionally useful, symbolically celebrated, but never fully invited to sit at the table where consequential power is actually exercised.

Find one another.
Create spaces of conversational trust.
And yes, when professional circumstances require it, those spaces may need to be discreet, confidential, and even clandestine.
Create support networks where you can speak without performing.
Create spaces where you do not have to explain every racial nuance before discussing what happened.
Create spaces where professional advice can coexist with emotional honesty.
Create spaces where somebody understands why something that might appear insignificant to others was not insignificant to you.

Create spaces where people remind one another:
I see you.
I know what burdens you are carrying.
I understand what is happening to you.
You are still very much needed.
Your gifts and talents still matter.
Your past, present, and future contributions matter.

Because there is too much important work left to be done. And there are too many communities that need your gifted and talented leadership.
No prestigious title or position is worth allowing professional isolation, racialized diminishment, or institutional exclusion to slowly convince you that your presence no longer matters—or, worse, that your very life has somehow become void of mattering.

Response to: “Why I Stopped Forcing My Kid to Share” Article

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Why I Stopped Forcing My Kid to Share: True generosity can’t be coerced.

The Atlantic By Jenisha Watts

Response

Michael A. Johnson, March 25, 2026

Great article! I enjoyed reading it, along with the many reader responses, as a life-long public-school educator. Actually, both “sharing” and “taking turns” are critical teaching objectives and, therefore, necessary parts of the Pre-K and Kindergarten curriculum. In those cases, however, the “teaching tools” (building blocks, puzzles, etc.) belong to the entire class, so we are trying to teach patience, fairness, and, of course, the cooperative group activity of sharing and taking a fair turn.
In the Pre-K to K world, we are also trying to wean children out of the at-home stage, where they always had full access to their own personal playthings, so that, for the next 12 years, they will be able to work cooperatively with others.

However, teaching children empathy and compassion (often confused with sharing and taking turns) is a more complex and difficult task, one I found myself engaged in as a teacher and principal with students up to the point that they reached the 12th grade.

I believe parents most often do a better job of teaching what the author and many readers were really aiming for: helping future adults develop empathy and show compassion for others (which naturally leads to sharing and taking turns gracefully). Parents can do this best by example.

My mother’s formal education ended in high school, but she was always kind and generous to the less fortunate, even when we did not have many resources ourselves. She was always giving us tasks that taught empathy and compassion, such as shopping for or taking food to a homebound elder in the neighborhood, and we did so without receiving any financial compensation. Her position, perhaps a little out of tune in today’s world of intense self-centeredness, was that God sees everything, and doing good is its own reward. It is no wonder that my sister became a nurse and I went into education. Even outside of our professions, we have always sought to extend a helping hand to others, sharing generously and always respectfully and patiently waiting our turn.

Why I Stopped Forcing My Kid to Share: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/03/children-sharing-siblings-riends/686436/?gift=a0PD0qSlNMACBg3usWk487dYaYjgvFc6ryYzHDd1iok&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

Responding to Racist Attacks on Popular and Heroic Black Public Figures: An Educational Imperative for Adaptive, Corrective, and Protective Lesson and School-Wide Response Planning

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As the bulk of the decent, non-prejudiced poisoned citizens left in America express, justifiably so, righteous anger and moral indignation at the U.S. President’s escalation toward more explicit visual expressions of the ugly beliefs and policies that undergird his reign of racism; professional educators, who are human beings and ethically embarrassed citizens (we take any form of ignorance personally), will also feel the pain of this moment. And that pain will not be limited to Black educators only. We therefore must “stay focused, and stay on the job.”

First, we must recognize, from a pedagogical perspective, what Barack and Michelle Obama meant, not only (but especially) to Black children in our own country and beyond, but also to children of every color, ethnicity, and nationality, in schools not just across the United States, but in schools all over the world.

So, our first job is to develop age- and grade-appropriate lesson plans, across multiple content areas, including active involvement with guidance and counseling departments, that support healthy healing, conceptual correction, and, particularly in light of the current ICE brutal assaults on human beings, a reassuring sense of both group and personal protection.

We know enough developmental psychology to understand that when young people are hurt, angry, or frightened, they will not always express or act out those feelings in the most positive or productive ways; therefore, professional educators must step in directly into the present fray, and help students process this disgraceful moment in our history in the most positively edifying and emotionally strengthening manner possible.

Each school-based administrator must make a personal and professional decision regarding how far to go, and in what format; therefore, I would not offer a blanket recommendation for how school leaders should respond to these types of historical moments.
That said, based on my past experiential practice as a high school principal, where we understood that whatever major event existed in the public atmosphere, our students already knew about it, so instead of hiding from the obvious, what I did then, and what I would do now, is to shift into full response mode.

I would immediately convene a crash cabinet, school-leadership and departmental emergency meeting to design a school-wide classroom, and guidance-counseling response strategy, beginning with four grade-level assemblies that I would personally lead. After all, we invested a great deal of time—eight years—building students’ pride, resilience, hope, and aspirations around the exemplary model and public leadership excellence of the Obama family; and we cannot allow all of that deliberate self-esteem-building work to be attacked without a purposeful teaching-and-learning response.

A note of caution for principals: understand that superintendents are, by job description, though not necessarily by personal preference, both educational and political actors. You must therefore read the present situation within that dual context and know your superintendent’s position on this matter before acting.

As for me, I have articulated my own self-guiding response position to moments such as these across several chapters of my book, Report From the Principal’s Office: A 200-Day Inspirational and Aspirational School Leadership Journal, including:

13. The Ethical Principalship.
20. Ethical Righteous Authority Means You Can’t Always Ask for Permission to Act.
21. Wise Righteous Authority Means There Are Times When You Should Ask for Permission to Act.
32. The Authentic Principalship.
64. The Mindful Principalship.
And very relevant to our present concern:
75. Part of the Effective Principalship Practice Is Not Throwing Yourself Under the Bus!

So, act according to your ethical inclinations, pedagogical responsibilities and your district political realities.

I do not want to get any principal in trouble, so full disclosure: my leadership style is my leadership style, and even when teaching future school administrators, I always explain my leadership approach with a clearly stated warning label. That said, I firmly believe that the most moral, ethical, and pedagogically sincere educators, and especially educational leaders, are, in fact, made in and for this moment.

This is not a moment for professional silence, instructional avoidance, or moral retreat disguised as neutrality. Racist attacks on major well-known by students Black public figures, particularly those who represent dignity, excellence, and aspirational possibility, inevitably, one way or another, land in our classrooms, whether we invite them or not.

The question before educators is not whether students will be affected, but whether we will meet them with intentional guidance, protective care, and intellectually honest instructional practices. If we truly believe that education is both a moral and civic endeavor, then this is precisely the moment when principled, prepared, and courageous educational leadership must rise to meet the work.

Michael A. Johnson has served as a NYC public school teacher, an award-winning principal, and a school district superintendent. A former adjunct professor of education and the author of two books on school-building leadership, he writes about educational equity, policy, and the ethical and moral obligations that come with safeguarding the educational lives and promising futures of all children. Inspired by ancestral heroes such as Dr. Gerald Deas, John Lewis, and W.E.B. Du Bois, he strives to make as much “good trouble” as possible before closing his eyes for the final time.

Before Advising a Young Person to Avoid or Drop Out of College: A Few Important Considerations

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“For the first time in 50 years, college grads are losing their edge.”
— Washington Post, January 31, 2026

PART 1: The Purpose of a K–12 Education

(There is just no way that I can give this foundationally important educational Part 1 topic section its due treatment in a short blog post. For those keenly interested in this topic, I would recommend reading any of, but specifically these two books by John Dewey: Democracy and Education and Experience and Education.)

As is often the case with fear-inspiring and commercially motivated, eyeball-grabbing articles, the most important operational devil is buried deep in the research-methodological details of a poorly organized and largely under-informed writing project about public education. Too often, such pieces dangerously play into the hands of those seeking a confirmation “cover” for their own biased and prejudiced views. I’ve found that many very prominent people, including professional K–16 educators, are quick to proclaim, “We have overdone this everyone-preparing-for-college thing, college isn’t for everyone,” and in almost every case, that “everyone” does not include their own children, or the children of their economic and ethnic class.

While it is true that many high school guidance and college/career counseling services need significant upgrading to provide far better and more individualized academic and post-high school graduation planning information, doing so would require public high schools to be funded adequately to staff full-time college and career advisors. It would also require the development of a standardized best-practices advising methodology, a more clearly defined set of professional codes of conduct, technology-aided college and career offices, and a systematic operational and ethical approach to post–high school advising practices, including the use of “discovering your gifts, talents, and future career options” lessons beginning in the ninth grade.

The devil is also in the use and interpretation of numbers, so consider this critical warning caveat, quietly tucked into the middle of this Washington Post article:

“Jeff Strohl, director of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, cast the shifts as a ‘historic anomaly.’ The question becomes, are we talking about a structural break? Is this in any way indicative of what the world is going to look like in two or three years?”

Forget the next two or three years, what about the next 5, 10, and 20 years of workplace and national economic landscape shifts that every current high school graduate will be facing? The honest answer is that no one really knows what will happen in the future, and, more importantly, what that future will mean for an individual high school student trying to plan a viable adult career path. Or will the very idea of a single long-term commitment to a career path become a historical artifact, no longer practiced in the not-so-distant future that today’s high school graduates will face? Or consider the possibility of a future world in which multiple, simultaneously practiced professions become a common practice, for example, an orchestral cello player doubling as a cello-design-and-building carpenter; a plumber doubling as a professional poet.

So what happens if a nation like the United States continues shifting away from hands-on manufacturing jobs and never returns to them, despite the wrongheaded nostalgic efforts of some current misguided politicians? What if AI and robotics, or some technological intervention we have not yet seen, make many of these manufacturing jobs functionally people-less, cheaper, more efficiently operated, and (more profit-making) productive? Does anyone seriously believe that the current generation of industry titans will retain and generously pay these low-tech workers for sentimental reasons?
And what if, at the same time, we oversaturate the labor market with low-tech workers while facing an acute shortage of college-educated professionals in the high-tech areas needed across a growing service sector, STEM research, CAD/CAM operational management, and health-related fields, especially those required to serve a rapidly expanding, aging U.S. population that, although living longer, will still face significant late-onset diseases (typically emerging after ages 60–65) health challenges?

Numbers may not lie, but they also don’t always describe the complete and comprehensive truth.

Statistical predictions are built on large cohorts of individuals, but those predictions do not always translate cleanly or accurately to a real human being, who is a real person, not simply a data point in a research study. High school guidance counselors and career advisors are routinely asked to speculate 10, 15, and even 20 years into the future. The truth is that there is no reliable way to perfectly predict future, economy-driven employment needs. Nations change. Regions change. Individual student interests, talents, and opportunities change. Time itself is a powerful and unpredictable agent of transformation.

Despite some excellent exceptions, generally speaking, “education news articles” are in my view are often correct information deficient.

This article operates from several public schooling misconceptions, starting with the most egregious misunderstanding of the purpose of a K–12 education, and then continuing with distorted assumptions about high schools, and ending with deeply flawed ideas about how post-secondary pathways are, or should be, decided.
Professional public educators themselves contribute to this confusion because we have not always been clear about why we do what we do.
In part, this is because we live within a national culture that turns nearly everything American into a commercial feeding enterprise and therefore turns every student into a present and future commodity.
Another reason is that we are often rhetorically bold but actionably insincere about the true democratic purpose of public education, because full honesty would require acknowledging that, for large segments of the U.S. population, we do not do nearly as well as we are professionally, ethically, and financially paid to do.

I fully recognize and concede that we live in a social reality where the overwhelming majority of American high school graduates will not inherit vast sums of money that allow them to live expense-free while choosing to live “rent free” in any lifestyle they desire. The overwhelming majority of us must figure out how to pay for basic living expenses: housing, food, clothing, healthcare, transportation, entertainment-leisure, and eventually some form of financial retirement security.
But that recognition cannot become the sole, driving obsession of our formal educational lives.

In every meaningful sense, chasing the “next hot jobs” list denies a core value of human life, and a core purpose of K-12 schooling: the development of a fully realized human being, living a purposefully enriched life. Schooling soley for the purposes of employment ignores the importance of discovering what one is gifted and talented at doing, and then building a life and related career around work that is meaningful, productive, and deeply satisfying.

For years, when students asked me, as a high school principal, what they should do after graduation, my response was always the same:

Do something you love. Do something you are talented and gifted at doing, which means you will likely enjoy doing it, and living it, as a long-term career option. Then figure out how to get someone, or yourself, if entrepreneurship is your calling—to pay you well to do it.

I believed then, and still believe now, that this advice is the most principled and honest career guidance a professional educator can offer without violating our core professional responsibilities, while still acknowledging that we live, for better or worse, in a society governed by the often brutal rules of commodity capitalism, where individuals are frequently forced into marketing and then selling themselves on the trading block of life; and also living a winners-or-losers zero-sum game by applying hyper-individualized, selfish, and personal reproduction-gene-protection survival strategies.

The best high school guidance/career/college advisors do a good job of offering advice that balances the living in the future ideal with the immediate, and future possible reality, getting students to where they enjoy occupational satisfaction and are also able to live a financially self-sustaining life.

For most public educators, we are both aware of, but strive to work around those dog-eat-dog national principles; however, we are also charged morally and authentically to protect young people’s future options. We are absolutely, at the PreK beginning and at the grueling high school graduation end, working carefully within a political system that prioritizes having money over having a meaningful life.

A career choice should be what you are authentically and spiritually called to be, or no job, regardless of the amount of money you make, will ever be truly internally satisfying and rewarding.

Yes, we public educators complain about constant external criticism of public education. Yes, the unpaid hours we donate to the system are staggering. Yes, the work is exhausting, frustrating, and emotionally draining, especially when those same complaining stakeholding governmental powers fail to provide us with the adequate resources to meet the “educate all children” expectations they request and we desire to reach. And yes, we often find ourselves tired, discouraged, in tears, or talking about giving up.

Yet, if most of my colleagues were being honest, they would admit that despite all of the above things working against our succeeding, we know that we are exactly where we need to be in this life, doing the exact work we are called to do. We love this profession even as it sometimes feels like it does not love us back, and painfully breaks our hearts. We love changing the world for the better by changing the life of a single student. We love discovering our own purposeful life through service, and we love watching students begin to articulate and pursue their own life-purpose missions under our thoughtful guidance and effectual tutelage.

Closing Reflection: Why the “Purpose of Education” Ideal Matters When Advising Young People About Going, or Not Going, to College

Finally, yes, I am deeply indebted to my professional education in developmental psychology, special education, curriculum and instruction, and, for me specifically, my mathematics and science education coursework; and later to my graduate studies in supervision, administration, and school- and district-level leadership, which prepared me well for a long and productive career in public education.
But it was my enriching K–12 humanities subjects classes experiences that greatly expanded my creativity, imagination, and understanding of a vast world outside of my childhood neighborhood; and when supplemented with my undergraduate liberal arts education courses in economics, history, art, music, philosophy, fiction and nonfiction literature, political science, and related academic fields, these creative encounters most profoundly shaped me into a better teacher, principal, and superintendent, capable of performing those roles at their highest imaginatively created levels of effectuation.

As Maxine Greene so powerfully reminded us, “By imagination, we are enabled to look at things, to think about things as if they could be otherwise.” (drawn from: “Releasing the Imagination”)
Those liberal arts exposures also helped to mold me into a better, albeit still flawed (not because of, but in spite of, their influence), somewhat contributing human being and a more responsible, well-informed citizen. That is why advising a young person to avoid or prematurely abandon a college experience based solely on short-term labor-market anxieties, possibilities projections, or media-driven economic narratives is not an educaring act; it is a consequential educational and moral decision that narrows, rather than expands, a young person’s developmental possibilities.

The cultivation of thoughtful citizens and fully formed human beings, individuals prepared to be positive contributors to their fellow citizens and to our shared global human family, is an essential yet deeply overlooked and under-spoken purpose of public education. When that broader civic and human-development mission is discounted or dismissed, college becomes miscast and misunderstood by students as a mere transactional credentialing tool, rather than a formative intellectual growing experience. Young people are then reduced to future workforce machine parts instead of developing into whole-knowledge and wholly-knowledgeable citizens. It is precisely because we have neglected this purpose that we, as a profession, with the tacit blessing of society at large, have come to rely far too heavily on the criminal justice system to compensate for our collective educational failures and inadequacies.

“For the first time in 50 years, college grads are losing their edge,”—Washington Post; January 31, 2026; https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/01/31/labor-market-gap-trade-workers-white-collar/

PART 2: This article also wrongly conflates, though, in fairness, many people also do, including professional educators, the high school Career and Technical Education (CTE) curriculum and learning-objectives pathway with what was historically labeled as Vocational Education. I will address that issue in my next blog posting.

The Cost of Uncivil Meanness: Why NYC Pre-K Must Be Truly “For All” Children

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Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani got it right in insisting that Pre-K for all NYC children means all NYC children, regardless of the child’s family citizenship or immigration status. Also, I am not trying to convince my past and present public-education colleagues that the Mayor is absolutely aligned with our longstanding professional ethical standards and practices of seeking to educate every child without exception who crosses the threshold of our schoolhouse door.

People who don’t now, or who never have, worked in public education may not realize that we professional educators have never, regardless of who the mayor, governor, or president is, refused learning access to any Pre-K–12 child based on their family’s citizenship or immigration status.

It is neither morally defensible nor professionally ethical to deny a child an education. It also violates the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child: “Education must be provided without discrimination and with respect for the child’s dignity.” And NYC definitely does not want to end up on the International Criminal Court (ICC) conviction-and-warrant-for-arrest list with the likes of Benjamin Netanyahu and Vladimir Putin for human rights violations against children. Further, denying an innocent child an education should violate any religious or moral principles one claims to believe in.

I am also convinced that I will not change the thinking of those Americans who, as we see especially in places like Minnesota, view practicing moral meanness as being part of their spiritual constitution. Instead, I am seeking to reach those basically decent human beings who may be innocently confused by the shortsighted and cruel right-wing talking points about “our spending tax money to educate foreigners.”

I could explain in complex pedagogical, historiographical, macro-economic, and sociological terms why not educating significant segments of a city, state, or national population will, in the long run, cost far more in tax money and human pain and suffering for those presently documented citizen members of that society. For example, let’s see how the strategy of not educating the majority (girls) of the youth population works out developmentally for places like Afghanistan in the present or very near future.

But a good short example, closer to home, is our own collective and equally wrong decision to underspend (on the front end) on public education by not providing, yes, diversity access, equity, and equality of opportunity, meaning providing high-quality teaching and learning spaces, to large (Black and Latino) segments of our US youth population. We therefore end up spending multiple times more tax dollars (on the back end) to fund a vast enforcement, court-system, incarceration, and probation criminal-justice civil-service industry. And included in that cost is the price a society pays individually and collectively when large numbers of the population are without hope or the skills to become highly productive members of that society.

I don’t buy the jingoistic and racist-inspired “China is our greatest enemy!” slogan. But what we should be competitively concerned about is that China has arrived at the smart conclusion that they must, and they are, actively working hard to close the quality teaching-and-learning gaps between their urban and rural schools; while our fallback-failing public-education plan is incarceration for those very capable but undereducated children of our nation.

What is painfully clear historically, regardless of geography, is that educational exclusionary tactics do not build better schools, cities, societies, or national futures.
America’s present (Trump-accelerating) race to second-class world status is ironically fueled by the US not exercising its greatest strength and superpower advantage: its cultural, ethnic, and racial diversity that could drive a powerful intellectual and creative national development engine. Sure, we have the military might to bomb a lot of middle-level countries when they don’t do what we say; and we could even kidnap or kill a smaller nation’s president from time to time. But that won’t change the end-of-empire trajectory we are presently on, for it is time—not developing countries—that is our greatest enemy.

No child’s access to a quality learning experience should hinge on citizenship, race, gender, ethnicity, religion, or social status, because childhood dignity, personhood respect, and humanity should not be conditional.

We need pedagogical, civic-religious, and political leaders who operate with courageous conviction and moral clarity. And even if your motivation is based on practicality: for those of us who hope that there is still an America after Trump and the present GOP hegemonic reign ends. Know that presently, those children for whom their families or themselves are undocumented and who can escape ICE’s current brutal racial roundup will be in our nation for the remainder of their educational lives. Which means (and all superintendents know this budgetary reality) that punitively excluding these children from the Universal Pre-K initiative will seriously undercut their early childhood learning capacity, which in turn will negatively impact their elementary school prerequisite readiness skills, which will force taxpayers to spend more—and spend more expensively—on the corrective-remedial programs they will need over a twelve-year schooling period.

At the end of the day, the argument is neither complicated nor abstract. A civilized and self-respecting society does not punish children for the politics of adults. It does not weaponize early childhood learning. It does not make dignity conditional. The future of the nation is not secured or enhanced by denying four-year-olds the right to learn; it is secured by expanding the human capacity, creative power, and civic promise of all the children who will soon inherit it. Let the children learn. All of them.

Michael A. Johnson has served as a NYC public school teacher, an award-winning principal, and a school district superintendent. A former adjunct professor of science education and the author of two books on school-building leadership, he writes about educational equity, policy, and the ethical and moral obligations that come with safeguarding the educational lives and promising futures of all children. Inspired by ancestral heroes such as Dr. Gerald Deas, John Lewis, and W.E.B. Du Bois, he strives to make as much “good trouble” as possible before closing his eyes for the final time.

Modern Slave Catching 2.0: Why Studying Black History Is Civic Literacy and a Survival Skill*

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Suppressing the historical record of a people does not only deny their participating humanity; it strips the entire nation of the civic navigation tools required to recognize the signs of grave communal danger and inhibits even the enfranchised from comprehending, and thus resisting, their own depersonalization.

I recently read an excellent book on the history of post–WWII East Germany (Beyond the Wall: A History of East Germany by Katja Hoyer); and so, watching the daily growth of Germany’s neo-Nazi AfD party, and then reading that the AfD movement was making its greatest growth spurts in those parts of Germany that were formerly East Germany (“Germany’s nationalist AfD party hopes to take power in 2026” — Washington Post, 1/13/26), was quite surprising, since I imagined that these were the Deutsche Volk who were heavily exposed to a solid public educational system that held the anti-fascist principles of Marx, Lenin, and Engels as the underpinning philosophy of their pedagogy. What happened?

I thought: how could so many in this part of the German nation enthusiastically embrace the neo-Nazification of the AfD? And further, how could AfD supporters ignore the history of how both West and East Germany suffered terribly from the interrupted process of national development (how did that Nazism stuff work for you’ll the last time)?

But (back to my book) it seems that East Germany suffered the most from an entire nation losing its way and choosing to follow the sick and twisted mind of a Make Germany Great Again (MGGA) leader. And I thought about the AfD’s sister proto-fascist/retro-confederate organization in the U.S., the Make America Great Again (MAGA-GOP) movement. And then, it made sense why, it’s the intoxicating, but not soul healing, ideology of resentment and anger.

So, despite decades of communist ideological scaffolding and indoctrination, the poorest parts of Germany, the communities left out of the West German “economic miracle” and deprived of any stable sense of place or purpose in this world, would revert, as their 1930s political ancestors once did, to their most primitive tribal limbic defense mechanism:

“We were great, and we could be great again if not for the presence of the racialized ‘other!’”

Genocidal acts perpetrated anywhere in the world can be conveniently-contextually redefined, selectively applied, and politically justified based on the race, religion, and nationality of the beaten-down “other.” The Somali community in Minnesota fits all three categories and, therefore, like enslaved African victims of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, they have no human rights that need to be respected by ICE or the Department of Homeland Security, after all, they are not considered humans.

And so, I would recommend that the decent people of Minnesota and other parts of our nation that are negatively impacted by ICE/DHS, particularly those wonderful and compassionate opposing slave-catching modern abolitionists like the late Renee Good — study the work-actions of movements like the Underground Railroad and how they helped Africans escaping from bondage to realize their innate right to freedom.

“A strong man will deliver us,” until he doesn’t. And only then do his followers discover that they have surrendered both their humanity and the good promises of their future history.

History is a great teacher, but denying and hiding history is a grave mistake. Movements like the AfD in Germany, Ms. Meloni’s right-wing alliance of parties in Italy, England’s Reform UK party, and America’s own homegrown MAGA/GOP movement should study how these types of proto-fascist movements have never served their nation’s or their followers’ best interests; things always seem to end badly, because they are movements based on a lie. That lie is that the only way their members can realize their humanity is to physically oppress, traumatize, and try to snuff out the physical and spiritual humanity of the darker, or not-like-us “others.” And yet, ironically, this denial of historiography and the denial of humanity to the disenfranchised and oppressed “others” eventually pushes these reactionary citizen-actors further and further away from the meaningful and purposeful humanity that they so desperately seek.

*Slave Catching 1.0: The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 transformed the entire nation, both free and slave-holding states alike, into an extension of the slave states’ justifying and policing apparatus. The law compelled all citizens and public officials to detain and return escaped enslaved people to bondage, and it criminalized any act of refusal. This statute stripped African freedom seekers of even the most basic human rights and legal due-process protections, including the right to contest their fate. In effect, the Act nationalized slavery’s vindication and enforcement and made the entire nation’s citizens, and the federal government, its guarantor and enforcer.

What Would It Mean to “Govern Expansively and Audaciously” in NYC Public Schools?

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“…In writing this address, I have been told that this is the occasion to reset expectations, that I should use this opportunity to encourage the people of New York to ask for little and expect even less. I will do no such thing. The only expectation I seek to reset is that of small expectations. Beginning today, we will govern expansively and audaciously. We may not always succeed. But never will we be accused of lacking the courage to try.…A moment like this comes rarely. Seldom do we hold such an opportunity to transform and reinvent” — Excerpt from Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s inauguration speech.

Like many who listened to the newly sworn-in NYC mayor’s inaugural address, I felt both inspired and hopeful about what governing expansively and audaciously could mean for New York City’s children, particularly those who, mayor after mayor, still find themselves, to borrow from my former Columbia University Revson Fellowship mentor Eli Ginzberg, receiving the “short end” of the learning-quality stick.

As I have written previously (Winning NYC’s Affordability Fight Is Impossible Without Public School Accountability), closing New York City’s affordability gap is inseparable from closing its persistent teaching and learning quality gaps. Demographic reality makes clear that large-scale student reassignment schemes, based on race, often offered as morally deficient, and politically placating shortcuts, are neither mathematically feasible nor educationally responsible. There simply are not enough white students to redistribute, and such efforts would create a busing and public-transportation nightmare that would dismantle many great after-school programs, academic teams, athletic sports, and enrichment opportunities that currently sustain learning communities across more than 1,500 NYC schools.

From my eleven years as a Title I high-school principal, one conclusion is unavoidable: the fastest and most durable way to break generational cycles of poverty and despair, and to create genuine generational quality-of-life leaps opportunities, is for public education to do its most fundamental job well. That job is not symbolic integration or rhetorical reassurance, but the creation of learning environments where every child’s intellectual potential is deliberately surfaced, developed, and honored.

Closing the quality learning-opportunity gap is the unfinished, and most fiercely resisted, descendant of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Brown did not merely challenge where Black children sat; it also challenged whether the nation would finally accept responsibility for how well Black children were being educated. It is true that separate was never intended to be equal, and that one of the tragic byproducts of so-called “integration” was the elimination of vast numbers of highly competent and highly efficacious Black teachers and school administrators.
What followed was not the end of educational segregation, but its reinvention. Society devised new, evilly ingenious ways to separate Black students from quality education, constructing parallel systems in the same districts and school buildings, that preserved inequality, low expectations, while cloaking it in the language of progressive education.

These systems remain firmly in place, even in the most liberal and bluest of states, including New York. The moment therefore demands a modern, updated Brown movement, one that confronts and dismantles this contemporary form of quality-learning segregation. Any substitution of that real instructional transformation with rhetorical flourishes or “magical” (often costly) initiatives merely extends the present status quo under a different name.

This leaves NYC elected officials and professional educators with a clarifying question they can no longer avoid: if we truly believe there is nothing wrong with the learning capacity of Black and Latino children, yet their academic outcomes consistently fall far short of their potential, then what are we doing wrong in how we organize, resource, conduct and lead schools, and why do we citizens tolerate this massive loss of societal intellectual wealth?
And if, instead, we quietly believe that race, poverty, immigration status, neighborhood conditions, parental education levels, or English-language fluency permanently limit a child’s educability, then professional honesty demands disclaimers. Parents and taxpayers deserve to be told outright that if your child falls into the “wrong” ZIP code or demographic category, the system cannot deliver on its promise to properly educate them.
After all, no rational consumer would purchase a kitchen appliance if the manufacturer warned in advance that there was a 70 percent chance it would fail the moment it was plugged in. Yet we, as citizens, have grown disturbingly numb to the unacceptable terrible outcomes of one of our most expensive, and consequential, civic undertakings: public education.

We already know multiple ways how to effectively educate all children. When we fail to do so, that failure is not pedagogical—it is political.

A physically easier way to avoid a massive school integration busing nightmare, at far less educational and financial cost, though unquestionably a more politically dangerous path; would be to mandate and declare the NYCDOE a Children-First Learning and Adult Accountability Priority Zone. Having served for many years as both a principal and a superintendent in New York City, I understand the extraordinary courage such a declaration would require. I know the system’s ugly undersides. I know the deeply entrenched political forces that have created, and continue to maintain, our present learning-quality apartheid system.

Which is why, if you encounter a principal leading a consistently high-performing Title I school, you should probably buy them a gift card, or a lottery ticket. For, their calm exterior often conceals the daily accumulation of emotional scars earned by serving as a constant rule-breaking and rule-bending counterforce within a system that routinely undermines its own stated mission: educating all children.

These leaders succeed not because the system supports them, but because they are willing to absorb personal, professional, and moral risk on behalf of children.
So when I return to the mayor’s speech and hear the word expansively used in connection with public education, I hear more than rhetorical flourish. I hear the possibility of a governing posture defined by spacious capacity, by a purposeful, strategic inclusion of all children. I hear a commitment that no cohort of students will be excluded from the city’s rich ecosystem of informal learning institutions, cultural resources, and enrichment opportunities. I hear an expansiveness of heart rooted in a moral responsibility to future generations, not merely political viability in the present.

I also share a biographical bond with both the new mayor and his chancellor. As a first-generation Caribbean American, I—like them—am living testimony to the power of education to make the highest promise of this nation real. What drew me, as a young college student in the 1970s, toward a life in professional education was an internal, largely unarticulated conviction that transcends policy and politics: the idea that every child enters the world with inherent worth and untapped potential, and that society bears a sacred obligation to cultivate those gifts rather than squander them.

Public education, at its best, is not merely a workforce pipeline, or, tragically for too many, an incarceration pipeline, it is a moral undertaking, a collective act of faith in human possibility, and a covenant with generations yet to come.

But if expansively signals intentional, ethically mandated inclusion; audaciously signals courage, real courage, untainted by a stage magician’s illusionary distractions.
Audacity is what it looks like when civic, religious, political, and educational leaders fully understand the cost of acting and doing what’s right and then act anyway. It is Harriet Tubman courage. It is Dietrich Bonhoeffer courage. It is Nelson Mandela courage. It is the recognition that once you cross the rubicon of righteous responsibility, there is no turning back, no compromise deal to be struck, no rhetorical cover to be offered for systems that continue to produce educational suffering while claiming it’s reform.

We already know how to effectively educate all children; there is ample evidence to tell us exactly what it would take to achieve that objective. When we nevertheless choose not to educate large numbers of children, that failure is political and ethical, not experientially educational. For example, we know we must address the negative “tipping-point” concentration of inexperienced teachers, the related chronic teacher-turnover problem in high-poverty (Title I) schools, and the blatant disconnection of our most highly experienced, mastery-level instructional practitioners from our most academically struggling students.

To govern expansively and audaciously in NYC public schools would mean declaring, without hesitation, without ineffective initiatives, and without recycling public education’s familiar “greatest hits” of verbal vacillations; that children’s learning is the city’s first priority, even when doing so is politically dangerous, professionally career-threatening, and morally challenging.

It would also require the NYCDOE to confront two decisions it has long avoided. First, whether the purpose of public education, like too much of our criminal-justice system, has been reduced to employment acquirement and containment compliance, rather than human healing, intellectual development, and democratic evolution. Second, whether the system is finally willing to acknowledge that ground zero of any serious, system-wide quality-learning improvement effort is the individual school building itself. That acknowledgment would demand granting principals and their school-based leadership teams, real staffing authority, adequate and stable resources, and sustained professional development so they can become highly valued and highly effective school-building leaders, and then holding them to uncompromising, no-excuses, compelled to pursue high standards for the academic performance success of all students under their charge.

Expansive governance means standing with principals who succeed only by bending and breaking rules in a system that routinely undermines its own stated mission, extending the full reach of the city’s cultural and learning institutions to every child, and rejecting cowardly thinking disguised as realism. Audacious leadership demands courage without illusion, the kind that understands there is no rhetorical compromise capable of justifying the continued educational suffering produced by present conditions.

History is unambiguous: those who acted audaciously knew there was no turning back, no big pay-day for children harming behaviors, no political deal to be struck, no softening narrative to be offered for injustice. We will soon learn whether these words, expansive and audacious, were merely elegant sounds delivered in a speech, or a governing promise finally kept for the most educationally disenfranchised and dismissed children of New York City.

Michael A. Johnson is a former NYC public school teacher, award-winning principal, and school district superintendent. A past adjunct professor of science education and the author of two books on school-building leadership, he writes frequently about educational equity, policy, authentic school improvement, and the moral obligations of those entrusted with the lives of children.

Why Principals Must Not Confuse Morally, Ethically, and Pedagogically Guided Dissent With Malicious Mission-Undermining Behaviors

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Facing resistance is not an anomaly for highly effective school-building leaders; it is an expected condition of the work.

One piece of superintendent advice I routinely offered principals navigating school-building people-personality challenges was this:

“As the principal, by design of the profession, you are already the centrally casted aloneness character in the public-education show; so don’t do and say things that will make you even more alone and isolated in the school building.”

The work is isolating enough without compounding it through avoidable leadership missteps, especially the misstep of confusing principled dissent with malicious mission-undermining behavior.

That confusion has quietly derailed more promising principals, and more school improvement efforts, than most leadership preparation programs are willing to acknowledge.

What SUPERVISION Really Means

There is a practical reason the school-based administrator’s role is called SUPERVISION. It implies the capacity to see beyond ordinary vision, beyond where a school currently exists (and sometimes comfortably underperforms), toward where it is capable of performing at its optimal best.

This is not abstract optimism. It is disciplined foresight, grounded in evidence, strategic planning, and moral purpose.

SUPERVISION allows principals to:

• Hold uncompromisingly high expectations for both students and the adults entrusted with their learning, as well as their emotional and physical well-being

• Recognize unrealized, but improvable instructional capacity within the school’s teaching personnel and deliberately cultivate it; ultimately, the work of public education is always about the quality of instruction

• Surface and address questions or concerns early, before ambiguity, misinformation, or uncertainty hardens into resistance

• Anticipate the sources, motivations, and mechanisms of resistance in their proto-operational stages, long before they calcify into organized opposition

• Enforce school-wide, efficacious adult accountability to safeguard the non-negotiable principle of protected instructional time and high-quality learning conditions for all students

This is not brutish managerial authority. It is a compassion-based, moral, instructional, and professional stewardship practice exercised before a crisis of disunity takes hold. And because this school leadership work is so demanding, and so human orientated, it means that principals must be fundamentally motivated by LOVE: love of people, love of the school, and love of the overarching academic-achievement mission entrusted to their care.

It is intentional leadership foresight, thinking deliberately about the beginning, functional middle, and end-product results of how any potentially challenging idea is introduced, moves through, and ultimately reshapes both the school’s operating systems and its human relational environment.

It is having the disciplined capacity to see yourself and your entire staff as one team, pursuing a shared, championship-level mission, while fully accounting for human frailty, including your own. It requires anticipating where that frailty may surface and deliberately creating the conditions for it to be addressed, corrected, and strengthened, rather than being denied, ignored, or punished.

This SUPERVISIONARY vantage point is essential because schools, contrary to the untrained and often unprofessional external gaze, are extraordinarily complex organizations. They are filled with personal psychological histories, converging and disjoining alliances, individual life ambitions, competing needs, and multiple legitimate interests operating simultaneously, all within the same proscribed timeframes, physical spaces, finite resources, and under the stewardship of one single principal.

Leadership decisions made in this context will almost never be universally popular. Principals, therefore, can only strive to do the greatest possible good while causing the least amount of possible harm, and to do so with sincere concern, moral clarity, and ethically enriched judgment on behalf of every member of the school building family.

Which leads us to an essential distinction.

Being “Liked” Is Not the Same as Being Trusted

From a superintendent’s lens, this distinction is not merely semantic; it is leadership competency diagnostic and evaluative.

It is not uncommon, for example, for a teacher to urge a principal to impose disciplinary consequences on a student with a disability that exceed what is permitted under special-education disciplinary law or, it will directly contradict the protections and interventions stipulated in the student’s Individualized Education Program (IEP).

No serious or sane school administrator purposely wants staff members to be unhappy. But staff happiness cannot always be the decision-making objective when that “happiness” would compromise a student’s educational rights, undermine instructional access, or violate codified legal and regulatory mandates.

In such cases, the principal’s obligation is not to appease adult frustration, but to protect the student’s learning rights, faithfully follow the law, and uphold the integrity of the principalship, and yes, to avoid unnecessarily testing the patience of your superintendent.

When a parent rightfully seeks an appeal under these circumstances, no superintendent, whose time, credibility, and authority have been needlessly expended, can support or sustain a decision that is legally indefensible, ethically unsound, and pedagogically harmful.

These (IEP violations) are among the most easily avoidable, self-inflicted errors of the principalship, and they are precisely the kind that drive superintendents crazy, not because they are complex, but because they are so easily preventable. And yet, principals continue to make these types of career-harming mistakes.

This type of bad decision-making incident is not a failure of compassion; it is a failure of judgment. Appeasement may feel humanely good in the moment, but legality, access-equity, instructional, and institutional integrity must always prevail (as well as not annoying your superintendent).

Highly Effective Principals Understand:

• Leadership is not an exercise in appeasement, nor does it require compromising core values or organizational objectives.

• Collaboration and consensus are both powerful leadership tools, but not universal solutions. When misapplied or overused, they can delay necessary action, dilute purpose, and ultimately undermine positive outcomes.

• Surface popularity is not evidence of effectiveness; in some cases, it signals a school leader’s avoidance of making hard, discomforting decisions, the very daily, high-stakes school-building judgments that a true school-based leadership practice demands.

True trust is not built through superficial agreement or blind chain-of-command obedience, nor is it earned through insincere or unprincipled acts of staff-members surrender. It is built through respect for leadership clarity, consistency, and courage, especially when decisions are difficult, contested, stretch the staff, or are unpopular.

True trust is established when a school community comes to collectively believe that even when leadership decisions are uncomfortable or challenge the way things have traditionally been done; those decisions are being made in service of a clear, student-centered mission, applied consistently and faithfully over time.

And further, your rating-supervisor superintendent is not asking, “Do your people like you?”
They are asking:
“Will your people trust you to lead them, especially when the path forward, or even the end-of-the-journey objective, is not immediately clear or agreeable to everyone?”

Know this, Principal: popularity and likeability, depending on the issue, the context, and who in the school building is helped or less helped by your decision, can arrive quickly and fade just as fast, sometimes within the very same school week.

Trust and Respect, however, endure. Even when a school family member does not “like” your decision; trust and respect, often unspoken in the raw-feelings moment, settles in over time when people recognize that the decision you made was principled, ethically grounded, student-centered, and consistently applied.

Principled Dissent vs. Mission-Undermining Behavior

This is where many principals get themselves into unnecessary trouble.
Morally, ethically, and pedagogically guided dissent is not inherently disloyal, nor is it an act of leadership defiance. More often, it is a sign of professional seriousness and authentic instructional commitment. Principled dissent is acceptable, and valuable, when it is:

• Grounded in improved student learning and principles of equity or equality access

• Qualitatively and quantitatively outcomes-based, rather than rooted in personal preference, discomfort, or “this is not how we’ve always done it”

• Expressed respectfully and professionally, recognizing that every initiative has a human author attached to it; principals must therefore establish clear norms and rubrical expectations for raising principled objections

• Focused on system improvement, consistently tethered to the essential question: Does this action move us closer to, or further away from, the school’s overarching academic achievement mission?

• Willing to move beyond critique and actively engage in problem-solving, solution-building, and collaborative “how-can-we-make-this-work” efforts

By contrast, malicious mission-undermining behavior is not dissent, it is organizational sabotage. This behavior often emerges from, and reveals itself through:

• Fear of change masquerading as thoughtful or righteous opposition

• A commitment to preserving the unworkable status quo at all costs

• Public disparagement without constructive analysis or evaluative intent

• Quiet oppositional noncompliance disguised as false “concerns”

• Critical conversations occurring in staff lounges rather than professional forums

• Cynicism, misinformation, or the recruitment and organization of oppositional factions

• Personal grievance or animosity repackaged as moral, ethical, or professional objections

• Refusal to accept accountability paired with a distorted claim of professional autonomy

At the surface level, principled dissent and mission-undermining behavior may sound similar. But their origin, intent, and impact are demonstrably different.
The principal’s responsibility is not to eliminate disagreement or deny it. It is to discern it accurately, manage it deliberately, and direct it into a structured, accountable, dialogical space, where the end product is always improved quality teaching and learning for students.

Silencing principled dissent weakens a school and opens it to possible underperformance across multiple operational domains; on the other hand, tolerating and enabling mission sabotaging behaviors will absolutely destroy a school’s capacity to be any version of the best performing iteration of itself.

The Principalship Burden: Act With Discernment, Not Defensiveness

Principals must exercise a high level of emotionally intelligent leadership maturity in order to:

• Separate ego injury intent from legitimate critique

• Evaluate dissent on pedagogical merit, not tone or delivery

• Distinguish truth-telling from trouble-making

• Channel disagreement into professional, accountable structures

• Focus on the corrective value of the message, not the messenger

This level of discernment is not instinctive. It is a form of practiced emotional intelligence, and it must be operationalized even when you do not feel like it, or when your positional authority might suggest that you do not have to.
Leadership maturity is revealed not when authority is unchallenged, but when it is tested.

How Highly Effective Principals Lead Through Resistance Without Abdicating Authority

Resistance should neither be ignored nor reflexively punished. It must be diagnosed, addressed, and responded to proportionately and professionally.
Too often, principals expend disproportionate energy managing staff members who openly raise legitimate questions, while overlooking those who remain silent in meetings but quietly plan to undermine the successful implementation of the new effort. Many leadership failures could be prevented by addressing misunderstandings early, before resistance hardens into passive sabotage.

Effective principals always use a calibrated response to receiving uncomfortable information. This is an essential skill to master, because much of a principal’s day, and much of the information they receive, is problem-solving-centered. A principal is in serious trouble when staff, students, or parents begin withholding critical information because:

• They fear the principal’s reaction (including nonverbal responses), or

• They have become so disengaged from the school’s mission that they no longer believe raising concerns is worth the effort

Both conditions signal a breakdown in trust, and both will seriously undermine any school improvement possibilities.

The Principal’s Resistance Response Ladder

Level 1: Active Listening to the Point of Understanding (Diagnostic Phase)
Purpose: Determine the true source and content of the dissenting concern.
Principals engage in calm, private dialogue, asking clarifying questions without assuming bad intent. The principal restates the concern to ensure accurate understanding of the dissenting concern being expressed.

At this stage, resistance often stems from confusion, fear, a shift in authority, workload pressure, or misinformation. Listening here does not signal agreement, it signals professionalism, respect, and leadership discipline.

Level 2: Clarifying Process, Expectations, and End-Product Objectives (Alignment Phase)
Purpose: Remove ambiguity and establish shared clarity.
At this stage, the principal restates the intentionality of the initiative being introduced and explicitly checks for alignment with dissenting staff member(s). The work here is to move the conversation from reactive resistance to a shared, student-centered purpose.

The principal deliberately rearticulates why the initiative exists and what success looks like, shifting the discussion away from immediate emotional reaction and toward collective professional responsibility.

For example, in response to resistance to a new (actual scenario) instructional initiative designed to help students master extended-response prompts on standardized exams, a principal might share the following during a discussion with dissenting staff member(s).
Doing so immediately shifts the conversation away from personal preferences, including the principal’s and into a professional, quantifiable, evidence-based rationale for introducing the initiative, allowing the principal to authentically convey, without ever stating: “this is not about me, and it is bigger than both of us.”

The Principal:

“This strategic initiative emerged from the history department’s analysis of student extended-response answers on state assessments, which revealed a consistent pattern: students often demonstrated strong conceptual understanding, yet were ‘giving away points’ because they struggled to express that understanding clearly and coherently in an essay format.”

The issue, therefore, was not only about “helping the English department,” nor about “forcing other content-area teachers to teach spelling, punctuation, and grammar.” Rather, it was about expanding students’ ability to communicate mastery through structured academic writing, a skill required across all disciplines and essential for success on standardized assessments.

The Principal Continues:

“We are probably in agreement that students must perform better on open-ended essay responses on standardized exams. The purpose of this initiative is to ensure that all students in the school can ‘nail the essay format.’ Here is how every department, including mathematics, can support that outcome. When mathematics teachers say, ‘spelling and English don’t count’ when students are asked to explain their answers, that sends a counter-message that undermines our ‘nailing the essay’ initiative. Instead, mathematics teachers should insist on complete and correct written explanations using ELA standards. This reinforces student success in ELA courses, strengthens the ‘nailing the essay’ initiative, and improves students’ ability to explain reasoning on math exams as well. Together, this raises accountability, coherence, and instructional quality across the entire school.”

(And, in direct response to the mission-undermining act of departmental, selfish, siloed thinking, not uncommon in high schools, the principal might further clarify)

“We are organized into academic departments to improve instructional efficiency and efficacy, deepen professional teaching expertise, and strengthen curriculum, pacing and formal assessment planning. But our departments are not independent organizational silos competing for pedagogical advantage. We are one school, responsible for delivering one coherent, high-quality learning experience for all students. When students are required to write clearly, explain their reasoning, and communicate their thinking in every classroom, they are not being burdened, they are being properly prepared.”

This reframing makes clear that the initiative is not a departmental imposition, but a school-wide commitment to instructional coherence, one that will serve students across all content areas rather than the interests or preferences of any single department.

This explanation intentionally shifts the narrative from “this is what the principal wants” to “this is what we, as a school community, must do collectively to strengthen and empower our students.”

It reinforces that school-wide improvement efforts are not principalship pet projects, nor favors to a single department, but a collective commitment to excellence grounded in professional ethics and student need.

At Level 2, the principal explicitly connects the new initiative to evidence-based, non-negotiable expectations by emphasizing:

• Letting evidence guide instructional practice and initiative decision-making, rather than personal preference

• Professional ethics and instructional responsibility superseding individual comfort or habit, which ultimately raises academic standards for all students

• Information-sharing, supportive assistance, and capacity-building as the leadership objective—not coercive compliance

• Improved student performance outcomes across all subject-area state and national assessments

• Cross-disciplinary coherence, reinforcing that everyone has a stake in the initiative’s success

• Unity of purpose, affirming that the school operates as one system with one overarching academic-achievement mission

When done well, and when received fairly, thoughtfully, and professionally, this phase replaces confusion with clarity, suspicion with coherence, and fragmented effort with shared resolve.

Alignment at this level does not require agreement on every tactic. Principals must always remain open to improvement-strategy suggestions. However, it does require agreement on purpose, expectations, and outcomes.

Even in an era where individuals may claim subjective “personal truths” or realities, the principal must insist, both for themselves and for others, on the disciplined use of objective, qualitative and quantitative analysis in problem-solving and decision-making. This evidence-based approach is essential to guiding the school toward high operational effectiveness and sustained educational performance.

Schools can only improve academically through studied evidence agreement, not personal opinion.

That is how principals transform resistance rooted in confusion into professional commitment anchored in mission.

Level 3: Active, Positive Support for Compliance (Capacity-Building Phase)
Purpose: Address legitimate barriers while maintaining expectations.

At this stage, principals introduce supports that make success more likely, without lowering standards. The intent is to remove skill, knowledge, or resource barriers that may be contributing to resistance, while making clear that expectations remain intact.

Examples of appropriate supports include:

• Targeted professional development aligned to the initiative

• One-on-one instructional coaching for individual teachers or teams

• Lesson-plan development assistance tied directly to expected practices

• Relevant instructional resources and materials

• Modeling and mentoring by a mathematics teacher who has successfully integrated the initiative into their classroom practice

• Providing math journals to integrate mathematical reasoning with ELA writing structures

• Offering students structured extra credit opportunities connected to math journaling

• Expanding the use of rigorous mathematical word problems that require written explanations

• ELA teachers intentionally incorporating mathematical contexts, such as biographical or analytical writing assignments connected to mathematicians or problem-solving scenarios

• Using student journals diagnostically to assess conceptual and algorithmic understanding during mathematical problem-solving

Principals may also provide instructional-practice theory readings on related topics, such as George Pólya’s work on liguistical framing in mathematical problem solving, and Vygotsky’s linkage between language and thinking, to demonstrate how literacy structures strengthen mathematical reasoning, and how mathematical reasoning, in turn, deepens language arts development.

The goal at Level 3 is to close resistance gaps caused by misinformation, skill deficits, or under-preparation. Only after these supports are provided can a principal accurately and fairly distinguish inability from unwillingness.

Throughout this phase, principals must remain focused on keeping the main leadership objective the main thing: the principal’s work is not to win arguments, but to win pedagogical allies, to protect instructional integrity, maintain adult efficacy and accountability, and advance student learning without surrendering authority or moral clarity.

Principals do not lead schools to be right.
They lead schools to get the highest level of teaching and learning right, across the entire school and for all cohorts of students.

Level 4: Monitor and Document (Accountability Phase)
Purpose: Verify follow-through and protect instructional integrity.

Once expectations have been clarified and appropriate supports have been provided, the principal’s responsibility shifts from persuasion to verification. At this stage, monitoring is not punitive, it is professionally corrective.
Principals engage in:

• Targeted classroom observations aligned to the stated initiative or expectation

• Evidence collection tied directly to agreed-upon practices, student work, and instructional outcomes

• Accurate documentation of what is occurring, what has improved, and what has not
Documentation serves multiple essential purposes. It, protects students, by ensuring instructional commitments are actually delivered

• Protects staff, by creating clarity and fairness around expectations and feedback

• Protects the institution and the principal, by establishing a factual record grounded in observable practice rather than opinion

Level 5: Address Noncompliance Directly (Authority Phase)

After you have done all that can reasonably be done as a considerate listener, carefully answering questions, addressing concerns within reason, soliciting constructive suggestions, and thoughtfully allocating appropriate professional-development resources, you must now stand fully in your leadership responsibility.
When you have listened carefully, clarified expectations, and exhausted every appropriate coaching and support option, there comes a moment when leadership requires resolve. It is time to take a stand.

At this point, standing firm is not stubbornness; it is stewardship stick-to-itiveness. It signals clarity of purpose, respect for students’ right to a high-quality learning experience, and fidelity to the school’s mission. You should feel no sense of satisfaction or “glee” in this moment, but you should feel professionally comfortable exercising principalship authority when the situation requires it. If that professional and appropriate comfort with exercising principalship authority does not exist within you, then school-building administration may not be your proper calling.

Purpose: To interrupt persistent resistance with calm clarity and principled resolve.
When monitoring reveals that noncompliance continues, despite clear expectations and adequate support, the principal must act decisively. This is the moment where authority is exercised without hesitancy, without hostility, and without apology.
At this phase, principals must:

• Name the noncompliance explicitly, referencing specific behaviors, actions, or omissions

• Anchor decisions and language in established policy, contractual provisions, and evaluation criteria, not personal preference, hurt feelings, or bitter resentments

• Repeat or reconfigure targeted coaching and professional-development supports, where appropriate, without lowering expectations

• Restate expectations clearly, including timelines for correction and the consequences of continued noncompliance

This conversation must always be:

• Centered in professional ethics, and commitment to the school’s mission

• Calm, professional, standards-based, and factual

• Free of labeling, shaming, or name-calling

• Absent emotional escalation or moral grandstanding

• Focused on practice, professionalism, and impact—not personality

At Level 5, the principal is no longer persuading. The principal is protecting instructional integrity, adult accountability, and student learning.

At this phase, principals are confirming whether resistance has dissipated through clarity and support, or whether it has persisted despite them. Monitoring makes patterns visible, separating isolated missteps from chronic noncompliance. Time/Date and contextual-context documentation of all observations.

At this stage, principals are no longer asking whether the work will be done. They are clarifying how and when compliance will occur, and what happens if it does not.
This is not authoritarian leadership. It is a moral institutional stewardship practice exercised in defense of students and the school’s mission.

Level 6: Formal Intervention (Due-Process Phase)
Purpose: Safeguard the school’s mission through lawful and ethical process.
If noncompliance persists beyond direct intervention, the principal is obligated to move into formal processes, not as retaliation, but as school mission protection actions.
At this level, principals:

• Engage and know well labor contractual language and stipulated procedures

• Consult with a senior peer colleague/mentor, or a district-level supervisor

• Seek the counsel of the district’s legal counsel as required

• Initiate formal improvement plans, disciplinary procedures, or corrective action consistent with contract and law

• Maintain strict confidentiality, professionalism, and procedural integrity

This Level 6 phase, even when it involves nothing more than a formal warning letter and/or a written ‘improvement of professional practice’ plan, requires precision. Errors in operational steps, incomplete documentation, or procedural missteps when applying disciplinary measures can be costly: to students, to staff, and to the principal’s credibility. For that reason, principals should not “go there” unless all other reasonable options have been fully exhausted.

Due process is not optional. It is both a systemic legal safeguard, and a leadership ethical obligation.

Importantly, reaching this level often reflects a leadership practice grounded in human development, not punitive revenge impulses. Allowing persistent, counterproductive resistance to a school-wide initiative to go unchecked is far more damaging to the institution than invoking a formal compliance process when it is warranted.

Level 7: Leadership Reflection (Praxis Phase)

Purpose: Strengthen leadership learning and practice without lowering expectations.
The ladder does not end with employee compliance or discipline. It ends with authentic leadership praxis.

Principals and their school leadership teams must engage in honest, disciplined reflection on questions such as:

• What did the introduction of this initiative teach us about our school and our school family members (SFMs)?

• What did the resistance reveal about communication clarity gaps at the outset?

• Where and why did pushback occur, and what could we have anticipated or handled better?

• Was the timing and pacing developmentally and professionally appropriate?

• How effectively was the new system designed, rolled out, and operationalized?

• Which professional development supports, material resources, or structural supports need strengthening?

• What early dissent signals were missed—and how can they be detected sooner next time?

• Did the initiative produce any unintended consequences or collateral damage?

• Were there unanticipated positive outcomes that should be leveraged moving forward?

• Over time, what are the short-, medium-, and long-term results of the initiative?

This reflection is not about assigning blame, nor is it a revisionist retreat into fantasy thinking. A school-wide learning community must be led by a legitimate learning community of school-building leaders who are themselves committed learners.

Standardized assessments cannot apply only to students, and evaluations cannot apply only to staff members. Expanding leadership growth capacity is a professional obligation of every principal, and a recurring, institutionalized practice characteristic of the highest-performing schools.

This final phase ensures that all forms of resistance, whether quietly passive or openly aggressive, resolved informally or escalated formally, becomes an invaluable source of school-culture intelligence, strengthening both the introductory framing and operational application of future initiatives, while enhancing the institution’s resolve and capacity for continuous improvement.

From a Superintendent’s Perspective

At every level of the ladder, the principal’s work is not to win arguments. It is to win pedagogical allies, protect instructional integrity, maintain adult efficacy and accountability, and advance student learning, without surrendering authority or moral clarity.

That is the principalship practiced at its highest professional and ethical standard.

What Highly Effective Principals Consistently Do When They Encounter Problem-Causing Resistance

Highly effective principals:

• Begin from an assumption of best intentions

• Contextualize resistance thoughtfully, asking: Is it the person? The conditions? Or something in my own leadership?

• Maintain relational trust and respect without surrendering expectations

• Address resistance early and professionally, before it hardens into opposition

• Escalate responses proportionately rather than emotionally

• Separate empathy for people from tolerance of practices that harm students

• Lead adults through discomfort without destabilizing the school or diluting the mission

• Keep the problem from ending up on their superintendent’s desk; resistance is not the problem; mismanaging that resistance is a problem.

Principalship excellence is not demonstrated by the absence of resistance, but by the moral authority and disciplined capacity to lead through it effectively.

Final Reflection

Principals are not appointed to ensure 100 percent staff approval for every decision, something I never witnessed in an eleven-year principalship. They are, however, appointed to effectively lead and manage staff, protect learning conditions, enforce standards, and steward the school toward its reachable academic-achievement mission.

Morally, ethically, and pedagogically guided dissent is one of the final safeguards against institutional underperformance drift, whether that drift emerges from low expectations (among staff, for students, or both), diminished efficacy, cynical civil-service complacency, or the inevitable reality that, at times, a principal gets something wrong: introducing a new idea without sufficient preparation, underestimating its impact on people, or failing to anticipate unintended consequences. The principal is a supervisor, but is never super-omnipotent.

Principled dissent allows schools to frame implementation plans thoughtfully, monitor impact honestly, and, when necessary, course-correct before harm becomes normalized and operationalized, a defining characteristic of chronically underperforming institutions.

Principals who understand this do not fear dissent. They lead it, shape it, and learn from it.

And principals must remember this: you will need to work with that dissenting staff member after the immediate situation has passed. What will that professional relationship look like in the near future, and over time? Will it mature into a productive working partnership in service of student learning, or calcify into lasting bad feelings division?

Those principals who mistake forced compliance for coherent agreement, and fearful silence for invested commitment, eventually learn the hard way, when initiatives collapse under the weight of unspoken truths.

Children deserve principals who lead with unquestionable integrity, discern with compassion, reason with strategic clarity, close knowledge and capacity gaps, and do so with the patient grace of a competently skilled, confidently grounded, highly valued school-building leader, one singularly focused on the success of the school rather than personal validation or vindication.

Wise school leaders ultimately understand this truth:
When the school wins, that is the only way the principal truly wins, personally and professionally.

Michael A. Johnson is a former NYC public school teacher, award-winning principal, and school district superintendent. A past adjunct professor of science education and the author of two books on school-building leadership, he writes frequently about educational equity, policy, authentic school improvement, and the moral obligations of those entrusted with the lives of children.

Winning NYC’s Affordability Fight Is Impossible Without Public School Accountability

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When public schools fail to educate with integrity and accountability, families are priced out of the future.

When a city’s school system fails to deliver high-quality education to its most educationally, politically, and economically disenfranchised students, and does so without intentional, effective integrity or, no possibility of facing the threat of meaningful consequences for failure; the families of those children, and the communities in which they live, pay severe and permanent costs.

Those costs are psychological, financial, and social, paid through diminished opportunity, eroded trust, and the stolen hope public education is meant to make possible for all students: real, meaningful generational leaps in the quality of their lives. Any city will remain unaffordable, generation after generation, for families whose children are denied access to the kind of rigorous, accountable education that breaks cycles of poverty rather than reproduces them, regardless of zip code, socioeconomic status, immigration status, race, or nationality.

No city, state, or nation can sustainably outperform, economically or otherwise, the level of educational quality it is willing to invest in all of the children under its care. I learned this lesson viscerally years ago, sitting in my principal’s conference room, when I posed a blunt question to a visiting international delegation of senior public-education officials: Why travel halfway around the world to visit a 99.9 percent Black and Latino, Title I urban American high school?

The answer, delivered with striking honesty, left no room for ambiguity. I paraphrase, but not the intent: “To fully develop our country, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), we must close the quality gap between our rural and urban schools. National strength depends on educating every child to their highest potential.” They had studied our work, referencing the New York Times (“Scores Count,” Sept. 8, 1996), and noted something they found instructive: students who entered our high school with significant academic deficiencies were graduating four years later performing at high academic levels.

That PRC delegation was operating with a clarity of purpose too often missing from American debates about “school improvement,” what they described simply as “seeking truth from facts.” Their thinking echoed the famous words of former Chinese Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping: It doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or yellow, as long as it catches mice. In other words, results matter. And nations serious about their future do not knowingly leave large segments of their children educationally underdeveloped and then expect long-term economic prosperity, innovation, or social stability to follow.

The history lesson here is unambiguous. Societies that deliberately deny any group of children, by race, gender, geography, or circumstance, access to a rigorous and empowering public education are choosing chronic underdevelopment across every sphere of civic life. Economic vitality weakens. Scientific and medical advancement slows. Cultural and artistic innovation withers. The tremendous human potential necessary for national progress is squandered.

Replacing educational opportunity with missed-opportunity incarceration is neither a sound economic strategy nor a defensible educational one. A prison industry fed by failed public schooling outcomes is a moral failure masquerading as public policy. With courageous civic leadership and sustained determination, public school systems can move beyond models that tolerate mediocrity for some children while reserving excellence for others.

Moral, ethical, intellectual, and technical capacities do not emerge by accident. They are built, child by child, class by class, school by school, through a compassionate but uncompromising commitment to high expectations, instructional excellence, and equal access to opportunity. But accountability must be real. It must be shared, and it must be tied to meaningful consequences, not borne solely by students, parents, and the communities with the least political protection.

Public school systems cannot serve two masters. Schools must be places where children’s learning is the non-negotiable priority, not adult employment agencies protected from the outcomes they produce. At the very least, parents and taxpayers deserve honesty about which path has been chosen. Without that truth, what passes for “reform” is little more than the rationalization of failure.

And as long as a city is willing to accept devastating public education outcomes for its least politically connected and least protected children, that city will remain unaffordable for them, generation after generation, regardless of who occupies City Hall.

Michael A. Johnson is a former NYC public school teacher, award-winning principal, and school district superintendent. A past adjunct professor of science education and the author of two books on school-building leadership, he writes frequently about educational equity, policy, authentic school improvement, and the moral obligations of those entrusted with the lives of children.