Whether We Know It or Not, Someone Is Always Watching and Learning—We Are Extremely Impactful Influencers, Teachers, and Role Models

Posted on by

If you are an African American leader at any level or in any capacity and experience any sense of joy, or even disinterested neutrality regarding the tragedy involving the Michigan football coach; then, leadership responsibility and accountability require a pause to examine what you truly stand for, and which ethical virtues and values are shaping your moral compass.

Part of the Black Leadership Required Reading List Must Include the Works of Frantz Fanon

Any serious Black leadership practice must include a required reading list, particularly for those preparing to lead schools, athletic teams, organizations, institutions, movements, or communities shaped by, and still being harmed by, historical and contemporary systems of domination, denigration, and exploitation. That reading list must include the foundational works of Frantz Fanon.

These texts are not merely historical artifacts. They are diagnostic tools, essential for understanding power, collective and individual psychological pathologies, the healthy psychology of self-affirmation and resistance, and the moral costs of oppression on both the colonized and the colonizer.

What you hold sacred is what you love.
And what you love is what you are willing to fight for.

At a minimum, that canon should include:

• Black Skin, White Masks
A searing examination of racialized identity formation, internalized oppression, and the psychological violence inflicted by white supremacy, essential reading for leaders who must understand how domination reshapes their own self-perception and social behavior.

• A Dying Colonialism
A critical study of how colonized peoples transform culturally, politically, and psychologically in the act of resistance, revealing that liberation is not only political, but also deeply human and profoundly healing for those deemed to be the “wretched of the earth.”

• The Wretched of the Earth
Fanon’s most uncompromising and comprehensive work on decolonization, power, violence, and moral responsibility. This book should be required reading for leaders who must grapple honestly with the authentic costs of freedom, justice, equality, and complete societal transformational change.

• Toward the African Revolution
A collection that connects theory to praxis, challenging leaders to move beyond rhetoric toward disciplined, ethically grounded action in the struggle for collective liberation, which remains the only true path to individual liberation.

Together, these works force leaders to confront uncomfortable truths:
that oppression is not only structural, but psychological, including our own psychology;

that who we choose to love is not random;
that standards of beauty are not produced solely by internal preference;
that personal and political liberation are inseparable;
and that both demand courage, clarity, and sacrifice.

They also remind us that moral neutrality in the face of injustice is itself a form of complicity.

For Black leaders, whether leading a Little League team, a school, a nonprofit, or an international corporation, there must be a commitment to authentic self-liberation, an ethical leadership practice, and both internal and external transformational change.

Don’t get lost in the glitter and noise.
Stay focused.
Stay disciplined.
Keep the main thing the main thing.
Make the next generation’s work easier.

Let’s be clear: shared skin is not shared struggle. All skinfolk are not automatically good struggle-partnership kinfolk. Under the daily pressures of domination, building healthy, reliable relationships is difficult. But ultimately, staying with the Michigan football metaphor, your team is your team, and clarity about that existential truth is itself an act of leadership courage.
Leadership wisdom demands discernment, because mistaking racial identity proximity for solidarity, a mistake I have made throughout my life, can be a costly error.

Fanon ultimately warns us that the gravest danger facing oppressed people is not only the violence of external domination, but the internalization of that domination, when the oppressed begin to police their own imagination and direct their deepest desires in the most self-harming, self-rejecting ways. In doing so, they narrow their sense of what is possible and mistake unaccountable accommodation for love. The danger, Fanon reminds us, is not merely seeking freedom, but unconsciously dreaming of replacing the oppressor rather than removing the system that produced him.

Authentic, correct, ideologically grounded, and psychologically healthy Black leadership does not cheer the ugly and disgusting behaviors of P. Diddy, nor does it celebrate the public spectacle or profit-driven amplification of those behaviors by Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson. Both actions distract from and ultimately undermine—our collective capacity to progress toward genuine freedom.

Leadership, then, is not about proximity to power or personal advancement; it is about refusing psychic colonization and modeling freedom in real time, every day, in our real lives.

If we truly understand Fanon, we know this: our children are not only watching what we say and do; we are teaching them how to see, how to love, or not love—themselves, how to resist, or submit to, cultural aggression, and ultimately how to imagine a future beyond societally imposed limitations.

That is the weight of leadership. That is why neutrality is a lie. And the claim that “how I live my personal life is my business” is also a lie. Leadership is public, formative, and consequential. That is why the work must always be done with discipline, courage, and moral clarity, knowing that we are always teaching by how we live.

If the New NYC Mayor Truly Wants System-Wide Quality Learning, He Must See Through the Fog of the Fake “Class Size” Misdirection War

Posted on by

Ask any principal: “Is a class size of twenty students better than a class size of thirty students?” The answer you will probably get from most principals is, “Yes, absolutely!”—especially when class size impacts underperforming students and those who are struggling to meet conceptual and skills performance standards.

But then ask the question in a different way: “Would you rather have an experienced and proven master teacher teach a class of thirty students, or a less-than-stellar, not-meeting-the-instructional-quality-standards teacher instruct a class of twenty students?” You might get a different answer—and I know which option I would, and did, take.

As a high school principal, in organizing two departmental courses—9th-grade Algebra and 9th-grade English Language Arts—I placed my “weakest” students (based on transcript and 4th/8th-grade standardized testing scores) in classes of twenty with some of the strongest and most masterly skilled teachers; and I offset the cost by programming larger student class-size numbers in my advanced junior–senior-level classes and in my Advanced Placement (AP) courses.

So, I am the last to say that class size does not matter, because from a principal’s strategic vision to make it possible for all students to succeed in a system structured to only make a few entitled students academically successful, one of those leadership tools that must be used is to absolutely manipulate class size—and it works—as was reported in The New York Times (“Scores Count,” Sara Mosle, September 8, 1996), where a former student who was interviewed was from that coming-from-middle-school, underperforming and below-grade-level cohort; that student went on to take Physics and other advanced courses as a senior.

Therefore, strategically and contextually, class size will always matter, but it should never be considered a substitute for high-quality instruction and dedicated, efficacious practices.

This politically popularized, but pedagogically shallow and falsely binary, “either/or” framing of the class-size question is beneath serious professional debate and actively undermines the learning needs of real students in real schools. Well-informed policymakers and professional educators should instead be engaged in a rigorous, system-level conversation about how class size is deployed strategically—by different schools, grade band, subject area, academic course requirements (e.g., CTE classes), developmental psychology, student need, instructional capability strength, and the overarching school mission—across the entire PreK–12 continuum.

This standardized political approach of, “Well, we don’t know what to do, so let’s just do something that sounds right—and that we can sell to parents and taxpayers as if it will truly and significantly raise student academic achievement,” when in fact these chronically ineffective actions only succeed in wasting a great deal of money (millions) and squandering the precious learning windows of opportunity for thousands of children at all academic performance levels.

With every new mayoral change, the consultants, educational businesses, and those lobbying for someone other than children—who have no lobbyist—come out of the woodwork to “love bomb” and create a fog of confusion around the new mayor, all claiming that what they want (as opposed to what they really want and won’t say, which is a lucrative contract or more dues-paying members) is in the best interest of children, when what they want has no intention of helping children—especially those children in the city who will benefit the least, or not at all, from these expensive but useless initiatives.

Many (I won’t name them out of respect for the very dedicated employees involved) Title 1 school districts—destinations North, South, East, and West in our country—have some of the lowest class-size numbers in the nation; and yet these very high per-pupil-allocation districts don’t see their lower class sizes translate into higher academic-achievement performance, particularly for their most (usually the majority) politically disenfranchised children of color. We can’t blame this on direct racism, although an indirect neocolonial case could be made, because the primary governance officials—the local, state, and federal elected officials, and the district and school administrators—primarily share the same racial and cultural heritage as the vast number of chronically underreaching proficiency-level students. So, what’s up with that?

In the electoral-political sphere, it’s the economy (affordability); in public education, it’s the quality of instruction!

No school or school district (and the New York City Department of Education is technically a school district) can create significant, demonstrative, all-lives-changing, and sustainable high student academic performance—and I’m not talking about the press-kit fiddling with a few percentage-point “improvements” generated by averaging the higher-performing students with the lowest-performing students (like averaging my salary with Jeff Bezos’s salary and then calling me a multi-millionaire)—without establishing an extensive culture of high levels of instructional quality that the child receives year-grade after year-grade and when moving from class to class in middle and high schools.

I am hoping—and every speech I have heard from Zohran Mamdani suggests that my hope is not in vain—that he is smart enough to ignore the peddling pedagogical merchants who want to enrich themselves and not the educational experience of children. Many of these undereducated children are the very ones most in need of a high-quality public educational experience to break them out of a generational cycle of poverty and disappointment.

I am also betting my hope on the fact that two schools Mr. Mamdani attended, and that I visited several times—Bank Street School for Children and The Bronx High School of Science—were schools where the City’s elected officials, parents, school administrators, and the governing oversight bodies had little tolerance for a second-rate, not-properly-preparing-students-for-the-next-level, and terribly inferior educational learning climate. These two schools efficaciously did whatever it took to make their students successful.

Once, a NYC Specialized High School (SHS) principal colleague/friend called me about an African American teacher I was mentoring and had written a letter of recommendation for, who was now seeking a transfer from her present Manhattan high school to the SHS. The principal asked, “She is a great teacher, but does she know what she is in for?” The principal did not need to explain what that “what she is in for” statement meant, because I had already met with the teacher and had a keeping-it-real-honest conversation where I explained, “You will need to operate at your A+ level best every day of school, because those SHS parents are very politically connected, so there is no space for you to show up one day and think you could just ‘phone it in’ with these students” (not that I thought she ever would, but I wanted us to be clear-eyed about this SHS transfer she was seeking). And so, I explained that although she was technically tenured, no labor contract would protect her if she did not teach, as she now does, at a mastery level.

If Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani can simply focus on the types of schools he attended—schools that represented excellent, innovative instructional practices, high expectations for students, and an efficacious teaching model—as a standard offering for every NYC child, then the deceiving or misinformed “class size” whisperers will be ignored and will go away, allowing him to embark on an uncompromising pursuit of realizing school-system-wide instructional excellence.

If the new mayor truly wants system-wide quality learning, he must concentrate on the one policy lever that actually moves student achievement: sustained and high levels of instructional excellence in every classroom. That requires rejecting the fog of the fake “class size” misdirection war and instead embracing the school-cultural imperatives that guide places like the Bank Street School for Children, The Bronx High School of Science, and other NYC Specialized High Schools, and programs that demand, expect, and protect rigorous, next-level-preparing teaching every single day. Their leaders and parents do not tolerate weak instructional products, excuses, or adult-centered diversions, because they operate from a clear ethical directive: children deserve the best, and only the best, educational product we can provide.

If the mayor adopts that same standard for all of NYC’s children, the class-size-type distractions will fall away, the fog will lift, and the city can finally begin the urgent work of building a school system defined not by slogans or classroom seating gimmicks, but by real instructional excellence and authentic student success.

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.

Whence Comes This Spirit of Ungratefulness: Or, Why Can’t We Be Happy When Others Succeed?

Posted on by

Over the last two-plus decades, we public educators have watched—and, in far too many cases, contributed to—the drift of Pre-K and Kindergarten learning objectives toward an overly narrow fixation on teaching literacy and numeracy skills. The profession’s leaders, policymakers, and even many well-meaning practitioners have increasingly pressured early childhood classrooms to function solely as “first-grade readiness factories,” squeezing out the expansive, exploratory, language-rich, creative mind expanding, and imagination-affirming learning environments that Pre-K and Kindergarten children need and deserve.

This trend has been accompanied by the rise—and I would argue the pedagogically indefensible rise—of so-called “gifted and talented” programs at the Pre-K and Kindergarten levels. These initiatives are, in both theory and practice, professionally unethical and fundamentally anti-good pedagogy; they mistake developmental variance for innate genius, parental informal-education push factors for “natural” gifts and talents, and ignore the sociocultural and psychological foundations of early childhood learning, while unfairly sorting children before they have even had a chance to unfold into themselves. (See: Ending Kindergarten Gifted & Talented Screenings Is Right—But It’s a Superficial Political Fix for a Complicated Pedagogical Problem — https://majmuse.net/).

And before any of my former Community School District 29 (Queens, NYC) colleagues or parents call out my hypocrisy, a full confession is required. As superintendent, I pushed an all-grades, district-wide literacy empowerment initiative titled Readers-to-Leaders. I also ramped up elementary mathematics instruction to dramatically increase the number of students prepared to take—and master—algebra by the end of 8th or 9th grade. I dramatically expanded elementary gifted and talented programs across the district. And, of course, these decisions placed intensified academic preparation pressures on our Pre-K and Kindergarten programs.

Further, I must confess that I was perhaps a chief advocate and enthusiastic contributor to this rigorous academic “push-down” approach into the Pre-K and Kindergarten world—installing Applied Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) labs and placing specially trained STEM teachers in several of our early childhood schools and classrooms.
Now that I’ve completed my self-confession and truth-telling, let me return to my larger point.

Because of this rush to push academic rigor down into the Pre-K and Kindergarten grades, what suffered most, curriculum-wise, were those equally essential learning objectives tied to emotional intelligence, social cooperation, sharing and working together, tolerance, patience, and the recognition of the humanity of others. These are the ethical/moral foundational dispositions children are supposed to learn and master in Pre-K and Kindergarten; and yet they were all either seriously diminished or pushed aside completely in service of reaching prematurely accelerated academic goals.

And it shows—particularly on social media platforms, both in the postings themselves and in the responses to them. Now, some of that is due to the zeitgeist (spirit-of-the-era) we live in, where many of our civic, elected, celebrity, athlete, and entertainment figures have elevated “put-down culture” to a required art of communication. This means that speaking or posting kind words, and being encouraging and appreciative of the efforts of others, has been redefined as a weakness. Thus, a vicious cycle has emerged in which dismissive and denigrating talk has become a normal communicative style between human beings, assisted by social media algorithms that are designed to purposely accelerate and spread conflict conversations widely: “If they—real or imagined—clap at me, I must clap back harder and uglier!”

As these platforms have grown in popularity and usage, I have detected, with increasing concern, a general tone of “put-down meanness.” People post comments that, I suspect, they would either be afraid—or, hopefully, ashamed—to say directly to the faces of those who are on the receiving end of their vitriolic missives.

All of the above—Pre-K–Kindergarten curriculum learning objectives, the zeitgeist, and the substance and tone on social media—came to mind recently after I read or listened to, and then reflected on, some of the comments responding to Mr. Mamdani’s tactically successful meeting with Mr. Trump (See: Those Who Wanted a Mamdani–Trump Fight Reveal Their True Priorities—And NYC’s Children Aren’t Among Them —https://majmuse.net/).

I can honestly say that I was not surprised by the negative responses from some on the right (though, in fairness, I was equally surprised by their sudden praise). But I must admit that I was genuinely taken aback by some of the dismissive comments coming from individuals who categorize themselves as “progressive” or “left”—including a major city progressive mayor for whom I hold deep respect, and whom Mr. Mamdani has praised profusely in the past.

So, where were these negative comments from the “progressive/left” coming from?

A lifelong good friend of mine who is a trauma surgeon often accuses me of looking for answers in deep philosophical and political spaces. “Perhaps,” he is fond of saying, “the behaviors we’re observing could actually be responses generated in the limbic system—the pre-analytical, basic emotional, fear-driven, bio-competitive, pleasure-or-anger part of the brain that is naturally inclined toward brutish, selfish pettiness.” Or, as young people have wisely codified and defined it, as the act of “hating.”

Hating Will Not Heal Us!
For example, it is profoundly sad to watch two talented men—one a former governor and the other a soon-to-be former mayor (yes, they possess leadership talents, even if the way they have operationalized those talents could be legitimately questioned)—embark on what can only be described as a public “bitterness tour.” And so, the question becomes: How does that “bitterness tour” help New Yorkers? And my particular area of immense interest: NYC’s school children? And equally important: How does that negatively grounded attitudinal approach help these two men to emotionally and spiritually heal?

There are very few Black school superintendents in this nation who have not faced professional rejection at some point in their careers—even when they were actually doing an excellent job. The real question is: What do leaders do after facing rejection? How about not responding right away? And, after reflecting, then when responding, can’t it be done in a helpful, healthy, emotionally sound, and spiritually grounded way? Why not choose to be a morally ethical leader and avoid hurting people by undermining your successor’s ability to transition effectively? Why lay operational landmines for the person who comes after you—and, by extension, for the very constituents you claim to love?

Perhaps your rejection or dismissal, however painful and unfair it may feel, is actually a disguised opportunity—an invitation to deep self-reflection that can lead to higher levels of personal and professional development. You can come back wiser, stronger, and better. But that cannot happen when you choose revenge, bitterness, or envy as your teachers.

And back to those “hating on” Mr. Mamdani for his success with Mr. Trump folks: let’s go full 1950s Brooklyn Caribbean-American old-school parental wisdom—“If you don’t have something good to say about somebody, then keep your mouth shut!” And how about reviving the fading, lost art of “minding your own business!” Every mayor should run their city the way they see fit. Let Mr. Mamdani lead New York City in the way he believes the moment, the mission, and the moral mandate require.

NYC is unlike any city I’ve visited in the world. A city of eight million—likely closer to nine million when you count those the census misses—would be economically devastated by any major U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency invasion. One can easily imagine the cascading financial collapse: entertainment, restaurants, hotels, local businesses both small and large, the entire tourism industry—all dependent on both the workers and the customers who would disappear in sizable numbers. These interdependent economic spheres would damage and drag each other down in a destructive chain reaction.

The NYC public school system—the largest in the nation—would be equally devastated. As we’ve seen in other cities targeted by aggressive ICE practices, many students-of-color absences would skyrocket to COVID-era proportions. The learning-opportunity windows for countless non-white U.S. citizen children of immigrants would slam shut, some permanently. Effective remediation would require double the amount of money the city currently allocates to public education. And the long-term impact on New York City’s reduced contribution to America’s intellectual competitiveness capacity would be severe—perhaps irreversible for at least a generation.

If I were a member of NYC’s business wealthy cohort, I would spend far less time worrying about Mr. Mamdani’s fair, ethical, but modest tax-generating proposals, and far more time worrying about the astronomical restoration taxes and workforce educational skills deficiencies you will pay for after ICE destroys this city’s economic and human-resource capacity.

Many people of color—since the neighborhoods where they live, not the large white immigrant communities, will be the primary targets of ICE—will stop going to clinics and hospitals. And once that happens, we will see a rise in long-term, severe, and in some cases highly communicable diseases. And of course, not treating these illnesses in a timely way will eventually make them extraordinarily expensive to treat—at least for those who survive ICE’s onslaught.

The only “good news” from this tragic scenario, if one can call it that, is that crime statistics will improve. But that will only occur because large numbers of immigrant or U.S.-citizen people of color will no longer call or report crimes to the police when they themselves are victims. Fear will replace civic trust—and the “good data news” will lie.

Give Mr. Mamdani credit: he understood the White House assignment.

Further, let me return to another old-school value: How about being happy for someone else’s success? Too many pursue the false notion that if another person succeeds, “I’m a loser”—as if success were a limited-quantity commodity that human beings must constantly claw and scratch to acquire. And, even worse, as if the best strategy for obtaining success is not to earn it through effort and excellence, but to sabotage those who are on their way toward it, or those who have already achieved a measure of it. You know—those emotional-intelligence, self-confidence, social-awareness, and appreciation-of-others learning objectives we are supposed to intentionally teach and nurture in young children during the Pre-K and Kindergarten years.

Wait for Your Turn—Your Good Turn Is Coming. In the Meantime, Applaud and Encourage Those Who Are in Their Good-Turn Moment!
But perhaps that is the heart of the matter: somewhere along the path from childhood to adulthood, too many of us forget the very lessons we insist our youngest learners must master. We abandon empathy for spectacle, replace mutually advantageous cooperation with ugly, unfriendly zero-sum competition, and trade emotional maturity for public displays of resentment. Yet cities—especially a city as vast, dynamic, and interdependent as New York—cannot be led by people stuck in the emotional basement of bitterness, envy, or performative outrage. They require leaders, and citizens, who possess the courage to celebrate another person’s success, the humility to learn from it, and the wisdom to understand that every genuine “good acts” victory for one can become an opportunity for all to collectively flourish. In this moment of national fracturing and municipal vulnerability, we would all do well to return to those Pre-K and Kindergarten lessons—and actually live them.

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.

Those Who Wanted a Mamdani–Trump Fight Reveal Their True Priorities—And NYC’s Children Aren’t Among Them

Posted on by

Somewhere around my third year as a principal, I vowed to stop saying, “Now I’ve seen everything!” I’m glad I made that vow, because even in my 11th and final year, I left the principalship still being surprised—by the amazing events, both good and bad, that can unfold when leading an urban high school.

So here I am in my 75th year, watching C-SPAN, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a POTUS throw both the GOP and the DNC under the bus at the same time, in the same press conference.

I can only imagine what some Republicans must be thinking as they watch the same broadcast: “Wait… I built my entire present or future election/reelection campaign on ‘otherizing’ Mr. Mamdani—playing to anti-people-of-color biases, Muslim prejudice, and the widespread ignorance about the difference between communism and democratic socialism (see: https://majmuse.net/2025/11/10/why-so-many-u-s-high-school-graduates-cant-tell-the-difference-between-democratic-socialism-and-communism/). And here is the head of our own party offering praise, adulation, and promises of support for the very man we hoped to demonize.”

And then you had their fellow Democratic Party “under-the-bus mates,” who twisted themselves into knots trying to play the part of the cowardly lion—running away from Mr. Mamdani—only to hear the leader of the opposition party they claim to despise praise Zohran as rational and admirable. No name-calling. No ridicule. No dismissive put-downs. Meanwhile, these DNC folks literally sprinted in the opposite direction of their own constituents, even allowing themselves to be goaded into voting for that ridiculous “anti-socialism” bill, without a moment’s thought about how deeply it would offend many of our closest allies—Finland, Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark. Did these folks skip their high school civics course, or was it simply taught badly? Yes: forms of democratic governance and extensive democratic-socialism systems can coexist—in the same nation, at the same time, without contradiction.

A Large Part of Public Civil-Service Leadership is Taking Responsibility for Real People

Every school-district superintendent knows that nothing good for children can emerge from a public fight with a city, county, or state chief executive. Your first duty as a superintendent is to ensure that no physical, emotional, or educational harm comes to the children under your care. And that means avoiding reckless provocations of those in power—especially individuals who possess the authority to directly or indirectly harm your students. Responsible leadership requires strategic restraint, wise words, not performative bravado.

Mr. Mamdani, soon to be responsible for eight million people, was vocabulary, tone, and pitch-perfect on point, and, interestingly, so was Mr. Trump. Both men demonstrated the discipline to stay on message despite the press gaggle’s repeated invitations to “hold their coats” in hopes of witnessing, and reporting on, an Oval Office brawl. I’ve warned students for years: anyone eager to hold your coat while you fight is not your friend. And the same holds true for those on both ends of the political spectrum who were rooting for a rumble in the White House.

Mr. Mamdani, and, in fairness, Mr. Trump as well (I must “tell the truth and shame the devil”), modeled what strong school-based and district-level leaders do every day: stay focused on the work of making the present world better for young people while preparing them to create a better future.

Those of us who have spent many years working in NYC schools understand the immigration documentation and legal-residency challenges faced by countless numbers of NYC students and their families.

If you, as I have, have ever had a crying 12th-grade honor-roll, model student sitting in your office while you work with lawyers, immigration officials, a U.S. Senator’s office, and the State Department to figure out how to help that student realize a well-deserved college dream, trust me—those moments, and the ultimate victories, never leave your memory. If Mr. Mamdani can buy those wonderful young people and their families some desperately needed time, then his trip to Washington, and the intelligently dignified way he conducted himself, was unquestionably worth it.

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.

A Setup-and-Trap Move Mayor-Elect Mamdani Must Avoid: “Arresting Netanyahu” — While the Urgent Work Is Expanding NYC’s Best Educational Practices to All Children

Posted on by

A Setup-and-Trap Move Mayor-Elect Mamdani Must Avoid: “Arresting Netanyahu” — While the Urgent Work Is Expanding NYC’s Best Educational Practices to All Children

The devil is not just a master liar; he is also a master distractor.

“STAY FOCUSED!”
How many times have my former high school students heard me boom that request somewhere in the school building? Perhaps one of my young tenth-grade charges was utterly convinced they had met their forever soulmate—only for that “eternal love” to fade by the time they reached the eleventh grade. Or maybe a student was self-destructively over-focusing on a teacher’s personality, instructional style, or course requirements, instead of centering their attention on the curriculum knowledge and skills they needed to acquire.

My response in all of these scenarios was always the same: Stay focused on what is essentially important. Present academic performance. Promotion to the next grade. Earning the highest-quality graduation designation possible. Creating multiple meaningful, purposeful, and rewarding post-graduation pathways.
Anything else is a distraction.

If I were in the mayor-elect’s place, I can imagine hearing Pauline Johnson offer one of her Caribbean mother’s standard lines of inquiry—only this time, as she often does now, from heaven:

“Why are you focusing on Mr. Netanyahu and not on yourself—and, more importantly, on what God has sent you to do on this earth!”

If Mr. Mamdani’s supporters truly want him to succeed on behalf of so many disenfranchised New Yorkers—and in my particular case, I desperately want him to succeed in raising the academic success possibilities for the majority of NYC’s children, many of whom presently live on the underperforming side of the NYCDOE ledger—then we must grant him the grace and space to step back from this “arresting Netanyahu” foolishness. Nothing good or productive for a new mayoralty can come from it. In fact, that entire distraction is designed to feed the beastly political machine already organizing to turn the Mamdani’s tenure as mayor into a tragic failure.

As a principal, I always warned students that the so-called “friends” who eagerly offer to hold your coat before you fight on Flatbush Ave or Benning Rd are not your friends. And I guarantee you—they won’t volunteer to sit in solidarity with you when you face your judgment in my office.

I also remember warning myself when I became a principal: “You can no longer talk about the ‘educational system’ or the ‘school administration.’ You are the system, and you are the school administrator.” And upon becoming a superintendent, I could no longer complain about this or that district policy—for now, I was the chief policy-maker of a district.

An important reading from my Bed-Stuy St. Augustine Young Fellowship class came rushing back to me:

“When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”

It is very easy, when you are not responsible for real people, to throw rhetorical rocks at “the system.” But what happens when you are placed in a position of authority within that very system? Suddenly, the language you used as an outsider-agitator, opposition-movement person won’t work once you hold the reins of power. Because real citizens expect real—not symbolic—acts that will improve the quality of their lives and, in my primary concern, the quality of their children’s future lives.

Just to be clear: unfortunately, the world is filled (I’ve got a long list covering multiple continents) with international leaders who justifiably should be arrested. So, is New York City’s mayor now responsible for arresting them all?

Furthermore, as the host city of the United Nations (UN), it should be obvious that the responsibility for arresting “bad leaders” is both impractical and, on some level, violates the rules and diplomatic norms governing the UN. Those rules exist because the international community must monitor, sanction when necessary, and directly negotiate peace-making agreements—even with the most reprehensible leaders—who must still be able to present themselves and be held to account.

NYC can’t have it both ways. We can’t proudly claim to be the great world-class city that houses the historic and globally significant UN—where all of us excited schoolchildren once went on class trips—and at the same time suggest that the mayor should run around the city chasing misbehaving presidents and prime ministers. Really? Because, as I stated earlier, that list would be extremely long, politically explosive, and practically unmanageable.

Further, as any elder old-school Brooklynite has already figured out, this “arresting Netanyahu” idea is a mission-killing setup and trap. Imagine if the prime minister of any nation—India, Great Britain, Denmark, take your pick—were arrested by a New York City mayor. Such a reckless act would instantly trigger a major international and national crisis, one that would consume all of the mayor’s leadership time and energy. And in this particular case, it would unleash an unbelievable amount of internal citywide trauma-drama. It would be nothing short of an unforced political error of historic proportions—an act of serious dereliction of responsibility that would deeply harm those New Yorkers who are suffering the most and who desperately need a laser-focused, morally anchored City Hall administration.

We can already see the outline of this doomsday playbook. Look at how the present mayor, Mr. Adams—acting in one of the most irresponsible and unethical ways imaginable—advanced the false and dangerous idea that children of a certain religious group would be unsafe under a Mamdani administration. And this from someone who, as a former police officer, knows perfectly well that the largest and most vulnerable groups most likely to suffer targeted or random acts of violence in NYC are Black and Latino people, Black and Latina women, and Black and Latino young people.

The mayor-elect should Stay Focused on making NYC schools a model of a system that truly integrates all of its students—not just the lucky, zip-coded few—into some of the greatest educational ideas, projects, programs, and schools in the world. Also, our children are surrounded by one of the richest concentrations of informal educational resources imaginable: museums, libraries, cultural institutions, scientific centers, and artistic enterprises that exist in no other city at this scale.

History teaches us, sadly, that the Netanyahus of the world will come and go. But with the tremendous power the mayor holds to shape the Pre-K–12 landscape, his greatest contribution will not be as an arresting agent of world leaders, but as an agent of hopeful change—someone with the capacity to flood the world with large numbers of well-educated, highly moral, deeply compassionate young people who are sincerely committed to seeking peace with their fellow human beings.

That has always been my educational response to the bad actors of this world:

“I’ll just make more good-acting people in the world.”

Whenever we find ourselves arresting badly acting adults—whether they are prime ministers committing genocidal acts on civilians or inmates on Rikers Island who hit someone over the head to rob them—remember that both types of acts require the perpetrators to first dehumanize their victims. And that, tragically, means that we as a community of parents, elders, adults, and educators collectively failed them during that precious window of opportunity when values and virtues should have been taught, modeled, and nurtured in their childhood.

Ultimately, the work—what many say is the second-hardest job in America—before Mayor-Elect Mamdani is not to symbolically police the world’s misbehaving leaders but, in my prioritized thinking, to profoundly transform the daily lived experiences of New York City’s schoolchildren.

His mandate is to make this city a place where every child—regardless of race, religion, language, disability status, immigration background, or zip code—has access to the highest levels of academic excellence and human flourishing. That is the real fight.
That is the arena where a mayor can change the trajectory of generations. If he stays focused, resists the traps set by those who prefer spectacle over substance, and grounds his administration in moral purpose and educational justice, then his mayoralty can become a beacon—not of arrests—but of uplift, of opportunity, and of hope. And that, more than anything else, is the kind of leadership this moment demands.

Michael A. Johnson is a former NYC public school teacher, principal, and superintendent, and formally an adjunct professor of science education, the author of two books on school-building leadership. His lifelong work focuses on building just, high-quality learning environments for all children—especially those who have been systemically underserved.

“Race is linked to who gets to take algebra, data shows”

Posted on by

“Race is linked to who gets to take algebra, data shows” —Washinton Post 11/18/2025
By Lauren Lumpkin

“Schools are less likely to offer Latino and Black students early algebra, limiting odds they will get advanced courses and higher-paying jobs.”
“Schools are less likely to offer Latino and Black students early algebra classes, effectively shutting these students off from advanced courses and higher-paying jobs, according to research released Tuesday.

Algebra has traditionally been offered to teens starting in ninth grade, but a growing body of research shows that students who take the class in eighth grade are more likely to succeed in high school math, pursue STEM majors in college and earn more money as adults.

Nationwide, 3 in 5 schools offer students the option to take early algebra, according to research from NWEA, a national testing group. Schools in rural areas, high-poverty schools and campuses with a large Black or Latino student body were less likely to offer the class.
“Algebra in eighth grade is not just another math class,” said Daniel Long, one of the report’s researchers. “This is closing off access to advanced math pathways for many students.”

Even if a school does offer algebra to eighth graders, access is often determined by a child’s race or ethnicity, Long added. More than half of Asian eighth graders took the course when their school offered it, compared with 22 percent of Latino teens and 17 percent of Black students, data shows.

Those gaps, Long said, persisted even among top-achieving students. About 60 percent of high-performing Black students are placed into algebra in eighth grade, compared with 84 percent of Asian teens and 68 percent of White and Latino students.
“Placement, not ability, seems to be the driver,” Long said. Researchers examined 162,000 children in 22 states.
Most schools use test scores, teacher recommendations and parent requests to determine who gets to take eighth-grade algebra. But those methods can be biased, said Allison Socol, vice president of P-12 policy, practice and research at EdTrust, a national education nonprofit that has also found disparities in who gets to take challenging classes.

“Because of implicit biases, racial biases, and mindsets about who is and who isn’t a math person, Black and Latino students and students from low-income backgrounds — even when they demonstrate that they are ready and they are very clear that they are eager for those courses — are still shut out,” Socol said. “Across the U.S., in every state, students of color and students from low-income backgrounds are often shut out of rigorous courses.”

Teachers tend to underestimate children of color, even when they perform similarly to White students, a New York University researcher found. Wealthier parents tend to advocate more than less affluent families, according to research from Rand.

The effects can be seen within a few years. Students who take early algebra have more time in high school to take harder math classes, including calculus — a course that universities often use as a proxy for college readiness, Socol said.

“When we look at the kinds of careers that will be growing in those students’ future and the kind of skills that we need, there is a huge need for us to be communicating to all students, but in particular students who’ve been shut out in the past … that anyone can be a math student,” she said.

Long said schools can bypass these biases by embracing universal screening and automatically placing high-achieving students in rigorous classes. It’s an approach that has shown promise in some states including Colorado, Texas, North Carolina and Nevada, researchers noted.

In Central Texas, automatic enrollment policies increased the share of high-achieving Black students in eighth-grade algebra from 40 percent to 70 percent between 2014 and 2021. Meanwhile, Latino enrollment jumped from 50 percent to 70 percent. In 2023, the state passed a law requiring schools to give top-performing fifth graders more advanced math classwork.

North Carolina adopted a similar law and saw the share of top-performing Black students enrolled in advanced math grow from 88 percent to 92 percent after a single school year.

Now, about a third of eighth graders are taking algebra, said Sneha Shah-Coltrane, the state’s senior director of advanced learning and gifted education.
“That really has helped with the excellence gaps more than anything else,” Shah-Coltrane said. In some parts of the state, particularly in sparsely populated rural areas, districts have offered online classes or sent middle schoolers to the local high school for math class.

“We don’t want place to limit placement,” she said. “We’ve been able to catch the potential of students, and see the potential in students, in a way that we have not been able to see before.””

Original Article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2025/11/18/algebra-racial-disparities/

For NYC Schools to Succeed for All Children, the New Mayor Must Heed the Experientially Wise Counsel of School-Building Supervisors and Administrators

Posted on by

One of the most important leadership decisions—and some would say the most important—made by a superintendent is the appointment of School-Building Administrators (SBAs), that is, school-based supervisors, assistant principals, and principals.

A school can survive a great many challenges and still thrive academically, but one thing it is very hard for any school to overcome is the presence of incompetent, unethical, or ineffective school leadership. That’s why the highest-performing—and most entitled—private and public schools invest so heavily in getting the principalship appointment decision right. They understand that a wrong decision can inflict severe and long-term damage on the future success of children and on the well-being of the staff entrusted with serving them.

This became shockingly clear to me when a group of parents from a specialized high school approached me quietly at a high school fair and asked if I would consider applying to replace their departing principal. It was evident that this majority-white parent group was not concerned about my being an African American; their sole focus was on securing the best possible educational opportunities for their children. I thanked them, told them I was honored by their confidence, but respectfully declined.

School-Building Leadership Matters. School-District Leadership Matters. School-System Leadership Matters. And the Quality of Children’s Futures Depends on All Three.

Needless to say, the SBA screening and selection process a superintendent employs must adhere to the highest standards of school-building leadership practices: professional knowledge, skills, competencies, ethical conduct, emotional steadiness, and sound temperament. But it is also a principled moral decision on the part of the superintendent—one that must place the emotional and educational well-being of children above all other considerations.

This is the same challenge that mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani now faces as he contemplates who he will select as the next NYC Chancellor. And the overarching question is this: Will his decision be driven primarily by future electoral values or ethical pedagogical values?

There are many essential questions that mayor-elect Mamdani must pose to prospective chancellor candidates, questions they must be able to answer not through rhetoric alone, but through demonstrated past actions that show a courageous commitment to just, equitable, significant, and sustainable school improvement that reaches every zip code and neighborhood in the city.

NYC’s most underserved and vulnerable students cannot endure yet another status-quo, “political favor” chancellor appointment. The parents of these students are desperately pleading for educational quality justice. Yet for too many years, these Black and Latino voices have been unable to reach the great halls of state and municipal power.

This newly elected NYC mayor has repeatedly promised to uplift the city’s least heard and most locked-out citizens. His chancellor selection offers him the opportunity to make good on those powerful, uplifting, and in the case of public education, children’s dreams lifting words.

If the next Chancellor cannot articulate a credible plan for producing equity, sustainable improvement, and system-wide instructional excellence, then they should not be hired.

Recently, when watching an interview with the mayor-elect and his designated first deputy mayor, Dean Fuleihan, I noticed that when the interviewer pressed them about “getting those hard policy things done,” they confidently affirmed their commitment and stayed on a positively focused message: “We are starting from a place of yes!”

NYC parents therefore have every right to expect that a “starting from a place of yes” philosophy in public education translates into a no-excuses approach—one that refuses to accept any rationale for why every NYC child cannot receive the highest-quality education available. The city needs a Chancellor who understands that educational justice and academic achievement are inseparable—and who can articulate concrete, actionable proposals rather than slogans.

After decades of uneven progress—progress often misleadingly claimed through statistically averaged performance scores that conceal the city’s academic underperforming deserts—only candidates willing to confront structural inequities with courage and competence deserve serious consideration.

The next NYC Chancellor must be prepared to disrupt and dismantle entrenched bureaucratic failures, not cosmetically repackage them. And they must accomplish this feat without lowering standards or punishing any students who are already performing at or above grade-level and at the highest academic achievement levels. Serving all students well, at every performance level, is the essence of educational leadership excellence.

For hundreds of thousands of children, the difference between a profound visionary, and serous actionary Chancellor and a status-quo manager is life-changing. And for entire neighborhoods, it can determine whether they experience long-denied generational-improvement leaps—an essential objective of public education—or continue to endure the recurring nightmare of Black and Latino community underdevelopment.

This moment should push both the mayor and his chosen Chancellor out of their “play-it-political-safe” comfort zone—and it should—because that difficult, truth-facing space is the only place where the children of disenfranchisement have any real chance of receiving the quality education they deserve.

Further, the mayor-elect’s chancellor choice will determine whether NYC schools move toward real improvement or drift deeper into the kind of performative reform that makes consultants rich while leaving most of the city’s children educationally poor.

The question is simple: Is this new administration prepared to lead on the issue of quality education for all, or are they merely prepared to talk about it?

If any prospective chancellor candidate’s interview with the mayor-elect falls back on the standard educational “throw-away” lines:

• “It takes a village…”
(Let’s begin with the village’s professional educators doing their jobs—taking professional responsibility at a higher, better, and more effectual level.)

• “All children can learn!”
(We already know that; the real challenge is how you actually make that happen with real children in real schools.)

• “Children First!”
(That’s not going to happen in a system where children are too often placed second to satisfying adult employment needs.)

• “Empower parents and teachers to have more say in the running of schools.”
(Often used as a good political soundbite—a faux-collaborative distraction trap that enables civic authorities and public-school leaders to abdicate any real responsibility for whether children learn. If everybody is responsible, then no one is responsible)

If these four, and similar sounding statements represent the type of oratorical drivel the mayor-elect hears from a chancellor candidate, then he should politely end the interview, thank them for their time, and move on. NYC’s school system is far too large and far too complex to waste time entertaining amateuristic pretenders. He should continue interviewing until he finds a serious candidate willing to risk everything—including political safety—to save children.

Explore All Avenues of Information and Knowledge—Not Just the Self-Serving and Politically Motivated Entitled

School-Building Administrators (Assistant Principals, Supervisors, and Principals) represent a critical catalytic force behind any academic improvement that happens inside a school—and therefore across the entire system. Thus, a central question becomes:
What is the new mayor’s plan to consult with, and incorporate the insights of, SBAs in his effort to make the NYCDOE a first-class educating system for all students—not only those from the city’s most entitled zip codes?

Will he include, as authentic partners, the Council of Supervisors and Administrators (CSA) in discussions around the chancellor selection, major policy decisions, or system-wide initiatives? SBA exclusion has been a painful issue for many school-based supervisors, assistant principals, and principals (myself included) for far too many years. Out of professionalism and commitment to their schools, SBAs have largely remained quiet about this marginalization.

But something I learned as a superintendent is that the quickest—and most sustainably effective—way to raise student achievement performance is to ensure that every school has highly effectual school-building leaders. These leaders serve as the most powerful individual forces in making a school succeed for all of its children.

Yes, I understand the political reality: elected officials are often inclined to shape decisions around the groups with the most electoral weight. But the ethically correct move—the morally grounded move—is to do what is in the best interest of children, not what pleases this or that adult interest group.

If the mayor-elect’s first act is not to include the voices of educational leaders—superintendents, deputy superintendents, supervisors, and SBAs—then the system will remain stuck in its long-standing, professionally ineffective default mode. In that mode, parents can only hope and pray that their child happens to land in a school led by a radically off-beat, good-trouble-making group of school administrators and a courageous efficacious teaching and support staff—a team willing to do everything in their power to make the school work for every child in that building.

District-Level and School-Based Supervisors and Administrators Hold a Wealth of Institutional Knowledge and Wisdom

This valuable information can stop the destructive cycle in which every new “face of school governance” repeats the same ineffective (and very taxpayers expensive) decisions—decisions that have historically failed the majority of NYC’s students.

The best NYC principals spend an unbelievable portion of their day breaking or bending school-system rules so that children can learn. As a former NYC principal (Science Skills Center High School) of what many inside and outside the profession labeled a “good and effective school,” I must admit something I am not proud to confess that a staggering amount of my daily leadership time was spent breaking or bending bureaucratic rules, regulations, and blocking politically driven procedures that—ironically—worked against the very mission the public school system proclaims: effectively educating all children.

I also, every year, had to raise—beyond my standard budget allocation—hundreds of thousands of dollars through the school’s 501(c)(3) foundation to provide my Title I students not only with basic living and school supplies needs, but also with educational, cultural, and informal learning opportunities, as well as advanced enrichment learning experiences. For example, I once had to raise $20,000 in just two weeks to send our FIRST Robotics team to the national finals in Florida. These are opportunities normally reserved for NYC’s most wealthy and entitled children. I’m not complaining; I did what I had to do. But the enormous resource inequalities that still exist in the NYC public school system make any rhetorical claim of “quality education for all” ring insincerely hollow.

And I learned quickly that my principalship experience was not unique. When I became a NYC superintendent, I found myself once again engaged in a constant cycle of corrective actions—undoing bad policies, practices, and regulations, and closing opportunity gaps that were actively harming good teaching and learning experiences. It was déjà vu, only now with higher district-level stakes.

This is the painful truth: we have a school system that often seems structurally designed to undermine its own stated mission—one that loudly proclaims it will do “everything possible” to ensure that all children have a promising future rather than a path to prison. Yet the internal machinery of that same system frequently drives outcomes that contradict those noble aspirations.

There is something profoundly wrong—ethically, operationally, and organizationally—when the very school leaders most directly responsible for student learning must spend so much of their time “tricking” the system simply to help children succeed. When principals and superintendents feel compelled to constantly perform work-arounds in order for the system to fulfill its primary mission, that institution is not merely misaligned—it is in desperate need of dramatic, dynamic repair, and certainly not the kind delivered by lofty, superficial word-playing games.

My years as principal and superintendent taught me that the people who know the system best—and who can make it work at its best—are often the ones forced to fight it the hardest. That contradiction is neither sustainable nor morally defensible. The next NYC Chancellor must recognize that the wisdom of school-building administrators is not optional—it is essential. And, until the city embraces that truth, the burden of “tricking and offsetting the system” will continue to fall on those fighting to save children, instead of on the leaders empowered to fix what is failing them.

Michael A. Johnson is a former New York City public school teacher, principal, and superintendent (Community School District 29, Queens), a district STEM education program director, and a former adjunct college professor of science education. He is the author of two books on school leadership, designed to prepare the next generation of Assistant Principals and Principals. Johnson writes frequently on educational equity, leadership ethics, and real systemic reform in public education.

Why So Many U.S. High School Graduates Can’t Tell the Difference Between Democratic Socialism and Communism

Posted on by

The 2025 NYC mayoral race taught us professional educators, especially those of us who work in high schools, a great deal about the tremendous amount of civic, historical, political science, and economic illiteracy that exists among our graduates. It also revealed how our current curriculum designs for these social science subjects fail to meet the standard of helping future citizen-voters become critical thinkers in the face of polarization and the purposeful misuse of political vocabulary.

The recent widespread invocation of these two very different political ideologies—often conflated in public discourse—suggests that we must examine how well we are doing as public educators in what has become a less-than-stellar, almost “after-thought” approach to civics education.

A visit (and I have) to any high school in Europe, or to any nation with a parliamentary political system of government, reveals that students (and the citizens) possess a far deeper understanding of the critical differences between political ideologies. This is largely because, in those systems, the ideologies present themselves as distinct political parties with formal representation in the national deliberative body of government.

In these parliamentary systems, the Communist Party and the Democratic Socialist Party (along with others such as the Greens, Christian Democrats, Labour, Conservative, and the growing “Far Right” or neo-Fascist parties) hold very different ideas about how government should function. Yet, from time to time, they may align, disentangle, and then realign with one another to form coalitions around specific issues or bills of importance to their members or principles—but they always maintain their own distinct political identities.

I can imagine my professional education colleagues in places like Germany, England, and Italy cringing when they hear Mr. Mamdani being referred to as both a Democratic Socialist and a Communist in the same sentence—as would members of those European parties, who are often bitterly opposed to each other. And if, after observing the European parliamentary systems, one is still unclear that these two political ideologies are profoundly different, then here’s a final lesson: put a Communist and a Democratic Socialist in a room (it sounds like the opening line of a joke) and offer just one word to start the conversation—“Trotsky”—then watch the sparks fly.

The U.S. Two-Party System and the Weaponization of Political Language
In the United States, with its non-parliamentary two-party dominant system, “political affiliation identification” becomes far less clear. Both of the major parties—the Republican (GOP) and the Democratic (DNC)—embrace a capitalist economic framework, and so political labeling becomes extremely murky. This confusion allows language itself to be weaponized. We often hear the GOP accusing someone like Joe Biden of advancing “left-wing” or “Green Party” policies—claims that, of course, couldn’t be further from the truth. Meanwhile, Republicans rarely describe themselves as pro-wealthy, unrestricted-capitalist, right-wing, or (in some policy areas) neo-fascist—which would, in fact, be more accurate descriptors. They have mastered the art of throwing political shade without ever being properly shaded in return by the DNC.

But here lies the deeper problem: both parties are, in essence, pro-capitalist entities primarily serving the interests of the rich—especially their donors. The difference is that the DNC prefers to practice its politics of economic exploitation with a kinder face and softer language, advocating for safety-net-lite measures such as modest consumer protections, less painfully exploitative labor laws, Social Security, food assistance for the working poor, and healthcare programs like the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare).

Civics Ignorance: The Educational Roots of Political Language Misdirection

Now, in terms of “civics ignorance” I’m not referring here to the Vice-President J.D. Vances or the Congressional Representative Elise Stefaniks of the world. Whether or not one agrees with their political ideologies, they are well-educated individuals—even as they work tirelessly to undermine the very fine university systems that educated them. They were educated intellectually, though not necessarily in the moral or ethical sense of graduating with a compassion-guided compass. Their conflation of these two extremely different political ideologies—Democratic Socialism and Communism—is, in their case, a cynical feigning of ignorance. It is a manipulative, opportunistic strategy designed to exploit the very real and frightening ignorance that is widespread among the American citizenry.

The Vance/Stefanik approach to conflation, then, is deliberately tactical. It differs markedly from that of the low-information or intellectually deficient Americans who genuinely believe that Democratic Socialism and Communism are the same thing. And it is on this latter group that I wish to focus.
Before I proceed, I must (in full disclosure) begin with a professional confession. As a former high school principal, I must ask myself: how did we in the profession—especially high school educators—get this critical history, civics, and political-science learning objectives so profoundly wrong for so many people? We cannot hide behind that tired and useless excuse: “We taught the lesson effectively; the students just didn’t learn it effectively.” Wrong!

As many master teachers know, and as countless school administrators have made clear during post-lesson observation conferences, whenever that excuse appears, openly or subtly, the truth must be stated: there is no space between the successful quality of the lesson’s instructional methods and the successful quality of students learning the conceptual and behavioral objectives of that lesson.
In other words, the students didn’t learn effectively because they weren’t taught effectively. If Americans cannot distinguish between different political systems, the fault lies—at least in large part—with us, the public educators.

The News Media Reports—But Schools Must Teach

The traditional news media has been mildly helpful in obligatorily repeating the “Mr. Mamdani is not a communist” correction phrase in many of its news stories, commentaries, and editorials. But this is not one of those “blame the media” moments. The news media’s primary objective is to report and inform, not to remediate civic illiteracy. The deeper problem lies elsewhere.
The primary work of properly educating Americans to read, interpret, and analytically understand those very news articles is the sole responsibility of K–12 educators. It is a sacred charge that cannot be outsourced, deferred, or delegated to any other institution in the nation.

Who Knew? Stephen A. Smith and Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, Political Economists!

I knew we were in trouble when Stephen A. Smith and Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson became the explaining voices for capitalism. (There are, of course, many distinguished professional Black political economists available.) Yet, instead of drawing from great intellectual resources such as Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery, Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, or Manning Marable’s How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, too many turn to celebrity sound bites for their understanding of complex economic theory and political science power dynamics.

Right Now, American Education Is the Problem, but It Is Also the Solution

There are several cross-curricular corrective actions we as professional educators must take—especially at the high school level, to help our students become discerning civic actors in their future adult voting lives. (In other words: no student should leave high school without knowing these things.)

Moral Foundations:
Students must leave us enriched and ennobled with what I call the Major Moral C’s: Moral Conviction, Moral Consistency, and Moral Courage. This means they must learn not to say, “These are not genocidal acts if my side is inflicting the acts.” Every person on the planet must be fully entitled to enjoy their personhood.

Complexity and Contradiction:
Students must understand that two things—sometimes seemingly contradictory—can be true at the same time. For example, our national immigration system is a mess, but unkind cruelty is neither the best nor the most effective operational policy for fixing bad border policies. The opposite of bad actions is good actions, not more bad actions.

Recognizing Shared Humanity:
Students must understand that there are people beyond our own “tribe” who deserve to live their best lives—those who practice religions different from ours, or hold political, cultural, and social beliefs we may not share. What we all share is our humanity, and that descriptive distinction must always be recognized, honored, and protected.

The Virtue of Learning:
Ignorance must never be proudly proclaimed as a virtue. Learning, and continually wanting to learn more about the world beyond one’s own ideas and convictions, is a virtue every twelfth grader should carry with them as they walk across the graduation stage into their next stage of life.

Critical and Metacognitive Thinking:
We must improve and enhance students’ metacognitive (thinking about their own thinking) and analytical skills, helping them move from the limbic (instinctive, emotional) brain system toward higher-order reasoning when facing societal, political, economic, or social problems. And, more importantly, we must also ask: what should all of us do, as thoughtful and compassionate human beings, when we confront the discomfort that accompanies inevitable change?

For example, importing 7,000 white South Africans into the U.S. won’t solve the so-called “Great White Replacement” anxiety fueling parts of the MAGA movement for two important reasons. First, there’s no guarantee that the younger and future generations of those immigrants won’t become more politically progressive and open-minded on questions of race. Second, demographic trends take on lives of their own; so even if every one of those 7,000 South Africans joined the MAGA movement, that number is far too small to alter the birthrate trajectory that underlies the movement’s existential “white replacement” fear of America’s unstoppable shift toward becoming a majority People of Color nation. No discriminatory immigration restriction, no importation of white populations, and no brutal and cruel mass deportation raids will reverse that trend.

Honest History Education:
We must approach the teaching of history as a historiographical science—beginning with truth and facts as guiding curricular standards and evaluative rubrics, and applying deconstructive, inductive, and deductive reasoning techniques. One of history’s primary objectives is to help students learn from past human mistakes. That critical learning cannot occur if we hide or sugarcoat the egregious human errors of the past.

Honesty in teaching history is essential: slavery happened; Japanese internment camps did exist. Glossing over such atrocities or their long-term effects will not erase them from history—ironically, it will make us more likely to repeat them. Seeing the modern rise of neo-Nazi and far-right movements in Germany, France, and England, one would think that the painful lessons of the 1940s had been learned. Apparently, not.

Early and Intentional Civics Education:
We must begin earlier—well before high school—to take seriously the responsibility of producing a well-informed citizenry through thoughtful, intentional civics curricula.
The reason so many of Mr. Mamdani’s critics (including some college-educated individuals on social media—I’ll spare their alma maters the embarrassment by not naming them) can say things like, “He will turn NYC into a Socialist/Communist city” or “a Muslim city,” is because they don’t understand how government actually works. Some on the right know better, but many others, not politically aligned, sincerely believe these falsehoods.
These misconceptions reveal the deep weakness of our high school civics programs—particularly in explaining the structure, powers, and separation of powers among the U.S., New York State, and New York City governments, as well as the statutory authority of their respective legislative and executive agencies and officeholders. And this doesn’t even touch on the powerful non-governmental centers of influence—labor unions, finance, real estate, and the entertainment industry—that all shape governmental policy in very complex but important ways.

In what warped, make-believe universe can a NYC mayor act independently of these entrenched, well-situated, and powerfully positioned players? One of the first lessons you learn as a principal—and learn again as a superintendent—is that most of the “political power capital” you’re said to possess is actually spent on selling ideas: convincing, encouraging, inspiring, and inviting people to follow your leadership. The myth of the all-powerful civil servant executive is just that—a myth. Anyone who took a good NYC high school civics class (and stayed awake) should know better.

Truth Over Propaganda:
Finally, while every nation’s educational system contains some propagandistic elements, teaching inaccuracies—or outright falsehoods—does not prepare students to build a nation or engage intelligently with a globally interdependent world. There must be intellectual space for pedagogical honesty—a space that does not mirror the North Korean model of indoctrination.

We must teach students to ask: What is capitalism as an economic, political, and social system? What is its real relationship to democracy—and what exactly is democracy? How do we explain the “socialist” quality-of-life programs in some Scandinavian countries that seem to work well for their citizens? How many socialized programs must exist before a democracy becomes “socialist”?

If Nicolás Maduro (President of Venezuela) is a “socialist,” in what ways is he or his government practicing socialism? How is Cuba different from the People’s Republic of China, and how are both different from Russia or Vietnam? High school students shouldn’t have to take (and most won’t) an Advanced Placement history, political science, or economics course to wrestle with these essential questions.

The reason a U.S. senator from Alabama—or any prominent figure—can claim that a NYC mayor could somehow turn the city into a “one-religion” place is that such claims only work as put-downs when a large audience shares that same bigoted ignorance.

If Democracy Is to Survive, Public Education Must Be Its Defender

The essential work of democracy has always begun, and will always begin, in the classroom. Whether that classroom sits in a modest rural schoolhouse or a massive urban high school, it is where a nation teaches its young how to think—not what to think, but how to discern, question, and reason morally.

If we as educators fail to equip our students with the intellectual tools to distinguish truth from falsehood, ideology from principle, and propaganda from evidence, then we should not be surprised when demagogues, entertainment celebrities, and political opportunists step in to do our job for us. Civic ignorance is not a natural condition—it is a curriculum outcome.

It is not the media’s responsibility, nor Hollywood’s, nor the politicians’. It is ours. A core principle of the American public education system is the understanding that democracy cannot defend itself; it must be defended by citizens who are educated enough to recognize when democracy is under attack, and moral enough to act when it is.

If the next generation of American students leaves our classrooms unable to tell the difference between Democratic Socialism and Communism, between populism and proto-fascist demagoguery, between patriotism and ethnonationalism, then the republic itself is at grave risk—not because our students are ignorant, but because we, the professional educators, failed to teach them otherwise.

So yes, right now American education is the problem. But it is also, if we are bold and honest enough to face it, the only solution.

Michael A. Johnson is a former New York City public school teacher, principal, and superintendent (Community School District 29, Queens), a district STEM education program director, and a former adjunct college professor of science education. He is the author of two books on school leadership, designed to prepare the next generation of Assistant Principals and Principals. Johnson writes frequently on educational equity, leadership ethics, and real systemic reform in public education.

Mr. Mamdani Must Wage a Two-Front Battle for New York City’s Forgotten Students

Posted on by

Both CNN and MSNBC owe Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) a guest-appearance fee for her excellent, instant post-election analysis of New York City’s mayoral campaign. She said something essential that none of the “in-house” regular commentators would—or perhaps could—say. Paraphrasing her point: Mr. Mamdani’s win, unlike any other Democratic candidate’s victory that evening, was achieved even as he was forced to fight on two fronts throughout his entire campaign.

There’s a very good reason military strategists have long advised against waging a two-front war, and the history of global conflicts supports their caution. The new mayor, Mr. Mamdani, indeed faced fierce opposition from right-wing Republican forces who barely concealed their anti-Islamic and racial animus toward him. But the other front—the one more adept at disguising its Islamophobia and bigotry—was made up of the familiar figures every organizational leader recognizes: the passive-aggressive insiders. In this case, they were Democratic Party leaders, politicians, and candidates who refused to endorse Mr. Mamdani, even though he had won the primary fair and square.

Some offered slow, tepid, and perfunctory endorsements—what can only be described as “wimpy support.” This double-standard hypocrisy, the idea that “voting blue is good for you, but not always for me,” is a betrayal all too familiar to African Americans, including Brother Kwame Mamdani himself.

Now, I am convinced that those two anti-Zohran antagonistic forces—though severely wounded on November 4—are far from dead. In fact, I believe they are already regrouping and developing plans to ensure that Mr. Mamdani’s tenure as mayor ends in failure.

I know what you’re thinking: “But many of those oppositional people are ‘liberal,’ professional Democrats, and people of color.” It doesn’t matter. I learned that lesson painfully during my tenure as superintendent of Community School District 29 in Queens (CSD29Q) from 2000 to 2003.

It didn’t matter that we sought only to do what was right and good for our citizens—in our case, to dramatically and sustainably raise academic achievement in every school, for every student cohort across the district. It didn’t matter that our intentions were noble or our goals equitable. An alliance quickly formed among those wounded by my appointment. They were injured, yes—but not dead. And soon, I found myself fighting on two fronts: one against white racist indifference, and the other against Black leaders, many of them elected officials, who wanted to restore the corrupted status quo that had necessitated my assignment to the district in the first place.

One of the NYCDOE administrators assigned to brief me on the district compassionately went off script, warning me—something I would later hear echoed by several senior officials—that Community School District 29 in Queens (CSD29Q) was “pound for pound, the most underachieving district in the city, given its large Black middle-class homeownership and strong, often two-parent working families.”

When I moved to Southeast Queens, I quickly understood that assertion. On my block in Cambria Heights, every Black family lived in a well-kept home, with both parents often holding solid city, state, or federal civil service jobs. So, the natural and haunting question emerged: Why aren’t these children doing better academically?

Over the next three years, I learned that my block was no exception. The pattern repeated itself across the district. Complaining about socio-economic obstacles—accurate as such complaints may be—has unfortunately risen to an art form in my profession. But as I often reminded the CSD29Q staff: “If we can’t get these Southeast Queens children to succeed academically, then what are we doing as public educators?”

So, like me, Mr. Mamdani will need to continue waging a two-front war if he truly intends to serve and protect our most disinherited and disenfranchised New York City citizens. But unlike me, I hope he remains in office long enough to enact irreversible positive change.

We will soon know whether the new mayor truly plans to fight for our most educationally vulnerable children—those condemned by their zip codes to live in a learning-rich city that too often provides them with an inferior, second-class education.

Much will depend on whom Mr. Mamdani appoints as Schools Chancellor. Will it be someone from the “go-along-to-get-along” leadership side of the table—a professional educator fluent in bold rhetorical flourishes and the latest slogan-filled pedagogical sound bites, yet firmly committed to maintaining the educational status quo?

If so, thousands of Black and Latino children, and their families, will remain trapped—denied the beauty of generational-leap improvement, which is one of the true moral missions of public education. And if that happens, the new mayor may as well keep Rikers Island open, because he will surely need the space.

In the end, every leader who dares to confront entrenched systems of inequity must learn to fight on two fronts: against the obvious adversaries outside the gates and the quieter, more insidious forces within.

Mr. Mamdani’s true test will not be in his campaign slogans or early policy speeches, but in his willingness to stand firm when the comfortable, the connected, and the complicit push back. If he can hold that line—fighting both battles with integrity, courage, and love for those children whom this city too easily forgets—then perhaps New York will finally live up to its promise of being not just a great city, but an educationally just one.

Michael A. Johnson is a former New York City public school teacher, principal, and superintendent (Community School District 29, Queens), a district STEM education program director, and a former adjunct college professor of science education. He is the author of two books on school leadership, designed to prepare the next generation of Assistant Principals and Principals. Johnson writes frequently on educational equity, leadership ethics, and real systemic reform in public education.

“Should the Mayor Control N.Y.C. Schools? Mamdani and Cuomo Don’t Agree.” Oddly, They’re Both Wrong.

Posted on by

“Should the Mayor Control N.Y.C. Schools? Mamdani and Cuomo Don’t Agree.” Oddly, They’re Both Wrong.

By Michael A. Johnson

As much as I appreciate The New York Times covering an important public education topic (“Should the Mayor Control N.Y.C. Schools? Mamdani and Cuomo Don’t Agree,” NYT, 10/28/25), this is one of those moments when I fall back on the warnings of my great high school geometry teacher, Mr. Weinberger, who used to remind us: “If you start off with the wrong algorithmic premise, you will absolutely end up with the wrong answer.”

In this case, the see-sawing governance performance show starring centralization vs. decentralization actors has never significantly shifted the academic performance gap calculus in a New York City public school system made up of a majority of Black and Latino students. And when you look at the most intellectually vibrant, inspiring, and empowering schools and programs in the city, those same “majority” students remain a chronically underrepresented minority.

So many years after the passing of our nation’s signature civil rights laws, the condition of Black and Latino students’ access to intellectually enriching programs is still dismal. Specialized high school admission numbers (even with an expanded number of schools) have dramatically dropped in comparison to my 1960s high school days. Those higher numbers from the ’60s are even more startling when you consider that many students didn’t apply to specialized high schools because you could actually receive a quality education at your neighborhood high school—so taking the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT) wasn’t such a big deal.

We need to talk about why the pedagogically and strategically deficient governance question is always asked, and answered, in the same narrow and ineffective ways. Part of the problem is deciding whether public education exists to serve its true purpose as a generational progress multiplier, or as an adult jobs-and-consultants payday system. In some schools, districts, and zip codes, the latter clearly prevails. In others, fewer in number, providing a quality education to secure the next generation’s future success remains the real mission.

And lest anyone think this corruption of purpose is solely the work of “evil, powerful White New Yorkers,” let me assure you—there are plenty of us former NYC Black and Latino superintendents (with the scars to prove it) who can share community school board corruption stories you’d swear could only come from the pen of a fiction writer.

But the system’s terrible response to this dysfunction—“removing politics” from education by concentrating political control in the hands of the city’s chief political officer (the mayor)—was doomed from the start. Again, channeling my high school geometry teacher: why did anyone think that would work? Beyond a few incremental “gains,” statistically lifted by the performance of the system’s most advantaged students, mayoral control has never produced sustained, equitable academic excellence.

Now we’re entertaining decentralization 2.0 (or is it 3.0, 4.0, or 5.0?). Yet in this latest iteration, there’s still no mention of—or respect for—the highly impactful activists in any school’s success: the educational supervisors, assistant principals, and principals. As a former superintendent, I learned firsthand the incredible power of school building leadership to drive rapid, significant, and sustained academic improvement.

Black and Latino parents: don’t be hoodwinked, bamboozled, or led astray by voices that sound progressive but will lead your children down the same regressive, underachieving path—regardless of the governance structure. If “teachers and parents” are allegedly given more policymaking power, then no elected or appointed official is responsible for student learning. The teachers will keep their jobs; the consultants will keep their contracts; and the only losers will be Black and Latino families—whose children will continue to feed our criminal justice system.

At some point, the ignored and disenfranchised parents of New York City must demand a first-loyalty-to-children pledge from every elected official who receives their votes. That pledge must compel those officials to do—statutorily and structurally—“whatever is necessary,” including revisiting labor and governance laws, to ensure that every child receives a quality education every year of their school life.
A good place to start is by ending the governance merry-go-round that always leaves the same children on the bottom rung. We need an accountable system that looks nothing like “mayoral control,” powerless educational panels, or faux “parent-teacher” governance models.

Michael A. Johnson is a former NYC teacher, principal, superintendent, and adjunct professor of education. He is the author of two books on school-building leadership: Report to the Principal’s Office: Tools for Building Successful High School Administrative Leadership and Report from the Principal’s Office: A 200-Day Inspirational and Aspirational School Leadership Journal.