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.

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

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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

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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?

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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.