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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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