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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Michael A. Johnson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ending Kindergarten Gifted & Talented Screenings Is Right—But It’s a Superficial Political Fix for a Complicated Pedagogical Problem

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Ending Kindergarten Gifted & Talented Screenings Is Right—But It’s a Superficial Political Fix for a Complicated Pedagogical Problem

Over the last few weeks, I’ve received numerous emails and calls from across the country asking for my professional opinion on one of New York City’s mayoral candidates’ promises to eliminate the NYCDOE’s Gifted & Talented (G&T) program—starting with kindergarten.

I can’t think of another question I’ve been asked in recent years that has produced more shocked reactions to my answer. I suppose people assumed, based on what they believe about my educational philosophy—or perhaps what they’ve read in media coverage like The New York Times’ “Scores Count” article or the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) journal piece on how my elementary and middle school students passed New York State high school math and science Regents exams. Folks can’t imagine that I would strongly oppose eliminating early G&T screenings.

It’s true that I’ve always advocated for the good educational purposes of standardized exams—as tools to strengthen students’ conceptual, competitive, and performance skills based on learning standards, and as instruments to inform instruction. But I’ve also been a consistent opponent of bad, and sometimes downright deleterious, assessment tools, especially those that confirm and perpetuate unfair advantages.

And this is the place where I usually get into trouble: I will always call out the hypocrisy of public education systems and elected officials. NYC’s Specialized High Schools Admissions Test (SHSAT), is just as educationally and morally problematic as the kindergarten G&T screening test, largely because it measures the quality of a student’s exposure to consistent, high-quality instruction year after year, something over which a child has absolutely no control.

When I earned my Master’s in Supervision and Administration from Bank Street College, I occasionally observed classes at the Bank Street School (the alma mater of one of the mayoral candidates). I spoke with administrators, teachers, and students. The Bank Street School’s entire educational program could, in many ways, be considered a G&T-based pedagogy. Its methodologies, rooted in Deweyan progressive education, emphasized critical thinking, problem-posing, and problem-solving skills. And yes, the staff also helped students build strong conceptual and technical test-taking skills. Their approach was designed to draw out each child’s inherent gifts and talents while preparing them to perform well on standardized assessments like the SHSAT.

My position, as some have miscategorized, is not about loving standardized exams, but as the old Brooklyn saying goes, my position is simple: “Don’t hate the player, hate the game.” And if these are the “gate-keeping” rules of the game, then let’s help the children of disenfranchisement master them.

“Change the joke and slip the yoke.” —Ralph Ellison

I have spent my professional life warning Black and Latino parents, while actively empowering their children educationally, about the twin dangers of liberal paternalism and conservative degradation. They sound and act differently, yet both lead us through endless cycles of centralization and decentralization, one failed and very expensive “closing-the-gap” initiative after another, and still these public-school systems continue to fail the same majority cohort of Black and Brown students.

This current gifted-and-talented debate (one of many over the years) will be no different, because elected officials either lack the knowledge or the will to create public schools where every child, regardless of the school they attend, receives the high-quality education they deserve. Anything less is campaign-commercial talk.

Even if a mayor and their chancellor abolished every K–8 G&T program in the city, the political elephant in the room remains: learning quality inequity would simply reorganize itself by zip code and schools. Some children would still receive G&T-level experiences, while others—trapped in the wrong zip codes and schools—would continue receiving an inferior education.

So let’s explore the educational, developmental, psychological, and social variables that distort or invalidate any attempt to administer or interpret a kindergarten G&T admissions exam accurately. And let’s also examine where both the “ban it” and “keep it” camps fall pedagogically and courageously short; for neither addresses how to effectively support children entering kindergarten who arrive at vastly different points along the pre-kindergarten learning spectrum—regardless of race or ethnicity.

The real question is: how do we design ethical early childhood education screenings, not for exclusionary labeling, but to guide instructional models that embraces “multiple intelligences” and adopts a more male-child-friendly, sound-developmental approach to early childhood teaching and learning?

High-Stakes Admission Testing for Four- and Five-Year-Olds—What Could Possibly Go Wrong? Well, everything.

The Ethical Flaws: Human Developmental and Racially Prejudicial Problems

Applying a high-stakes admissions exam to 4- or 5-year-olds presumes that “giftedness” is fixed at birth—and therefore measurable at that very early stage of human development. Worse, it assumes that giftedness is not equally distributed among the “being born” population. This idea, even if put forward by an atheist assumes that God is favoring some children to be giftedly great in this world and others to be something less-than-great. Or, that nature (for those atheistically inclined), in a random casino-gambling way, somehow placed “giftedness” in the heads of a select group of babies whose parents just happen to be mostly white, wealthy, and well-educated.

Both positions are morally and scientifically indefensible. Children at this age are in a state of rapid and constant neurodevelopmental fluctuation—their attention spans vary widely depending on external stimuli, the language of adults, emotional responses, and their willingness to please authority figures. Their test performance can swing unpredictably based on comfort with the examiner, prior exposure to testing, or even what they ate that morning. These variables are profoundly shaped by home environment, nutrition, access to enrichment, and socio-economic conditions—not by innate “giftedness.”

And let’s be honest: if high school principals like me have trouble convincing some teenagers, especially boys, to treat high-stakes exams as life-changing events, what hope do we have of convincing 4- or 5-year-olds? (Full-disclosure) When my own daughter took the G&T test, we didn’t even tell her what it was. We made up a story about why a friendly stranger wanted to ask her questions. Fortunately, she was a confident graduate of Brooklyn’s Little Sun People preschool, where she had spent years engaging with adults who weren’t her parents and learning in a rich, kindergarten-like environment. On test day, she went into full “please-the-adults” performance mode.

The truth, which educators know but rarely tell the public (perhaps out of fear of further lowering public confidence), is that despite the great work of developmental psychologists like Bruner, Vygotsky, and Piaget, there is still much about the brain and mind we do not know—certainly not enough to justify excluding children from future opportunities at such an early formative age.

What if the G&T exam is not measuring giftedness at all—but rather, a child’s unearned access to “parent-pushing power,” privileged affluence, early literacy exposure, and parental educational attainment? If so, this exam is not assessing brilliance—it’s auditing privilege, parental personalities and family priorities.

As a 40+ year public educator, I’ve quietly observed how veteran teachers, often unconsciously, change their tone and demeanor when two well-educated, well-spoken Black or Latino parents walk into the room. Professional educators, including test administrators, are human. My daughter’s charm, vocabulary, and background won the day—but the truth is her environment gave her enormous advantages: nightly reading, exposure to museums, modern ballet classes, a home library, and an academically rich preschool experience. Meanwhile, countless other children—whose parents, for reasons of work, awareness, or distrust, did not even bring them for G&T testing—were automatically excluded from consideration.

How About This: Let Professional Educators Make Educational Decisions

And finally, the primary reason this critical early childhood decision should be taken out of the hands of all politicians, regardless of party or ideology, and placed in the not-seeking-votes hands of dedicated professional educators. Public education fails large segments of families not because parents don’t care or because children lack ability, but because a high-quality educational product is not equally distributed across the system.

In schools like Bank Street, Stuyvesant, and Bronx Science, there is zero tolerance for instructional incompetence. The open secret of public education is that in too many schools, often those serving our poorest students, there is too much teacher turnover, too many inexperienced teachers for school administrators to coach effectively, and not enough of a critical mass of veteran, very-good to mastery-level teachers capable of sustaining high levels of instructional excellence, that matches high expectations of student capabilities.

And those “very good to mastery-level” teachers, and their school leaders, must operate from what I call, a place of Essential Efficacy: the conviction that educators bear full responsibility for a child’s success, independent of the student’s socio-economic status, language background, or parental influence.

Many of us who led high-performing Title I schools achieved this by becoming Entrepreneurial Principals (see Report from the Principal’s Office, pp. 556–564), closing the resource gap by raising huge amounts of additional funds and building high-efficacy instructional cultures. But more importantly, we succeeded because we, and our staff, believed—deeply—that all children arrive in this world with a unique set of skills and talents, and that it is the sacred duty of professional educators to find and draw out those gifts.

So yes, ending kindergarten G&T testing is the right decision—but for the wrong reasons and in the wrong way. It’s an easy political-rhetorical win, but a meaningless gesture that doesn’t address the deeper disease of educational quality inequity.

And, until we build a system that cultivates every child’s potential with the same fervor, we now reserve for labeling a few as “gifted,” we will keep playing the same mis/under educated rigged game.

The goal isn’t to find the gifted, it’s to bravely grow the gifts inherently existing in all of our students.


There Is an Alarming Amount of Misinformation About the Public-School Superintendent Hiring Process (Parts 1 & 2)

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There Is an Alarming Amount of Misinformation About the Public-School Superintendent Hiring Process (Parts 1 & 2)

The “Misinformation Circus”

Watching the current misinformation circus surrounding the topic of the public-school superintendent hiring process (or it’s problems), I believe some of it represents a mean-spirited and cynical attempt to score political points on unrelated issues, such as the predictable operational deficiencies caused by our badly broken national immigration policies, which have little to do with the emotional or educational well-being of children.
But the other side of the misinformation problem, like so many so-called “educational news stories,” is driven by a lack of informed knowledge and by the inclination of some in the news media to seek out the most sensational aspects of a story, not to educate, but to capture the largest number of revenue-generating eyeballs.

I’m not angry with them, for as a lifelong public educator, I understand that electronic and print news services are business entities. Yet, they can also become powerful educational tools when employed in classrooms by professional educators guided by ethical, pedagogically sound, and learning-outcome-driven standards.

1. A Patchwork of Rules and Realities
As someone who has operated on both sides of the superintendent hiring equation—first as a candidate seeking and successfully securing a superintendency, and later as an executive search firm advisory consultant and informal advisor to school board members, I can perhaps shed a little light on what is often presented as a simple and straightforward process, when in truth, the opposite is the case.
Across the United States (and its territories) there are roughly 14,000 school districts, in addition to the school systems operated by the military. Each state establishes its own licensure and certification requirements for superintendents, and every district designs its own search and selection procedures within those parameters. Consequently, there is no national model, only thousands of variations shaped by state law, district culture, and governance structures.
Large urban systems such as New York City, Chicago, Detroit, and Los Angeles add another layer of complexity: they are technically single districts under one state-recognized superintendent (often called a chancellor or CEO), even though they employ multiple community or area superintendents who must also hold valid state credentials.

2. Misunderstood Issues in Personnel Screening
Public confidence in the hiring process is often shaken by rare failures that attract headlines. Yet, as those of us who have worked inside the system know, Human Resources departments generally get it right. Each year they process thousands of new employees, ensuring background checks, references, university degrees, licenses and certifications are in place. There is, however, no good news story when Human Resources, considering the huge number of new employees they process each year, gets it right—as they overwhelmingly do—and those “unacceptable” prospective employees never set foot inside a school building or district.

Still, vulnerabilities exist. Because the U.S. lacks a national school system or a unified educator database, information about an employee’s misconduct may not always follow them across school districts or state lines. Staff who resign before disciplinary proceedings are finalized, or administrators who accept “no-fault” transfers or demotions, can leave behind incomplete personnel records for future background checkers. Further, differing state employee privacy laws often prevent districts from sharing negative employment information.

There is also the persistent problem of employees “pleading down” to much less serious charges—either within a district’s internal disciplinary process or through the legal system, where charges can be reduced below the level of a felony.

Compounding this is the absence of a consistent mechanism for districts to learn when an employee has been arrested for conduct occurring outside of school buildings, beyond the school day, or even outside the city, state, or country. This creates a deeply problematic situation in which most districts must rely on employees to self-report such “illegal” incidents, which can be problematic when there is an arrest and no indictment or conviction.

Unfortunately, law-enforcement agencies vary widely in their communication with school districts. Some are diligent and proactive in notifying school systems of employee arrests, while others are inconsistent—or fail to report such information altogether. In these cases, ironically, the news media often becomes the district’s first, and sometimes only, source of information regarding a school employee’s arrest.

3. The Limits of Detection: Why “Past Bad Acts” Can Go Undiscovered
Here lies a fundamental truth that the public rarely understands: a school district or executive search firm has almost no independent authority to uncover hidden misconduct if that information does not appear in an accessible, verifiable database.

Unlike medicine or law enforcement, education operates without a national professional registry that tracks disciplinary actions or license revocations across state lines. Because public education is a state—not federal—responsibility, each state maintains its own credentialing and revocation system. There is no single national repository where a search firm or district HR team could check whether a candidate had quietly resigned from another state under investigation or settled a disciplinary case out of view.

If the individual’s prior state education agency never revoked or suspended their license, and no criminal conviction was recorded, that history effectively disappears. To the receiving state or district, the candidate appears fully qualified. Even the most diligent search firm can only examine what is legally available: official state certification records, background-check clearances, and reference statements. When those sources are silent, so is the system.

This structural limitation is not due to neglect or incompetence by HR staff or executive search consultants; it is a direct consequence of our federalized educational framework. Since the United States does not operate as a single national school system, there is no centralized data clearinghouse comparable to national databases used in other professions. As a result, both districts and search firms must rely on trust in state-level credentialing agencies—and occasionally, luck—when verifying a superintendent’s professional past.

Understandably, given the enormous workload that often-understaffed state education departments and local school district HR offices must manage, annually certifying thousands of teachers and school-building administrators (and other non-public education professionals), maintaining a centralized list of “bad-behaving” superintendents is rarely a top priority. Yet the absence of a unified, nationwide status reporting and revocation database leaves even the most diligent search teams navigating in partial darkness. Each new superintendent search is forced to depend on its own creative, time-consuming, and sometimes incomplete background-research strategies, rather than drawing from a shared national system of verified information.

4. Licensure and Reciprocity: Who Decides Who Is Qualified?
A crucial, little-understood point is that school districts and search firms have no authority over superintendent licensure. That power rests solely with each state’s education department. When a superintendent relocates to another state, they must request reciprocal certification—a process that differs widely across jurisdictions.

Some states, informally referred to as “gold-card reciprocity states” (for example, New York), get readily accept by another state’s credentialing body: “If New York says you’re qualified, that’s good enough for us.” Others require partial documentation or coursework verification, but few re-investigate an applicant’s complete professional or legal history. Therefore, if a certification were ever granted in error or through lax verification, a hiring district would have no knowledge of it or have the power to overturn it once the state has officially issued the superintendency license.

5. Why Districts Use Executive Search Firms
Critics sometimes question why school boards spend public funds on search firms. The answer is straightforward: the applicant pool is enormous and the stakes are high. A single superintendent vacancy can draw hundreds of applications, many of them formally qualified on paper.

A reputable executive search firm helps the district’s governing body—school board, mayor, or trustees—clarify the leadership qualities, competencies, and values it seeks. These early sessions resemble strategic retreats, where the firm facilitates consensus before the public process begins. Once a clear profile emerges, the firm screens, recruits, and discreetly contacts both active candidates and currently serving superintendents who may be ready for a new challenge.
These non-public exploratory conversations allow both sides to determine fit without destabilizing the candidate’s current district. When news of a superintendent’s departure becomes public prematurely, morale and operations can suffer; hence the use of interim or “caretaker” superintendents while searches conclude.

6. The Bottom Line
The superintendent selection process is neither secretive nor simple. It operates at the intersection of law, policy, politics, and human judgment. Errors make headlines; accuracy does not. Understanding the limits of district authority, the complexities of state licensure, and the professional prudence of using search firms can help the public view these appointments with greater realism and less suspicion.
The goal, after all, is to ensure that the person leading a school district is not merely certified on paper, but genuinely capable of safeguarding and advancing the educational mission entrusted to them.

About the Author:
Michael A. Johnson is a former New York City superintendent, executive search consultant, and school leadership mentor. He has served as a site supervisor for graduate students in school-building leadership programs and as a district mentor to aspiring principals and assistant principals. His work focuses on strengthening ethical, equitable, and high-impact school-building leadership pipelines in public education.

From Barely Struggling to Seriously Soaring: A First-Year Mayoral Plan for Immediate, Significant, and Sustainable Improvement in the NYC School System

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One of the first lessons you learn as a school superintendent is that real change takes time—you can’t accomplish everything in year one. It’s a bit like turning around an aircraft carrier: it takes focus, steady hands, and a clear course of action. So the question becomes—what can a mayor do in public education, in their first year, that would make a profound and meaningful difference for children? And in New York City’s case, if that mayor were re-elected and wanted to make a bold, renewing statement about public education, what could that look like?

So, drawing on over 50 years of observations and experience, here is my collection of “greatest schools’ greatest hits.” Every high-performing school district or school I’ve encountered around the world implemented most—if not all—of the below numbered basic practices. If the NYCDOE adopted them, the positive academic achievement results would be city-wide, radical, immediate, and lasting.

What’s notably absent here are the usual “sexy-sounding” (and always very expensive) “school improvement” or “closing the gap” initiatives, as well as the recurring governance merry-go-round (“You run the schools—no, you run the schools…”) that serve more as political throw-away lines than educational solutions. Beyond the built-in lack of accountability, worst of all, these popular rhetorical approaches fail to authentically educate students—especially our most disenfranchised and too-often discarded NYC children.

What I’m proposing here is not everything, but it would be a phenomenal first year (or any year) start for any mayoral administration. Most importantly, it would dramatically reduce (my apologies to those employed in that sector) our city’s reliance on the criminal justice system as an employment driver, while greatly expanding the dream-driven aspirations and life opportunities of countless New York City children.

For deeper discussion of these strategies and others, see my books:

• Report to the Principal’s Office: Tools for Building Successful High School Administrative Leadership

• Report from the Principal’s Office: A 200-Day Inspirational and Aspirational School Leadership Journal

1. Empower Superintendents, Principals, and Assistant Principals to be able to do their best work.

• Stop forcing school administrators to spend a lot of time and energy on “out-thinking,” “out-flanking,” and “out-maneuvering” the huge amount of anti-student policies within their own NYCDOE system. The most successful leaders in Title I schools often must quietly bend or break rules daily to ensure students can learn. Any school system fighting hard to defeat its own wonderfully noble mission, will win that fight!

• Every elementary school in the city, regardless of student population size—needs a full-time Assistant Principal.

• Middle Schools (MS) are tough child psychological development places, and I don’t think I ever saw a MS with an adequate number of APs to do all of the student “handholding,” administrative work and staff support that was needed.

• School supervision licensing and certification alone aren’t enough; we must rethink how we develop, appoint, and continue to professionally grow school-building administrators.

• Any hoping to be effective School-Building Leader (SBL) must master their role as a Chief Instructional Coach, including conducting high-quality classroom lesson observations and having impactful post-observation conferences.

• Principals and APs must be empowered to make classrooms safe, focused, and productive for teaching and learning. SBLs who, for any reason, cannot achieve this goal risk getting caught in a painful school-underperformance cycle: poor-quality instructional time and space leads to off-task student behaviors, which in turn further degrade instructional time and space quality.

• Principals need a trusted critical friend, coach, and mentor. Strengthening the principal–superintendent supervisory relationship is essential to reduce mission-harming—and financially costly—leadership mistakes. For this to happen, superintendents must have genuine, accountable budgetary and policy-making authority. NYC has long maintained a confusing, overlapping, and often conflicting series of concurrent school governing systems. In recent years, additional costly supervisory layers have emerged between the Chancellor and superintendents, many of which add little productive value. The real work of effectively educating students is done by those closest to the school buildings. The accountability system should be simple, straightforward—clear enough for parents and other stakeholders to understand—and measurable: the Chancellor (and deputy chancellors) supervise the superintendents, and the superintendent (and deputy superintendents) supervises the principals in their districts.

• Stop letting uninformed commentators or the media drive performance evaluations. We should compare schools to similar schools and to their own past performance—not specialized admissions schools, to more open-admission schools. This approach is not pedagogically sound or helpful, and serves to hide the serious underperformance elements in so-called “good schools.”

• If you want CEO-level results, give the Principal CEO-level power and authority.

2. Strengthen the Quality of Instructional Practices in all Schools.

• In politics, “it’s the economy, stupid!” In public schools “it’s the quality of Instruction!”

• The “class size” chant is an easy way to dodge accountability. While smaller classes can help, the far bigger issue is a school’s collective level of instructional quality. And how this quality instructional factor is tragically unevenly distributed across districts, schools, and even different classrooms inside of school buildings. Furthermore, some of our most struggling schools will suffer from chronic teacher turnover and a bad ‘tipping-point’ of having too many1-3 year teachers to effectively professionally develop.

• Identify a cohort of Master Teachers and incentivize them with higher pay, housing vouchers, free transit passes, for working in our most underperforming schools. Along with extra pay for teaching after-school, weekend, school breaks and summer tutorial classes.

• Provide weekly subject-specific collaborative planning and professional development time for teachers, aligned with state and national standards.

• In each school deploy top-performing teachers as in-house instructional coaching-colleagues for new and struggling staff. Reward them with grants, gift cards, for professional and classroom supplies of their choice.

• Place Teacher Instructional Improvement Centers in every Title I school, led by a full-time Instructional Coach selected by the principal and approved by the superintendent.

• There must be a heavy financial, material, time, and personnel ‘front-end’ investment in helping students to master the K-5 English Language Arts (ELA) and Mathematics standards, any deficiencies in these areas simply becomes harder and more expensive to fix as the child moves up in grades.

3. Use Data the Right Way

• Conduct regular diagnostic assessments (aligned with state standards) to identify learning gaps in real time and adjust instructional methods accordingly.

• Maintain a visible school data wall—physical or digital—tracking in-school weekly testing progress toward identified academic targets.

• Hold weekly, monthly, and by semester, student progress reports meetings to address those at risk of failing.

• Ask qualitative questions about excellence: “What makes a highly effective student, teacher, or school administrator—and how can we reproduce those groups common characteristics qualities?”

4. Expand Student Learning Opportunities

• Shift the focus from racial integration alone to integrating high expectations and world-class learning environments—starting with PreK–8 schools. Don’t burn precious political capital on trying to dismantle the Specialized High School admissions policy. Instead, move quickly and decisively to reconstitute the High School Division with a singular mission: make neighborhood high schools “Great Again” by transforming them into exciting, high-performing learning hubs. These schools should offer robustly supported CTE, STEM, and Performing & Creative Arts programs, giving students—whether below, slightly below, on, or above grade-level—empowering, non-specialized “ed-options” schools that set them up for post-high school success.

• Fully fund, especially on the elementary and middle school level, creative and performing arts programs, including band and orchestra musical instruments, so principals aren’t “forced” to cut them to balance budgets. Every school should have a fully funded library and Librarian.

• Establish after-school, weekend, and summer programs in elementary and middle schools focused on museum, cultural institution, and the theater visits; STEM, robotics, chess, AI, and coding; performing and creative arts; and non-traditional sports such as gymnastics, tennis, fencing, and archery. These programs will provide many students with enriching opportunities and help level the playing field with peers from more affluent families who already benefit from such powerful informal educational experiences. Additionally, these activities will break down stereotypes about who can excel academically and participate in various athletic pursuits.

• Offer extended learning time—after school, weekends, summers, and holidays—staffed by specially trained teachers, assigned by performance mastery and not seniority.

• In middle and high schools, implement 2 to 4 pilot-model team-taught math classes in every school district, with a composition of approximately 30% special education students and 70% regular education students. Each class should be staffed by a special education teacher, a regular education math content-certified teacher, and an educational and behavioral paraprofessional to provide comprehensive support. Expand the model each year as student performance data demonstrates positive outcomes and as personnel and financial resources become available.

• Design a K-12 (very popular in 2000-2003 CSD 29) “Readers-to-Leaders” to strengthen literacy city-wide but to also encourage student to engage in reading for fun and enjoyment.

• Expand reading support by hiring and placing certified Elementary Reading Specialists in struggling Title 1 middle schools. A CSD 29 initiative; 2000–2003, that produced great reading scores improvement results.

• Create dedicated science/technology labs in elementary schools, modeled after the successful CSD 29 initiative (2000–2003). Staff these labs with strong, specially trained teachers—not as a throwaway “cluster” position—who can teach to and beyond the 4th-grade science exam standards. As demonstrated in CSD 29, this approach will boost 4th-grade science exam scores across all student performance levels and strengthens STEM conceptual understanding and practical skills as students transition to middle school.

• To better prepare students for STEM college majors, increase the number of NYC students ready to enter and successfully pass 8th-grade Algebra.

5. Build a Culture of High Expectations for all students.

• Raise, not lower, academic, promotion and graduation standards.

• Provide school administrators and teachers—especially in Title I schools—with professional development focused on using empowering language and practical methodologies that enhance student achievement through compassionate and committed efficacy strategies.

• If the Sate or a school uses a “portfolio assessment model,” make sure that the standards and rubrics for evaluating that portfolio assessment is rigorous and meets State learning standards.

• Eliminate social promotion and replace it with flexible, supportive gateway/pathway schools, that will allow them to legitimately meet (at least get close to) grade level standards. Sending students to middle or high school, who we know are totally unprepared to do the minimally required work at those levels is setting these students up for failure.

• Expand Advance Placement (AP) course taking by high school students attending “neighborhood schools,” but this won’t work authentically (beyond the usual for show symbolism) if students in the K-8 world are not provided with strong ready-to-do high school work skills.

6. Support Parents in Their Most Important Role

• Stop misleading parents into thinking their main duty is to run the school; their top priority is managing and supporting their child’s educational progress.

• Offer monthly workshops on homework routines, home studying techniques, good student punctuality and attendance skills, interpreting progress reports, and, for high school parents, “how to read and understand a student’s academic transcript.”

• Use text and a secure school website to immediately provide parents with academic/assignments updates, their child’s daily punctuality and attendance report, not just event announcements.

• Get Title 1 parents out of the fundraising business, not only does it cause huge resource gaps between schools, in some schools it creates terrible distracting, and often safety issues. Further, principals can raise more funds—without the accompanying human drama—by establishing a “Friends of [School Name]” 501(c)(3) foundation. This nonprofit can solicit gifts, secure donations, and serve as a formal conduit for grant writing funds. Don’t attempt to end parent fundraising at affluent schools—that’s a political ‘third rail’ issue for a Chancellor. Instead, match the dollar amounts they raise with equal-value grants for the city’s poorest schools. Every school district should have a Director of Fundraising, who along with a grant writing team can help all schools raise much needed supplementary funds.

• School-Building Administrators must hold weekly meetings with parents of underperforming students (I often included their teachers in quick stand-up meetings), especially those who are capable but underachieving—often young Black and Latino boys.

7. Optimize the First 10 Days of School (and Each Semester)

• Conduct baseline ELA and math assessments immediately to guide instruction and student class/course scheduling.

• Build community and positive school culture from day one.

• Host parent orientations to set clear academic, behavioral, and attendance expectations.

8. Improve Attendance and Punctuality

• Reinstitute and reinvigorate the School Attendance Teachers/Officers Program, you can’t teach a child who is not in school, and for the chronically absent when they do occasionally come to school the classroom does not work for them or the other students.

• Make schools especially middle and high, interesting places where students would actually want to go. Partner with community organizations to address barriers like transportation or any family need that is causing a student to not come to school.

9. Prioritize Social, Emotional, and Physical Health

• Provide Title I schools with an additional guidance counselor whose role extends beyond IEP mandated counseling services.

• Share a school psychologist across 2–3 schools as needed.

• Offer rotating health, vision, and dental clinic services, including providing eyeglasses.

• (I’m sure some will take this the wrong way) For large numbers of students in the system we need to practically, not theoretically embrace “In loco parentis.” We need to put programs and people in position to provide these students with maximum high effective parental-like support.

10. Create a Rapid Response System/School for Underperformance

• Allocate funds for the appointment of a Director of School Improvement (DOSI) in every school district.

• The DOSI will in cooperation with school-based administrators, identify struggling new and veteran teachers within 1- 2 weeks of the new school year, and launch targeted PD and support immediately.

• The DOSI will require academic recovery plans for any student cohort, specific courses, grade, subject areas, or schools falling below benchmarks once the first semester data arrives.

• The DOSI coordinates the collaboration of district-level content supervisors, instructional coaches, Teacher Center staff developers, and Master Teachers in framing all PD efforts.

• The DOSI organizes the twice-yearly district “Best Practices Fairs” to share and standardize high-quality instructional practices.

• Empower superintendents to transform two of their lowest-performing schools into “District Charter Schools” (DCS)—schools with charter-like flexibility in staff selection, scheduling, school calendar, and operations, staffed exclusively by voluntary transferees who are master practitioners in every job category. Each DCS would be fully reconstituted, exempt from many labor contract restrictions and NYCDOE bureaucratic regulations, and offer higher salaries, enabling a rapid, high-quality turnaround in student academic performance.

A Final Word on Mayoral School System Options – Year One

Again, drawing on my superintendent experience—and still carrying the scars that came with it! I’ve learned that even the most positive, student-centered initiatives must be introduced in carefully timed, manageable phases. While this approach won’t eliminate resistance, it helps prevent the “no-go” forces, both inside and outside the school system; those who are invested in maintaining a system that underperforms for most children, especially children of color, from quickly uniting and undermining your efforts to raise student academic achievement for all.

Further, if you truly want to “fight”—or, more amicably, compete with charter schools, do it on the educational battlefield, not the political one. Outperform them with proven practices, hold uncompromising expectations for both staff and students, and foster a no excuses operational culture. Adopt a “whatever it takes” mindset, put children before adults, and make “failure is not an option” more than a slogan. Above all, raise the academic learning standards for every student—not just the fortunate or well-connected few.

As a NYC Title I public high school principal, I saw firsthand that many parents who had previously sent their children to private or parochial K–8 schools chose, for the first time, to ‘go public’ by enrolling them in my high school. That’s one way to make NYC more affordable! And proof that when traditional public schools deliver the highest quality education product, parents will choose them every time.


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PreK-12 educators must uphold the valuable pedagogical principles of Diversity, Equity, Equality, and Inclusion in their conceptual and behavioral learning objectives.

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As professional educators, we must take an enlightened and ethical step up and away from the common uninformed and often divisive ‘politically toxic’ current conversations concerning the application of the principles of Diversity, Equity, Equality, and Inclusion (DEEI). We understand the educational value of each DEEI principle individually and how they work together in a school building. Additionally, we recognize that, operationally and pedagogically, Equity and Equality are profoundly different teaching and learning strategies. And even if some of our university colleagues, now under political and financial siege, are forced to abandon the efficacious teaching and learning power of applying (or even discussing) DEEI, we must hold the line. For in our PreK-12 world, these core doctrinal conceptual and behavioral learning standards are inseparable from the type of schools we want to create, the learning objectives we want to teach, and the profiles of the kinds of students we want to send into a very diversely integrated and growing internationally-interactional nation and planet. We must seek to empower students with a broad spectrum of communicative competencies and a rich reservoir of applicable knowledge and intelligences. Their neighborhood, the city, the state, and the region of the nation where they reside, along with their nation itself, is not the entire planetary humanity story, not even close! Our job as intellectual capacity builders is to broaden and not limit and shrink the child’s locus of power and influence. In a good and wise Democracy, its public education system will build a greater unity of purpose that fully embraces and develops the gifts and talents of all of its citizen children.

As professional educators, we must upgrade our game for teaching personal responsibility skills.

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This is not just an academic task but a professional, ethical mission to inspire and motivate our students to take charge of their living well in the future possibilities.

For eleven years, I treated the Principal’s Office (or should I say it treated me) as a classroom for understanding human psychology. I learned so much about life and human motivations in that space.

One of the first things I learned was the transformative power of effective communication. Many of the parents I met with in the principal’s office often applied very different parenting methods than the ones I experienced as a 1950s first-generation immigrant Caribbean-American public-school child. The differences in both chronological time and family-raising culture were profound, and I quickly realized that if I hoped to communicate effectively with many of my school parents, then I needed to bridge the gap between my upbringing and the way students were being raised in the current (then 1990’s) era.

The first significant difference I noticed between my professional principal experience and my own public schooling experience was around this critical concept of personal responsibility. I participated in so many “odd” parent conferences in my office where when there was a student who was seriously misbehaving and disrupting a classroom lesson (which is how and why they ended up in my office) or a student who was dramatically underperforming academically when their middle-school academic performance record and standardized test-scores indicated they could do much better. I was amazed when a parent, with all sincerity, asserted some versions of things like:

“The teacher (does not like) has it out for my child!”

“The teacher wants my child to fail the course (or the end-of-course standardized exam, e.g., Regents)!”

“This school is asking too much of students!” (“And you, principal Johnson is doing too much!”)

“He or She is associating with the wrong people!” (It’s fascinating when all the parents of the rambunctious group independently say the same thing about the other students in the group)

“This school (and often specifically me, the principal) doesn’t like my child!”

“My child has a First Amendment right to express their opinions on the lesson while it is being taught.”

“The teacher does not know how to teach (pick one: science, math, history…).”

“Other students in the class were doing the same or similar “bad” things!”

“How come you don’t ever suspend any of the students on the honor roll!” (I heard that one a lot)

It was always amazing to see parents cast their wanna-be bully child into the award-winning role of “victim.”

(And one of my all-time favorites from a father of a 9th grader being in-house suspended for blurting out in the middle of a lesson an extremely inappropriate remark about a part of a teacher’s anatomy) “Come on, Mr. Johnson, didn’t you have a crush on a teacher when you were in high school?” He said it in front of his victory-smiling son; I knew then I had a lot of work to do for the next four years.

Effective verbal and body language are critical tools in achieving personal and professional objectives.

Those themes ran throughout many (and thankfully for my emotional sake, not all) of these principal office ‘corrective-action’ parent meetings. Sadly, there was always something outside of the child’s power to reason with, control, or have the ability to independently manage that was the cause for their misbehaving or academic underperforming actions. Exempting, of course, those special education cases where the student was documented diagnostically struggling with control issues, but even in those IEP disciplinary situations, the objective was to grow that child self-control powers.
However, this parental abdication (for acting out and underperforming regular education students) of personal responsibility on the part of the student could be badly enhanced by parents who cherished their role of being the child’s “friend” over being a behavioral standards-setting adult parent.

Sometimes, parents would say, “It’s racism (as the cause)!” when the teacher was White, but that did not explain when the child exhibited the same negative behaviors or academic underperformance in a Black teacher’s classroom. For sure, our society is far away from removing the national stain and shame of its slavery past, a historical holocaust that has been changing in form but not in its practical expressions, even up to our modern era.
My concern, and a discussion I often had with my students, is that if everything that goes wrong in our personal lives is caused by racism (even when no White person is involved), then that removes all self-authority from our existing lives, essentially rendering us as less than human.

Perhaps a primary price of “Freedom” is taking personal responsibility, knowingly acting in our best interest, affirming our humanity by properly managing our behaviors, including managing our response to the harmful behaviors (e.g., racism) of others, and not waiting for permission to exercise our agency, meaning not simply always being in a state of reacting dependency. In many ways, and for many years, this has been a core pillar of my educational philosophy.

The ability to effectively advocate for oneself or for the good of others is an invaluable life skill!

As a science center director, I and Dr. Gerald Deas met with the then President of SUNY Downstate Medical Center (SDSMC) in Brooklyn, where we proposed a major groundbreaking summer program. This program, where the esteemed faculty of SDSMC would teach middle and high school students, had the potential to inspire and motivate the next generation of scientists and medical professionals. I was able to establish similar partnership programs at IBM, Brooklyn Union Gas, Polytechnic University, Pratt University, Pfizer, Bristol-Myers Squib, Columbia University, NYC Technical College, Office of Naval Research, The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Construction Trade Unions, The U.S. State Department, the U.S. Architect of the Capital, the National Science Foundation, etc., see: https://majmuse.net/a-little-about-me/

In addition, early in my personal professional journey, I had to appear before a board of examiners for the verbal portion of my seven-hour NYC principals licensing and certification exam. I approached this challenge as any good, standardized test-taker would: I stayed on mission-message. I reminded myself, “This isn’t about me. It’s about understanding the established standards and qualifying rubrics that the test-grading interviewers will use to determine whether I can serve as a public high school principal. If I don’t succeed, I won’t be in a position to help young people, many of whom share my ethnic, cultural, or socio-economic background. My commitment to these students is unwavering, and their success was my ultimate goal.”

In many situations where I needed to ‘make a pitch’ to secure resources and opportunities for young people, a central thought guided me: “This is not about me or how I feel; it’s about achieving my objective.” This perspective required me to engage in attitudinal-adjusting and “code-switching” communication techniques, powerful skills that allows us to adaptively transform our language, behavior, or appearance to fit and succeed in different social, professional, and educational contextual environments.

Code-switching is an essential life skill that not all young people have equal access to, yet it plays a crucial role in achieving career success. As professional educators, we have a responsibility to ensure that all students have this tool in their arsenal, leveling the playing field and empowering them for their future aspirations. That’s why I believed it was vital to teach students the appropriate techniques for code-switching and other professional “soft skills,” despite facing political backlash, often from privileged individuals who had already reached their own professional goals and were secretly imparting these skills to their children.
We regularly organized sessions on topics like “How to Dress for a Successful Interview” and “How to Present Your Best Personal and Professional Self” for students preparing for apprenticeship programs, college admissions, scholarships, internships, or job interviews.

I have always emphasized that some “old-fashioned” values such as self-discipline, compassion, perseverance, honesty, manners, civility, and good character are always in good personal standing fashion, In part because I used them to advance my own career. Why then would I hide these essential ‘soft-skills’ values from my students?

Unfortunately, in the current climate of our nation’s history, rash rudeness, vulgar disrespect, and bullying behaviors are often celebrated as strengths, while virtues like decency, respect and humility are mistakenly viewed as weaknesses. In this challenging context, we, as educators, must remain committed to instilling the timeless positive and good and best-life outcome producing values in our students, inspiring them to uphold these virtues and guiding them toward a successful future.

As a principal and superintendent, I interviewed many, many people for many different positions. So it was strange to see some of them saying things on social media like: “Let the brother be his unadjusted, nonadaptive, “keeping-it-real” natural self when interviewing for a job,” when they did not behave in that manner when they interviewed with me for a job! Or, I know of instances when their own children engaged in a life-enhancing interview scenario, and they did not advise them to: “Just be you boo, and make those folks interviewing you like and accept it!” Isn’t that the operational definition of hypocrisy?

“Good for thee, but not for me (or my children)!”

I’m often amazed at how many entertainment celebrities who project a “street credibility” persona of rejecting formal education, but who meticulously plan strong academic pathways for their own children to ensure their success in life. It starkly contrasts with the anti-academic lifestyle they will promote for their concert-paying or music-buying audiences!
And one of my grave disappointments during my many years of public education service is the number of professional educators who give one set of reasonable advice to their own children and a completely different, failing strategy to other people’s children. This, again, is what we call hypocrisy, and it’s crucial for parents to be aware of its ever-recurring low-expectations presence in our schools.

If at any point in your life you took and passed a specialized high school exam, met the creative arts performance standards for admission to a prestigious performing arts high school or college, passed a city or state assessment exam, earned an International Baccalaureate Program Diploma, or took the SAT, ACT, Advanced Placement (AP) exam, LSAT, Bar exam, MCATs, GRE, nursing, national teachers or principals exams, or any other qualifying exams, if you have earned an Associate, Bachelor’s, Master’s, or Doctoral degree, then you have submitted yourself to the rules, conditions, standards, and requirements necessary to achieve that recognized, personal and financially rewarding status. If this status applies to you, please do not send the message to young people—whether in person, in your classroom, or on social media—that the “reality” in their heads is the only reality that exists in the world. It is misleading to suggest that success in life can be achieved solely through their subjective evaluations and interpretations of what is required of them. This notion is hypocritical because you (and probably your children) did not follow this self-destructive approach.

Sometimes, courage in education (and parenting) is just simply telling the truth in a crowded circle of cowed individuals committed to not confronting uncomfortable realities.

But then again, what do I know? I’m just an old guy who is laser-focused on helping young people navigate the many societal gatekeeping systems—including various forms of bigotry and discrimination—by acquiring knowledge and mastering skills, learning all about how these gate-keeping systems operate, learning the established standards and evaluative rubrics these systems employ; and then applying the best practices rules of positive communitive engagement techniques to their quality-of-life advancement advantage.

(house lights dim) “The second act is starting now.” (Senior Second Acts)

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“Scott Rudin, Producer Exiled for Bad Behavior, Plans Return to Broadway” –NYT March 28, 2025 This is an excellent (and literally) “second-act” story. I think that the idea of reinvention or renovation of a creative/productive life is one of the … Continue reading →

Cell Phones in Schools Operational Follow-up: As a profession, how many bad policy historical experiences do we need?

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Yes, there have been many instances where some student somewhere, in some classroom, has used a pencil, pen or a computer in an unintended, not so good, and perhaps, even in a dangerous way, should we then ban those writing and educational instruments from schools? Continue reading →

The issue isn’t cell phones in public schools; the problem is the many academically unchallenged and learning underserved students in these institutions.

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“…If we can’t get more interested and capable students successfully into and through the STEM college major and career gatekeeper course of Algebra 1, then that student having or not having a cell phone won’t matter.” Continue reading →