“College Isn’t for Everyone”—It Depends on Who Is Saying It and Why!

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First, a full disclosure: During my 11 years as a high school principal, I encouraged and witnessed many students who graduated from my high schools and chose not to attend college immediately—even though, consistent with my school’s policy and expectations, they were college-ready, eligible, and, in many cases, had been accepted to several colleges.

Some chose to start private entrepreneurial businesses. Others entered well-paying civil-service careers with excellent benefits or went directly into strong private-sector positions. Some used the STEM education they received while in high school to earn technology-industry certifications and went on to work for major corporations. Others attended specialized skills-training institutes, for example, in the culinary arts, or pursued long-term careers in one of the military services.
Still others entered construction-trade apprenticeship programs after earning both a college-ready high school diploma and a CTE (Career and Technical Education) pre-apprenticeship certification. Some combined pathways, attending a post-high-school specialty training institute or CTE program and later starting their own businesses related to the skills or crafts they had mastered.

Many of these graduates did well, and continue to do well, without having attended college, while others simply delayed college until it made sense for their personal or professional goals.

And that is precisely why I do not automatically object when someone says, “College isn’t for everyone.” For me, the critical questions are: Who is saying it? To whom are they saying it? And for what reasons are they saying it? It is ultimately a matter of the professional expertise and ethical intent of the person giving the advice—and whether that advice is designed to expand the advisee’s possibilities or prematurely limit them.

All of the above is to say that, in public education, the same words and phrases can carry vastly different meanings—and produce vastly different consequences—for students from different socioeconomic classes and for specific cohorts of students, particularly when it comes to college and career advisement.

After spending more than 40 years working at virtually every level of this profession, you certainly do not get to see and hear everything; I stopped saying that somewhere in my third principalship year—but you do get to see and hear a lot. And during my long period of experiential seeing and hearing, I have learned that if I were creating a critical:

“Parents, You Must Pay Attention to This” list, one item would unquestionably appear near the top:

“When the school is speaking about your child, which political language are they using?”

Are they using the vocabulary of high expectations?
Are they using the vocabulary of efficacious care and concern?
Are they using the vocabulary of equity and equality of opportunity?
Are they using the vocabulary of dream-affirming generational advancement?
Are they using the vocabulary of fully developing your child’s innate gifts and talents?

And are they using the vocabulary of having the agape love of wanting for your child what they would want for their own child?

Yes, public education is always, ultimately, and above all, a political act.
Therefore, guidance and counseling, like every other part of the public education system, are not politically or values-neutral. And in an efficacious, ethical, and best-seeking-for-every-student sense, they should not be neutral. They should actively help students overcome external societal factors that would dismiss, diminish, or deny their human potential.

However, there is another side to this reality:

Our economic system is not presently structured as though public schools will successfully prepare every, or even the vast majority of students to enter a meaningful, economically sustaining adult-life after high school, or a meaningful and useful postsecondary school career pathway. And we should at least be willing to ask an uncomfortable question: What would happen to the many institutions, private and civil service occupations, and businesses built around correcting, fixing, supervising, punishing, and incarcerating people if our public schools actually succeeded with nearly all of the children they serve?

Consider, for example, an admittedly imaginary scenario in which New York City public schools fully achieved the often-stated mission that “all children will learn”—including dramatically improved educational and economic outcomes for Black and Latino boys. That achievement alone might not eliminate all known forms of crime or the need for some form of criminal incarceration.

But imagine what might happen if we could substantially interrupt one of the major pathways to incarceration in America—one that has long concerned educators like me and many other human- and civil-rights advocates: the so-called school-to-prison pipeline.

The implications would extend far beyond schools.

Imagine, for example, how dramatically the debate over the future of NYC’s Rikers Island might change if far fewer young people ended up there after being repeatedly exposed, grade after grade, to inadequate educational experiences, low expectations, and denial of access to high-quality learning opportunities—conditions that can contribute to eventual involvement with the criminal justice system. The numerical realities themselves could fundamentally alter the political conversation: fewer people entering the pipeline would mean fewer people needing to be incarcerated.

And so, when I hear the statement “College isn’t for everyone,” I immediately and instinctively follow it with two questions:

“Who is saying it—and why are they saying it?”

Because after more than four decades in public education, I have heard colleagues, from classroom teachers to district superintendents, propose, implement, support, or mandate pedagogical practices and educational policies for other people’s children that they would never accept for—or impose on—their own children.
And therein lies the problem.

The question is not whether every child must attend college, or even attend college immediately after high school graduation; my opening full-disclosure statement makes that student-by-student, personal-journey point clear. The question is whether we are providing other people’s children with the same range of high-quality advice, choices, preparation, encouragement, information, and opportunities that we would insist upon for our own.

“We need to bring back vocational education!”
(Enthusiastically cheered on by the social-media professional education experts.)
Actually, we don’t—not if by “bring it back” we mean returning to the way vocational education was too often used as a targeted, group-demeaning practice for separating students into two categories: those who allegedly could only work with their hands and those presumed to possess the intellectual “gray matter” required to work primarily with their brains.
We know better now. That was an artificial—and, dare I say, often cynical pedagogical division.

What we should do instead is continue upgrading and expanding a modern Career and Technical Education (CTE) philosophy: one that prepares students for meaningful post-high-school careers while refusing to separate technical skill from intellectual development, academic rigor, entrepreneurship, college readiness, or future professional growth.

What many members of the NYC public may not fully appreciate is that schools such as the High School of Fashion Industries, Transit Tech, and Aviation High School are CTE schools. These schools demonstrate that career preparation and serious academic preparation need not be competing educational philosophies. They can enrich both the minds and the skilled talents of young people.*
In other words, we can educate both the mind and the skilled talents of a young person at the same time.

That power of CTE conversation brings me to NYC’s Murry Bergtraum High School for Business Careers.

I recently read a sad story about this historically significant NYC high school. A school with the physical capacity to serve approximately 3,000 students is now serving roughly 90 students.

Speaking as a former high school principal and superintendent, I don’t know how to look at those two numbers—3,000 and 90—and conclude anything other than that something is terribly wrong. And when a problem reaches that level of magnitude, tinkering around the edges is not enough. Sometimes an extraordinary problem requires a radical reimagining of what a school could become.

So, here is mine.

Think about the extraordinary possibilities represented by the Murry Bergtraum High School for Business Careers name, mission, location, and physical capacity. This is a school situated in New York City—the financial capital of the world; home to an enormous civil-service workforce; thousands of small businesses and major corporations; thriving technology, healthcare, construction, and skilled-trades sectors; and one of the world’s great tourism and hospitality destinations.
Why not radically reimagine Murry Bergtraum as a powerful, comprehensive, 21st-century CTE high school organized around multiple career-themed majors?

Imagine a school offering rigorous college-ready academics alongside pathways in finance and banking; accounting; entrepreneurship and small-business development; hospitality and tourism; information technology and cybersecurity; artificial intelligence and AI coding; public administration and civil service; construction management and skilled trades; healthcare administration; marketing and digital media; and other emerging fields tied directly to New York City’s present and future workforce needs.

Then build partnerships around those pathways—with corporations, labor unions, government agencies, colleges and universities, professional associations, apprenticeship programs, and successful entrepreneurs. Give students opportunities to earn industry-recognized certifications, college credits, paid internships, apprenticeships, and authentic workplace experiences before they graduate.
And make entrepreneurship more than an elective course. Make the school itself an entrepreneurial incubator, where students with the interest and ability to build something of their own can graduate not merely knowing how businesses work, but having already begun the process of creating one.

That would be my proposal: a total CTE redesign for Murry Bergtraum High School. Based on my experience, I have found that students enrolled in high-quality CTE programs are often strongly self-motivated to come to school every day, engage passionately in their CTE courses, and be inspired by a like-minded group of fellow CTE students and dedicated CTE teachers. They also benefit from access to industry partnerships, external stakeholders, internships, and other authentic work-based learning experiences.

And perhaps most important, there is the very real possibility of a good job—not four years after graduating from high school, but immediately after graduation. That makes the incentive to stay in school, successfully complete the program, graduate, and enter a meaningful career pathway extraordinarily powerful.

A school building designed to educate approximately 3,000 young people but serving roughly 90 should not simply generate a conversation about declining enrollment. It should force us to ask a much larger educational question:

What could we create here that thousands of New York City students and families would actually want—and deserve—to attend?

The larger point, however, is not simply about one school.

Communities that have historically experienced educational disenfranchisement need to pay very close attention to the “love language” being used when their children are discussed—even when those communities are represented politically by people who look like them.

Is the school or district message:

We love the fact that your child’s presence helps pay the bills and sustain an educational system in which some other children will receive the highest-quality educational opportunities?

Or is the message:

We love your child enough to insist that, regardless of socioeconomic status, race, ethnicity, immigration status, parental wealth, or political power, your child receives every reasonable opportunity to become the highest expression of their best potential self?

Those are two very different educational agape love languages.

And if I had to grade myself on one aspect of my own career, I would probably give myself somewhere between a D and an F for my inability to convince some of our most educationally dismissed and American-Dream-disinherited communities to consistently ask a few basic questions whenever a major education policy is announced:

“Which groups of adults, and which groups of children, are being enfranchised and empowered by this policy?”

“Which groups of adults, and which groups of children, are being disenfranchised and disempowered by this policy?”

And, even more importantly:

“What will the implementation of this policy mean for my community—and specifically, what will it mean for my child?”

Whether the issue is the misguided and politically motivated proposed paraprofessional bonus, the annual class-size debate and its disconnection from the far more important question of a school’s instructional quality, or New York State’s changing Regents examination requirements, parents should resist evaluating educational policies solely through education’s rhetorical “greatest hits,” political slogans, endorsements from stakeholders whose primary interests may not be the children, or the racial and cultural identities of the people promoting them and the policies.

Every public-school-system action can play out differently across different school districts, and in different schools within the same district, and with different groups of children within the same school building.

So do not simply rely on—or automatically trust—a person because of their skin color (“all skin folk ain’t kin folk”), nationality, political party, organizational affiliation, or political rhetoric. Ask the question that matters most for your child:

“Will this action expand or restrict my child’s educational opportunities?”

Malcolm X offered a warning that remains relevant here: “If you form the habit of taking what someone else says about a thing without checking it out for yourself, you’ll find that other people will have you hating your friends and loving your enemies.”

Which brings me back, once again, to the statement at the center of this essay:
“College isn’t for everyone.”

But before accepting that advice when it is directed toward your child, ask the three questions that have guided this entire discussion:

Who is saying it?
Why are they saying it?
And who is your child?

That third question may be the most important of all. Who is your child—their interests, gifts, talents, academic strengths, aspirations, temperament, dreams, and possibilities? And is the person offering advice about your child actually taking the time to know that child before deciding which educational and career doors should remain open—or be quietly closed?

Because ultimately, the question is not whether the speaker is a political friend or enemy of you. The far more consequential question is:

Is the person saying “College isn’t for everyone” speaking as a friend—or an enemy—of your child’s future possibilities?

________________________________________
*And, since we are on the subject, here is another CTE proposal: Congress could significantly increase federal Perkins funding and expand its funding portfolio to explicitly include career-intensive visual and performing arts high schools such as New York City’s LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, Baltimore School for the Arts, Alabama School of Fine Arts, Los Angeles’s Ramon C. Cortines School of Visual and Performing Arts, and Washington, D.C.’s Duke Ellington School of the Arts.

Why shouldn’t we recognize these schools as engaged in serious professional career technical/technique education?

A young person intensively studying instrumental or vocal music, dance, theater, technical theater, filmmaking, visual arts, or another professional arts discipline is not simply participating in an extracurricular activity. That student is developing specialized techniques, professional habits, technical competencies, discipline-specific knowledge, and potentially marketable career skills.
If we are serious about expanding our definition of career and technical education for the 21st-century economy, then Congress should consider expanding the federal Perkins funding framework so that qualifying career-focused visual and performing arts programs can benefit from those federal resources as well.

Peering into a jury of racial peers—The Lindsay Clancy case.

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I have served on several juries over the years, twice as jury foreman. And yes, those deliberations were sometimes tense. Disagreement is a natural and necessary part of the jury process, and the majority is not always right simply because it is the majority.

But in the Lindsay Clancy case, I find myself wondering: Why was it necessary for one juror, when discussing the lone dissenting juror, to publicly identify him as a Black man? Why not simply present her disagreement with his reasoning and explain why she believed his position was wrong? What purpose does identifying his race serve?

And perhaps more troubling: What is the expectation of her hope of what will happen to him next—or to people who share his racial and cultural heritage, now that his race has become part of the public narrative surrounding his dissent?

A juror should be able to disagree, even strongly and even alone, without his racial identity becoming an explanation for—or a public marker attached to, his disagreement. We are (and have been for a long time) in a bad place in this country when a disagreement over evidence and judgment cannot simply remain a disagreement over evidence and judgment.

Who Are the Real Donald Trump Supporters?

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“How Many People Support Trump but Don’t Want to Admit It?”—NY Times, 9/16/2026

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/11/opinion/campaign-stops/how-many-people-support-trump-but-dont-want-to-admit-it.html

Who Are the Real Donald Trump Supporters?

This is actually one of the best news media commentaries I’ve encountered attempting to explain a phenomenon that almost no one seems willing to discuss honestly. At least Mr. Edsall brings us closer to confronting it.

I stopped watching many cable news programs and reading much of the political commentary in the print media on this topic because they repeatedly seemed to be missing what I believe is an important element of the story.

After food and gas prices don’t go down. After senseless, seemingly endless wars are initiated. After we witness unbelievable displays of grotesque self-enrichment and corruption—after, after, after—what explains the enduring and, as this article suggests, remarkably high levels of Trump’s political support? Is part of the explanation hiding inside of people living amongst us in plain sight?

As I read this well-researched and analytically grounded article, I kept trying to make sense of what, from my perspective, appears to be a profound contradiction:

“You are ashamed to publicly tell someone that you support a person whom many regard as a racist and a bigot—and yet, you still support that person.”

And so, I am left with what I can only describe as my kindest spiritual hypothesis:

Perhaps that sense of shame is the last expression of a fleeting sense of godliness and human kindness decency—still fighting for your soul.

I ain’t mad one bit at Lonnie Bunch. In fact, I totally get it.

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“And whoever will not receive you nor hear your words, when you depart from that house or city, shake off the dust from your feet.”
—Matthew 10:14

I probably should play it safe, stay with educational topics, and leave romantic-relationship advice to those who are far more capable and knowledgeable about the subject. But I do believe this much about romantic relationships is true: When someone emphatically and clearly chooses someone else over you, let it go—and move on. It took me a while to learn that “moving-on” lesson: sometimes the best move is simply to move on.

So, Dr. Bunch, take your intellectual gifts, vast store of wisdom and knowledge, leadership skills, and historical expertise, and share those gifts somewhere else; somewhere where you are appreciated and can receive the honor you deserve.

Museums are powerful learning vehicles that strengthen the informal educational system and, in turn, wonderfully complement the formal PreK–12 education system.

The political conflict surrounding Bunch’s departure is real. The Trump administration has sharply criticized the Smithsonian’s presentation of American history, accusing the Institution of emphasizing oppression and promoting what it considers an anti-American historical narrative. The administration has also threatened federal support and pressed for changes in how the Smithsonian presents the nation’s history. Dr. Bunch, meanwhile, has defended the importance of presenting an accurate, inclusive, and complex American story.

And I can’t help seeing all of this through an educational lens.

History, after all, is supposed to teach us something. When citizens encounter political movements that draw upon exclusionary nationalism or authoritarian ideas, one of the most important educational questions they can ask is: What happened the last time a nation traveled down a similar road? That is why serious historiographical studies matters. History should not merely make us feel good about ourselves; it should help us recognize dangers, understand consequences, and avoid repeating catastrophic mistakes.

That brings me back to Dr. Bunch and the Smithsonian.

Perhaps the most important contribution of Bunch’s leadership has been his insistence that America is strong enough to confront the complexity of its own history. He spent nearly four decades at the Smithsonian, became its first African American Secretary and first historian to hold that position, and, most significantly, transformed the National Museum of African American History and Culture from an idea—with essentially no collection, building, or substantial institutional infrastructure—into one of the nation’s major historical institutions.

That kind of historical truth-telling is not an argument against America. It is an argument that America can become better by understanding America more honestly.
A museum should never become a monument to comforting falsehoods. Nor should it become an instrument for excluding some Americans from the national story while artificially exalting others.

At its best, a national museum system should invite us into deep, sometimes uncomfortable, but ultimately constructive reflection about who we have been, who we are, and who we still have the capacity to become.

That means recognizing both the profound beauty of the American experiment and the ugly historical wounds that remain part of our national inheritance. It means acknowledging extraordinary achievements while also confronting slavery, racial discrimination, dispossession, exclusion, and other injustices that shaped the nation. And it means recognizing the contributions of people who, despite suffering those injustices, nevertheless helped build America into the economically, culturally, scientifically, and politically consequential nation it became.
That is not a denunciation of America.

That is historical honesty and societal maturity.

And perhaps that was the larger significance of Lonnie Bunch’s work: presenting America not as a finished masterpiece without blemishes, nor as a hopelessly irredeemable nation, but as a still-evolving national project—possessing both ugly warts that must be confronted and profound beauty that deserves recognition.
Museums can help a nation engage in that kind of honest reflection. And honest reflection can lead to corrective national action.

Because there is something deeply ungrateful about enjoying the greatness of a nation while refusing to acknowledge all of the people—especially those historically excluded from its promises—whose labor, sacrifice, creativity, courage, intellect, and perseverance helped make that greatness possible.

Or, to put it in the theological language I grew up understanding:

God don’t like ugly.

And ungratefulness is ugly.

Episode 3 of Lanterns Reclaims the Uncorrupted Meaning of “Woke”: Black Protection and Black Progress

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Episode 3 of Lanterns Reclaims the Uncorrupted Meaning of “Woke”: Black Protection and Black Progress

I promise: this essay contains no spoilers. I will only suggest that you watch Episodes 1 and 2 before watching Episode 3, so that what happens in that episode can land in your heart and mind with its full meaning and power.

As I watch the current use of the word “woke,” I am struck by how far it has traveled from the meaning I first understood in the early 2000s—and from its much earlier expressions in Black political and cultural life. Marcus Garvey, for example, issued his Pan-African call to “Wake up Ethiopia! Wake up Africa!” And in 1938, blues and folk musician Lead Belly (Huddie Ledbetter), speaking in connection with his song about the Scottsboro Boys, urged Black people traveling through Alabama to “stay woke.”

Today, the term is routinely deployed by ideological descendants of the anti-civil-rights and anti-Black-progress coalitions of the 1950s and ’60s. More recently, they have been joined by a younger group of self-described progressives who sometimes find themselves apologizing for, and distancing themselves from, what is a false presentation of “woke” or “wokeism.”

And then there is a large cohort of extraordinarily talented Black journalists—all younger than I am—who rarely correct their White colleagues when the term is used in ways that bear little resemblance to its original meaning. Surely many of them are more knowledgeable than I am about its linguistic and cultural origins. (Where is the New York Times’ John McWhorter when we really need him?)

I can understand people in my 75-plus age group being confused about the Woke phrase. The only reason I became familiar with the contemporary use of “woke” many years ago was that, as a lifelong public-school educator, I remained connected through social media to many of my former students.

And what I encountered as the meaning of “woke” was not that complicated.

Stay awake.

Don’t sleep on dangers intended for you. Study—and, in particular, study your history and the history of America’s racist traditions. Stay alert to current events, especially those forces capable of harming your present existence or restricting your future. Recognize threats. Recognize opportunities. Protect yourself. Prepare yourself. Make progress for yourself and your cultural community.

In essence, as I understood it, being “woke” was a call for Black Protection and Black Progress.

I don’t recall anything about DEI, who could use which bathroom, men playing in the WNBA, or canceling the language of White America. In fact, the “woke” commentaries I encountered were not anti-White at all. They simply were not addressed to White America.

They were positive Black messages, by Black people, addressed to Black people.

Who stole “woke” and then cynically corrupted its meaning is an analysis I will leave to those working in the political, cultural-linguistic, and historiographical arenas.

My primary interest, as always, is educational.

And that brings me to Season 1, Episode 3 of Lanterns.

What the writers, director, and actors accomplish in this episode is to educate a nation about the painful fragility of Black existence—especially for Black boys, who are too often forced to surrender their childhoods much too early because, in the eyes of too much of America, their birth certificates might as well have been stamped:

Dangerous if he survives to adulthood.

In that sense, Episode 3 reclaims and restores what I understood to be the original, unadulterated meaning of being “woke”: a compassionate commitment to Black survival and success.

We All Received “The Talk”

Black boys of my generation received “The Talk” when we reached a certain age and, perhaps more importantly, a certain size.
I remember being told that I could no longer run on the sidewalks of Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

“If you want to run, run in the playground at P.S. 9 or in Prospect Park.”

That rule seemed strange to me, since joyfully running was an essential part of our early-adolescent play world. But I was also given very specific instructions about what to do—and what not to do—if stopped by the police. I was told to carry identification and a dollar or two in my wallet.

Like young people everywhere, however, we were determined to prove that the old folks worried too much.

So one day, walking home from Middle School 294, my friends and I decided to race along Vanderbilt Avenue between Fulton Street and Atlantic Avenue. Our adolescent logic was impeccable: there were mostly factories along that stretch and no pedestrians, so technically, we reasoned, we were not really violating our parents’ prohibition against running on crowded sidewalks.

Halfway up the block, a police car pulled us over.

The officers emerged menacingly, shouting and snarling commands.
Suddenly, “The Talk” was no longer an annoying collection of parental rules.

It was a survival manual.

I immediately reminded my friends: Don’t run.

We put our hands against the wall as directed. Continuing down my mental checklist of instructions, I spoke loudly, clearly, and politely, without turning around or making any sudden movements:

“I am reaching into my pocket to get my wallet and I.D.”

Without turning, I handed my wallet to the officer closest to me. Prominently displayed inside was my Police Athletic League (PAL) membership card.

The atmosphere suddenly changed.

One officer said something to the effect of, “Oh, these are Officer Powell’s kids”—referring to the officer who ran the PAL program at our local police precinct.

They let us go.

We continued our journey to the Brooklyn Public Library—shaken and, needless to say, no longer running.

We also reached an immediate and unanimous agreement:

We were not telling our parents about the incident.

I certainly wasn’t, because I had no desire to stand quietly—which is what children were expected to do in those days—through a long Caribbean-American parental speech titled:

“I thought I told you not to…”

That would have been followed by several versions of “What were you thinking?” Followed by: “Oh, you were not thinking?”

And the lecture would not have ended at home. Neighborhood and church elders, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and godparents would eventually have been informed of our bad-decision deed, requiring us to endure multiple sequels of that original admonition speech.

But there was another childhood lesson in Black protection that I did not understand until years later.

I was a dedicated reader of Ebony and Jet magazines. One month, however, I could not find the latest issue of Jet. And, as my mother undoubtedly hoped, I soon forgot about it. There were too many scooters to build, war games to play, comic books to read, and stickball and skelly games demanding my attention.

Years later, I learned why that issue had disappeared.

It contained the horrific open-casket photograph of Emmett Till.

That next summer, without any explanation to us kids—not required in those days—the Black parents in our neighborhood canceled their children’s trips down South. My mother explained to me years later, when I was in college, that the neighborhood “ban” had been imposed largely to protect Black boys from the possibility of suffering a similarly murderous fate.

That was those parents being protectively “woke.”
Not a political slogan.
Not a partisan insult.
Not a cable-news debating point.

Protection. Awareness. Survival. Preparation. Progress.

And That Is What the Parents in Lanterns Are Trying to Do
The Black parents in Lanterns are trying to protect their Black boys the best way they know how—albeit in heightened and dramatic ways appropriate for television.

The two extraordinary actors, Jasmine Cephas Jones and J. Alphonse Nicholson, are portraying what generations of Black parents before, during, and after my generation have tried to do.

First, get their children safely to adulthood.

Second, make them strong enough to confront unfair and undeserved societal obstacles without allowing those obstacles to define or defeat them.

And finally, help them discover and realize their innate gifts, talents, possibilities, and special calling in life.

That is the essential arc of effective parenting.

And schools can either assist or hinder that work.

I resented then—and still resent today—those portions of my childhood that had to end prematurely. I resented having to think about survival to adulthood as a goal at such a young age. And I hated hearing another warning that sounded grossly unfair to my young ears, but turned out to be painfully true: “You must be twice as good to get a fair chance.” My teenage years seemed to exist between dangerous extremes: Would my life be damaged or ended by a police bullet or arrest, drugs, imprisonment, or the unsolicited violence of another Black or Latino teenager in the neighborhood?

As an educator who spent many years working with teenagers, I know that growing up is hard enough. Young people should not also have to calculate their chances of surviving to adulthood while simultaneously trying to discover who they are. They should be thinking about future careers, occupations, aspirations, and possibilities—not wondering who they might become if they can safely make it to adulthood.

That is one reason we desperately need well-educating, intellectually challenging, emotionally nurturing, and physically safe public-school buildings where Black and Latino young people do not feel hunted—or haunted—by society’s fears of them and low expectations for them.

Parents cannot fight this battle alone.

Public schools must do their part.

They must create safe, secure, and educationally rich learning environments capable of bringing forth the best gifts and talents of children whom too much of society has already decided are unworthy of our best adult efforts.

The Baton Must Be Passed

And speaking of gifts and talents, a personal disclosure:
One of the wonderful young actors in Episode 3 of Lanterns, Lumi Oniyide, is the child of two of my former students. One of those former students—despite all of my shortcomings as a principal—decided to become a principal and is now a great one.

There is something beautifully circular about that for me.

A former principal watches the child of his former students portray, in a powerful work of art, themes that connect directly to the lives of generations of Black children—and to the educational responsibility of those adults entrusted with preparing them for the future.

There is always hope in the positive passing of the baton.

One generation protects, prepares, educates, and encourages the next. And then that generation must do the same for the children coming behind them.

Perhaps that is another way to understand what “stay woke” was always supposed to mean:

Know what came before you.

Know what could be coming for you.

Understand what surrounds you.

Protect what is precious to you.

Prepare an easier path for those who will follow you.

And every day, keep moving forward as the best presentation of yourself.

That is our collective, sacred Woke-Hope.

That is Woke Black Protection.

That is Woke Black Progress.

Ask yourself: “Are You Afraid” of a Positive Black Future?

And that is why I hope Episode 3 of Lanterns, “OutKast,” receives the Emmy recognition—and award—I believe it deserves.

Lanterns, Season 1, Episode 3, “OutKast,” is currently streaming on HBO Max and through the HBO Max Amazon Channel in participating regions.

Public Education Has an Anti-Artificial Intelligence (AI) Bandwagon Problem

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Public Education Has an Anti-Artificial Intelligence (AI) Bandwagon Problem.
So, I have a question for the anti-AI celebrants: Are we creating yet another technology and educational-opportunity gap?

Because while some public schools debate whether students should be permitted to use artificial intelligence at all, some elementary and middle school parents will be teaching their children coding at home, enrolling them in after-school or weekend coding programs, or sending them to summer coding camps where AI technology will absolutely be incorporated into the learning experience.

And therein lies the danger.

Too often in public education, the least-informed—and frequently the loudest—nonprofessional pedagogical voices are allowed to drive educational policy, while professional educators with deep theoretical knowledge and practical experience in a particular field are pushed to the sidelines.

We have also entered an age in which simplistic, non-thinking solutions to extraordinarily complex problems are increasingly treated as preferable to thoughtful ones. Instead of carefully examining a problem, identifying its multiple dimensions, consulting knowledgeable practitioners, anticipating unintended consequences, and then developing a measured response, we reach for the sledgehammer when a scalpel is required.

We can see versions of this phenomenon far beyond education. Consider America’s immigration policy—or lack thereof. Rather than developing a sensible, comprehensive, humane, and well-contemplated approach to a profoundly complicated national issue, political pressure can produce sweeping, ugly policies and practices that disregard both the humanity of the people affected and the long-term best interests of the nation and its citizens.

Public education should not operate that way.

Everything cannot be rushed into policy because the loudest activist voices demand immediate action. Historically, some of public education’s biggest mistakes have emerged from precisely that kind of reactionary policymaking. (Do any former NYC high school principals remember the 1994 Sequential Mathematics Program disaster?) And those mistakes have often done the greatest damage to students from economically disadvantaged communities and, disproportionately, to students of color who are already positioned on the disadvantaged side of educational-opportunity gaps.

I remember, as a superintendent, meeting with a contingent of parents from a non-Title I school who wanted to eliminate those “bad” standardized state examinations.
I listened patiently to their arguments—talking points that, interestingly, closely mirrored those of another political entity in the district. But I digress.

Two important issues emerged from that meeting.

First, the parents made a legitimate point: state examinations did not—and could not—measure the full range of their children’s intellectual capabilities, talents, creativity, and possibilities.

I agreed.

But I also explained that the responsibility of school-based educators—and certainly my responsibility as superintendent—was to ensure that the state curriculum standards upon which those examinations were based represented the ground floor, not the ceiling, of what students were expected to know, understand, create, and intellectually accomplish.

A standardized state examination should not define the totality of a child’s education. But neither should we confuse the limitations of an assessment with the absence of a legitimate need for common academic standards.

The purpose of state standards and assessments is, in part, to establish a common expectation that every child in the state—and therefore every child in our district—should demonstrate sufficient proficiency to master grade-level, school-level, and course requirements while acquiring the prerequisite knowledge and skills necessary to succeed at the next learning level.

What is the alternative?

Should every classroom, school, or district simply create its own subjective definition of proficiency?

We would never accept that approach in other professions. Dentists, plumbers, lawyers, firefighters, airline pilots, and, yes, even school superintendents cannot simply declare themselves proficient, licensed, and certified. Some legitimate external authority, informed by expert practitioners, establishes knowledge and performance standards that must be met before someone receives a professional designation.

Why should we believe that determining whether a student has mastered essential fourth-, eighth-, or twelfth-grade knowledge and skills requires no common external standard whatsoever?

Can state assessments be improved?

Absolutely.

Should they constitute the entirety, or even the most important part of a child’s educational experience?

Absolutely not.

But eliminating them completely is another matter, particularly when our public schools already operate across enormous gaps in expectations, educational opportunities, access to resources, and parental capacity to independently supplement what schools provide.

Then came the second revealing moment in that parent meeting.
I asked:
“Are you willing to go on record as opposing all standardized examinations—the Gifted & Talented (G&T) admissions exam, eighth-grade Algebra screening exam, SAT and ACT, Advanced Placement examinations, International Baccalaureate examinations, the LSAT, MCAT, teacher-certification examinations, professional licensing examinations, and so forth?”

Silence.

My response was mental, not verbal:

“Oh, I see. Not those standardized examinations. Just the state examinations.”

And that brings me back to artificial intelligence.

The New York City Schools Chancellor made what I believe was a good and sensible interim decision. Having served as a superintendent in that city, I understand that sometimes educational leaders need to deliberately create a pause-and-think working space, particularly when outside political voices become so loud and distracting that thoughtful policymaking becomes almost impossible. And in New York City, educational decisions are inevitably complicated by political actors who will seize almost any opportunity to undermine a mayor or chancellor they oppose.
But a pause cannot become a permanent policy.

The next step should be the creation of a well-informed task force composed of experienced educators, curriculum and instructional specialists, developmental psychology experts, STEM practitioners, researchers, parents, students where appropriate, and—yes, absolutely—people from the technology industry, where many of our students will one day seek employment, establish professional partnerships, or perhaps create their own technology-related companies.

Its mission should be to develop a thorough set of meaningful, pedagogically sound, developmentally appropriate, and grade-specific recommendations to the Chancellor that can inform the development of guidelines governing how students should—and should not—use AI.

The question should never be reduced to:

“AI: Yes or no?”

That is far too simplistic.

The more useful questions are:

At what age? For what educational purpose? Under what conditions? With what safeguards? With what degree of teacher supervision? What should students be required to know and do independently before AI assistance is permitted? When does AI enhance intellectual development, and when does it replace the productive struggle necessary for intellectual development? How do we teach students to verify AI-generated information, recognize bias and fabrication, protect their privacy, and use these tools ethically?

Those are worthy and complicated educational questions that require the thoughtful work and informed input of highly skilled, experienced educators—not political performers.

And there are other realities that we cannot ignore.

Wearing my principal’s hat, I recognize the practical limits of what a central-office staff—especially in a large school district—can realistically monitor and enforce when it comes to carrying out official directives at the school and classroom levels. The reality is that there will be some NYC students, in some NYC elementary and middle school classrooms and schools, who are going to learn how to use AI applications regardless of what the official policy says.

And,

Public schools cannot control everything children learn through informal education outside the school building and beyond school hours. So, while one group of adults celebrates keeping AI out of a school, another group of parents, in that same or another school, may be enrolling their children in outside-of-school coding, robotics, engineering, science, and technology programs where those same children are learning how to use AI productively.

Five or ten years later, we may suddenly discover that we have an “AI achievement gap” and act mystified about how it happened.

We should not be mystified.

We created it.

I hope educators, STEM practitioners, parents, and community organizations—particularly those serving historically underserved communities—are already thinking about after-school, weekend, and summer programs that teach children the responsible use of AI in coding, robotics, mathematics, engineering, scientific inquiry, and other intellectually productive activities.

Technology, like so many human innovations, is not inherently the enemy. Students can benefit greatly from thoughtfully designed software-based instructional tools. The point is not that technology should replace teachers or student thinking. It should not. The question is whether technology can be intelligently designed and responsibly used to strengthen teaching, learning, practice, exploration, and intellectual independence.

We should therefore resist jumping onto every educational bandwagon that comes rolling down the street—whether that means enthusiastically and thoughtlessly going all-in on AI or reactionarily and reflexively going all-in on being anti-AI.

Instead, parents, educators, and community leaders should continually ask:

How will this policy decision affect my child’s ability to become the fullest intellectual and skilled expression of themselves?

How will this policy decision affect my community—particularly those children whose families may not have the financial resources to purchase privately what the public schools decide not to provide?

And, paraphrasing a warning I learned from my former Columbia University professor and mentor, economist Eli Ginzberg:

When major public policies are put into place, we had better ask very carefully whether Black people will once again receive the short end of the stick.

Finally:

What community-based educational defenses, enrichment opportunities, and support systems must we build now to prevent today’s policy decisions from strengthening tomorrow’s educational disadvantages?

Those are the questions we should be asking before we prematurely celebrate the demise of AI. Because when it comes to artificial intelligence and public education, the greatest danger may not be AI itself.

The greater danger may be making poorly informed educational decisions about AI—and discovering years later which children were given the opportunity to master the technology while other very capable children were prevented from learning it.

A Moral-Based Journalism Means Challenging MAGANOMICS, Not Mayor Mamdani

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“Bodegas of New York, Unite!”: A Washington Post Editorial Badly Misses the Mark

It’s amazing watching non-New Yorkers try to wrap their heads around a city of more than 8 million people.

And many “throwing shade” savvy native New Yorkers can recognize what looks like a false-flag, right-wing-initiated political campaign when we see one—particularly when its ultimate objective appears to be undermining the credibility of New York City’s popular mayor.

It won’t work.

This week, Mayor Zohran Mamdani is supposedly anti-bodega. Last week, it was the politically attractive but substantively inadequate bonus proposal for paraprofessionals—workers who, along with New York City public school employees represented by DC 37, need something far more meaningful: a permanent, pensionable increase in their base salaries, substantially improved benefits, and those improvements codified in long-term collective-bargaining agreements.

Meanwhile, the much larger economic story receives far less outrage: the impact of MAGANOMICS on the ability of working- and middle-class Americans to feed their families.

I spent most of my life in New York City—born there, raised there, and having spent much of my professional career there. I also lived in Washington, D.C., a city that has struggled with serious food-access disparities in some neighborhoods. Full disclosure: not in the Ward 4 neighborhood where I lived.

People who actually live in New York understand something that seems to get lost in these national discussions. NYC already has more than 700 city-funded community kitchens and food pantries spread across the five boroughs, in addition to other charitable, religious, nonprofit, site-based and mobile food-distribution efforts.

I guess the newly mobilized “bodega bros” could complain that all of those organizations are also cutting into their profits. Perhaps they should sue the food pantries for giving groceries away to struggling New Yorkers.

Of course, that would not be a particularly good political look.

But it illustrates the absurdity of the argument. The sheer size of New York City’s population means that even hundreds of organizations distributing free food to New Yorkers in need have not somehow destroyed the private grocery marketplace.

And in addition to those emergency food providers, New Yorkers have access to thousands of commercial food-purchasing outlets: nontraditional and convenience grocery retailers such as CVS, 7-Eleven, Duane Reade, Walgreens, and Rite Aid; medium- and large-scale supermarkets; small neighborhood grocery stores; specialty markets, including health-food stores; permanent and pop-up farmers markets; food co-ops; delis; specific cultural-nationalities, and religious related food stores, produce markets; and, of course, the so-called bodegas found throughout the city—sometimes two or three on the same street and certainly within a few blocks of one another in many neighborhoods.

That is why adding three, four, or five government-supported grocery stores to a city of this size is not going to fundamentally transform New York City’s overall grocery marketplace.

The scale simply does not support that argument.

Did The Washington Post send a reporter to New York City to actually walk through these neighborhoods and assess the likely impact of these scattered grocery outlets before reaching its conclusions?

And the word scattered matters.

New York City is not one single walkable neighborhood. Yes, it has extraordinary population density, a relatively compressed geography for its population size, and one of the world’s largest and most extensive public transportation systems. But outsiders can still misunderstand the everyday shopping habits of New Yorkers.

Brooklyn residents generally do not travel to the Bronx to do their routine grocery shopping. Manhattan residents generally do not travel to Queens or Brooklyn for it. Queens residents are not routinely heading to Staten Island—or across the city—to buy tonight’s dinner. Grocery shopping is overwhelmingly local, particularly in a city where, thankfully, the majority of residents do not own cars.

Therefore, any serious analysis of the potential competitive impact of a handful of new publicly supported grocery stores must examine: where each store will be located, what food-shopping options already exist within its realistic customer radius, what prices those existing stores charge, and what unmet community need that particular store is intended to address.

That is the type of investigative analysis I would expect from a major national newspaper.

And this is where the larger journalistic question arises.
Why expend so much editorial energy attacking a mayor for trying something, whether one ultimately agrees with his particular approach or not—to address the high cost of feeding a family, while minimizing the much larger national economic forces making groceries increasingly difficult for working- and middle-class families to afford?

That should be the story.

Stop engaging in a news-media practice that minimizes the impact of MAGANOMICS on working- and middle-class Americans’ ability to feed their families.

For, at least one elected official is attempting to do something tangible about grocery affordability rather than simply recycling the familiar political rhetoric: “We will not tolerate these high POTUS caused food prices!”

Fine, then what are you going to do about them?

Mayor Mamdani has offered an answer. People can debate whether his answer will work. They can challenge its economics, examine its implementation, scrutinize its costs, and demand evidence of its effectiveness.

As an avid, consistent daily news consumer, I believe that is good journalism.

But turning every policy proposal from Mayor Mamdani into another opportunity for reflexive anti-Mamdani commentary—with anti-New York sentiment seemingly serving as a secondary motivation—is something else entirely.

And if The Washington Post is genuinely concerned about government policy, grocery competition, affordability, and access to nutritious food, perhaps its editorial board should devote some of that investigative and editorial energy closer to home.

Go to Ward 8.

Talk with Washingtonians living in communities where obtaining affordable fresh fruits, vegetables, and other nutritious foods remains a challenge. Ask residents what grocery competition looks like from where they live. Ask how far they must travel. Ask what healthy food costs when they get there.

And while you are there, consider this remarkable contrast: a recent District of Columbia government assessment reported that: Ward 8 had only one full-service grocery store, while each of Wards 1 through 6 had at least nine.

Now that is a grocery-access disparity story worthy of serious editorial attention.

And then ask the most important question:

How do we get those Ward 8 families what Mayor Mamdani is trying to provide for New Yorkers struggling with grocery costs: greater access to good, higher-quality food at a reasonable price?
That would be journalism rooted not merely in political “hating” and partisan posturing, but in moral purpose and journalistic ethics.

“Bodegas of New York, Unite!”: A Washington Post Editorial Badly Misses the Mark: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/08/27/minority-owned-bodegas-will-be-hurt-by-mamdani-city-run-groceries/

“Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes (and ears)?”: Reframing the “Secret Meeting” vs. “Private Meeting” Distinction

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I think we need to make an important distinction between a “secret meeting” and a private, non-public meeting. The difference has everything to do with context, purpose, professional legitimacy, and—perhaps most important, whether the participants would be comfortable acknowledging that the meeting took place.

As a principal or superintendent, it is entirely appropriate—and happens all the time—to have a private, non-public meeting with a labor union representative, particularly when an employee’s confidential personnel information is being discussed. In fact, such a meeting can serve a very constructive purpose. It might provide an opportunity to resolve a problem informally, to mitigate or completely eliminate the need for formal disciplinary actions, clarify a misunderstanding, or find a mutually acceptable solution that prevents an unnecessary grievance from being filed.

Those are private meetings, not secret meetings.

I never had a “secret meeting” with a labor union representative because the very characterization would credibly suggest that we were “up to something”—something one or both of us believed needed to be hidden from one or both of our constituencies.

And that is an entirely different matter.

Think of the married man who is caught walking out of what the old folks once called a “house of ill-repute.” (I know, I’m telling my age—look it up, youngins.)
His explanation?

“You see, I only went in there to emphatically explain to the proprietor that I believe intercourse should occur exclusively between married couples, and further, to inform him that I intend to vigorously hold him and his associates accountable to those standards and rules!”

Good luck selling that. Because at some point, what people reasonably observed will overwhelm whatever elaborate explanation you construct after the fact.

That leads to a leadership lesson I regularly offer prospective school administrators—and, for that matter, anyone entrusted with organizational or institutional leadership:

If you find yourself expending enormous amounts of energy after an incident explaining why your actions were appropriate, innocent, ethical, or misunderstood, you may already be standing on very shaky leadership-credibility ground.

Effective leaders should certainly protect confidentiality. And they will sometimes need to meet privately. They will sometimes engage in sensitive conversations that cannot and should not—be conducted publicly.

But privacy and secrecy are not the same thing.

Privacy protects legitimate confidentiality.

Secrecy protects something from being discovered.

And whenever leaders find themselves repeatedly asking people to disregard what they plainly saw and heard and instead accept an increasingly complicated after-the-fact explanation, they should remember that old comedic vaudevillian line:

“Who are you going to believe—me, or your lying eyes?”

Black Educators Leadership Principle: Home Is the Only Safe Place to Get Healed

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They will only see and cheer the individual you when you betray the collective you…

If members of your own cultural community, whether justified or not, hurt your feelings—and if you serve as a principal or superintendent for even one week, your feelings are almost certain to be hurt regularly—it is simply part of the job. For instance, when students, staff members, parents, or community stakeholders begin with, “I don’t mean no disrespect…” be prepared: some form of disrespect is usually about to follow.

In those moments, immediately shift into a mindset of respectful deflection and emotional resilience. Recognize that such criticism, however poorly expressed or delivered, often emerges from a place of genuine concern, frustration, disappointment, or principled disagreement. Your responsibility as an educational leader is to maintain your composure, listen for whatever truth may be buried beneath the delivery, and respond in a way that reflects a calm, disciplined, and emotionally mature leadership temperament.

But if you feel publicly wounded by criticism from a professional organization to which you belong—even if you believe that criticism is unfair—you must resist the temptation to seek comfort, affirmation, or public validation from outsiders, particularly those who do not have your community’s best interests at heart. Instead, take a deep breath, decenter from your hurt feelings, and prioritize understanding, accountability, and resolution within your own professional and cultural community.

For instance, if the National Alliance of Black School Educators (NABSE) were, hypothetically, to give me a “thumbs-down” rating, my immediate response would be to request a private meeting with the NABSE executive board to seek explanation, clarification, and, if necessary, correction. I recognize NABSE as a respected body of knowledgeable and experienced educational leaders who care deeply about our community and the quality of education our children deserve. For that reason, I would take their concerns seriously and value the opportunity to hear their perspective.

As I did when serving as a principal and superintendent, I believe it is an educational leader’s responsibility to remain open to the possibility that our ideas, words, decisions, or actions—even when well-intentioned—may unintentionally cause harm to the students, educational staff members, families, and communities we serve. Effective school leadership therefore requires enough humility to listen, enough courage to self-correct when necessary, and enough commitment to the community to seek constructive dialogue and resolution within your own professional and cultural community before seeking validation outside of it.

Direct NYC’s $8,500 Large-Class-Size Teacher Bonus to Master Teachers—And It Could Save Countless Students

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First, let’s go inside the thinking and practice of a highly effective principal leading a Title I school that is, academically speaking, “punching above its academic-achievement-expectations weight class.”

In any high-performing Title I school situation, it is predictable—In fact, I have never not seen it; that the school is led by a strategically smart, bravely audacious, and creatively thoughtful principal who daily knows when and how to bend, work around, and, when necessary, challenge those public-school-system rules and regulations that stand between Black, Latino, poor, or otherwise politically disenfranchised children and their ability to engage their innate gifts and talents and perform at very high academic levels.

For students attending many Title I schools, the combination of public education’s bureaucratic operating structures and its too-often adult-employment-happiness priorities can condemn them to an educational and dream-deferring death sentence.

And so, the only way to interrupt that cycle of not-learning and poor learning, and student underperformance, is for a principal to demonstrably interrupt the process itself. That means challenging, bending, or creatively working around all of those “bad” or “incomplete” rules that get in the way of students learning.

For many years, I heard that some highly successful Title 1 principals would deliberately over-program their highest-performing master instructional practitioners—with those teachers’ permission, of course—with classes larger than 34 students; for example, 39–44 students. And, of course, these principals found creative and legal ways to reward those teachers, although obviously not to the tune of $8,500. (Which, by the way, is one compelling reason every Title I school should establish a 501(c)(3) support foundation capable of raising the much-needed extra-budgetary funds that schools serving societally ignored, economically disadvantaged, and politically dismissed communities so desperately need.)

But this larger-class-size arrangement can accomplish two important school-mission reaching objectives.

1. Put More Students in Front of the School’s Best Teachers

Contrary to the beliefs of the pedagogically misinformed, it is the quality of instruction, not class size alone, that is the most important school-based factor in determining students’ ability to engage in high-quality learning.

This good-sounding political obsession with “class size” can become a convenient distraction, one that allows crucially positioned, powerful elected and appointed stakeholders to avoid confronting the far more difficult and consequential challenge: dramatically improving the quality of instruction, especially for our academically weakest and most instructionally vulnerable students.

However, by placing those additional five to ten students in the classrooms of master teachers, principals could increase the likelihood that those students would perform at higher academic-achievement levels, pass their courses, earn higher grades, become better prepared with the prerequisite knowledge and skills required for the next-level course or school year, and perform more successfully on standardized examinations. In high schools, this could also mean helping students remain on a positive credit-earning trajectory and ultimately graduate successfully.

The sad and morally troubling part of this process is that school administrators must painfully decide which students will receive access to those master teachers.
That selection is potentially a life-changing decision, for students—and one I am sure those school administrators wish they did not have to agonizingly make. Yet they still have to make it.

These principals most likely made those decisions in consultation with the teacher and other school-building leaders, using a “greatest-needs” criterion. In one case, I heard that high-potential but self-sabotaging and intentionally underperforming Black and Latino boys were deliberately placed in these oversized master-teacher classes—with amazingly positive results.

But morally and ethically, there is no legitimate way to claim that this is how we should be doing public schooling. Every child should have access to a high-quality teaching-and-learning environment.

Something I always warn prospective principals about is that, beginning with the creation of your annual school budget, you will be forced throughout your principalship tenure to make extraordinarily difficult choices. And you will quickly discover that very few of those decisions will involve choosing between a perfect good and a perfect evil. Most will involve choosing among imperfect options while trying to determine which choice will do the greatest educational good—and the least harm—to children.

2. Give New and Struggling Teachers Smaller Classes While Master Teachers Carry More Students

The way the public education system is structured, it is not unusual for Title I schools to be burdened with disproportionately high numbers of first-, second-, and third-year teachers.

When a school reaches a “tipping point” in the number of new teachers it must absorb, the problem can become self-perpetuating. Every new school year brings another large cohort of inexperienced teachers. Eventually, that number becomes too great for the school’s administrators and instructional leaders to effectively mentor, coach, supervise, and develop.

Some of those new teachers will frustratingly leave the profession.

But some first-, second-, and third-year teachers, after a Title I school has invested enormous amounts of mentoring and instructional-coaching time, and substantial professional-development resources, in helping them improve their practice, will become very good at their craft. And then, ironically, that very success can create another problem: they may either be actively recruited away or self-select to seek employment in a non-Title I district or school, where students are generally not confronting the same magnitude of social, economic, and parental resources challenges.

And so the destructive cycle continues:
New school year. Too many new teachers. Insufficient mentoring and coaching capacity. Teacher turnover. Another new school year. Another large group of new teachers.

In addition, one of the quiet “open secrets” of public education is that some school districts and schools do not experience—or tolerate—the same degree of instructional mediocrity. In part, that is because their entitled, politically connected, well-organized, well-informed, and highly active parent bodies simply will not tolerate mediocre instruction endangering their children’s futures.
In these more fortunate districts and schools, public officials are also more likely to see themselves first as public servants, obligated to act primarily in the best interests of the children and families they serve. Unfortunately, that same sense of urgency, responsiveness, and institutional accountability is not distributed equally across all communities.

How else, then, do we explain the stubborn persistence of what has been called the “school-to-prison pipeline”—a societal pathway in which some children are systematically provided with fewer high-quality educational opportunities, denied access to mind-expanding educative experiences, subjected to diminished expectations of their intellectual capabilities and potential, and ultimately excluded from the quality learning experiences that could dramatically alter the trajectory of their lives?

Meanwhile, Title I principals and superintendents, and the families they serve, do not enjoy that same level of powerful, societal, external political protection.

In such a system, one of the few instructional weapons available to a Title I principal trying to save children academically is to deliberately oversize the class of a Master Teacher while giving a new teacher—or an underperforming veteran teacher—a smaller class size.

I know someone reading this, someone in private industry, someone working in a private school, or perhaps someone who has never worked in the NYC public school system or another large urban public school district, is probably asking:
“Why doesn’t the principal just get rid of the underperforming veteran tenured teacher?”

For an NYC principal, that can mean investing an enormous amount of time, documentation, energy, and administrative work into a process they may very well lose. From the principal’s perspective, the arbitration and disciplinary system can make successfully removing an ineffective tenured teacher extraordinarily difficult.

And so, sadly, some principals conclude that it is easier to just try to “move the teacher along”—unfortunately, passing the problem on to another one of their principal colleagues somewhere else in the system. That does not solve the problem. It merely changes the school address where the problem resides.

So, What Could the $8,500 Large-Class-Size Teacher Bonus Accomplish?

The proposed $8,500 Large-Class-Size Teacher Bonus is not a perfect solution. And, to be honest, I am not optimistic that a Master Teacher/High Quality Instructional Practitioner requirement would ultimately be allowed.

But imagine if it were.

Imagine if eligibility for that $8,500 were strategically tied to demonstrated instructional excellence, so that principals could deliberately assign additional students to the highest-performing master teachers in their buildings—particularly in schools serving large numbers of academically struggling students.

And again, just in case a reader who has never worked in a public school is wondering, “Well, how will these best-of-the-best teachers be identified?”—that is not nearly as difficult as it might sound. The teachers in a school already know who the master instructional practitioners are. They know because they see their work, hear about their results, observe their instructional practices, and, perhaps most revealingly, those are the teachers in whose classrooms they would want their own children placed.
In fact, that “best-of-the-best” professional knowledge often extends beyond the walls of a single school. From a district perspective, information about “who the great teachers are in a school” travels informally between schools. Teachers will sometimes request the “professional courtesy” of having their own children placed in the classrooms of highly proficient teachers working in schools where they themselves do not work.

That tells us something important: the identification of instructional excellence is not some mysterious, unknowable process. The people working closest to teaching and learning generally know where and when exceptional teaching is taking place.

We proved this in Community School District 29 Queens (CSD 29Q) in the early 2000s, when we developed a professional-development activity titled The Best Instructional Practices Fair. Teacher-presenters were selected by their individual school-based teams, consisting of school administrators and teachers. And I do not recall hearing of a single school team experiencing any serious disagreement over who their school’s best instructional practitioners were—or who should represent their school at the Fair.
However, although we incorporated an awards system into the Fair, this proposed $8,500 incentive presents a very different situation. When substantial amounts of money are attached to being designated a “Master Instructional Practitioner,” I would not want to create unnecessary and unfriendly competition, resentment, or conflict among teachers by asking them to select one another for the award.

Therefore, I would place the selection responsibility with the school administrators, who already have access to multiple measures of teacher instructional performance. But those selections should be subject to strict superintendent and district-level supervisory oversight, with clearly established data-based selection criteria and safeguards designed to prevent favoritism, cronyism, or any other abuse of the process.

The goal should never be to create a popularity contest among teachers. The goal is to identify, as objectively and professionally as possible, those master instructional practitioners who have demonstrated the capacity to successfully teach more students—and then strategically place more students in front of them.
Now the $8,500 Large-Class-Size Teacher Bonus policy would become more than compensation for having additional students in a classroom. It could become an instructional intervention strategy.

The bonus could provide principals with a meaningful tool to place more academically vulnerable students in front of the teachers most capable of accelerating their learning, while simultaneously creating smaller instructional settings in which novice and developing teachers could improve their practice.

Would such a policy “over-help” schools that already enjoy significant entitlement advantages?

Probably.

But that is almost always a danger with every system-wide initiative. Schools with greater organizational capacity, politically influential parent communities, stronger staffing stability, are often better positioned to exploit any new resource or policy opportunity.

That reality should not stop us from pursuing a potentially useful idea. Rather, it places an even greater responsibility on serious and sincere Title I principals and superintendents to make this—or any other initiative—work in the best educational interests of their children.

Because in an imperfect public education system, the best principals will do this every day:
They take imperfect policies, imperfect rules, imperfect resources, and imperfect circumstances—and creatively transform them into the best possible educational opportunities for children.

And if NYC is going to spend $8,500 per teacher for oversized classes anyway, then we should at least ask the most important instructional quality question:
Why not deliberately place more struggling students in front of the teachers who have demonstrated that they can teach them exceptionally well?

Michael A. Johnson is a veteran public school educator and former New York City public school teacher, principal, and school district superintendent. He has also served as an adjunct college professor of education, and has spent decades mentoring teachers, assistant principals, principals, aspiring school-building and district-level leaders. He is the author of Report to the Principal’s Office and Report from the Principal’s Office and writes the weekly blog, Michael A. Johnson’s Education Notes: A Site for Educaring Leaders and Learners, where he examines public education policies, school-building leadership issues, educational equity, and the moral responsibility of educators to act courageously in the best interests of children.