Monthly Archives: January 2026

The Cost of Uncivil Meanness: Why NYC Pre-K Must Be Truly “For All” Children

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Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani got it right in insisting that Pre-K for all NYC children means all NYC children, regardless of the child’s family citizenship or immigration status. Also, I am not trying to convince my past and present public-education colleagues that the Mayor is absolutely aligned with our longstanding professional ethical standards and practices of seeking to educate every child without exception who crosses the threshold of our schoolhouse door.

People who don’t now, or who never have, worked in public education may not realize that we professional educators have never, regardless of who the mayor, governor, or president is, refused learning access to any Pre-K–12 child based on their family’s citizenship or immigration status.

It is neither morally defensible nor professionally ethical to deny a child an education. It also violates the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child: “Education must be provided without discrimination and with respect for the child’s dignity.” And NYC definitely does not want to end up on the International Criminal Court (ICC) conviction-and-warrant-for-arrest list with the likes of Benjamin Netanyahu and Vladimir Putin for human rights violations against children. Further, denying an innocent child an education should violate any religious or moral principles one claims to believe in.

I am also convinced that I will not change the thinking of those Americans who, as we see especially in places like Minnesota, view practicing moral meanness as being part of their spiritual constitution. Instead, I am seeking to reach those basically decent human beings who may be innocently confused by the shortsighted and cruel right-wing talking points about “our spending tax money to educate foreigners.”

I could explain in complex pedagogical, historiographical, macro-economic, and sociological terms why not educating significant segments of a city, state, or national population will, in the long run, cost far more in tax money and human pain and suffering for those presently documented citizen members of that society. For example, let’s see how the strategy of not educating the majority (girls) of the youth population works out developmentally for places like Afghanistan in the present or very near future.

But a good short example, closer to home, is our own collective and equally wrong decision to underspend (on the front end) on public education by not providing, yes, diversity access, equity, and equality of opportunity, meaning providing high-quality teaching and learning spaces, to large (Black and Latino) segments of our US youth population. We therefore end up spending multiple times more tax dollars (on the back end) to fund a vast enforcement, court-system, incarceration, and probation criminal-justice civil-service industry. And included in that cost is the price a society pays individually and collectively when large numbers of the population are without hope or the skills to become highly productive members of that society.

I don’t buy the jingoistic and racist-inspired “China is our greatest enemy!” slogan. But what we should be competitively concerned about is that China has arrived at the smart conclusion that they must, and they are, actively working hard to close the quality teaching-and-learning gaps between their urban and rural schools; while our fallback-failing public-education plan is incarceration for those very capable but undereducated children of our nation.

What is painfully clear historically, regardless of geography, is that educational exclusionary tactics do not build better schools, cities, societies, or national futures.
America’s present (Trump-accelerating) race to second-class world status is ironically fueled by the US not exercising its greatest strength and superpower advantage: its cultural, ethnic, and racial diversity that could drive a powerful intellectual and creative national development engine. Sure, we have the military might to bomb a lot of middle-level countries when they don’t do what we say; and we could even kidnap or kill a smaller nation’s president from time to time. But that won’t change the end-of-empire trajectory we are presently on, for it is time—not developing countries—that is our greatest enemy.

No child’s access to a quality learning experience should hinge on citizenship, race, gender, ethnicity, religion, or social status, because childhood dignity, personhood respect, and humanity should not be conditional.

We need pedagogical, civic-religious, and political leaders who operate with courageous conviction and moral clarity. And even if your motivation is based on practicality: for those of us who hope that there is still an America after Trump and the present GOP hegemonic reign ends. Know that presently, those children for whom their families or themselves are undocumented and who can escape ICE’s current brutal racial roundup will be in our nation for the remainder of their educational lives. Which means (and all superintendents know this budgetary reality) that punitively excluding these children from the Universal Pre-K initiative will seriously undercut their early childhood learning capacity, which in turn will negatively impact their elementary school prerequisite readiness skills, which will force taxpayers to spend more—and spend more expensively—on the corrective-remedial programs they will need over a twelve-year schooling period.

At the end of the day, the argument is neither complicated nor abstract. A civilized and self-respecting society does not punish children for the politics of adults. It does not weaponize early childhood learning. It does not make dignity conditional. The future of the nation is not secured or enhanced by denying four-year-olds the right to learn; it is secured by expanding the human capacity, creative power, and civic promise of all the children who will soon inherit it. Let the children learn. All of them.

Michael A. Johnson has served as a NYC public school teacher, an award-winning principal, and a school district superintendent. A former adjunct professor of science education and the author of two books on school-building leadership, he writes about educational equity, policy, and the ethical and moral obligations that come with safeguarding the educational lives and promising futures of all children. Inspired by ancestral heroes such as Dr. Gerald Deas, John Lewis, and W.E.B. Du Bois, he strives to make as much “good trouble” as possible before closing his eyes for the final time.

Modern Slave Catching 2.0: Why Studying Black History Is Civic Literacy and a Survival Skill*

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Suppressing the historical record of a people does not only deny their participating humanity; it strips the entire nation of the civic navigation tools required to recognize the signs of grave communal danger and inhibits even the enfranchised from comprehending, and thus resisting, their own depersonalization.

I recently read an excellent book on the history of post–WWII East Germany (Beyond the Wall: A History of East Germany by Katja Hoyer); and so, watching the daily growth of Germany’s neo-Nazi AfD party, and then reading that the AfD movement was making its greatest growth spurts in those parts of Germany that were formerly East Germany (“Germany’s nationalist AfD party hopes to take power in 2026” — Washington Post, 1/13/26), was quite surprising, since I imagined that these were the Deutsche Volk who were heavily exposed to a solid public educational system that held the anti-fascist principles of Marx, Lenin, and Engels as the underpinning philosophy of their pedagogy. What happened?

I thought: how could so many in this part of the German nation enthusiastically embrace the neo-Nazification of the AfD? And further, how could AfD supporters ignore the history of how both West and East Germany suffered terribly from the interrupted process of national development (how did that Nazism stuff work for you’ll the last time)?

But (back to my book) it seems that East Germany suffered the most from an entire nation losing its way and choosing to follow the sick and twisted mind of a Make Germany Great Again (MGGA) leader. And I thought about the AfD’s sister proto-fascist/retro-confederate organization in the U.S., the Make America Great Again (MAGA-GOP) movement. And then, it made sense why, it’s the intoxicating, but not soul healing, ideology of resentment and anger.

So, despite decades of communist ideological scaffolding and indoctrination, the poorest parts of Germany, the communities left out of the West German “economic miracle” and deprived of any stable sense of place or purpose in this world, would revert, as their 1930s political ancestors once did, to their most primitive tribal limbic defense mechanism:

“We were great, and we could be great again if not for the presence of the racialized ‘other!’”

Genocidal acts perpetrated anywhere in the world can be conveniently-contextually redefined, selectively applied, and politically justified based on the race, religion, and nationality of the beaten-down “other.” The Somali community in Minnesota fits all three categories and, therefore, like enslaved African victims of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, they have no human rights that need to be respected by ICE or the Department of Homeland Security, after all, they are not considered humans.

And so, I would recommend that the decent people of Minnesota and other parts of our nation that are negatively impacted by ICE/DHS, particularly those wonderful and compassionate opposing slave-catching modern abolitionists like the late Renee Good — study the work-actions of movements like the Underground Railroad and how they helped Africans escaping from bondage to realize their innate right to freedom.

“A strong man will deliver us,” until he doesn’t. And only then do his followers discover that they have surrendered both their humanity and the good promises of their future history.

History is a great teacher, but denying and hiding history is a grave mistake. Movements like the AfD in Germany, Ms. Meloni’s right-wing alliance of parties in Italy, England’s Reform UK party, and America’s own homegrown MAGA/GOP movement should study how these types of proto-fascist movements have never served their nation’s or their followers’ best interests; things always seem to end badly, because they are movements based on a lie. That lie is that the only way their members can realize their humanity is to physically oppress, traumatize, and try to snuff out the physical and spiritual humanity of the darker, or not-like-us “others.” And yet, ironically, this denial of historiography and the denial of humanity to the disenfranchised and oppressed “others” eventually pushes these reactionary citizen-actors further and further away from the meaningful and purposeful humanity that they so desperately seek.

*Slave Catching 1.0: The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 transformed the entire nation, both free and slave-holding states alike, into an extension of the slave states’ justifying and policing apparatus. The law compelled all citizens and public officials to detain and return escaped enslaved people to bondage, and it criminalized any act of refusal. This statute stripped African freedom seekers of even the most basic human rights and legal due-process protections, including the right to contest their fate. In effect, the Act nationalized slavery’s vindication and enforcement and made the entire nation’s citizens, and the federal government, its guarantor and enforcer.

What Would It Mean to “Govern Expansively and Audaciously” in NYC Public Schools?

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“…In writing this address, I have been told that this is the occasion to reset expectations, that I should use this opportunity to encourage the people of New York to ask for little and expect even less. I will do no such thing. The only expectation I seek to reset is that of small expectations. Beginning today, we will govern expansively and audaciously. We may not always succeed. But never will we be accused of lacking the courage to try.…A moment like this comes rarely. Seldom do we hold such an opportunity to transform and reinvent” — Excerpt from Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s inauguration speech.

Like many who listened to the newly sworn-in NYC mayor’s inaugural address, I felt both inspired and hopeful about what governing expansively and audaciously could mean for New York City’s children, particularly those who, mayor after mayor, still find themselves, to borrow from my former Columbia University Revson Fellowship mentor Eli Ginzberg, receiving the “short end” of the learning-quality stick.

As I have written previously (Winning NYC’s Affordability Fight Is Impossible Without Public School Accountability), closing New York City’s affordability gap is inseparable from closing its persistent teaching and learning quality gaps. Demographic reality makes clear that large-scale student reassignment schemes, based on race, often offered as morally deficient, and politically placating shortcuts, are neither mathematically feasible nor educationally responsible. There simply are not enough white students to redistribute, and such efforts would create a busing and public-transportation nightmare that would dismantle many great after-school programs, academic teams, athletic sports, and enrichment opportunities that currently sustain learning communities across more than 1,500 NYC schools.

From my eleven years as a Title I high-school principal, one conclusion is unavoidable: the fastest and most durable way to break generational cycles of poverty and despair, and to create genuine generational quality-of-life leaps opportunities, is for public education to do its most fundamental job well. That job is not symbolic integration or rhetorical reassurance, but the creation of learning environments where every child’s intellectual potential is deliberately surfaced, developed, and honored.

Closing the quality learning-opportunity gap is the unfinished, and most fiercely resisted, descendant of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Brown did not merely challenge where Black children sat; it also challenged whether the nation would finally accept responsibility for how well Black children were being educated. It is true that separate was never intended to be equal, and that one of the tragic byproducts of so-called “integration” was the elimination of vast numbers of highly competent and highly efficacious Black teachers and school administrators.
What followed was not the end of educational segregation, but its reinvention. Society devised new, evilly ingenious ways to separate Black students from quality education, constructing parallel systems in the same districts and school buildings, that preserved inequality, low expectations, while cloaking it in the language of progressive education.

These systems remain firmly in place, even in the most liberal and bluest of states, including New York. The moment therefore demands a modern, updated Brown movement, one that confronts and dismantles this contemporary form of quality-learning segregation. Any substitution of that real instructional transformation with rhetorical flourishes or “magical” (often costly) initiatives merely extends the present status quo under a different name.

This leaves NYC elected officials and professional educators with a clarifying question they can no longer avoid: if we truly believe there is nothing wrong with the learning capacity of Black and Latino children, yet their academic outcomes consistently fall far short of their potential, then what are we doing wrong in how we organize, resource, conduct and lead schools, and why do we citizens tolerate this massive loss of societal intellectual wealth?
And if, instead, we quietly believe that race, poverty, immigration status, neighborhood conditions, parental education levels, or English-language fluency permanently limit a child’s educability, then professional honesty demands disclaimers. Parents and taxpayers deserve to be told outright that if your child falls into the “wrong” ZIP code or demographic category, the system cannot deliver on its promise to properly educate them.
After all, no rational consumer would purchase a kitchen appliance if the manufacturer warned in advance that there was a 70 percent chance it would fail the moment it was plugged in. Yet we, as citizens, have grown disturbingly numb to the unacceptable terrible outcomes of one of our most expensive, and consequential, civic undertakings: public education.

We already know multiple ways how to effectively educate all children. When we fail to do so, that failure is not pedagogical—it is political.

A physically easier way to avoid a massive school integration busing nightmare, at far less educational and financial cost, though unquestionably a more politically dangerous path; would be to mandate and declare the NYCDOE a Children-First Learning and Adult Accountability Priority Zone. Having served for many years as both a principal and a superintendent in New York City, I understand the extraordinary courage such a declaration would require. I know the system’s ugly undersides. I know the deeply entrenched political forces that have created, and continue to maintain, our present learning-quality apartheid system.

Which is why, if you encounter a principal leading a consistently high-performing Title I school, you should probably buy them a gift card, or a lottery ticket. For, their calm exterior often conceals the daily accumulation of emotional scars earned by serving as a constant rule-breaking and rule-bending counterforce within a system that routinely undermines its own stated mission: educating all children.

These leaders succeed not because the system supports them, but because they are willing to absorb personal, professional, and moral risk on behalf of children.
So when I return to the mayor’s speech and hear the word expansively used in connection with public education, I hear more than rhetorical flourish. I hear the possibility of a governing posture defined by spacious capacity, by a purposeful, strategic inclusion of all children. I hear a commitment that no cohort of students will be excluded from the city’s rich ecosystem of informal learning institutions, cultural resources, and enrichment opportunities. I hear an expansiveness of heart rooted in a moral responsibility to future generations, not merely political viability in the present.

I also share a biographical bond with both the new mayor and his chancellor. As a first-generation Caribbean American, I—like them—am living testimony to the power of education to make the highest promise of this nation real. What drew me, as a young college student in the 1970s, toward a life in professional education was an internal, largely unarticulated conviction that transcends policy and politics: the idea that every child enters the world with inherent worth and untapped potential, and that society bears a sacred obligation to cultivate those gifts rather than squander them.

Public education, at its best, is not merely a workforce pipeline, or, tragically for too many, an incarceration pipeline, it is a moral undertaking, a collective act of faith in human possibility, and a covenant with generations yet to come.

But if expansively signals intentional, ethically mandated inclusion; audaciously signals courage, real courage, untainted by a stage magician’s illusionary distractions.
Audacity is what it looks like when civic, religious, political, and educational leaders fully understand the cost of acting and doing what’s right and then act anyway. It is Harriet Tubman courage. It is Dietrich Bonhoeffer courage. It is Nelson Mandela courage. It is the recognition that once you cross the rubicon of righteous responsibility, there is no turning back, no compromise deal to be struck, no rhetorical cover to be offered for systems that continue to produce educational suffering while claiming it’s reform.

We already know how to effectively educate all children; there is ample evidence to tell us exactly what it would take to achieve that objective. When we nevertheless choose not to educate large numbers of children, that failure is political and ethical, not experientially educational. For example, we know we must address the negative “tipping-point” concentration of inexperienced teachers, the related chronic teacher-turnover problem in high-poverty (Title I) schools, and the blatant disconnection of our most highly experienced, mastery-level instructional practitioners from our most academically struggling students.

To govern expansively and audaciously in NYC public schools would mean declaring, without hesitation, without ineffective initiatives, and without recycling public education’s familiar “greatest hits” of verbal vacillations; that children’s learning is the city’s first priority, even when doing so is politically dangerous, professionally career-threatening, and morally challenging.

It would also require the NYCDOE to confront two decisions it has long avoided. First, whether the purpose of public education, like too much of our criminal-justice system, has been reduced to employment acquirement and containment compliance, rather than human healing, intellectual development, and democratic evolution. Second, whether the system is finally willing to acknowledge that ground zero of any serious, system-wide quality-learning improvement effort is the individual school building itself. That acknowledgment would demand granting principals and their school-based leadership teams, real staffing authority, adequate and stable resources, and sustained professional development so they can become highly valued and highly effective school-building leaders, and then holding them to uncompromising, no-excuses, compelled to pursue high standards for the academic performance success of all students under their charge.

Expansive governance means standing with principals who succeed only by bending and breaking rules in a system that routinely undermines its own stated mission, extending the full reach of the city’s cultural and learning institutions to every child, and rejecting cowardly thinking disguised as realism. Audacious leadership demands courage without illusion, the kind that understands there is no rhetorical compromise capable of justifying the continued educational suffering produced by present conditions.

History is unambiguous: those who acted audaciously knew there was no turning back, no big pay-day for children harming behaviors, no political deal to be struck, no softening narrative to be offered for injustice. We will soon learn whether these words, expansive and audacious, were merely elegant sounds delivered in a speech, or a governing promise finally kept for the most educationally disenfranchised and dismissed children of New York City.

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