Monthly Archives: February 2026

Responding to Racist Attacks on Popular and Heroic Black Public Figures: An Educational Imperative for Adaptive, Corrective, and Protective Lesson and School-Wide Response Planning

Posted on by

As the bulk of the decent, non-prejudiced poisoned citizens left in America express, justifiably so, righteous anger and moral indignation at the U.S. President’s escalation toward more explicit visual expressions of the ugly beliefs and policies that undergird his reign of racism; professional educators, who are human beings and ethically embarrassed citizens (we take any form of ignorance personally), will also feel the pain of this moment. And that pain will not be limited to Black educators only. We therefore must “stay focused, and stay on the job.”

First, we must recognize, from a pedagogical perspective, what Barack and Michelle Obama meant, not only (but especially) to Black children in our own country and beyond, but also to children of every color, ethnicity, and nationality, in schools not just across the United States, but in schools all over the world.

So, our first job is to develop age- and grade-appropriate lesson plans, across multiple content areas, including active involvement with guidance and counseling departments, that support healthy healing, conceptual correction, and, particularly in light of the current ICE brutal assaults on human beings, a reassuring sense of both group and personal protection.

We know enough developmental psychology to understand that when young people are hurt, angry, or frightened, they will not always express or act out those feelings in the most positive or productive ways; therefore, professional educators must step in directly into the present fray, and help students process this disgraceful moment in our history in the most positively edifying and emotionally strengthening manner possible.

Each school-based administrator must make a personal and professional decision regarding how far to go, and in what format; therefore, I would not offer a blanket recommendation for how school leaders should respond to these types of historical moments.
That said, based on my past experiential practice as a high school principal, where we understood that whatever major event existed in the public atmosphere, our students already knew about it, so instead of hiding from the obvious, what I did then, and what I would do now, is to shift into full response mode.

I would immediately convene a crash cabinet, school-leadership and departmental emergency meeting to design a school-wide classroom, and guidance-counseling response strategy, beginning with four grade-level assemblies that I would personally lead. After all, we invested a great deal of time—eight years—building students’ pride, resilience, hope, and aspirations around the exemplary model and public leadership excellence of the Obama family; and we cannot allow all of that deliberate self-esteem-building work to be attacked without a purposeful teaching-and-learning response.

A note of caution for principals: understand that superintendents are, by job description, though not necessarily by personal preference, both educational and political actors. You must therefore read the present situation within that dual context and know your superintendent’s position on this matter before acting.

As for me, I have articulated my own self-guiding response position to moments such as these across several chapters of my book, Report From the Principal’s Office: A 200-Day Inspirational and Aspirational School Leadership Journal, including:

13. The Ethical Principalship.
20. Ethical Righteous Authority Means You Can’t Always Ask for Permission to Act.
21. Wise Righteous Authority Means There Are Times When You Should Ask for Permission to Act.
32. The Authentic Principalship.
64. The Mindful Principalship.
And very relevant to our present concern:
75. Part of the Effective Principalship Practice Is Not Throwing Yourself Under the Bus!

So, act according to your ethical inclinations, pedagogical responsibilities and your district political realities.

I do not want to get any principal in trouble, so full disclosure: my leadership style is my leadership style, and even when teaching future school administrators, I always explain my leadership approach with a clearly stated warning label. That said, I firmly believe that the most moral, ethical, and pedagogically sincere educators, and especially educational leaders, are, in fact, made in and for this moment.

This is not a moment for professional silence, instructional avoidance, or moral retreat disguised as neutrality. Racist attacks on major well-known by students Black public figures, particularly those who represent dignity, excellence, and aspirational possibility, inevitably, one way or another, land in our classrooms, whether we invite them or not.

The question before educators is not whether students will be affected, but whether we will meet them with intentional guidance, protective care, and intellectually honest instructional practices. If we truly believe that education is both a moral and civic endeavor, then this is precisely the moment when principled, prepared, and courageous educational leadership must rise to meet the work.

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

Before Advising a Young Person to Avoid or Drop Out of College: A Few Important Considerations

Posted on by

“For the first time in 50 years, college grads are losing their edge.”
— Washington Post, January 31, 2026

PART 1: The Purpose of a K–12 Education

(There is just no way that I can give this foundationally important educational Part 1 topic section its due treatment in a short blog post. For those keenly interested in this topic, I would recommend reading any of, but specifically these two books by John Dewey: Democracy and Education and Experience and Education.)

As is often the case with fear-inspiring and commercially motivated, eyeball-grabbing articles, the most important operational devil is buried deep in the research-methodological details of a poorly organized and largely under-informed writing project about public education. Too often, such pieces dangerously play into the hands of those seeking a confirmation “cover” for their own biased and prejudiced views. I’ve found that many very prominent people, including professional K–16 educators, are quick to proclaim, “We have overdone this everyone-preparing-for-college thing, college isn’t for everyone,” and in almost every case, that “everyone” does not include their own children, or the children of their economic and ethnic class.

While it is true that many high school guidance and college/career counseling services need significant upgrading to provide far better and more individualized academic and post-high school graduation planning information, doing so would require public high schools to be funded adequately to staff full-time college and career advisors. It would also require the development of a standardized best-practices advising methodology, a more clearly defined set of professional codes of conduct, technology-aided college and career offices, and a systematic operational and ethical approach to post–high school advising practices, including the use of “discovering your gifts, talents, and future career options” lessons beginning in the ninth grade.

The devil is also in the use and interpretation of numbers, so consider this critical warning caveat, quietly tucked into the middle of this Washington Post article:

“Jeff Strohl, director of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, cast the shifts as a ‘historic anomaly.’ The question becomes, are we talking about a structural break? Is this in any way indicative of what the world is going to look like in two or three years?”

Forget the next two or three years, what about the next 5, 10, and 20 years of workplace and national economic landscape shifts that every current high school graduate will be facing? The honest answer is that no one really knows what will happen in the future, and, more importantly, what that future will mean for an individual high school student trying to plan a viable adult career path. Or will the very idea of a single long-term commitment to a career path become a historical artifact, no longer practiced in the not-so-distant future that today’s high school graduates will face? Or consider the possibility of a future world in which multiple, simultaneously practiced professions become a common practice, for example, an orchestral cello player doubling as a cello-design-and-building carpenter; a plumber doubling as a professional poet.

So what happens if a nation like the United States continues shifting away from hands-on manufacturing jobs and never returns to them, despite the wrongheaded nostalgic efforts of some current misguided politicians? What if AI and robotics, or some technological intervention we have not yet seen, make many of these manufacturing jobs functionally people-less, cheaper, more efficiently operated, and (more profit-making) productive? Does anyone seriously believe that the current generation of industry titans will retain and generously pay these low-tech workers for sentimental reasons?
And what if, at the same time, we oversaturate the labor market with low-tech workers while facing an acute shortage of college-educated professionals in the high-tech areas needed across a growing service sector, STEM research, CAD/CAM operational management, and health-related fields, especially those required to serve a rapidly expanding, aging U.S. population that, although living longer, will still face significant late-onset diseases (typically emerging after ages 60–65) health challenges?

Numbers may not lie, but they also don’t always describe the complete and comprehensive truth.

Statistical predictions are built on large cohorts of individuals, but those predictions do not always translate cleanly or accurately to a real human being, who is a real person, not simply a data point in a research study. High school guidance counselors and career advisors are routinely asked to speculate 10, 15, and even 20 years into the future. The truth is that there is no reliable way to perfectly predict future, economy-driven employment needs. Nations change. Regions change. Individual student interests, talents, and opportunities change. Time itself is a powerful and unpredictable agent of transformation.

Despite some excellent exceptions, generally speaking, “education news articles” are in my view are often correct information deficient.

This article operates from several public schooling misconceptions, starting with the most egregious misunderstanding of the purpose of a K–12 education, and then continuing with distorted assumptions about high schools, and ending with deeply flawed ideas about how post-secondary pathways are, or should be, decided.
Professional public educators themselves contribute to this confusion because we have not always been clear about why we do what we do.
In part, this is because we live within a national culture that turns nearly everything American into a commercial feeding enterprise and therefore turns every student into a present and future commodity.
Another reason is that we are often rhetorically bold but actionably insincere about the true democratic purpose of public education, because full honesty would require acknowledging that, for large segments of the U.S. population, we do not do nearly as well as we are professionally, ethically, and financially paid to do.

I fully recognize and concede that we live in a social reality where the overwhelming majority of American high school graduates will not inherit vast sums of money that allow them to live expense-free while choosing to live “rent free” in any lifestyle they desire. The overwhelming majority of us must figure out how to pay for basic living expenses: housing, food, clothing, healthcare, transportation, entertainment-leisure, and eventually some form of financial retirement security.
But that recognition cannot become the sole, driving obsession of our formal educational lives.

In every meaningful sense, chasing the “next hot jobs” list denies a core value of human life, and a core purpose of K-12 schooling: the development of a fully realized human being, living a purposefully enriched life. Schooling soley for the purposes of employment ignores the importance of discovering what one is gifted and talented at doing, and then building a life and related career around work that is meaningful, productive, and deeply satisfying.

For years, when students asked me, as a high school principal, what they should do after graduation, my response was always the same:

Do something you love. Do something you are talented and gifted at doing, which means you will likely enjoy doing it, and living it, as a long-term career option. Then figure out how to get someone, or yourself, if entrepreneurship is your calling—to pay you well to do it.

I believed then, and still believe now, that this advice is the most principled and honest career guidance a professional educator can offer without violating our core professional responsibilities, while still acknowledging that we live, for better or worse, in a society governed by the often brutal rules of commodity capitalism, where individuals are frequently forced into marketing and then selling themselves on the trading block of life; and also living a winners-or-losers zero-sum game by applying hyper-individualized, selfish, and personal reproduction-gene-protection survival strategies.

The best high school guidance/career/college advisors do a good job of offering advice that balances the living in the future ideal with the immediate, and future possible reality, getting students to where they enjoy occupational satisfaction and are also able to live a financially self-sustaining life.

For most public educators, we are both aware of, but strive to work around those dog-eat-dog national principles; however, we are also charged morally and authentically to protect young people’s future options. We are absolutely, at the PreK beginning and at the grueling high school graduation end, working carefully within a political system that prioritizes having money over having a meaningful life.

A career choice should be what you are authentically and spiritually called to be, or no job, regardless of the amount of money you make, will ever be truly internally satisfying and rewarding.

Yes, we public educators complain about constant external criticism of public education. Yes, the unpaid hours we donate to the system are staggering. Yes, the work is exhausting, frustrating, and emotionally draining, especially when those same complaining stakeholding governmental powers fail to provide us with the adequate resources to meet the “educate all children” expectations they request and we desire to reach. And yes, we often find ourselves tired, discouraged, in tears, or talking about giving up.

Yet, if most of my colleagues were being honest, they would admit that despite all of the above things working against our succeeding, we know that we are exactly where we need to be in this life, doing the exact work we are called to do. We love this profession even as it sometimes feels like it does not love us back, and painfully breaks our hearts. We love changing the world for the better by changing the life of a single student. We love discovering our own purposeful life through service, and we love watching students begin to articulate and pursue their own life-purpose missions under our thoughtful guidance and effectual tutelage.

Closing Reflection: Why the “Purpose of Education” Ideal Matters When Advising Young People About Going, or Not Going, to College

Finally, yes, I am deeply indebted to my professional education in developmental psychology, special education, curriculum and instruction, and, for me specifically, my mathematics and science education coursework; and later to my graduate studies in supervision, administration, and school- and district-level leadership, which prepared me well for a long and productive career in public education.
But it was my enriching K–12 humanities subjects classes experiences that greatly expanded my creativity, imagination, and understanding of a vast world outside of my childhood neighborhood; and when supplemented with my undergraduate liberal arts education courses in economics, history, art, music, philosophy, fiction and nonfiction literature, political science, and related academic fields, these creative encounters most profoundly shaped me into a better teacher, principal, and superintendent, capable of performing those roles at their highest imaginatively created levels of effectuation.

As Maxine Greene so powerfully reminded us, “By imagination, we are enabled to look at things, to think about things as if they could be otherwise.” (drawn from: “Releasing the Imagination”)
Those liberal arts exposures also helped to mold me into a better, albeit still flawed (not because of, but in spite of, their influence), somewhat contributing human being and a more responsible, well-informed citizen. That is why advising a young person to avoid or prematurely abandon a college experience based solely on short-term labor-market anxieties, possibilities projections, or media-driven economic narratives is not an educaring act; it is a consequential educational and moral decision that narrows, rather than expands, a young person’s developmental possibilities.

The cultivation of thoughtful citizens and fully formed human beings, individuals prepared to be positive contributors to their fellow citizens and to our shared global human family, is an essential yet deeply overlooked and under-spoken purpose of public education. When that broader civic and human-development mission is discounted or dismissed, college becomes miscast and misunderstood by students as a mere transactional credentialing tool, rather than a formative intellectual growing experience. Young people are then reduced to future workforce machine parts instead of developing into whole-knowledge and wholly-knowledgeable citizens. It is precisely because we have neglected this purpose that we, as a profession, with the tacit blessing of society at large, have come to rely far too heavily on the criminal justice system to compensate for our collective educational failures and inadequacies.

“For the first time in 50 years, college grads are losing their edge,”—Washington Post; January 31, 2026; https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/01/31/labor-market-gap-trade-workers-white-collar/

PART 2: This article also wrongly conflates, though, in fairness, many people also do, including professional educators, the high school Career and Technical Education (CTE) curriculum and learning-objectives pathway with what was historically labeled as Vocational Education. I will address that issue in my next blog posting.