Tag Archives: Education

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.

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.

Whence Comes This Spirit of Ungratefulness: Or, Why Can’t We Be Happy When Others Succeed?

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Over the last two-plus decades, we public educators have watched—and, in far too many cases, contributed to—the drift of Pre-K and Kindergarten learning objectives toward an overly narrow fixation on teaching literacy and numeracy skills. The profession’s leaders, policymakers, and even many well-meaning practitioners have increasingly pressured early childhood classrooms to function solely as “first-grade readiness factories,” squeezing out the expansive, exploratory, language-rich, creative mind expanding, and imagination-affirming learning environments that Pre-K and Kindergarten children need and deserve.

This trend has been accompanied by the rise—and I would argue the pedagogically indefensible rise—of so-called “gifted and talented” programs at the Pre-K and Kindergarten levels. These initiatives are, in both theory and practice, professionally unethical and fundamentally anti-good pedagogy; they mistake developmental variance for innate genius, parental informal-education push factors for “natural” gifts and talents, and ignore the sociocultural and psychological foundations of early childhood learning, while unfairly sorting children before they have even had a chance to unfold into themselves. (See: Ending Kindergarten Gifted & Talented Screenings Is Right—But It’s a Superficial Political Fix for a Complicated Pedagogical Problem — https://majmuse.net/).

And before any of my former Community School District 29 (Queens, NYC) colleagues or parents call out my hypocrisy, a full confession is required. As superintendent, I pushed an all-grades, district-wide literacy empowerment initiative titled Readers-to-Leaders. I also ramped up elementary mathematics instruction to dramatically increase the number of students prepared to take—and master—algebra by the end of 8th or 9th grade. I dramatically expanded elementary gifted and talented programs across the district. And, of course, these decisions placed intensified academic preparation pressures on our Pre-K and Kindergarten programs.

Further, I must confess that I was perhaps a chief advocate and enthusiastic contributor to this rigorous academic “push-down” approach into the Pre-K and Kindergarten world—installing Applied Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) labs and placing specially trained STEM teachers in several of our early childhood schools and classrooms.
Now that I’ve completed my self-confession and truth-telling, let me return to my larger point.

Because of this rush to push academic rigor down into the Pre-K and Kindergarten grades, what suffered most, curriculum-wise, were those equally essential learning objectives tied to emotional intelligence, social cooperation, sharing and working together, tolerance, patience, and the recognition of the humanity of others. These are the ethical/moral foundational dispositions children are supposed to learn and master in Pre-K and Kindergarten; and yet they were all either seriously diminished or pushed aside completely in service of reaching prematurely accelerated academic goals.

And it shows—particularly on social media platforms, both in the postings themselves and in the responses to them. Now, some of that is due to the zeitgeist (spirit-of-the-era) we live in, where many of our civic, elected, celebrity, athlete, and entertainment figures have elevated “put-down culture” to a required art of communication. This means that speaking or posting kind words, and being encouraging and appreciative of the efforts of others, has been redefined as a weakness. Thus, a vicious cycle has emerged in which dismissive and denigrating talk has become a normal communicative style between human beings, assisted by social media algorithms that are designed to purposely accelerate and spread conflict conversations widely: “If they—real or imagined—clap at me, I must clap back harder and uglier!”

As these platforms have grown in popularity and usage, I have detected, with increasing concern, a general tone of “put-down meanness.” People post comments that, I suspect, they would either be afraid—or, hopefully, ashamed—to say directly to the faces of those who are on the receiving end of their vitriolic missives.

All of the above—Pre-K–Kindergarten curriculum learning objectives, the zeitgeist, and the substance and tone on social media—came to mind recently after I read or listened to, and then reflected on, some of the comments responding to Mr. Mamdani’s tactically successful meeting with Mr. Trump (See: Those Who Wanted a Mamdani–Trump Fight Reveal Their True Priorities—And NYC’s Children Aren’t Among Them —https://majmuse.net/).

I can honestly say that I was not surprised by the negative responses from some on the right (though, in fairness, I was equally surprised by their sudden praise). But I must admit that I was genuinely taken aback by some of the dismissive comments coming from individuals who categorize themselves as “progressive” or “left”—including a major city progressive mayor for whom I hold deep respect, and whom Mr. Mamdani has praised profusely in the past.

So, where were these negative comments from the “progressive/left” coming from?

A lifelong good friend of mine who is a trauma surgeon often accuses me of looking for answers in deep philosophical and political spaces. “Perhaps,” he is fond of saying, “the behaviors we’re observing could actually be responses generated in the limbic system—the pre-analytical, basic emotional, fear-driven, bio-competitive, pleasure-or-anger part of the brain that is naturally inclined toward brutish, selfish pettiness.” Or, as young people have wisely codified and defined it, as the act of “hating.”

Hating Will Not Heal Us!
For example, it is profoundly sad to watch two talented men—one a former governor and the other a soon-to-be former mayor (yes, they possess leadership talents, even if the way they have operationalized those talents could be legitimately questioned)—embark on what can only be described as a public “bitterness tour.” And so, the question becomes: How does that “bitterness tour” help New Yorkers? And my particular area of immense interest: NYC’s school children? And equally important: How does that negatively grounded attitudinal approach help these two men to emotionally and spiritually heal?

There are very few Black school superintendents in this nation who have not faced professional rejection at some point in their careers—even when they were actually doing an excellent job. The real question is: What do leaders do after facing rejection? How about not responding right away? And, after reflecting, then when responding, can’t it be done in a helpful, healthy, emotionally sound, and spiritually grounded way? Why not choose to be a morally ethical leader and avoid hurting people by undermining your successor’s ability to transition effectively? Why lay operational landmines for the person who comes after you—and, by extension, for the very constituents you claim to love?

Perhaps your rejection or dismissal, however painful and unfair it may feel, is actually a disguised opportunity—an invitation to deep self-reflection that can lead to higher levels of personal and professional development. You can come back wiser, stronger, and better. But that cannot happen when you choose revenge, bitterness, or envy as your teachers.

And back to those “hating on” Mr. Mamdani for his success with Mr. Trump folks: let’s go full 1950s Brooklyn Caribbean-American old-school parental wisdom—“If you don’t have something good to say about somebody, then keep your mouth shut!” And how about reviving the fading, lost art of “minding your own business!” Every mayor should run their city the way they see fit. Let Mr. Mamdani lead New York City in the way he believes the moment, the mission, and the moral mandate require.

NYC is unlike any city I’ve visited in the world. A city of eight million—likely closer to nine million when you count those the census misses—would be economically devastated by any major U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency invasion. One can easily imagine the cascading financial collapse: entertainment, restaurants, hotels, local businesses both small and large, the entire tourism industry—all dependent on both the workers and the customers who would disappear in sizable numbers. These interdependent economic spheres would damage and drag each other down in a destructive chain reaction.

The NYC public school system—the largest in the nation—would be equally devastated. As we’ve seen in other cities targeted by aggressive ICE practices, many students-of-color absences would skyrocket to COVID-era proportions. The learning-opportunity windows for countless non-white U.S. citizen children of immigrants would slam shut, some permanently. Effective remediation would require double the amount of money the city currently allocates to public education. And the long-term impact on New York City’s reduced contribution to America’s intellectual competitiveness capacity would be severe—perhaps irreversible for at least a generation.

If I were a member of NYC’s business wealthy cohort, I would spend far less time worrying about Mr. Mamdani’s fair, ethical, but modest tax-generating proposals, and far more time worrying about the astronomical restoration taxes and workforce educational skills deficiencies you will pay for after ICE destroys this city’s economic and human-resource capacity.

Many people of color—since the neighborhoods where they live, not the large white immigrant communities, will be the primary targets of ICE—will stop going to clinics and hospitals. And once that happens, we will see a rise in long-term, severe, and in some cases highly communicable diseases. And of course, not treating these illnesses in a timely way will eventually make them extraordinarily expensive to treat—at least for those who survive ICE’s onslaught.

The only “good news” from this tragic scenario, if one can call it that, is that crime statistics will improve. But that will only occur because large numbers of immigrant or U.S.-citizen people of color will no longer call or report crimes to the police when they themselves are victims. Fear will replace civic trust—and the “good data news” will lie.

Give Mr. Mamdani credit: he understood the White House assignment.

Further, let me return to another old-school value: How about being happy for someone else’s success? Too many pursue the false notion that if another person succeeds, “I’m a loser”—as if success were a limited-quantity commodity that human beings must constantly claw and scratch to acquire. And, even worse, as if the best strategy for obtaining success is not to earn it through effort and excellence, but to sabotage those who are on their way toward it, or those who have already achieved a measure of it. You know—those emotional-intelligence, self-confidence, social-awareness, and appreciation-of-others learning objectives we are supposed to intentionally teach and nurture in young children during the Pre-K and Kindergarten years.

Wait for Your Turn—Your Good Turn Is Coming. In the Meantime, Applaud and Encourage Those Who Are in Their Good-Turn Moment!
But perhaps that is the heart of the matter: somewhere along the path from childhood to adulthood, too many of us forget the very lessons we insist our youngest learners must master. We abandon empathy for spectacle, replace mutually advantageous cooperation with ugly, unfriendly zero-sum competition, and trade emotional maturity for public displays of resentment. Yet cities—especially a city as vast, dynamic, and interdependent as New York—cannot be led by people stuck in the emotional basement of bitterness, envy, or performative outrage. They require leaders, and citizens, who possess the courage to celebrate another person’s success, the humility to learn from it, and the wisdom to understand that every genuine “good acts” victory for one can become an opportunity for all to collectively flourish. In this moment of national fracturing and municipal vulnerability, we would all do well to return to those Pre-K and Kindergarten lessons—and actually live them.

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

Why So Many U.S. High School Graduates Can’t Tell the Difference Between Democratic Socialism and Communism

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The 2025 NYC mayoral race taught us professional educators, especially those of us who work in high schools, a great deal about the tremendous amount of civic, historical, political science, and economic illiteracy that exists among our graduates. It also revealed how our current curriculum designs for these social science subjects fail to meet the standard of helping future citizen-voters become critical thinkers in the face of polarization and the purposeful misuse of political vocabulary.

The recent widespread invocation of these two very different political ideologies—often conflated in public discourse—suggests that we must examine how well we are doing as public educators in what has become a less-than-stellar, almost “after-thought” approach to civics education.

A visit (and I have) to any high school in Europe, or to any nation with a parliamentary political system of government, reveals that students (and the citizens) possess a far deeper understanding of the critical differences between political ideologies. This is largely because, in those systems, the ideologies present themselves as distinct political parties with formal representation in the national deliberative body of government.

In these parliamentary systems, the Communist Party and the Democratic Socialist Party (along with others such as the Greens, Christian Democrats, Labour, Conservative, and the growing “Far Right” or neo-Fascist parties) hold very different ideas about how government should function. Yet, from time to time, they may align, disentangle, and then realign with one another to form coalitions around specific issues or bills of importance to their members or principles—but they always maintain their own distinct political identities.

I can imagine my professional education colleagues in places like Germany, England, and Italy cringing when they hear Mr. Mamdani being referred to as both a Democratic Socialist and a Communist in the same sentence—as would members of those European parties, who are often bitterly opposed to each other. And if, after observing the European parliamentary systems, one is still unclear that these two political ideologies are profoundly different, then here’s a final lesson: put a Communist and a Democratic Socialist in a room (it sounds like the opening line of a joke) and offer just one word to start the conversation—“Trotsky”—then watch the sparks fly.

The U.S. Two-Party System and the Weaponization of Political Language
In the United States, with its non-parliamentary two-party dominant system, “political affiliation identification” becomes far less clear. Both of the major parties—the Republican (GOP) and the Democratic (DNC)—embrace a capitalist economic framework, and so political labeling becomes extremely murky. This confusion allows language itself to be weaponized. We often hear the GOP accusing someone like Joe Biden of advancing “left-wing” or “Green Party” policies—claims that, of course, couldn’t be further from the truth. Meanwhile, Republicans rarely describe themselves as pro-wealthy, unrestricted-capitalist, right-wing, or (in some policy areas) neo-fascist—which would, in fact, be more accurate descriptors. They have mastered the art of throwing political shade without ever being properly shaded in return by the DNC.

But here lies the deeper problem: both parties are, in essence, pro-capitalist entities primarily serving the interests of the rich—especially their donors. The difference is that the DNC prefers to practice its politics of economic exploitation with a kinder face and softer language, advocating for safety-net-lite measures such as modest consumer protections, less painfully exploitative labor laws, Social Security, food assistance for the working poor, and healthcare programs like the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare).

Civics Ignorance: The Educational Roots of Political Language Misdirection

Now, in terms of “civics ignorance” I’m not referring here to the Vice-President J.D. Vances or the Congressional Representative Elise Stefaniks of the world. Whether or not one agrees with their political ideologies, they are well-educated individuals—even as they work tirelessly to undermine the very fine university systems that educated them. They were educated intellectually, though not necessarily in the moral or ethical sense of graduating with a compassion-guided compass. Their conflation of these two extremely different political ideologies—Democratic Socialism and Communism—is, in their case, a cynical feigning of ignorance. It is a manipulative, opportunistic strategy designed to exploit the very real and frightening ignorance that is widespread among the American citizenry.

The Vance/Stefanik approach to conflation, then, is deliberately tactical. It differs markedly from that of the low-information or intellectually deficient Americans who genuinely believe that Democratic Socialism and Communism are the same thing. And it is on this latter group that I wish to focus.
Before I proceed, I must (in full disclosure) begin with a professional confession. As a former high school principal, I must ask myself: how did we in the profession—especially high school educators—get this critical history, civics, and political-science learning objectives so profoundly wrong for so many people? We cannot hide behind that tired and useless excuse: “We taught the lesson effectively; the students just didn’t learn it effectively.” Wrong!

As many master teachers know, and as countless school administrators have made clear during post-lesson observation conferences, whenever that excuse appears, openly or subtly, the truth must be stated: there is no space between the successful quality of the lesson’s instructional methods and the successful quality of students learning the conceptual and behavioral objectives of that lesson.
In other words, the students didn’t learn effectively because they weren’t taught effectively. If Americans cannot distinguish between different political systems, the fault lies—at least in large part—with us, the public educators.

The News Media Reports—But Schools Must Teach

The traditional news media has been mildly helpful in obligatorily repeating the “Mr. Mamdani is not a communist” correction phrase in many of its news stories, commentaries, and editorials. But this is not one of those “blame the media” moments. The news media’s primary objective is to report and inform, not to remediate civic illiteracy. The deeper problem lies elsewhere.
The primary work of properly educating Americans to read, interpret, and analytically understand those very news articles is the sole responsibility of K–12 educators. It is a sacred charge that cannot be outsourced, deferred, or delegated to any other institution in the nation.

Who Knew? Stephen A. Smith and Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, Political Economists!

I knew we were in trouble when Stephen A. Smith and Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson became the explaining voices for capitalism. (There are, of course, many distinguished professional Black political economists available.) Yet, instead of drawing from great intellectual resources such as Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery, Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, or Manning Marable’s How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, too many turn to celebrity sound bites for their understanding of complex economic theory and political science power dynamics.

Right Now, American Education Is the Problem, but It Is Also the Solution

There are several cross-curricular corrective actions we as professional educators must take—especially at the high school level, to help our students become discerning civic actors in their future adult voting lives. (In other words: no student should leave high school without knowing these things.)

Moral Foundations:
Students must leave us enriched and ennobled with what I call the Major Moral C’s: Moral Conviction, Moral Consistency, and Moral Courage. This means they must learn not to say, “These are not genocidal acts if my side is inflicting the acts.” Every person on the planet must be fully entitled to enjoy their personhood.

Complexity and Contradiction:
Students must understand that two things—sometimes seemingly contradictory—can be true at the same time. For example, our national immigration system is a mess, but unkind cruelty is neither the best nor the most effective operational policy for fixing bad border policies. The opposite of bad actions is good actions, not more bad actions.

Recognizing Shared Humanity:
Students must understand that there are people beyond our own “tribe” who deserve to live their best lives—those who practice religions different from ours, or hold political, cultural, and social beliefs we may not share. What we all share is our humanity, and that descriptive distinction must always be recognized, honored, and protected.

The Virtue of Learning:
Ignorance must never be proudly proclaimed as a virtue. Learning, and continually wanting to learn more about the world beyond one’s own ideas and convictions, is a virtue every twelfth grader should carry with them as they walk across the graduation stage into their next stage of life.

Critical and Metacognitive Thinking:
We must improve and enhance students’ metacognitive (thinking about their own thinking) and analytical skills, helping them move from the limbic (instinctive, emotional) brain system toward higher-order reasoning when facing societal, political, economic, or social problems. And, more importantly, we must also ask: what should all of us do, as thoughtful and compassionate human beings, when we confront the discomfort that accompanies inevitable change?

For example, importing 7,000 white South Africans into the U.S. won’t solve the so-called “Great White Replacement” anxiety fueling parts of the MAGA movement for two important reasons. First, there’s no guarantee that the younger and future generations of those immigrants won’t become more politically progressive and open-minded on questions of race. Second, demographic trends take on lives of their own; so even if every one of those 7,000 South Africans joined the MAGA movement, that number is far too small to alter the birthrate trajectory that underlies the movement’s existential “white replacement” fear of America’s unstoppable shift toward becoming a majority People of Color nation. No discriminatory immigration restriction, no importation of white populations, and no brutal and cruel mass deportation raids will reverse that trend.

Honest History Education:
We must approach the teaching of history as a historiographical science—beginning with truth and facts as guiding curricular standards and evaluative rubrics, and applying deconstructive, inductive, and deductive reasoning techniques. One of history’s primary objectives is to help students learn from past human mistakes. That critical learning cannot occur if we hide or sugarcoat the egregious human errors of the past.

Honesty in teaching history is essential: slavery happened; Japanese internment camps did exist. Glossing over such atrocities or their long-term effects will not erase them from history—ironically, it will make us more likely to repeat them. Seeing the modern rise of neo-Nazi and far-right movements in Germany, France, and England, one would think that the painful lessons of the 1940s had been learned. Apparently, not.

Early and Intentional Civics Education:
We must begin earlier—well before high school—to take seriously the responsibility of producing a well-informed citizenry through thoughtful, intentional civics curricula.
The reason so many of Mr. Mamdani’s critics (including some college-educated individuals on social media—I’ll spare their alma maters the embarrassment by not naming them) can say things like, “He will turn NYC into a Socialist/Communist city” or “a Muslim city,” is because they don’t understand how government actually works. Some on the right know better, but many others, not politically aligned, sincerely believe these falsehoods.
These misconceptions reveal the deep weakness of our high school civics programs—particularly in explaining the structure, powers, and separation of powers among the U.S., New York State, and New York City governments, as well as the statutory authority of their respective legislative and executive agencies and officeholders. And this doesn’t even touch on the powerful non-governmental centers of influence—labor unions, finance, real estate, and the entertainment industry—that all shape governmental policy in very complex but important ways.

In what warped, make-believe universe can a NYC mayor act independently of these entrenched, well-situated, and powerfully positioned players? One of the first lessons you learn as a principal—and learn again as a superintendent—is that most of the “political power capital” you’re said to possess is actually spent on selling ideas: convincing, encouraging, inspiring, and inviting people to follow your leadership. The myth of the all-powerful civil servant executive is just that—a myth. Anyone who took a good NYC high school civics class (and stayed awake) should know better.

Truth Over Propaganda:
Finally, while every nation’s educational system contains some propagandistic elements, teaching inaccuracies—or outright falsehoods—does not prepare students to build a nation or engage intelligently with a globally interdependent world. There must be intellectual space for pedagogical honesty—a space that does not mirror the North Korean model of indoctrination.

We must teach students to ask: What is capitalism as an economic, political, and social system? What is its real relationship to democracy—and what exactly is democracy? How do we explain the “socialist” quality-of-life programs in some Scandinavian countries that seem to work well for their citizens? How many socialized programs must exist before a democracy becomes “socialist”?

If Nicolás Maduro (President of Venezuela) is a “socialist,” in what ways is he or his government practicing socialism? How is Cuba different from the People’s Republic of China, and how are both different from Russia or Vietnam? High school students shouldn’t have to take (and most won’t) an Advanced Placement history, political science, or economics course to wrestle with these essential questions.

The reason a U.S. senator from Alabama—or any prominent figure—can claim that a NYC mayor could somehow turn the city into a “one-religion” place is that such claims only work as put-downs when a large audience shares that same bigoted ignorance.

If Democracy Is to Survive, Public Education Must Be Its Defender

The essential work of democracy has always begun, and will always begin, in the classroom. Whether that classroom sits in a modest rural schoolhouse or a massive urban high school, it is where a nation teaches its young how to think—not what to think, but how to discern, question, and reason morally.

If we as educators fail to equip our students with the intellectual tools to distinguish truth from falsehood, ideology from principle, and propaganda from evidence, then we should not be surprised when demagogues, entertainment celebrities, and political opportunists step in to do our job for us. Civic ignorance is not a natural condition—it is a curriculum outcome.

It is not the media’s responsibility, nor Hollywood’s, nor the politicians’. It is ours. A core principle of the American public education system is the understanding that democracy cannot defend itself; it must be defended by citizens who are educated enough to recognize when democracy is under attack, and moral enough to act when it is.

If the next generation of American students leaves our classrooms unable to tell the difference between Democratic Socialism and Communism, between populism and proto-fascist demagoguery, between patriotism and ethnonationalism, then the republic itself is at grave risk—not because our students are ignorant, but because we, the professional educators, failed to teach them otherwise.

So yes, right now American education is the problem. But it is also, if we are bold and honest enough to face it, the only solution.

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

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