Tag Archives: NYC Chancellor

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.

For NYC Schools to Succeed for All Children, the New Mayor Must Heed the Experientially Wise Counsel of School-Building Supervisors and Administrators

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One of the most important leadership decisions—and some would say the most important—made by a superintendent is the appointment of School-Building Administrators (SBAs), that is, school-based supervisors, assistant principals, and principals.

A school can survive a great many challenges and still thrive academically, but one thing it is very hard for any school to overcome is the presence of incompetent, unethical, or ineffective school leadership. That’s why the highest-performing—and most entitled—private and public schools invest so heavily in getting the principalship appointment decision right. They understand that a wrong decision can inflict severe and long-term damage on the future success of children and on the well-being of the staff entrusted with serving them.

This became shockingly clear to me when a group of parents from a specialized high school approached me quietly at a high school fair and asked if I would consider applying to replace their departing principal. It was evident that this majority-white parent group was not concerned about my being an African American; their sole focus was on securing the best possible educational opportunities for their children. I thanked them, told them I was honored by their confidence, but respectfully declined.

School-Building Leadership Matters. School-District Leadership Matters. School-System Leadership Matters. And the Quality of Children’s Futures Depends on All Three.

Needless to say, the SBA screening and selection process a superintendent employs must adhere to the highest standards of school-building leadership practices: professional knowledge, skills, competencies, ethical conduct, emotional steadiness, and sound temperament. But it is also a principled moral decision on the part of the superintendent—one that must place the emotional and educational well-being of children above all other considerations.

This is the same challenge that mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani now faces as he contemplates who he will select as the next NYC Chancellor. And the overarching question is this: Will his decision be driven primarily by future electoral values or ethical pedagogical values?

There are many essential questions that mayor-elect Mamdani must pose to prospective chancellor candidates, questions they must be able to answer not through rhetoric alone, but through demonstrated past actions that show a courageous commitment to just, equitable, significant, and sustainable school improvement that reaches every zip code and neighborhood in the city.

NYC’s most underserved and vulnerable students cannot endure yet another status-quo, “political favor” chancellor appointment. The parents of these students are desperately pleading for educational quality justice. Yet for too many years, these Black and Latino voices have been unable to reach the great halls of state and municipal power.

This newly elected NYC mayor has repeatedly promised to uplift the city’s least heard and most locked-out citizens. His chancellor selection offers him the opportunity to make good on those powerful, uplifting, and in the case of public education, children’s dreams lifting words.

If the next Chancellor cannot articulate a credible plan for producing equity, sustainable improvement, and system-wide instructional excellence, then they should not be hired.

Recently, when watching an interview with the mayor-elect and his designated first deputy mayor, Dean Fuleihan, I noticed that when the interviewer pressed them about “getting those hard policy things done,” they confidently affirmed their commitment and stayed on a positively focused message: “We are starting from a place of yes!”

NYC parents therefore have every right to expect that a “starting from a place of yes” philosophy in public education translates into a no-excuses approach—one that refuses to accept any rationale for why every NYC child cannot receive the highest-quality education available. The city needs a Chancellor who understands that educational justice and academic achievement are inseparable—and who can articulate concrete, actionable proposals rather than slogans.

After decades of uneven progress—progress often misleadingly claimed through statistically averaged performance scores that conceal the city’s academic underperforming deserts—only candidates willing to confront structural inequities with courage and competence deserve serious consideration.

The next NYC Chancellor must be prepared to disrupt and dismantle entrenched bureaucratic failures, not cosmetically repackage them. And they must accomplish this feat without lowering standards or punishing any students who are already performing at or above grade-level and at the highest academic achievement levels. Serving all students well, at every performance level, is the essence of educational leadership excellence.

For hundreds of thousands of children, the difference between a profound visionary, and serous actionary Chancellor and a status-quo manager is life-changing. And for entire neighborhoods, it can determine whether they experience long-denied generational-improvement leaps—an essential objective of public education—or continue to endure the recurring nightmare of Black and Latino community underdevelopment.

This moment should push both the mayor and his chosen Chancellor out of their “play-it-political-safe” comfort zone—and it should—because that difficult, truth-facing space is the only place where the children of disenfranchisement have any real chance of receiving the quality education they deserve.

Further, the mayor-elect’s chancellor choice will determine whether NYC schools move toward real improvement or drift deeper into the kind of performative reform that makes consultants rich while leaving most of the city’s children educationally poor.

The question is simple: Is this new administration prepared to lead on the issue of quality education for all, or are they merely prepared to talk about it?

If any prospective chancellor candidate’s interview with the mayor-elect falls back on the standard educational “throw-away” lines:

• “It takes a village…”
(Let’s begin with the village’s professional educators doing their jobs—taking professional responsibility at a higher, better, and more effectual level.)

• “All children can learn!”
(We already know that; the real challenge is how you actually make that happen with real children in real schools.)

• “Children First!”
(That’s not going to happen in a system where children are too often placed second to satisfying adult employment needs.)

• “Empower parents and teachers to have more say in the running of schools.”
(Often used as a good political soundbite—a faux-collaborative distraction trap that enables civic authorities and public-school leaders to abdicate any real responsibility for whether children learn. If everybody is responsible, then no one is responsible)

If these four, and similar sounding statements represent the type of oratorical drivel the mayor-elect hears from a chancellor candidate, then he should politely end the interview, thank them for their time, and move on. NYC’s school system is far too large and far too complex to waste time entertaining amateuristic pretenders. He should continue interviewing until he finds a serious candidate willing to risk everything—including political safety—to save children.

Explore All Avenues of Information and Knowledge—Not Just the Self-Serving and Politically Motivated Entitled

School-Building Administrators (Assistant Principals, Supervisors, and Principals) represent a critical catalytic force behind any academic improvement that happens inside a school—and therefore across the entire system. Thus, a central question becomes:
What is the new mayor’s plan to consult with, and incorporate the insights of, SBAs in his effort to make the NYCDOE a first-class educating system for all students—not only those from the city’s most entitled zip codes?

Will he include, as authentic partners, the Council of Supervisors and Administrators (CSA) in discussions around the chancellor selection, major policy decisions, or system-wide initiatives? SBA exclusion has been a painful issue for many school-based supervisors, assistant principals, and principals (myself included) for far too many years. Out of professionalism and commitment to their schools, SBAs have largely remained quiet about this marginalization.

But something I learned as a superintendent is that the quickest—and most sustainably effective—way to raise student achievement performance is to ensure that every school has highly effectual school-building leaders. These leaders serve as the most powerful individual forces in making a school succeed for all of its children.

Yes, I understand the political reality: elected officials are often inclined to shape decisions around the groups with the most electoral weight. But the ethically correct move—the morally grounded move—is to do what is in the best interest of children, not what pleases this or that adult interest group.

If the mayor-elect’s first act is not to include the voices of educational leaders—superintendents, deputy superintendents, supervisors, and SBAs—then the system will remain stuck in its long-standing, professionally ineffective default mode. In that mode, parents can only hope and pray that their child happens to land in a school led by a radically off-beat, good-trouble-making group of school administrators and a courageous efficacious teaching and support staff—a team willing to do everything in their power to make the school work for every child in that building.

District-Level and School-Based Supervisors and Administrators Hold a Wealth of Institutional Knowledge and Wisdom

This valuable information can stop the destructive cycle in which every new “face of school governance” repeats the same ineffective (and very taxpayers expensive) decisions—decisions that have historically failed the majority of NYC’s students.

The best NYC principals spend an unbelievable portion of their day breaking or bending school-system rules so that children can learn. As a former NYC principal (Science Skills Center High School) of what many inside and outside the profession labeled a “good and effective school,” I must admit something I am not proud to confess that a staggering amount of my daily leadership time was spent breaking or bending bureaucratic rules, regulations, and blocking politically driven procedures that—ironically—worked against the very mission the public school system proclaims: effectively educating all children.

I also, every year, had to raise—beyond my standard budget allocation—hundreds of thousands of dollars through the school’s 501(c)(3) foundation to provide my Title I students not only with basic living and school supplies needs, but also with educational, cultural, and informal learning opportunities, as well as advanced enrichment learning experiences. For example, I once had to raise $20,000 in just two weeks to send our FIRST Robotics team to the national finals in Florida. These are opportunities normally reserved for NYC’s most wealthy and entitled children. I’m not complaining; I did what I had to do. But the enormous resource inequalities that still exist in the NYC public school system make any rhetorical claim of “quality education for all” ring insincerely hollow.

And I learned quickly that my principalship experience was not unique. When I became a NYC superintendent, I found myself once again engaged in a constant cycle of corrective actions—undoing bad policies, practices, and regulations, and closing opportunity gaps that were actively harming good teaching and learning experiences. It was déjà vu, only now with higher district-level stakes.

This is the painful truth: we have a school system that often seems structurally designed to undermine its own stated mission—one that loudly proclaims it will do “everything possible” to ensure that all children have a promising future rather than a path to prison. Yet the internal machinery of that same system frequently drives outcomes that contradict those noble aspirations.

There is something profoundly wrong—ethically, operationally, and organizationally—when the very school leaders most directly responsible for student learning must spend so much of their time “tricking” the system simply to help children succeed. When principals and superintendents feel compelled to constantly perform work-arounds in order for the system to fulfill its primary mission, that institution is not merely misaligned—it is in desperate need of dramatic, dynamic repair, and certainly not the kind delivered by lofty, superficial word-playing games.

My years as principal and superintendent taught me that the people who know the system best—and who can make it work at its best—are often the ones forced to fight it the hardest. That contradiction is neither sustainable nor morally defensible. The next NYC Chancellor must recognize that the wisdom of school-building administrators is not optional—it is essential. And, until the city embraces that truth, the burden of “tricking and offsetting the system” will continue to fall on those fighting to save children, instead of on the leaders empowered to fix what is failing them.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Michael A. Johnson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Use Data the Right Way

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

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

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

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

4. Expand Student Learning Opportunities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6. Support Parents in Their Most Important Role

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Build community and positive school culture from day one.

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

8. Improve Attendance and Punctuality

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

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

9. Prioritize Social, Emotional, and Physical Health

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

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

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

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

10. Create a Rapid Response System/School for Underperformance

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Final Word on Mayoral School System Options – Year One

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

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

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


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