Tag Archives: NYC Public Schools

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

However, there is another side to this reality:

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

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

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

The implications would extend far beyond schools.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, here is mine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is the school or district message:

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

Or is the message:

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

Those are two very different educational agape love languages.

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

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

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

And, even more importantly:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Why Principals Must Not Confuse Morally, Ethically, and Pedagogically Guided Dissent With Malicious Mission-Undermining Behaviors

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Facing resistance is not an anomaly for highly effective school-building leaders; it is an expected condition of the work.

One piece of superintendent advice I routinely offered principals navigating school-building people-personality challenges was this:

“As the principal, by design of the profession, you are already the centrally casted aloneness character in the public-education show; so don’t do and say things that will make you even more alone and isolated in the school building.”

The work is isolating enough without compounding it through avoidable leadership missteps, especially the misstep of confusing principled dissent with malicious mission-undermining behavior.

That confusion has quietly derailed more promising principals, and more school improvement efforts, than most leadership preparation programs are willing to acknowledge.

What SUPERVISION Really Means

There is a practical reason the school-based administrator’s role is called SUPERVISION. It implies the capacity to see beyond ordinary vision, beyond where a school currently exists (and sometimes comfortably underperforms), toward where it is capable of performing at its optimal best.

This is not abstract optimism. It is disciplined foresight, grounded in evidence, strategic planning, and moral purpose.

SUPERVISION allows principals to:

• Hold uncompromisingly high expectations for both students and the adults entrusted with their learning, as well as their emotional and physical well-being

• Recognize unrealized, but improvable instructional capacity within the school’s teaching personnel and deliberately cultivate it; ultimately, the work of public education is always about the quality of instruction

• Surface and address questions or concerns early, before ambiguity, misinformation, or uncertainty hardens into resistance

• Anticipate the sources, motivations, and mechanisms of resistance in their proto-operational stages, long before they calcify into organized opposition

• Enforce school-wide, efficacious adult accountability to safeguard the non-negotiable principle of protected instructional time and high-quality learning conditions for all students

This is not brutish managerial authority. It is a compassion-based, moral, instructional, and professional stewardship practice exercised before a crisis of disunity takes hold. And because this school leadership work is so demanding, and so human orientated, it means that principals must be fundamentally motivated by LOVE: love of people, love of the school, and love of the overarching academic-achievement mission entrusted to their care.

It is intentional leadership foresight, thinking deliberately about the beginning, functional middle, and end-product results of how any potentially challenging idea is introduced, moves through, and ultimately reshapes both the school’s operating systems and its human relational environment.

It is having the disciplined capacity to see yourself and your entire staff as one team, pursuing a shared, championship-level mission, while fully accounting for human frailty, including your own. It requires anticipating where that frailty may surface and deliberately creating the conditions for it to be addressed, corrected, and strengthened, rather than being denied, ignored, or punished.

This SUPERVISIONARY vantage point is essential because schools, contrary to the untrained and often unprofessional external gaze, are extraordinarily complex organizations. They are filled with personal psychological histories, converging and disjoining alliances, individual life ambitions, competing needs, and multiple legitimate interests operating simultaneously, all within the same proscribed timeframes, physical spaces, finite resources, and under the stewardship of one single principal.

Leadership decisions made in this context will almost never be universally popular. Principals, therefore, can only strive to do the greatest possible good while causing the least amount of possible harm, and to do so with sincere concern, moral clarity, and ethically enriched judgment on behalf of every member of the school building family.

Which leads us to an essential distinction.

Being “Liked” Is Not the Same as Being Trusted

From a superintendent’s lens, this distinction is not merely semantic; it is leadership competency diagnostic and evaluative.

It is not uncommon, for example, for a teacher to urge a principal to impose disciplinary consequences on a student with a disability that exceed what is permitted under special-education disciplinary law or, it will directly contradict the protections and interventions stipulated in the student’s Individualized Education Program (IEP).

No serious or sane school administrator purposely wants staff members to be unhappy. But staff happiness cannot always be the decision-making objective when that “happiness” would compromise a student’s educational rights, undermine instructional access, or violate codified legal and regulatory mandates.

In such cases, the principal’s obligation is not to appease adult frustration, but to protect the student’s learning rights, faithfully follow the law, and uphold the integrity of the principalship, and yes, to avoid unnecessarily testing the patience of your superintendent.

When a parent rightfully seeks an appeal under these circumstances, no superintendent, whose time, credibility, and authority have been needlessly expended, can support or sustain a decision that is legally indefensible, ethically unsound, and pedagogically harmful.

These (IEP violations) are among the most easily avoidable, self-inflicted errors of the principalship, and they are precisely the kind that drive superintendents crazy, not because they are complex, but because they are so easily preventable. And yet, principals continue to make these types of career-harming mistakes.

This type of bad decision-making incident is not a failure of compassion; it is a failure of judgment. Appeasement may feel humanely good in the moment, but legality, access-equity, instructional, and institutional integrity must always prevail (as well as not annoying your superintendent).

Highly Effective Principals Understand:

• Leadership is not an exercise in appeasement, nor does it require compromising core values or organizational objectives.

• Collaboration and consensus are both powerful leadership tools, but not universal solutions. When misapplied or overused, they can delay necessary action, dilute purpose, and ultimately undermine positive outcomes.

• Surface popularity is not evidence of effectiveness; in some cases, it signals a school leader’s avoidance of making hard, discomforting decisions, the very daily, high-stakes school-building judgments that a true school-based leadership practice demands.

True trust is not built through superficial agreement or blind chain-of-command obedience, nor is it earned through insincere or unprincipled acts of staff-members surrender. It is built through respect for leadership clarity, consistency, and courage, especially when decisions are difficult, contested, stretch the staff, or are unpopular.

True trust is established when a school community comes to collectively believe that even when leadership decisions are uncomfortable or challenge the way things have traditionally been done; those decisions are being made in service of a clear, student-centered mission, applied consistently and faithfully over time.

And further, your rating-supervisor superintendent is not asking, “Do your people like you?”
They are asking:
“Will your people trust you to lead them, especially when the path forward, or even the end-of-the-journey objective, is not immediately clear or agreeable to everyone?”

Know this, Principal: popularity and likeability, depending on the issue, the context, and who in the school building is helped or less helped by your decision, can arrive quickly and fade just as fast, sometimes within the very same school week.

Trust and Respect, however, endure. Even when a school family member does not “like” your decision; trust and respect, often unspoken in the raw-feelings moment, settles in over time when people recognize that the decision you made was principled, ethically grounded, student-centered, and consistently applied.

Principled Dissent vs. Mission-Undermining Behavior

This is where many principals get themselves into unnecessary trouble.
Morally, ethically, and pedagogically guided dissent is not inherently disloyal, nor is it an act of leadership defiance. More often, it is a sign of professional seriousness and authentic instructional commitment. Principled dissent is acceptable, and valuable, when it is:

• Grounded in improved student learning and principles of equity or equality access

• Qualitatively and quantitatively outcomes-based, rather than rooted in personal preference, discomfort, or “this is not how we’ve always done it”

• Expressed respectfully and professionally, recognizing that every initiative has a human author attached to it; principals must therefore establish clear norms and rubrical expectations for raising principled objections

• Focused on system improvement, consistently tethered to the essential question: Does this action move us closer to, or further away from, the school’s overarching academic achievement mission?

• Willing to move beyond critique and actively engage in problem-solving, solution-building, and collaborative “how-can-we-make-this-work” efforts

By contrast, malicious mission-undermining behavior is not dissent, it is organizational sabotage. This behavior often emerges from, and reveals itself through:

• Fear of change masquerading as thoughtful or righteous opposition

• A commitment to preserving the unworkable status quo at all costs

• Public disparagement without constructive analysis or evaluative intent

• Quiet oppositional noncompliance disguised as false “concerns”

• Critical conversations occurring in staff lounges rather than professional forums

• Cynicism, misinformation, or the recruitment and organization of oppositional factions

• Personal grievance or animosity repackaged as moral, ethical, or professional objections

• Refusal to accept accountability paired with a distorted claim of professional autonomy

At the surface level, principled dissent and mission-undermining behavior may sound similar. But their origin, intent, and impact are demonstrably different.
The principal’s responsibility is not to eliminate disagreement or deny it. It is to discern it accurately, manage it deliberately, and direct it into a structured, accountable, dialogical space, where the end product is always improved quality teaching and learning for students.

Silencing principled dissent weakens a school and opens it to possible underperformance across multiple operational domains; on the other hand, tolerating and enabling mission sabotaging behaviors will absolutely destroy a school’s capacity to be any version of the best performing iteration of itself.

The Principalship Burden: Act With Discernment, Not Defensiveness

Principals must exercise a high level of emotionally intelligent leadership maturity in order to:

• Separate ego injury intent from legitimate critique

• Evaluate dissent on pedagogical merit, not tone or delivery

• Distinguish truth-telling from trouble-making

• Channel disagreement into professional, accountable structures

• Focus on the corrective value of the message, not the messenger

This level of discernment is not instinctive. It is a form of practiced emotional intelligence, and it must be operationalized even when you do not feel like it, or when your positional authority might suggest that you do not have to.
Leadership maturity is revealed not when authority is unchallenged, but when it is tested.

How Highly Effective Principals Lead Through Resistance Without Abdicating Authority

Resistance should neither be ignored nor reflexively punished. It must be diagnosed, addressed, and responded to proportionately and professionally.
Too often, principals expend disproportionate energy managing staff members who openly raise legitimate questions, while overlooking those who remain silent in meetings but quietly plan to undermine the successful implementation of the new effort. Many leadership failures could be prevented by addressing misunderstandings early, before resistance hardens into passive sabotage.

Effective principals always use a calibrated response to receiving uncomfortable information. This is an essential skill to master, because much of a principal’s day, and much of the information they receive, is problem-solving-centered. A principal is in serious trouble when staff, students, or parents begin withholding critical information because:

• They fear the principal’s reaction (including nonverbal responses), or

• They have become so disengaged from the school’s mission that they no longer believe raising concerns is worth the effort

Both conditions signal a breakdown in trust, and both will seriously undermine any school improvement possibilities.

The Principal’s Resistance Response Ladder

Level 1: Active Listening to the Point of Understanding (Diagnostic Phase)
Purpose: Determine the true source and content of the dissenting concern.
Principals engage in calm, private dialogue, asking clarifying questions without assuming bad intent. The principal restates the concern to ensure accurate understanding of the dissenting concern being expressed.

At this stage, resistance often stems from confusion, fear, a shift in authority, workload pressure, or misinformation. Listening here does not signal agreement, it signals professionalism, respect, and leadership discipline.

Level 2: Clarifying Process, Expectations, and End-Product Objectives (Alignment Phase)
Purpose: Remove ambiguity and establish shared clarity.
At this stage, the principal restates the intentionality of the initiative being introduced and explicitly checks for alignment with dissenting staff member(s). The work here is to move the conversation from reactive resistance to a shared, student-centered purpose.

The principal deliberately rearticulates why the initiative exists and what success looks like, shifting the discussion away from immediate emotional reaction and toward collective professional responsibility.

For example, in response to resistance to a new (actual scenario) instructional initiative designed to help students master extended-response prompts on standardized exams, a principal might share the following during a discussion with dissenting staff member(s).
Doing so immediately shifts the conversation away from personal preferences, including the principal’s and into a professional, quantifiable, evidence-based rationale for introducing the initiative, allowing the principal to authentically convey, without ever stating: “this is not about me, and it is bigger than both of us.”

The Principal:

“This strategic initiative emerged from the history department’s analysis of student extended-response answers on state assessments, which revealed a consistent pattern: students often demonstrated strong conceptual understanding, yet were ‘giving away points’ because they struggled to express that understanding clearly and coherently in an essay format.”

The issue, therefore, was not only about “helping the English department,” nor about “forcing other content-area teachers to teach spelling, punctuation, and grammar.” Rather, it was about expanding students’ ability to communicate mastery through structured academic writing, a skill required across all disciplines and essential for success on standardized assessments.

The Principal Continues:

“We are probably in agreement that students must perform better on open-ended essay responses on standardized exams. The purpose of this initiative is to ensure that all students in the school can ‘nail the essay format.’ Here is how every department, including mathematics, can support that outcome. When mathematics teachers say, ‘spelling and English don’t count’ when students are asked to explain their answers, that sends a counter-message that undermines our ‘nailing the essay’ initiative. Instead, mathematics teachers should insist on complete and correct written explanations using ELA standards. This reinforces student success in ELA courses, strengthens the ‘nailing the essay’ initiative, and improves students’ ability to explain reasoning on math exams as well. Together, this raises accountability, coherence, and instructional quality across the entire school.”

(And, in direct response to the mission-undermining act of departmental, selfish, siloed thinking, not uncommon in high schools, the principal might further clarify)

“We are organized into academic departments to improve instructional efficiency and efficacy, deepen professional teaching expertise, and strengthen curriculum, pacing and formal assessment planning. But our departments are not independent organizational silos competing for pedagogical advantage. We are one school, responsible for delivering one coherent, high-quality learning experience for all students. When students are required to write clearly, explain their reasoning, and communicate their thinking in every classroom, they are not being burdened, they are being properly prepared.”

This reframing makes clear that the initiative is not a departmental imposition, but a school-wide commitment to instructional coherence, one that will serve students across all content areas rather than the interests or preferences of any single department.

This explanation intentionally shifts the narrative from “this is what the principal wants” to “this is what we, as a school community, must do collectively to strengthen and empower our students.”

It reinforces that school-wide improvement efforts are not principalship pet projects, nor favors to a single department, but a collective commitment to excellence grounded in professional ethics and student need.

At Level 2, the principal explicitly connects the new initiative to evidence-based, non-negotiable expectations by emphasizing:

• Letting evidence guide instructional practice and initiative decision-making, rather than personal preference

• Professional ethics and instructional responsibility superseding individual comfort or habit, which ultimately raises academic standards for all students

• Information-sharing, supportive assistance, and capacity-building as the leadership objective—not coercive compliance

• Improved student performance outcomes across all subject-area state and national assessments

• Cross-disciplinary coherence, reinforcing that everyone has a stake in the initiative’s success

• Unity of purpose, affirming that the school operates as one system with one overarching academic-achievement mission

When done well, and when received fairly, thoughtfully, and professionally, this phase replaces confusion with clarity, suspicion with coherence, and fragmented effort with shared resolve.

Alignment at this level does not require agreement on every tactic. Principals must always remain open to improvement-strategy suggestions. However, it does require agreement on purpose, expectations, and outcomes.

Even in an era where individuals may claim subjective “personal truths” or realities, the principal must insist, both for themselves and for others, on the disciplined use of objective, qualitative and quantitative analysis in problem-solving and decision-making. This evidence-based approach is essential to guiding the school toward high operational effectiveness and sustained educational performance.

Schools can only improve academically through studied evidence agreement, not personal opinion.

That is how principals transform resistance rooted in confusion into professional commitment anchored in mission.

Level 3: Active, Positive Support for Compliance (Capacity-Building Phase)
Purpose: Address legitimate barriers while maintaining expectations.

At this stage, principals introduce supports that make success more likely, without lowering standards. The intent is to remove skill, knowledge, or resource barriers that may be contributing to resistance, while making clear that expectations remain intact.

Examples of appropriate supports include:

• Targeted professional development aligned to the initiative

• One-on-one instructional coaching for individual teachers or teams

• Lesson-plan development assistance tied directly to expected practices

• Relevant instructional resources and materials

• Modeling and mentoring by a mathematics teacher who has successfully integrated the initiative into their classroom practice

• Providing math journals to integrate mathematical reasoning with ELA writing structures

• Offering students structured extra credit opportunities connected to math journaling

• Expanding the use of rigorous mathematical word problems that require written explanations

• ELA teachers intentionally incorporating mathematical contexts, such as biographical or analytical writing assignments connected to mathematicians or problem-solving scenarios

• Using student journals diagnostically to assess conceptual and algorithmic understanding during mathematical problem-solving

Principals may also provide instructional-practice theory readings on related topics, such as George Pólya’s work on liguistical framing in mathematical problem solving, and Vygotsky’s linkage between language and thinking, to demonstrate how literacy structures strengthen mathematical reasoning, and how mathematical reasoning, in turn, deepens language arts development.

The goal at Level 3 is to close resistance gaps caused by misinformation, skill deficits, or under-preparation. Only after these supports are provided can a principal accurately and fairly distinguish inability from unwillingness.

Throughout this phase, principals must remain focused on keeping the main leadership objective the main thing: the principal’s work is not to win arguments, but to win pedagogical allies, to protect instructional integrity, maintain adult efficacy and accountability, and advance student learning without surrendering authority or moral clarity.

Principals do not lead schools to be right.
They lead schools to get the highest level of teaching and learning right, across the entire school and for all cohorts of students.

Level 4: Monitor and Document (Accountability Phase)
Purpose: Verify follow-through and protect instructional integrity.

Once expectations have been clarified and appropriate supports have been provided, the principal’s responsibility shifts from persuasion to verification. At this stage, monitoring is not punitive, it is professionally corrective.
Principals engage in:

• Targeted classroom observations aligned to the stated initiative or expectation

• Evidence collection tied directly to agreed-upon practices, student work, and instructional outcomes

• Accurate documentation of what is occurring, what has improved, and what has not
Documentation serves multiple essential purposes. It, protects students, by ensuring instructional commitments are actually delivered

• Protects staff, by creating clarity and fairness around expectations and feedback

• Protects the institution and the principal, by establishing a factual record grounded in observable practice rather than opinion

Level 5: Address Noncompliance Directly (Authority Phase)

After you have done all that can reasonably be done as a considerate listener, carefully answering questions, addressing concerns within reason, soliciting constructive suggestions, and thoughtfully allocating appropriate professional-development resources, you must now stand fully in your leadership responsibility.
When you have listened carefully, clarified expectations, and exhausted every appropriate coaching and support option, there comes a moment when leadership requires resolve. It is time to take a stand.

At this point, standing firm is not stubbornness; it is stewardship stick-to-itiveness. It signals clarity of purpose, respect for students’ right to a high-quality learning experience, and fidelity to the school’s mission. You should feel no sense of satisfaction or “glee” in this moment, but you should feel professionally comfortable exercising principalship authority when the situation requires it. If that professional and appropriate comfort with exercising principalship authority does not exist within you, then school-building administration may not be your proper calling.

Purpose: To interrupt persistent resistance with calm clarity and principled resolve.
When monitoring reveals that noncompliance continues, despite clear expectations and adequate support, the principal must act decisively. This is the moment where authority is exercised without hesitancy, without hostility, and without apology.
At this phase, principals must:

• Name the noncompliance explicitly, referencing specific behaviors, actions, or omissions

• Anchor decisions and language in established policy, contractual provisions, and evaluation criteria, not personal preference, hurt feelings, or bitter resentments

• Repeat or reconfigure targeted coaching and professional-development supports, where appropriate, without lowering expectations

• Restate expectations clearly, including timelines for correction and the consequences of continued noncompliance

This conversation must always be:

• Centered in professional ethics, and commitment to the school’s mission

• Calm, professional, standards-based, and factual

• Free of labeling, shaming, or name-calling

• Absent emotional escalation or moral grandstanding

• Focused on practice, professionalism, and impact—not personality

At Level 5, the principal is no longer persuading. The principal is protecting instructional integrity, adult accountability, and student learning.

At this phase, principals are confirming whether resistance has dissipated through clarity and support, or whether it has persisted despite them. Monitoring makes patterns visible, separating isolated missteps from chronic noncompliance. Time/Date and contextual-context documentation of all observations.

At this stage, principals are no longer asking whether the work will be done. They are clarifying how and when compliance will occur, and what happens if it does not.
This is not authoritarian leadership. It is a moral institutional stewardship practice exercised in defense of students and the school’s mission.

Level 6: Formal Intervention (Due-Process Phase)
Purpose: Safeguard the school’s mission through lawful and ethical process.
If noncompliance persists beyond direct intervention, the principal is obligated to move into formal processes, not as retaliation, but as school mission protection actions.
At this level, principals:

• Engage and know well labor contractual language and stipulated procedures

• Consult with a senior peer colleague/mentor, or a district-level supervisor

• Seek the counsel of the district’s legal counsel as required

• Initiate formal improvement plans, disciplinary procedures, or corrective action consistent with contract and law

• Maintain strict confidentiality, professionalism, and procedural integrity

This Level 6 phase, even when it involves nothing more than a formal warning letter and/or a written ‘improvement of professional practice’ plan, requires precision. Errors in operational steps, incomplete documentation, or procedural missteps when applying disciplinary measures can be costly: to students, to staff, and to the principal’s credibility. For that reason, principals should not “go there” unless all other reasonable options have been fully exhausted.

Due process is not optional. It is both a systemic legal safeguard, and a leadership ethical obligation.

Importantly, reaching this level often reflects a leadership practice grounded in human development, not punitive revenge impulses. Allowing persistent, counterproductive resistance to a school-wide initiative to go unchecked is far more damaging to the institution than invoking a formal compliance process when it is warranted.

Level 7: Leadership Reflection (Praxis Phase)

Purpose: Strengthen leadership learning and practice without lowering expectations.
The ladder does not end with employee compliance or discipline. It ends with authentic leadership praxis.

Principals and their school leadership teams must engage in honest, disciplined reflection on questions such as:

• What did the introduction of this initiative teach us about our school and our school family members (SFMs)?

• What did the resistance reveal about communication clarity gaps at the outset?

• Where and why did pushback occur, and what could we have anticipated or handled better?

• Was the timing and pacing developmentally and professionally appropriate?

• How effectively was the new system designed, rolled out, and operationalized?

• Which professional development supports, material resources, or structural supports need strengthening?

• What early dissent signals were missed—and how can they be detected sooner next time?

• Did the initiative produce any unintended consequences or collateral damage?

• Were there unanticipated positive outcomes that should be leveraged moving forward?

• Over time, what are the short-, medium-, and long-term results of the initiative?

This reflection is not about assigning blame, nor is it a revisionist retreat into fantasy thinking. A school-wide learning community must be led by a legitimate learning community of school-building leaders who are themselves committed learners.

Standardized assessments cannot apply only to students, and evaluations cannot apply only to staff members. Expanding leadership growth capacity is a professional obligation of every principal, and a recurring, institutionalized practice characteristic of the highest-performing schools.

This final phase ensures that all forms of resistance, whether quietly passive or openly aggressive, resolved informally or escalated formally, becomes an invaluable source of school-culture intelligence, strengthening both the introductory framing and operational application of future initiatives, while enhancing the institution’s resolve and capacity for continuous improvement.

From a Superintendent’s Perspective

At every level of the ladder, the principal’s work is not to win arguments. It is to win pedagogical allies, protect instructional integrity, maintain adult efficacy and accountability, and advance student learning, without surrendering authority or moral clarity.

That is the principalship practiced at its highest professional and ethical standard.

What Highly Effective Principals Consistently Do When They Encounter Problem-Causing Resistance

Highly effective principals:

• Begin from an assumption of best intentions

• Contextualize resistance thoughtfully, asking: Is it the person? The conditions? Or something in my own leadership?

• Maintain relational trust and respect without surrendering expectations

• Address resistance early and professionally, before it hardens into opposition

• Escalate responses proportionately rather than emotionally

• Separate empathy for people from tolerance of practices that harm students

• Lead adults through discomfort without destabilizing the school or diluting the mission

• Keep the problem from ending up on their superintendent’s desk; resistance is not the problem; mismanaging that resistance is a problem.

Principalship excellence is not demonstrated by the absence of resistance, but by the moral authority and disciplined capacity to lead through it effectively.

Final Reflection

Principals are not appointed to ensure 100 percent staff approval for every decision, something I never witnessed in an eleven-year principalship. They are, however, appointed to effectively lead and manage staff, protect learning conditions, enforce standards, and steward the school toward its reachable academic-achievement mission.

Morally, ethically, and pedagogically guided dissent is one of the final safeguards against institutional underperformance drift, whether that drift emerges from low expectations (among staff, for students, or both), diminished efficacy, cynical civil-service complacency, or the inevitable reality that, at times, a principal gets something wrong: introducing a new idea without sufficient preparation, underestimating its impact on people, or failing to anticipate unintended consequences. The principal is a supervisor, but is never super-omnipotent.

Principled dissent allows schools to frame implementation plans thoughtfully, monitor impact honestly, and, when necessary, course-correct before harm becomes normalized and operationalized, a defining characteristic of chronically underperforming institutions.

Principals who understand this do not fear dissent. They lead it, shape it, and learn from it.

And principals must remember this: you will need to work with that dissenting staff member after the immediate situation has passed. What will that professional relationship look like in the near future, and over time? Will it mature into a productive working partnership in service of student learning, or calcify into lasting bad feelings division?

Those principals who mistake forced compliance for coherent agreement, and fearful silence for invested commitment, eventually learn the hard way, when initiatives collapse under the weight of unspoken truths.

Children deserve principals who lead with unquestionable integrity, discern with compassion, reason with strategic clarity, close knowledge and capacity gaps, and do so with the patient grace of a competently skilled, confidently grounded, highly valued school-building leader, one singularly focused on the success of the school rather than personal validation or vindication.

Wise school leaders ultimately understand this truth:
When the school wins, that is the only way the principal truly wins, personally and professionally.

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.

Winning NYC’s Affordability Fight Is Impossible Without Public School Accountability

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When public schools fail to educate with integrity and accountability, families are priced out of the future.

When a city’s school system fails to deliver high-quality education to its most educationally, politically, and economically disenfranchised students, and does so without intentional, effective integrity or, no possibility of facing the threat of meaningful consequences for failure; the families of those children, and the communities in which they live, pay severe and permanent costs.

Those costs are psychological, financial, and social, paid through diminished opportunity, eroded trust, and the stolen hope public education is meant to make possible for all students: real, meaningful generational leaps in the quality of their lives. Any city will remain unaffordable, generation after generation, for families whose children are denied access to the kind of rigorous, accountable education that breaks cycles of poverty rather than reproduces them, regardless of zip code, socioeconomic status, immigration status, race, or nationality.

No city, state, or nation can sustainably outperform, economically or otherwise, the level of educational quality it is willing to invest in all of the children under its care. I learned this lesson viscerally years ago, sitting in my principal’s conference room, when I posed a blunt question to a visiting international delegation of senior public-education officials: Why travel halfway around the world to visit a 99.9 percent Black and Latino, Title I urban American high school?

The answer, delivered with striking honesty, left no room for ambiguity. I paraphrase, but not the intent: “To fully develop our country, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), we must close the quality gap between our rural and urban schools. National strength depends on educating every child to their highest potential.” They had studied our work, referencing the New York Times (“Scores Count,” Sept. 8, 1996), and noted something they found instructive: students who entered our high school with significant academic deficiencies were graduating four years later performing at high academic levels.

That PRC delegation was operating with a clarity of purpose too often missing from American debates about “school improvement,” what they described simply as “seeking truth from facts.” Their thinking echoed the famous words of former Chinese Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping: It doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or yellow, as long as it catches mice. In other words, results matter. And nations serious about their future do not knowingly leave large segments of their children educationally underdeveloped and then expect long-term economic prosperity, innovation, or social stability to follow.

The history lesson here is unambiguous. Societies that deliberately deny any group of children, by race, gender, geography, or circumstance, access to a rigorous and empowering public education are choosing chronic underdevelopment across every sphere of civic life. Economic vitality weakens. Scientific and medical advancement slows. Cultural and artistic innovation withers. The tremendous human potential necessary for national progress is squandered.

Replacing educational opportunity with missed-opportunity incarceration is neither a sound economic strategy nor a defensible educational one. A prison industry fed by failed public schooling outcomes is a moral failure masquerading as public policy. With courageous civic leadership and sustained determination, public school systems can move beyond models that tolerate mediocrity for some children while reserving excellence for others.

Moral, ethical, intellectual, and technical capacities do not emerge by accident. They are built, child by child, class by class, school by school, through a compassionate but uncompromising commitment to high expectations, instructional excellence, and equal access to opportunity. But accountability must be real. It must be shared, and it must be tied to meaningful consequences, not borne solely by students, parents, and the communities with the least political protection.

Public school systems cannot serve two masters. Schools must be places where children’s learning is the non-negotiable priority, not adult employment agencies protected from the outcomes they produce. At the very least, parents and taxpayers deserve honesty about which path has been chosen. Without that truth, what passes for “reform” is little more than the rationalization of failure.

And as long as a city is willing to accept devastating public education outcomes for its least politically connected and least protected children, that city will remain unaffordable for them, generation after generation, regardless of who occupies City Hall.

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.

If the New NYC Mayor Truly Wants System-Wide Quality Learning, He Must See Through the Fog of the Fake “Class Size” Misdirection War

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Ask any principal: “Is a class size of twenty students better than a class size of thirty students?” The answer you will probably get from most principals is, “Yes, absolutely!”—especially when class size impacts underperforming students and those who are struggling to meet conceptual and skills performance standards.

But then ask the question in a different way: “Would you rather have an experienced and proven master teacher teach a class of thirty students, or a less-than-stellar, not-meeting-the-instructional-quality-standards teacher instruct a class of twenty students?” You might get a different answer—and I know which option I would, and did, take.

As a high school principal, in organizing two departmental courses—9th-grade Algebra and 9th-grade English Language Arts—I placed my “weakest” students (based on transcript and 4th/8th-grade standardized testing scores) in classes of twenty with some of the strongest and most masterly skilled teachers; and I offset the cost by programming larger student class-size numbers in my advanced junior–senior-level classes and in my Advanced Placement (AP) courses.

So, I am the last to say that class size does not matter, because from a principal’s strategic vision to make it possible for all students to succeed in a system structured to only make a few entitled students academically successful, one of those leadership tools that must be used is to absolutely manipulate class size—and it works—as was reported in The New York Times (“Scores Count,” Sara Mosle, September 8, 1996), where a former student who was interviewed was from that coming-from-middle-school, underperforming and below-grade-level cohort; that student went on to take Physics and other advanced courses as a senior.

Therefore, strategically and contextually, class size will always matter, but it should never be considered a substitute for high-quality instruction and dedicated, efficacious practices.

This politically popularized, but pedagogically shallow and falsely binary, “either/or” framing of the class-size question is beneath serious professional debate and actively undermines the learning needs of real students in real schools. Well-informed policymakers and professional educators should instead be engaged in a rigorous, system-level conversation about how class size is deployed strategically—by different schools, grade band, subject area, academic course requirements (e.g., CTE classes), developmental psychology, student need, instructional capability strength, and the overarching school mission—across the entire PreK–12 continuum.

This standardized political approach of, “Well, we don’t know what to do, so let’s just do something that sounds right—and that we can sell to parents and taxpayers as if it will truly and significantly raise student academic achievement,” when in fact these chronically ineffective actions only succeed in wasting a great deal of money (millions) and squandering the precious learning windows of opportunity for thousands of children at all academic performance levels.

With every new mayoral change, the consultants, educational businesses, and those lobbying for someone other than children—who have no lobbyist—come out of the woodwork to “love bomb” and create a fog of confusion around the new mayor, all claiming that what they want (as opposed to what they really want and won’t say, which is a lucrative contract or more dues-paying members) is in the best interest of children, when what they want has no intention of helping children—especially those children in the city who will benefit the least, or not at all, from these expensive but useless initiatives.

Many (I won’t name them out of respect for the very dedicated employees involved) Title 1 school districts—destinations North, South, East, and West in our country—have some of the lowest class-size numbers in the nation; and yet these very high per-pupil-allocation districts don’t see their lower class sizes translate into higher academic-achievement performance, particularly for their most (usually the majority) politically disenfranchised children of color. We can’t blame this on direct racism, although an indirect neocolonial case could be made, because the primary governance officials—the local, state, and federal elected officials, and the district and school administrators—primarily share the same racial and cultural heritage as the vast number of chronically underreaching proficiency-level students. So, what’s up with that?

In the electoral-political sphere, it’s the economy (affordability); in public education, it’s the quality of instruction!

No school or school district (and the New York City Department of Education is technically a school district) can create significant, demonstrative, all-lives-changing, and sustainable high student academic performance—and I’m not talking about the press-kit fiddling with a few percentage-point “improvements” generated by averaging the higher-performing students with the lowest-performing students (like averaging my salary with Jeff Bezos’s salary and then calling me a multi-millionaire)—without establishing an extensive culture of high levels of instructional quality that the child receives year-grade after year-grade and when moving from class to class in middle and high schools.

I am hoping—and every speech I have heard from Zohran Mamdani suggests that my hope is not in vain—that he is smart enough to ignore the peddling pedagogical merchants who want to enrich themselves and not the educational experience of children. Many of these undereducated children are the very ones most in need of a high-quality public educational experience to break them out of a generational cycle of poverty and disappointment.

I am also betting my hope on the fact that two schools Mr. Mamdani attended, and that I visited several times—Bank Street School for Children and The Bronx High School of Science—were schools where the City’s elected officials, parents, school administrators, and the governing oversight bodies had little tolerance for a second-rate, not-properly-preparing-students-for-the-next-level, and terribly inferior educational learning climate. These two schools efficaciously did whatever it took to make their students successful.

Once, a NYC Specialized High School (SHS) principal colleague/friend called me about an African American teacher I was mentoring and had written a letter of recommendation for, who was now seeking a transfer from her present Manhattan high school to the SHS. The principal asked, “She is a great teacher, but does she know what she is in for?” The principal did not need to explain what that “what she is in for” statement meant, because I had already met with the teacher and had a keeping-it-real-honest conversation where I explained, “You will need to operate at your A+ level best every day of school, because those SHS parents are very politically connected, so there is no space for you to show up one day and think you could just ‘phone it in’ with these students” (not that I thought she ever would, but I wanted us to be clear-eyed about this SHS transfer she was seeking). And so, I explained that although she was technically tenured, no labor contract would protect her if she did not teach, as she now does, at a mastery level.

If Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani can simply focus on the types of schools he attended—schools that represented excellent, innovative instructional practices, high expectations for students, and an efficacious teaching model—as a standard offering for every NYC child, then the deceiving or misinformed “class size” whisperers will be ignored and will go away, allowing him to embark on an uncompromising pursuit of realizing school-system-wide instructional excellence.

If the new mayor truly wants system-wide quality learning, he must concentrate on the one policy lever that actually moves student achievement: sustained and high levels of instructional excellence in every classroom. That requires rejecting the fog of the fake “class size” misdirection war and instead embracing the school-cultural imperatives that guide places like the Bank Street School for Children, The Bronx High School of Science, and other NYC Specialized High Schools, and programs that demand, expect, and protect rigorous, next-level-preparing teaching every single day. Their leaders and parents do not tolerate weak instructional products, excuses, or adult-centered diversions, because they operate from a clear ethical directive: children deserve the best, and only the best, educational product we can provide.

If the mayor adopts that same standard for all of NYC’s children, the class-size-type distractions will fall away, the fog will lift, and the city can finally begin the urgent work of building a school system defined not by slogans or classroom seating gimmicks, but by real instructional excellence and authentic student success.

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.

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.

Those Who Wanted a Mamdani–Trump Fight Reveal Their True Priorities—And NYC’s Children Aren’t Among Them

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Somewhere around my third year as a principal, I vowed to stop saying, “Now I’ve seen everything!” I’m glad I made that vow, because even in my 11th and final year, I left the principalship still being surprised—by the amazing events, both good and bad, that can unfold when leading an urban high school.

So here I am in my 75th year, watching C-SPAN, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a POTUS throw both the GOP and the DNC under the bus at the same time, in the same press conference.

I can only imagine what some Republicans must be thinking as they watch the same broadcast: “Wait… I built my entire present or future election/reelection campaign on ‘otherizing’ Mr. Mamdani—playing to anti-people-of-color biases, Muslim prejudice, and the widespread ignorance about the difference between communism and democratic socialism (see: https://majmuse.net/2025/11/10/why-so-many-u-s-high-school-graduates-cant-tell-the-difference-between-democratic-socialism-and-communism/). And here is the head of our own party offering praise, adulation, and promises of support for the very man we hoped to demonize.”

And then you had their fellow Democratic Party “under-the-bus mates,” who twisted themselves into knots trying to play the part of the cowardly lion—running away from Mr. Mamdani—only to hear the leader of the opposition party they claim to despise praise Zohran as rational and admirable. No name-calling. No ridicule. No dismissive put-downs. Meanwhile, these DNC folks literally sprinted in the opposite direction of their own constituents, even allowing themselves to be goaded into voting for that ridiculous “anti-socialism” bill, without a moment’s thought about how deeply it would offend many of our closest allies—Finland, Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark. Did these folks skip their high school civics course, or was it simply taught badly? Yes: forms of democratic governance and extensive democratic-socialism systems can coexist—in the same nation, at the same time, without contradiction.

A Large Part of Public Civil-Service Leadership is Taking Responsibility for Real People

Every school-district superintendent knows that nothing good for children can emerge from a public fight with a city, county, or state chief executive. Your first duty as a superintendent is to ensure that no physical, emotional, or educational harm comes to the children under your care. And that means avoiding reckless provocations of those in power—especially individuals who possess the authority to directly or indirectly harm your students. Responsible leadership requires strategic restraint, wise words, not performative bravado.

Mr. Mamdani, soon to be responsible for eight million people, was vocabulary, tone, and pitch-perfect on point, and, interestingly, so was Mr. Trump. Both men demonstrated the discipline to stay on message despite the press gaggle’s repeated invitations to “hold their coats” in hopes of witnessing, and reporting on, an Oval Office brawl. I’ve warned students for years: anyone eager to hold your coat while you fight is not your friend. And the same holds true for those on both ends of the political spectrum who were rooting for a rumble in the White House.

Mr. Mamdani, and, in fairness, Mr. Trump as well (I must “tell the truth and shame the devil”), modeled what strong school-based and district-level leaders do every day: stay focused on the work of making the present world better for young people while preparing them to create a better future.

Those of us who have spent many years working in NYC schools understand the immigration documentation and legal-residency challenges faced by countless numbers of NYC students and their families.

If you, as I have, have ever had a crying 12th-grade honor-roll, model student sitting in your office while you work with lawyers, immigration officials, a U.S. Senator’s office, and the State Department to figure out how to help that student realize a well-deserved college dream, trust me—those moments, and the ultimate victories, never leave your memory. If Mr. Mamdani can buy those wonderful young people and their families some desperately needed time, then his trip to Washington, and the intelligently dignified way he conducted himself, was unquestionably worth it.

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.

A Setup-and-Trap Move Mayor-Elect Mamdani Must Avoid: “Arresting Netanyahu” — While the Urgent Work Is Expanding NYC’s Best Educational Practices to All Children

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A Setup-and-Trap Move Mayor-Elect Mamdani Must Avoid: “Arresting Netanyahu” — While the Urgent Work Is Expanding NYC’s Best Educational Practices to All Children

The devil is not just a master liar; he is also a master distractor.

“STAY FOCUSED!”
How many times have my former high school students heard me boom that request somewhere in the school building? Perhaps one of my young tenth-grade charges was utterly convinced they had met their forever soulmate—only for that “eternal love” to fade by the time they reached the eleventh grade. Or maybe a student was self-destructively over-focusing on a teacher’s personality, instructional style, or course requirements, instead of centering their attention on the curriculum knowledge and skills they needed to acquire.

My response in all of these scenarios was always the same: Stay focused on what is essentially important. Present academic performance. Promotion to the next grade. Earning the highest-quality graduation designation possible. Creating multiple meaningful, purposeful, and rewarding post-graduation pathways.
Anything else is a distraction.

If I were in the mayor-elect’s place, I can imagine hearing Pauline Johnson offer one of her Caribbean mother’s standard lines of inquiry—only this time, as she often does now, from heaven:

“Why are you focusing on Mr. Netanyahu and not on yourself—and, more importantly, on what God has sent you to do on this earth!”

If Mr. Mamdani’s supporters truly want him to succeed on behalf of so many disenfranchised New Yorkers—and in my particular case, I desperately want him to succeed in raising the academic success possibilities for the majority of NYC’s children, many of whom presently live on the underperforming side of the NYCDOE ledger—then we must grant him the grace and space to step back from this “arresting Netanyahu” foolishness. Nothing good or productive for a new mayoralty can come from it. In fact, that entire distraction is designed to feed the beastly political machine already organizing to turn the Mamdani’s tenure as mayor into a tragic failure.

As a principal, I always warned students that the so-called “friends” who eagerly offer to hold your coat before you fight on Flatbush Ave or Benning Rd are not your friends. And I guarantee you—they won’t volunteer to sit in solidarity with you when you face your judgment in my office.

I also remember warning myself when I became a principal: “You can no longer talk about the ‘educational system’ or the ‘school administration.’ You are the system, and you are the school administrator.” And upon becoming a superintendent, I could no longer complain about this or that district policy—for now, I was the chief policy-maker of a district.

An important reading from my Bed-Stuy St. Augustine Young Fellowship class came rushing back to me:

“When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”

It is very easy, when you are not responsible for real people, to throw rhetorical rocks at “the system.” But what happens when you are placed in a position of authority within that very system? Suddenly, the language you used as an outsider-agitator, opposition-movement person won’t work once you hold the reins of power. Because real citizens expect real—not symbolic—acts that will improve the quality of their lives and, in my primary concern, the quality of their children’s future lives.

Just to be clear: unfortunately, the world is filled (I’ve got a long list covering multiple continents) with international leaders who justifiably should be arrested. So, is New York City’s mayor now responsible for arresting them all?

Furthermore, as the host city of the United Nations (UN), it should be obvious that the responsibility for arresting “bad leaders” is both impractical and, on some level, violates the rules and diplomatic norms governing the UN. Those rules exist because the international community must monitor, sanction when necessary, and directly negotiate peace-making agreements—even with the most reprehensible leaders—who must still be able to present themselves and be held to account.

NYC can’t have it both ways. We can’t proudly claim to be the great world-class city that houses the historic and globally significant UN—where all of us excited schoolchildren once went on class trips—and at the same time suggest that the mayor should run around the city chasing misbehaving presidents and prime ministers. Really? Because, as I stated earlier, that list would be extremely long, politically explosive, and practically unmanageable.

Further, as any elder old-school Brooklynite has already figured out, this “arresting Netanyahu” idea is a mission-killing setup and trap. Imagine if the prime minister of any nation—India, Great Britain, Denmark, take your pick—were arrested by a New York City mayor. Such a reckless act would instantly trigger a major international and national crisis, one that would consume all of the mayor’s leadership time and energy. And in this particular case, it would unleash an unbelievable amount of internal citywide trauma-drama. It would be nothing short of an unforced political error of historic proportions—an act of serious dereliction of responsibility that would deeply harm those New Yorkers who are suffering the most and who desperately need a laser-focused, morally anchored City Hall administration.

We can already see the outline of this doomsday playbook. Look at how the present mayor, Mr. Adams—acting in one of the most irresponsible and unethical ways imaginable—advanced the false and dangerous idea that children of a certain religious group would be unsafe under a Mamdani administration. And this from someone who, as a former police officer, knows perfectly well that the largest and most vulnerable groups most likely to suffer targeted or random acts of violence in NYC are Black and Latino people, Black and Latina women, and Black and Latino young people.

The mayor-elect should Stay Focused on making NYC schools a model of a system that truly integrates all of its students—not just the lucky, zip-coded few—into some of the greatest educational ideas, projects, programs, and schools in the world. Also, our children are surrounded by one of the richest concentrations of informal educational resources imaginable: museums, libraries, cultural institutions, scientific centers, and artistic enterprises that exist in no other city at this scale.

History teaches us, sadly, that the Netanyahus of the world will come and go. But with the tremendous power the mayor holds to shape the Pre-K–12 landscape, his greatest contribution will not be as an arresting agent of world leaders, but as an agent of hopeful change—someone with the capacity to flood the world with large numbers of well-educated, highly moral, deeply compassionate young people who are sincerely committed to seeking peace with their fellow human beings.

That has always been my educational response to the bad actors of this world:

“I’ll just make more good-acting people in the world.”

Whenever we find ourselves arresting badly acting adults—whether they are prime ministers committing genocidal acts on civilians or inmates on Rikers Island who hit someone over the head to rob them—remember that both types of acts require the perpetrators to first dehumanize their victims. And that, tragically, means that we as a community of parents, elders, adults, and educators collectively failed them during that precious window of opportunity when values and virtues should have been taught, modeled, and nurtured in their childhood.

Ultimately, the work—what many say is the second-hardest job in America—before Mayor-Elect Mamdani is not to symbolically police the world’s misbehaving leaders but, in my prioritized thinking, to profoundly transform the daily lived experiences of New York City’s schoolchildren.

His mandate is to make this city a place where every child—regardless of race, religion, language, disability status, immigration background, or zip code—has access to the highest levels of academic excellence and human flourishing. That is the real fight.
That is the arena where a mayor can change the trajectory of generations. If he stays focused, resists the traps set by those who prefer spectacle over substance, and grounds his administration in moral purpose and educational justice, then his mayoralty can become a beacon—not of arrests—but of uplift, of opportunity, and of hope. And that, more than anything else, is the kind of leadership this moment demands.

Michael A. Johnson is a former NYC public school teacher, principal, and superintendent, and formally an adjunct professor of science education, the author of two books on school-building leadership. His lifelong work focuses on building just, high-quality learning environments for all children—especially those who have been systemically underserved.