Tag Archives: NYCDOE

“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.

The NYCDOE Essential School Workers Deserve Livable Salaries—and Valuable Career Pathways

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First, a point of information and clarification that some in the news media can’t seem to get correct: the lowest-paid workers in a school building are those essential cafeteria workers and school aides represented by DC-37, a labor union, by the way, that I found, both as a principal and as a superintendent, to be progressive in its advocacy on behalf of children while also being a fierce advocate for the rights and interests of its workers.

Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani has the right idea: we need to permanently and substantially raise the annual salaries of paraprofessionals (UFT), cafeteria workers, health aides, and school aides so that New York City can be a realistic, livable, and economically viable place for them to pursue and sustain their careers.

These essential school workers need significant and permanent improvements in salaries and benefits—not one-time temporary financial gestures, or political stunts seeking to undermine the mayor. If we are sincere when we call these workers essential, then their compensation should reflect their essential contributions to the daily education, safety, health, and well-being of our children.

Finally, we also need to create a robust, tuition-paid high school-to-two-year CUNY community college pathway leading directly to paraprofessional employment in the New York City public schools. And that pathway should not end there. We should establish a CUNY 4-year college tuition-free Paraprofessional-to-Teacher Program that enables highly rated and proven successful paraprofessionals to earn the academic credentials and professional certification necessary to become classroom teachers.

This tuition investment should be contingent upon participants committing to work for the New York City Department of Education for a designated number of years following completion of the program, with the specific service requirement to be determined. Participants who voluntarily leave before fulfilling that service commitment would be required to repay an appropriately prorated portion of the tuition investment.

In this way, the program would represent a reciprocal commitment: New York City invests in the education and professional advancement of its school employees, and those employees, in turn, commit a meaningful period of professional service to the children and families of the New York City public schools.

Such a forward thinking-planning integrated career-development pipeline, would provide young people with an affordable and clearly defined pathway into the education profession, create meaningful upward professional and economic mobility for paraprofessionals already serving our children, and help address persistent staffing shortages in both the paraprofessional and teaching positions. This is the kind of strategic-thinking conceived, and long-term public investment that strengthens the workforce while simultaneously strengthening our schools.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Use Data the Right Way

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

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

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

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

4. Expand Student Learning Opportunities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6. Support Parents in Their Most Important Role

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Build community and positive school culture from day one.

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

8. Improve Attendance and Punctuality

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

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

9. Prioritize Social, Emotional, and Physical Health

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

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

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

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

10. Create a Rapid Response System/School for Underperformance

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Final Word on Mayoral School System Options – Year One

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

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

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


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