Tag Archives: school leadership

Black Educators Leadership Principle: Home Is the Only Safe Place to Get Healed

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They will only see and cheer the individual you when you betray the collective you…

If members of your own cultural community, whether justified or not, hurt your feelings—and if you serve as a principal or superintendent for even one week, your feelings are almost certain to be hurt regularly—it is simply part of the job. For instance, when students, staff members, parents, or community stakeholders begin with, “I don’t mean no disrespect…” be prepared: some form of disrespect is usually about to follow.

In those moments, immediately shift into a mindset of respectful deflection and emotional resilience. Recognize that such criticism, however poorly expressed or delivered, often emerges from a place of genuine concern, frustration, disappointment, or principled disagreement. Your responsibility as an educational leader is to maintain your composure, listen for whatever truth may be buried beneath the delivery, and respond in a way that reflects a calm, disciplined, and emotionally mature leadership temperament.

But if you feel publicly wounded by criticism from a professional organization to which you belong—even if you believe that criticism is unfair—you must resist the temptation to seek comfort, affirmation, or public validation from outsiders, particularly those who do not have your community’s best interests at heart. Instead, take a deep breath, decenter from your hurt feelings, and prioritize understanding, accountability, and resolution within your own professional and cultural community.

For instance, if the National Alliance of Black School Educators (NABSE) were, hypothetically, to give me a “thumbs-down” rating, my immediate response would be to request a private meeting with the NABSE executive board to seek explanation, clarification, and, if necessary, correction. I recognize NABSE as a respected body of knowledgeable and experienced educational leaders who care deeply about our community and the quality of education our children deserve. For that reason, I would take their concerns seriously and value the opportunity to hear their perspective.

As I did when serving as a principal and superintendent, I believe it is an educational leader’s responsibility to remain open to the possibility that our ideas, words, decisions, or actions—even when well-intentioned—may unintentionally cause harm to the students, educational staff members, families, and communities we serve. Effective school leadership therefore requires enough humility to listen, enough courage to self-correct when necessary, and enough commitment to the community to seek constructive dialogue and resolution within your own professional and cultural community before seeking validation outside of it.

Direct NYC’s $8,500 Large-Class-Size Teacher Bonus to Master Teachers—And It Could Save Countless Students

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First, let’s go inside the thinking and practice of a highly effective principal leading a Title I school that is, academically speaking, “punching above its academic-achievement-expectations weight class.”

In any high-performing Title I school situation, it is predictable—In fact, I have never not seen it; that the school is led by a strategically smart, bravely audacious, and creatively thoughtful principal who daily knows when and how to bend, work around, and, when necessary, challenge those public-school-system rules and regulations that stand between Black, Latino, poor, or otherwise politically disenfranchised children and their ability to engage their innate gifts and talents and perform at very high academic levels.

For students attending many Title I schools, the combination of public education’s bureaucratic operating structures and its too-often adult-employment-happiness priorities can condemn them to an educational and dream-deferring death sentence.

And so, the only way to interrupt that cycle of not-learning and poor learning, and student underperformance, is for a principal to demonstrably interrupt the process itself. That means challenging, bending, or creatively working around all of those “bad” or “incomplete” rules that get in the way of students learning.

For many years, I heard that some highly successful Title 1 principals would deliberately over-program their highest-performing master instructional practitioners—with those teachers’ permission, of course—with classes larger than 34 students; for example, 39–44 students. And, of course, these principals found creative and legal ways to reward those teachers, although obviously not to the tune of $8,500. (Which, by the way, is one compelling reason every Title I school should establish a 501(c)(3) support foundation capable of raising the much-needed extra-budgetary funds that schools serving societally ignored, economically disadvantaged, and politically dismissed communities so desperately need.)

But this larger-class-size arrangement can accomplish two important school-mission reaching objectives.

1. Put More Students in Front of the School’s Best Teachers

Contrary to the beliefs of the pedagogically misinformed, it is the quality of instruction, not class size alone, that is the most important school-based factor in determining students’ ability to engage in high-quality learning.

This good-sounding political obsession with “class size” can become a convenient distraction, one that allows crucially positioned, powerful elected and appointed stakeholders to avoid confronting the far more difficult and consequential challenge: dramatically improving the quality of instruction, especially for our academically weakest and most instructionally vulnerable students.

However, by placing those additional five to ten students in the classrooms of master teachers, principals could increase the likelihood that those students would perform at higher academic-achievement levels, pass their courses, earn higher grades, become better prepared with the prerequisite knowledge and skills required for the next-level course or school year, and perform more successfully on standardized examinations. In high schools, this could also mean helping students remain on a positive credit-earning trajectory and ultimately graduate successfully.

The sad and morally troubling part of this process is that school administrators must painfully decide which students will receive access to those master teachers.
That selection is potentially a life-changing decision, for students—and one I am sure those school administrators wish they did not have to agonizingly make. Yet they still have to make it.

These principals most likely made those decisions in consultation with the teacher and other school-building leaders, using a “greatest-needs” criterion. In one case, I heard that high-potential but self-sabotaging and intentionally underperforming Black and Latino boys were deliberately placed in these oversized master-teacher classes—with amazingly positive results.

But morally and ethically, there is no legitimate way to claim that this is how we should be doing public schooling. Every child should have access to a high-quality teaching-and-learning environment.

Something I always warn prospective principals about is that, beginning with the creation of your annual school budget, you will be forced throughout your principalship tenure to make extraordinarily difficult choices. And you will quickly discover that very few of those decisions will involve choosing between a perfect good and a perfect evil. Most will involve choosing among imperfect options while trying to determine which choice will do the greatest educational good—and the least harm—to children.

2. Give New and Struggling Teachers Smaller Classes While Master Teachers Carry More Students

The way the public education system is structured, it is not unusual for Title I schools to be burdened with disproportionately high numbers of first-, second-, and third-year teachers.

When a school reaches a “tipping point” in the number of new teachers it must absorb, the problem can become self-perpetuating. Every new school year brings another large cohort of inexperienced teachers. Eventually, that number becomes too great for the school’s administrators and instructional leaders to effectively mentor, coach, supervise, and develop.

Some of those new teachers will frustratingly leave the profession.

But some first-, second-, and third-year teachers, after a Title I school has invested enormous amounts of mentoring and instructional-coaching time, and substantial professional-development resources, in helping them improve their practice, will become very good at their craft. And then, ironically, that very success can create another problem: they may either be actively recruited away or self-select to seek employment in a non-Title I district or school, where students are generally not confronting the same magnitude of social, economic, and parental resources challenges.

And so the destructive cycle continues:
New school year. Too many new teachers. Insufficient mentoring and coaching capacity. Teacher turnover. Another new school year. Another large group of new teachers.

In addition, one of the quiet “open secrets” of public education is that some school districts and schools do not experience—or tolerate—the same degree of instructional mediocrity. In part, that is because their entitled, politically connected, well-organized, well-informed, and highly active parent bodies simply will not tolerate mediocre instruction endangering their children’s futures.
In these more fortunate districts and schools, public officials are also more likely to see themselves first as public servants, obligated to act primarily in the best interests of the children and families they serve. Unfortunately, that same sense of urgency, responsiveness, and institutional accountability is not distributed equally across all communities.

How else, then, do we explain the stubborn persistence of what has been called the “school-to-prison pipeline”—a societal pathway in which some children are systematically provided with fewer high-quality educational opportunities, denied access to mind-expanding educative experiences, subjected to diminished expectations of their intellectual capabilities and potential, and ultimately excluded from the quality learning experiences that could dramatically alter the trajectory of their lives?

Meanwhile, Title I principals and superintendents, and the families they serve, do not enjoy that same level of powerful, societal, external political protection.

In such a system, one of the few instructional weapons available to a Title I principal trying to save children academically is to deliberately oversize the class of a Master Teacher while giving a new teacher—or an underperforming veteran teacher—a smaller class size.

I know someone reading this, someone in private industry, someone working in a private school, or perhaps someone who has never worked in the NYC public school system or another large urban public school district, is probably asking:
“Why doesn’t the principal just get rid of the underperforming veteran tenured teacher?”

For an NYC principal, that can mean investing an enormous amount of time, documentation, energy, and administrative work into a process they may very well lose. From the principal’s perspective, the arbitration and disciplinary system can make successfully removing an ineffective tenured teacher extraordinarily difficult.

And so, sadly, some principals conclude that it is easier to just try to “move the teacher along”—unfortunately, passing the problem on to another one of their principal colleagues somewhere else in the system. That does not solve the problem. It merely changes the school address where the problem resides.

So, What Could the $8,500 Large-Class-Size Teacher Bonus Accomplish?

The proposed $8,500 Large-Class-Size Teacher Bonus is not a perfect solution. And, to be honest, I am not optimistic that a Master Teacher/High Quality Instructional Practitioner requirement would ultimately be allowed.

But imagine if it were.

Imagine if eligibility for that $8,500 were strategically tied to demonstrated instructional excellence, so that principals could deliberately assign additional students to the highest-performing master teachers in their buildings—particularly in schools serving large numbers of academically struggling students.

And again, just in case a reader who has never worked in a public school is wondering, “Well, how will these best-of-the-best teachers be identified?”—that is not nearly as difficult as it might sound. The teachers in a school already know who the master instructional practitioners are. They know because they see their work, hear about their results, observe their instructional practices, and, perhaps most revealingly, those are the teachers in whose classrooms they would want their own children placed.
In fact, that “best-of-the-best” professional knowledge often extends beyond the walls of a single school. From a district perspective, information about “who the great teachers are in a school” travels informally between schools. Teachers will sometimes request the “professional courtesy” of having their own children placed in the classrooms of highly proficient teachers working in schools where they themselves do not work.

That tells us something important: the identification of instructional excellence is not some mysterious, unknowable process. The people working closest to teaching and learning generally know where and when exceptional teaching is taking place.

We proved this in Community School District 29 Queens (CSD 29Q) in the early 2000s, when we developed a professional-development activity titled The Best Instructional Practices Fair. Teacher-presenters were selected by their individual school-based teams, consisting of school administrators and teachers. And I do not recall hearing of a single school team experiencing any serious disagreement over who their school’s best instructional practitioners were—or who should represent their school at the Fair.
However, although we incorporated an awards system into the Fair, this proposed $8,500 incentive presents a very different situation. When substantial amounts of money are attached to being designated a “Master Instructional Practitioner,” I would not want to create unnecessary and unfriendly competition, resentment, or conflict among teachers by asking them to select one another for the award.

Therefore, I would place the selection responsibility with the school administrators, who already have access to multiple measures of teacher instructional performance. But those selections should be subject to strict superintendent and district-level supervisory oversight, with clearly established data-based selection criteria and safeguards designed to prevent favoritism, cronyism, or any other abuse of the process.

The goal should never be to create a popularity contest among teachers. The goal is to identify, as objectively and professionally as possible, those master instructional practitioners who have demonstrated the capacity to successfully teach more students—and then strategically place more students in front of them.
Now the $8,500 Large-Class-Size Teacher Bonus policy would become more than compensation for having additional students in a classroom. It could become an instructional intervention strategy.

The bonus could provide principals with a meaningful tool to place more academically vulnerable students in front of the teachers most capable of accelerating their learning, while simultaneously creating smaller instructional settings in which novice and developing teachers could improve their practice.

Would such a policy “over-help” schools that already enjoy significant entitlement advantages?

Probably.

But that is almost always a danger with every system-wide initiative. Schools with greater organizational capacity, politically influential parent communities, stronger staffing stability, are often better positioned to exploit any new resource or policy opportunity.

That reality should not stop us from pursuing a potentially useful idea. Rather, it places an even greater responsibility on serious and sincere Title I principals and superintendents to make this—or any other initiative—work in the best educational interests of their children.

Because in an imperfect public education system, the best principals will do this every day:
They take imperfect policies, imperfect rules, imperfect resources, and imperfect circumstances—and creatively transform them into the best possible educational opportunities for children.

And if NYC is going to spend $8,500 per teacher for oversized classes anyway, then we should at least ask the most important instructional quality question:
Why not deliberately place more struggling students in front of the teachers who have demonstrated that they can teach them exceptionally well?

Michael A. Johnson is a veteran public school educator and former New York City public school teacher, principal, and school district superintendent. He has also served as an adjunct college professor of education, and has spent decades mentoring teachers, assistant principals, principals, aspiring school-building and district-level leaders. He is the author of Report to the Principal’s Office and Report from the Principal’s Office and writes the weekly blog, Michael A. Johnson’s Education Notes: A Site for Educaring Leaders and Learners, where he examines public education policies, school-building leadership issues, educational equity, and the moral responsibility of educators to act courageously in the best interests of children.

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.

The Invisible Black Leadership Man

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The Invisible Black Leadership Man

No heart-harming institution, regardless of how prestigious the title or position it offers, should ever convince you that your presence no longer matters—or, worse, that your very life has somehow become void of mattering.

When I was a principal, I remember standing in the school entrance lobby talking with my Custodial Engineer, a great guy, who happens to be white, about something I can no longer recall.

While we were talking, a Caucasian deliveryman entered the building pushing goods on a hand truck, clipboard in hand. He walked directly up to the two of us: me, in my usual shined Rockport shoes, shirt, and tie—my principal uniform—and my Custodial Engineer, who was clearly dressed in custodial work clothes and was not even wearing a collared shirt.

“I need the principal to sign for this.”
And he handed him the clipboard.

My Custodial Engineer, clearly pained and embarrassed, pointed in my direction.
“He’s the principal.”

I signed for the delivery, and the man left.
What stayed with me was not simply what the deliveryman had done. I had already accumulated enough experience as a Black man in America to understand what had just happened—I was invisible.

What struck me more deeply was how badly the incident made my Custodial Engineer feel. He was very sad and apologized to me profusely.

And suddenly I found myself drawing upon one of the lessons I had learned during my twelve years of attending Children’s Sunday School: When you are hurting or feeling bad, one Christian response is to do something that helps to relieve someone else’s suffering. In doing so, you may discover that some of your own pain has been lifted.
And it worked.

I realized how deeply the incident had affected my Custodial Engineer, and so I spent the next few minutes consoling him, assuring him that I would be all right.
After all, this was not my first encounter with America’s racialized reality. My personhood did not suddenly become vulnerable to racial diminishment because I had become a NYC principal.

The principalship had not provided me with some magical protective shield. I was still the same Black man who, the moment I stepped outside my Bed-Stuy door, entered an American social reality in which other people could make assumptions about my intelligence, authority, professional standing, social position, or even my right to occupy certain spaces—all before I had spoken a single word.
Being the principal did not make me immune from being rendered invisible.

Years later, when I became a superintendent, I engaged in an important Black group-self-care affirming exercise that stood in opposition to society’s professional and personal dehumanizing behaviors.

A group of us Black superintendents would meet on designated weekends each month. We deliberately chose out-of-the-way restaurants and met in secluded back rooms.
It was a kind of superintendent’s underground railroad ride to mental health.
Nothing about these meetings was publicized.

My executive assistant did not know about them. My deputy superintendents and other senior district staff did not know. Nothing was placed on an electronic calendar. Nothing was committed to paper.

We created a confidential space where Black superintendents could talk honestly with one another—without translation, without performance, without having to carefully calculate how every word might be interpreted outside the room.

We talked about the work.
We talked about educational leadership.
We talked about what was happening inside our districts.
But we could also talk about what was happening inside of us.

We could talk about how the work of the superintendency was affecting us at a deeply personal and distinctly Black human-experience level.

We provided one another with professional advice, personal encouragement, emotional support, and, when necessary, a safe place to say what could not safely or productively be said anywhere else.

I found those gatherings amazingly therapeutic and spiritually uplifting. I suspect others did as well.

There is a larger leadership lesson here.

Being appointed to a high-profile, influential, impactful, or prestigious position does not shield a Black American—or a Black British, French, German, or other Black professional—from the painful slings and arrows of racial dehumanization.

The title may sound impressive.
You could even be told that “you are in charge.”
You may be paid a really nice salary and enjoy many of the “perks of the office.”

But all of the degrees, publications, awards, professional accomplishments, and public accolades cannot automatically grant you immunity from being racially diminished, stereotyped, excluded, underestimated, ignored, or rendered invisible.

And you do not necessarily receive a racial-experience exemption because you have entered one of the world’s highly exalted, liberal, progressive-minded institutions of higher learning—or any other prestigious professional space.

Indeed, in such environments, the racism may not always announce itself loudly. The exclusionary practices may become more sophisticated. The downgrading of your presence may become more subtle. The disrespect may arrive wrapped in impeccable professional language.

In these sophisticated, heart-harming spaces, the racial diminishment may not be as simple, open, and immediately recognizable as watching a clipboard that should have been handed to you being placed into someone else’s hands. But it can be just as painful.

The exclusion may occur through an invitation never extended, a conversation that somehow takes place before you enter the room, a decision effectively made before your voice is solicited, an idea ignored when you offer it and enthusiastically embraced when someone else repeats it, or the persistent assumption that despite your title, credentials, accomplishments, and demonstrated expertise, someone else in the room must surely possess the greater authority.
The racial insult may become more eloquent.
But eloquence does not make it less injurious.

And so, I especially implore Black professionals working in these highly exalted spaces: Do not allow yourself to become merely the “spook who sits by the door”—physically present, institutionally useful, symbolically celebrated, but never fully invited to sit at the table where consequential power is actually exercised.

Find one another.
Create spaces of conversational trust.
And yes, when professional circumstances require it, those spaces may need to be discreet, confidential, and even clandestine.
Create support networks where you can speak without performing.
Create spaces where you do not have to explain every racial nuance before discussing what happened.
Create spaces where professional advice can coexist with emotional honesty.
Create spaces where somebody understands why something that might appear insignificant to others was not insignificant to you.

Create spaces where people remind one another:
I see you.
I know what burdens you are carrying.
I understand what is happening to you.
You are still very much needed.
Your gifts and talents still matter.
Your past, present, and future contributions matter.

Because there is too much important work left to be done. And there are too many communities that need your gifted and talented leadership.
No prestigious title or position is worth allowing professional isolation, racialized diminishment, or institutional exclusion to slowly convince you that your presence no longer matters—or, worse, that your very life has somehow become void of mattering.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

PreK-12 educators must uphold the valuable pedagogical principles of Diversity, Equity, Equality, and Inclusion in their conceptual and behavioral learning objectives.

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As professional educators, we must take an enlightened and ethical step up and away from the common uninformed and often divisive ‘politically toxic’ current conversations concerning the application of the principles of Diversity, Equity, Equality, and Inclusion (DEEI). We understand the educational value of each DEEI principle individually and how they work together in a school building. Additionally, we recognize that, operationally and pedagogically, Equity and Equality are profoundly different teaching and learning strategies. And even if some of our university colleagues, now under political and financial siege, are forced to abandon the efficacious teaching and learning power of applying (or even discussing) DEEI, we must hold the line. For in our PreK-12 world, these core doctrinal conceptual and behavioral learning standards are inseparable from the type of schools we want to create, the learning objectives we want to teach, and the profiles of the kinds of students we want to send into a very diversely integrated and growing internationally-interactional nation and planet. We must seek to empower students with a broad spectrum of communicative competencies and a rich reservoir of applicable knowledge and intelligences. Their neighborhood, the city, the state, and the region of the nation where they reside, along with their nation itself, is not the entire planetary humanity story, not even close! Our job as intellectual capacity builders is to broaden and not limit and shrink the child’s locus of power and influence. In a good and wise Democracy, its public education system will build a greater unity of purpose that fully embraces and develops the gifts and talents of all of its citizen children.

As professional educators, we must upgrade our game for teaching personal responsibility skills.

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This is not just an academic task but a professional, ethical mission to inspire and motivate our students to take charge of their living well in the future possibilities.

For eleven years, I treated the Principal’s Office (or should I say it treated me) as a classroom for understanding human psychology. I learned so much about life and human motivations in that space.

One of the first things I learned was the transformative power of effective communication. Many of the parents I met with in the principal’s office often applied very different parenting methods than the ones I experienced as a 1950s first-generation immigrant Caribbean-American public-school child. The differences in both chronological time and family-raising culture were profound, and I quickly realized that if I hoped to communicate effectively with many of my school parents, then I needed to bridge the gap between my upbringing and the way students were being raised in the current (then 1990’s) era.

The first significant difference I noticed between my professional principal experience and my own public schooling experience was around this critical concept of personal responsibility. I participated in so many “odd” parent conferences in my office where when there was a student who was seriously misbehaving and disrupting a classroom lesson (which is how and why they ended up in my office) or a student who was dramatically underperforming academically when their middle-school academic performance record and standardized test-scores indicated they could do much better. I was amazed when a parent, with all sincerity, asserted some versions of things like:

“The teacher (does not like) has it out for my child!”

“The teacher wants my child to fail the course (or the end-of-course standardized exam, e.g., Regents)!”

“This school is asking too much of students!” (“And you, principal Johnson is doing too much!”)

“He or She is associating with the wrong people!” (It’s fascinating when all the parents of the rambunctious group independently say the same thing about the other students in the group)

“This school (and often specifically me, the principal) doesn’t like my child!”

“My child has a First Amendment right to express their opinions on the lesson while it is being taught.”

“The teacher does not know how to teach (pick one: science, math, history…).”

“Other students in the class were doing the same or similar “bad” things!”

“How come you don’t ever suspend any of the students on the honor roll!” (I heard that one a lot)

It was always amazing to see parents cast their wanna-be bully child into the award-winning role of “victim.”

(And one of my all-time favorites from a father of a 9th grader being in-house suspended for blurting out in the middle of a lesson an extremely inappropriate remark about a part of a teacher’s anatomy) “Come on, Mr. Johnson, didn’t you have a crush on a teacher when you were in high school?” He said it in front of his victory-smiling son; I knew then I had a lot of work to do for the next four years.

Effective verbal and body language are critical tools in achieving personal and professional objectives.

Those themes ran throughout many (and thankfully for my emotional sake, not all) of these principal office ‘corrective-action’ parent meetings. Sadly, there was always something outside of the child’s power to reason with, control, or have the ability to independently manage that was the cause for their misbehaving or academic underperforming actions. Exempting, of course, those special education cases where the student was documented diagnostically struggling with control issues, but even in those IEP disciplinary situations, the objective was to grow that child self-control powers.
However, this parental abdication (for acting out and underperforming regular education students) of personal responsibility on the part of the student could be badly enhanced by parents who cherished their role of being the child’s “friend” over being a behavioral standards-setting adult parent.

Sometimes, parents would say, “It’s racism (as the cause)!” when the teacher was White, but that did not explain when the child exhibited the same negative behaviors or academic underperformance in a Black teacher’s classroom. For sure, our society is far away from removing the national stain and shame of its slavery past, a historical holocaust that has been changing in form but not in its practical expressions, even up to our modern era.
My concern, and a discussion I often had with my students, is that if everything that goes wrong in our personal lives is caused by racism (even when no White person is involved), then that removes all self-authority from our existing lives, essentially rendering us as less than human.

Perhaps a primary price of “Freedom” is taking personal responsibility, knowingly acting in our best interest, affirming our humanity by properly managing our behaviors, including managing our response to the harmful behaviors (e.g., racism) of others, and not waiting for permission to exercise our agency, meaning not simply always being in a state of reacting dependency. In many ways, and for many years, this has been a core pillar of my educational philosophy.

The ability to effectively advocate for oneself or for the good of others is an invaluable life skill!

As a science center director, I and Dr. Gerald Deas met with the then President of SUNY Downstate Medical Center (SDSMC) in Brooklyn, where we proposed a major groundbreaking summer program. This program, where the esteemed faculty of SDSMC would teach middle and high school students, had the potential to inspire and motivate the next generation of scientists and medical professionals. I was able to establish similar partnership programs at IBM, Brooklyn Union Gas, Polytechnic University, Pratt University, Pfizer, Bristol-Myers Squib, Columbia University, NYC Technical College, Office of Naval Research, The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Construction Trade Unions, The U.S. State Department, the U.S. Architect of the Capital, the National Science Foundation, etc., see: https://majmuse.net/a-little-about-me/

In addition, early in my personal professional journey, I had to appear before a board of examiners for the verbal portion of my seven-hour NYC principals licensing and certification exam. I approached this challenge as any good, standardized test-taker would: I stayed on mission-message. I reminded myself, “This isn’t about me. It’s about understanding the established standards and qualifying rubrics that the test-grading interviewers will use to determine whether I can serve as a public high school principal. If I don’t succeed, I won’t be in a position to help young people, many of whom share my ethnic, cultural, or socio-economic background. My commitment to these students is unwavering, and their success was my ultimate goal.”

In many situations where I needed to ‘make a pitch’ to secure resources and opportunities for young people, a central thought guided me: “This is not about me or how I feel; it’s about achieving my objective.” This perspective required me to engage in attitudinal-adjusting and “code-switching” communication techniques, powerful skills that allows us to adaptively transform our language, behavior, or appearance to fit and succeed in different social, professional, and educational contextual environments.

Code-switching is an essential life skill that not all young people have equal access to, yet it plays a crucial role in achieving career success. As professional educators, we have a responsibility to ensure that all students have this tool in their arsenal, leveling the playing field and empowering them for their future aspirations. That’s why I believed it was vital to teach students the appropriate techniques for code-switching and other professional “soft skills,” despite facing political backlash, often from privileged individuals who had already reached their own professional goals and were secretly imparting these skills to their children.
We regularly organized sessions on topics like “How to Dress for a Successful Interview” and “How to Present Your Best Personal and Professional Self” for students preparing for apprenticeship programs, college admissions, scholarships, internships, or job interviews.

I have always emphasized that some “old-fashioned” values such as self-discipline, compassion, perseverance, honesty, manners, civility, and good character are always in good personal standing fashion, In part because I used them to advance my own career. Why then would I hide these essential ‘soft-skills’ values from my students?

Unfortunately, in the current climate of our nation’s history, rash rudeness, vulgar disrespect, and bullying behaviors are often celebrated as strengths, while virtues like decency, respect and humility are mistakenly viewed as weaknesses. In this challenging context, we, as educators, must remain committed to instilling the timeless positive and good and best-life outcome producing values in our students, inspiring them to uphold these virtues and guiding them toward a successful future.

As a principal and superintendent, I interviewed many, many people for many different positions. So it was strange to see some of them saying things on social media like: “Let the brother be his unadjusted, nonadaptive, “keeping-it-real” natural self when interviewing for a job,” when they did not behave in that manner when they interviewed with me for a job! Or, I know of instances when their own children engaged in a life-enhancing interview scenario, and they did not advise them to: “Just be you boo, and make those folks interviewing you like and accept it!” Isn’t that the operational definition of hypocrisy?

“Good for thee, but not for me (or my children)!”

I’m often amazed at how many entertainment celebrities who project a “street credibility” persona of rejecting formal education, but who meticulously plan strong academic pathways for their own children to ensure their success in life. It starkly contrasts with the anti-academic lifestyle they will promote for their concert-paying or music-buying audiences!
And one of my grave disappointments during my many years of public education service is the number of professional educators who give one set of reasonable advice to their own children and a completely different, failing strategy to other people’s children. This, again, is what we call hypocrisy, and it’s crucial for parents to be aware of its ever-recurring low-expectations presence in our schools.

If at any point in your life you took and passed a specialized high school exam, met the creative arts performance standards for admission to a prestigious performing arts high school or college, passed a city or state assessment exam, earned an International Baccalaureate Program Diploma, or took the SAT, ACT, Advanced Placement (AP) exam, LSAT, Bar exam, MCATs, GRE, nursing, national teachers or principals exams, or any other qualifying exams, if you have earned an Associate, Bachelor’s, Master’s, or Doctoral degree, then you have submitted yourself to the rules, conditions, standards, and requirements necessary to achieve that recognized, personal and financially rewarding status. If this status applies to you, please do not send the message to young people—whether in person, in your classroom, or on social media—that the “reality” in their heads is the only reality that exists in the world. It is misleading to suggest that success in life can be achieved solely through their subjective evaluations and interpretations of what is required of them. This notion is hypocritical because you (and probably your children) did not follow this self-destructive approach.

Sometimes, courage in education (and parenting) is just simply telling the truth in a crowded circle of cowed individuals committed to not confronting uncomfortable realities.

But then again, what do I know? I’m just an old guy who is laser-focused on helping young people navigate the many societal gatekeeping systems—including various forms of bigotry and discrimination—by acquiring knowledge and mastering skills, learning all about how these gate-keeping systems operate, learning the established standards and evaluative rubrics these systems employ; and then applying the best practices rules of positive communitive engagement techniques to their quality-of-life advancement advantage.