Education Week likes to frustrate me in the morning. Reading their article today about the retreat of the anti-testing suburban opt-out movement, I should have been happy, but a few word-bytes in it are restating flimsy...
Archive - July 2018
As a principal, and as a former teacher who barely missed a day of school over my teaching career, I can tell you that teacher absences can wreak havoc on a school community. Last year, Thomas Fordham published a study that...

How My School Helped Me Find My Way in America, Raise Two Children and Be the First in My Family to Graduate
During my last trips to visit family in Rwanda and the Congo, I was able to connect with countless people who are working on reconciliation from a war that ravaged the area, and improving education for those who were unable to...
While there is a growing number of people who compare today’s America with murderous, racist, and xenophobic actions of “yesteryear,” no, we are not living through another Holocaust – Native American, African or...
In the spring of 1857, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, reminded the world that, Blacks were not and could never become citizens of the United States. Taney used the United States Constitution as the basis for his evil assertion...

An Open Letter to U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and U.S. Attorney General Jefferson Sessions
Recently, a group of diverse leaders across the education spectrum came together to advocate for justice (again). An open letter, with 70 signers ranging from CMOs, Commissioners, and Superintendents to prominent non-profits...

Independence Has Always Been a Day Late and a Dollar Short for Black People, But Schools Can Change That…If They Wanted To.
On June 19, 1865, two years after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation freeing (only) some of the enslaved, Union Major General Gordon Granger, rode into Galveston, Texas and announced: The people of Texas are informed...
If you have ever done a privilege walk, you know it can be a very moving, and sometimes emotional, visual of how some of us have been given opportunities and head starts and others of us have not. In the video above, the...