A Black principal in Dallas was removed recently, after convening a meeting only for Black students to discuss their grades and the school’s “B” rating. According to multiple parent accounts she reportedly told those students they were the reason the school was not an A campus. If that is what happened, it is a problem. But the bigger problem is not just what happened in that room. It is what happened before it, what adults failed to do long before it, and how quickly school systems move to blame Black children for outcomes that reflect adult practice, adult mindset, and adult failure.
If I were on that board, I would not have voted to remove her. I would have treated this as a professional learning opportunity. But my professional learning plan would have started long before that meeting ever took place.
A separate meeting for Black students, by itself, is not the issue. I have held plenty of closed-room meetings with students. I have challenged students directly. I have looked groups of children in the eye and told them hard truths about choices, effort, focus, and possibility. The question is never just whether you gathered them. The question is how you gathered them, why you gathered them, and whether the adults had already done the work necessary to make that meeting one of affirmation, challenge, and support rather than isolation, shame, or blame.
Years ago, when I was leading Shaw Middle School, I pulled the students together in a full auditorium because I wanted to reset expectations. I told those seventh and eighth graders that we were going to make Shaw the best middle school in the city. They did not just laugh.
They erupted.
That laughter told me more than a spreadsheet ever could. It told me what adults had already taught them to believe. It told me what low expectations, inconsistency, disappointment, and broken promises sound like when they live inside children long enough. They thought my belief in them was funny because too many adults before me had trained them not to believe in themselves or in school.
So I named it. I told them their laughter was not an insult to me. It was a diagnosis of us. It told me what we as adults had failed to build. And then we got to work. Not just on student behavior. On adult behavior. On systems. On instruction. On culture. On relationships.
That is why I keep coming back to this Dallas incident and asking the same question: why were the children called to the room before the adults were?
If Black students make up less than ten percent of the student population, then the first questions ought to be about the adults serving them. Are these students seen? Are they heard, valued, and loved? Are they challenged, but also supported? Who is teaching them? With what expectations? In what classrooms, and with what instructional practices?
These are the questions that school leader should be asking. They’re also the questions Pennsylvania should be asking, because Texas is not nearly as different from Pennsylvania as some people would like to believe. To be clear, I am not confusing this Dallas campus with a wealthy Philadelphia suburb. Woodrow Wilson is an urban Dallas ISD high school and, by recent demographic data, a little over half of its students are economically disadvantaged, roughly two-thirds are Hispanic, about a quarter are white, and only about 6 to 7 percent are Black. That context matters. My point is not that Dallas and the Philly suburbs are geographically the same. My point is that the mindsets and practices that undermine Black children travel across geography. They show up in city schools, suburban schools, and rural schools alike.
One of the wealthiest districts in Pennsylvania, Lower Merion, has also had one of the widest racial educational debts in the state. Wealthy districts love to congratulate themselves for being “great schools” while much of what appears to be school success is actually community wealth doing the heavy lifting. A district can sit in the middle of enormous advantage and still deliver middling instruction.
And when instruction is middling, Black and Brown students are often the ones most likely to be blamed for outcomes adults created. They are isolated, over-policed, under-supported, and talked out of rigorous opportunities. Then the district points to “the gap” as if that language does not conceal a debt institutions owe children.
That is why achievement debt is the right language. The problem is not what Black students supposedly failed to do. The problem is what schools, systems, and adults have failed to provide over time.
Avi Wolfman-Arent’s prior reporting on the Cheltenham school district remains important for that reason. He captured something so many of us have watched happen in suburban districts: people talk about the school “changing” as if the problem is the children and not the adults. “Changing” becomes a polite way of saying there are more Black and Brown children now and some people are uncomfortable with that fact. But adults did change—just not in the ways that mattered.
The instruction often did not get better. The professional development too many districts offered did not significantly shift the achievement debt or the instructional shortcomings of the adults in front of children. What changed for too many educators, leaders, and board members was belief. As districts and classrooms got browner, expectations dropped. Too many of the adults with the most power came to believe less was possible for the children in front of them.
That is what we teach our aspiring educators, including our high school students who are learning to become teachers. Mindset, skill, and will are the ingredients for effectively teaching Black students. All three matter, but mindset matters most. If you do not fundamentally believe Black children are brilliant, fully human, capable of deep thought, and deserving of rigor and care, then whatever skills you possess will be deployed in a limited, distorted way.
The tragedy is that many educators have never even been introduced to the pedagogies that have been shown to work with Black students. They know generic classroom management. They know pacing guides. They know how to prepare children for a test. But they have not been taught how to create classrooms where Black students feel seen, heard, valued, loved, challenged, and supported while being held to very high expectations. That is why it still matters to point people toward work on culturally responsive teaching.
Pennsylvania gives us yet another concrete example in Upper Dublin. Families there challenged a system that had Black students disproportionately pushed into lower-level classes and disproportionately disciplined, a pattern also laid out in the Public Interest Law Center’s case summary. This is how inequity often works in wealthy and suburban districts. It does not always arrive wearing a white hood. Sometimes it arrives as a recommendation, a placement decision, a guidance conversation, a behavioral note, a concern about “fit,” or an assumption that some students need less rigor and more control.
This is also why more Black teachers matter. The research on the benefits Black students experience with Black teachers is clear. Expectations rise. Access to rigorous coursework improves. Academic outcomes improve. Students are more likely to be identified for gifted opportunities. They are less likely to be pushed out.
And that matters in Dallas just as much as it matters in Pennsylvania.
I can hold more than one truth at once. If this principal reportedly blamed those students for the school’s B rating, then that was harmful and unacceptable. Impact matters. But I can also say that removing her would not have been my vote, because districts are often far more comfortable disciplining one Black leader than confronting the underlying adult practices that made the moment possible in the first place.
If I were on that board, the first closed-door meeting would not have been with students. It would have been with teachers, counselors, leaders, and central office staff. I would want the disaggregated data on achievement, discipline, course access, grading, recommendations, special education, gifted identification, and attendance on the table. I would want to know which Black students are in advanced courses, which are not, and why.
And then I would ask the adults the question too few systems ever ask directly: how are you serving these children?
Not what is wrong with them. What are you doing to teach them well? What are you doing to ensure they thrive? What are you doing to make sure they do not leave this school feeling like they are the reason grown adults are disappointed?
That is the meeting I keep waiting to hear about. Not the one where Black children are pulled into a room to answer for institutional outcomes, but the one where adults are finally required to answer for what they have or have not built.
There are schools where Black students thrive. They are not anomalies because Black children are magical exceptions there. They thrive because the adults built environments worthy of them. Schools like Shoemaker and others recognized for strong culture, strong relationships, and strong outcomes remind us that Black students feeling seen, heard, valued, loved, challenged, and well supported is not fantasy. It is possible. There just are not enough of those environments.
Dallas is one story. Pennsylvania is another. But the script is familiar in both places. Adults fail to do the hard work of changing instruction, culture, and access. Then they act surprised when Black students are not thriving. Then too many of them go looking for a child or a single leader to carry the blame.
That is why the wrong people were in the room.
