This week was Teacher Appreciation Week, one of my favorite weeks. After all, it honors a profession that should be considered one of the most important vanguards of our communities. They have one of the hardest and most...
Category - Accountability
Of my twenty-five plus years working with and on behalf of children, about eight of those years were spent in schools where 99.9 percent of the students were children of color, and 85-90 percent of the teachers were white...
Some of the most contentious decisions in a city often involve schools that are struggling – many for generations. While everyone can give solutions that they believe (but haven’t often seen) work, there is a lot of...
Time and time again, I’ve heard educators say that the lack of parental engagement in their schools is what is holding them back. But, when I listen to families, in Philly or Chicago or any other urban city, I hear about the...
Hildebrand Pelzer III, the principal of a public school, lays out the hard, slow work of improvement—and what it takes to turn schools around. On tough days, I want to close my school and start a new one from scratch. But I’m...
A recent study, reported on in the New York Times under the headline “Extensive Data Shows Punishing Reach of Racism for Black Boys,” and facilitated by researchers at Stanford, Harvard, and the Census Bureau, found that...
By last December, the fall of my ninth year of teaching high school, I had been observed by teacher coaches, visitors from educational non-profit organizations, principals and assistant principals, no fewer than 15 times. Each...
In the article Is the Road to Special Education (for Black Boys) Paved with the White Educator’s Paperwork?, we meet Randy for the first time. Some Context Let’s imagine something for a moment. There is a Black father...
My experience with a firearm in a school was in 2003. It was my first year as principal at Shaw Middle School in Southwest Philadelphia. I wasn’t on campus at the time. I was on my way back to school from a principals’...
Why do so many of you hate children? Maybe hate is a strong word. Shall I say really dislike? I ask myself this question daily when perusing education sites on socials and chatting it up with coworkers in common areas. As a...