Jose Vilson's Blog

Yesterday, the MacArthur Foundation named 22 people to their hallowed fellowship program, often referred to as the “Genius Grant.” The foundation awards $800,000 grant to individuals from across different fields who external nominators believe exemplify remarkable creativity and potential future work. MacArthur believes that this no-strings-attached grant would help further their singular pursuits. This announcement comes at a vexing time for those of us working in education policy and practice. For New York City denizens, The Times shook the educational hornet’s nest by asking mayoral hopeful Zohran Mamdani about gifted and talented programs. When asked, Mamdani said he would end gifted and talented programs for kindergarteners.

Gifted and talented programs are popular among a set of upwardly-aspiring middle and upper class parents. Gifted and talented programs breed segregation and deficit thinking in the nation’s public school system. Both are true at the same time.

Scholars have explored the concept of “genius” in important ways (with deference to Drs. Gholdy Muhammad, Christopher Emdin, Donna Y. Ford, and others). I should also let you in on a secret: for research, I informally review the MacArthur fellowship winners’ biographies. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting them, usually before they won the award. Every time I call them “genius,” they either blush or tell me to “stop it!”. When I ask them why, they pause. Then, after some ruminating, they acknowledge the generous gift they’ve been given and push me to think of their work as a public-facing endeavor.

In other words, the grant helps them advance works that help their communities and, potentially, humanity. They’ll quibble about the source of their creativity. But they see that award as an opportunity to create something larger than themselves.

Interestingly, the vast majority of the winners passed through all the academic filters our system uses to sort students. Many of them probably found themselves at the top of their class at some point. The “genius” unfolds despite and because of their circumstances. All the while, our education systems over the last quarter century have consistently found ways to stifle our students’ creativity, imaginations, and dreams.

The United States left millions of children behind on a bipartisan basis. Policymakers focused so much on test scores, core content areas, and jobs that “haven’t been created.” The third feels more cogent now, as corporations seek to replace skilled people with deskilling algorithms. If K-12 education boils down to a standardized test, then the byproduct is a student body that uses large language models to offload lower and higher order thinking. When teachers receive scripted lessons without enough time, space, and compensation to collaborate and write, teachers follow suit. Schools spent two decades cutting back on arts in favor of tested subjects all for people to write a prompt into a machine that generates renderings for them.

And we confuse the products generated by the machines for art, too. Who does that serve? In this light, children have more opportunities to see education, and life, as meaningless.

Furthermore, thousands of “gifted and talented” programs at multiple levels of schooling screen students for academic aptitude. While the aspects of gifted and talented programs vary district to district, the results are mixed at best. Authors of that study highlight an array of ideas worth bringing into this:

The analysis revealed that internal factors such as motivational, emotional-social, and demographic factors, as well as external factors including environmental perception, family, peers, and socio-economic/cultural factors, play significant roles in the underachievement of gifted students. The study underscores the importance of understanding and addressing these factors in all stages of a gifted student’s educational journey, from screening and assessment to identification, planning, and rehabilitation. It highlights the need for a comprehensive strategy that goes beyond solely focusing on the psychological empowerment of students.

Some bring in their individual stories about children who can read and do math at levels higher than their peers. I won’t debate personal experiences at first. Yet, the adults who’ve gone through these programs as children tell a nuanced story (myself included). From the research, there’s a positive but mixed body of research on those who people consider “gifted.” Some studies show that, generally, those labeled as “gifted” had a positive academic experience, but others show the negative effects of “giftedness” on their adult lives.

Many of my former students never got to showcase their acuity because schooling segmented them immediately. Abbreviations as labels appeared next to their names, which stifled their prospects. Many of my multilingual learners were implicitly not given the opportunity to take higher level algebra. (I taught it anyway.) Others were given individualized education programs and were given an unwieldy list of reasons they couldn’t excel in school. Many of my students, who, through no fault of their own, have bore the weight of a society that has rarely seen them for their most luminous selves. That played into their self-concept to this day.

As a sociologist, I can’t help but to think to why “gifted and talented” programs are such a tenuous issue. Part of it is that parents see their children as special, but also an extension of themselves. That’s natural. But our society confuses “my kid is special and deserves an experiences that matches their abilities” with “no one else’s children should have the type of education mine is getting.” Some parents are looking for any edge that makes their children the beneficiary of market-based odds.

Increasing the odds for one child to get into a problem while advocating to decrease the odds for another child is weird at best, oppressive at worst.

To that end, former Governor Andrew Cuomo, like Mayor Eric Adams, has advocated for expanding gifted and talented programs. But expansion won’t solve the segregation chasm in a city with a student body that’s 85% students of color. Rather than ensuring that every school gets a great education, people prefer the disparities if it means only acceptable children matriculate into those programs. A framework that pushes families to compete with each other gives us an inherently divided school system.

Also, what good is a program in which our schools label children gifted and talented, but don’t give them authentic opportunities to explore their radiance?

All of our children are gifted and talented. A framework in which every child had the largesse of opportunities to thrive would break down barriers, including the idiosyncratic Specialized High School Aptitude Test. The goal is to support students across the academic and socio-emotional spectrum without making any student feel worthless for choosing their own path. Some advocates, including those on the BrilliantNYC committee, have tried to bring this issue to light with research and nuance. We can actually keep expectations high, teach students how to read and do math, and scaffold so every student can climb up their ladder of genius. That takes resources, a concerted effort, and a collective moral will to do so.

As Linda McMahon and those who aspire to her political vision attempt to destroy public education, more people ought to see the wisdom in guaranteeing educational opportunities for our children. I’m not just advocating for personalization. I’m advocating for a complete transformation of why we want children to get an education to begin with.

Surely, the genius we see in our children will hopefully help us build more ingenuity now and in the future. For us all.

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Over the last year, New York City has had a fascinating discussion about teaching math. In particular, NYC Department of Education has started to implement a program called NYC Solves, a parallel program to the lauded NYC Reads initiative. NYC Solves hopes to narrow the math achievement gap through a uniform curriculum for the nation’s largest public school system. On the one hand, a common language with a narrow funnel for support and training feels comprehensive given the vast array of challenges facing our schools. On the other, most vocal math teachers decry diminishing professional autonomy, citing scripted lessons and our schools’ checklist culture.

But while we’re so focused on debates about curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment, we’re missing on two important discussions. The first is about culture, and specifically the norms we’re living in that inform how we’re thinking about schooling. The second is about notions of “outcomes,” and how we’ve had a hard time decoupling achievement scores with academic learning.

To the first, few people blink when another person says “I’m not a math person.” Typically, the person saying it means that they felt left behind along their educational journey. To an extent, that has merit. Even with the progress made to improve math education, schools still serve as a filter for the maths and math-nots. We still cast too many children as capable or incapable of mathematical learning at multiple levels. I’ve heard countless people tell me either “I wish I had someone like you teach me this math because I would have gotten it” or “it took me until I was an adult to get why math mattered.” Both groups have said “I’m not a math person” when someone else asks. That speaks to culture.

Some might argue that this feels like an individual problem. After all, a significant number of people have come out of our schools fully competent in a wide variety of maths. Our schools have made math more widely available than ever before. Yet, one only needs to look at how we understand “individual” to see the issue. It’s not that personalization doesn’t matter. It’s that our society strives to individualize problems because it relieves people of our collective responsibility to teach children well. The fact that people have meme-ified “I’m a math person” as a get-out-of-math pass is perilous especially because we have no such parallel for reading.

Looping back to the city context, NYC Reads is a vastly popular program for several reasons. For one, Mayor Eric Adams used his personal struggles with dyslexia to help the narrative fly. Secondly, the science of reading narrative hit a peak wave across the country at around the same time. Third, the United States, despite its anti-intellectual strain, has pegged illiteracy as a scourge to be condemned. Saying “I’m not a reading person” would look wild for someone to say, even if it’s the top lawmaker in the land.

We’ve rarely seen this multi-lever energy in the country, even at the start of the Cold War. The National Defense Education Act of 1958 earmarked funds to promote math, science, and foreign language across schools. A Nation at Risk, the (in)famous commissioned report of 1983, also pushed forth rigor in the content areas amidst so-called mediocrity. Despite these movements in policy, cultural disconnects remain. Innumeracy, never mind dyscalculia, don’t register in the public consciousness as the former.

This also leads me to the second portion, namely why we’re doing math anyways. Since the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, we’ve seen a ramp-up of standardized testing and other neoliberal solutions for our education system’s ills. Now, after almost a quarter-century, we’ve seen some relief of those solutions, but the smell remains. (Sidenote: Maybe shutting down dozens of public schools at the same time across multiple cities wasn’t a great idea!) If policymakers predicate the teaching of math simply for achievement scores (state tests, NAEP, etc.), then we’ve lost the plot. While standardized tests may provide evidence of a flashpoint in learning, it also creates an equivocation of sorts.

Too often, we believe doing well on a standardized test is equivalent to giving students an education.

In too many of our minds, our brightest students are those who’ve calculated their way up to the top, leaving the vast majority of “others” behind. Yet, when I talk to people about what it means to get an education, it’s not about scores. It’s about the breadth of tools a person has to navigate an ever-complicated world. Math as a set of approaches to modeling, making sense of, and building the world around them feels more aligned to people’s aspirations. If “outcomes” strictly means doing well on a standardized test (which is not the only way to assess someone), then we’ve truncated all imagination and possibility.

So, in thinking about NYC Solves, I respect those who feel like we have to do something. There’s also robust debate about whether Illustrative Math truncates or expands on teacher autonomy. However, whether we go with scripted lessons, unified curricula, and similar assessments, we have a big culture issue. Deficit thinking persists not just in NYC, but across American culture. Some vocal dissenters want us to go “back to basics,” to the detriment of our intellectual capacity and the futures we hope to build.

From there, discussing authentic professionalism and student learning becomes infinitely easier. That’s not something NYC can solve alone, but it’s something NYC can solve and start finding some common denominators.

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DC is one of my favorite cities in the country. That’s different than me saying Washington, of course. I’ve visited Washington on multiple occasions in my youth, including trips to the Smithsonian, a youth demonstration in my teens, and a protest related to the Supreme Court decision on affirmative action in 2003. Those were “Washington” trips, focused on the official buildings and monuments people immediately connect to the federal government.

That’s separate from DC, though, a combination of the neighborhoods and people that still call the space Chocolate City. My cousin Vanessa invited me to her new crib in the DMV area in my 20s. I’d hop on the Amtrak quarterly, exploring the cultural institutions that made this place home for millions of Black people. In my twenties, it felt miraculous to eat a fresh meal and pick up a book or 10 at Busboys and Poets. Vanessa also connected me to Malik, who pulled us into the burgeoning underground R&B/soul scene. When the National Museum of African American History and Culture opened a permanent home in 2016, the federal government built a connective tissue between Washington and DC, too.

The geometry of gridded streets mixed with spaces for art and authentic cuisine felt like people playing with shades and hues within a coloring book. The Trump administration has already ripped through the semblances of Washington airs and is now using their power to suppress these DC norms, too.

DC became a favored destination around the time when I began my teaching career. In my classroom, I teetered between using rows and aisles or groupings for seating arrangements. I immediately saw the pros and cons of the gridded seating. During “formal” assessments, I could quickly get a sense of individual learning and behaviors in relation to the content. But as I stood in front of them, I’d get anxious if the classroom was quiet for too long. The classroom needed a little more noise as that’s where the magic actually happens. During learning activities, getting them to learn from each other felt more organic in tables of two or more.

In other words, these rows and aisles helped with a perception of social control, but had diminishing returns for the desired culture of my classroom.

Not enough has been said about how our classrooms can be conduits for the societies we wish to live in. Over the years, we’ve had plenty of conversations about the school-to-prison pipeline, and rightly so. The multiple forms of justice in this lattice include racial, gender, disability, and (economic) class justice. However, we don’t talk about how many of us have been complicit in teaching through autocratic means. Yes, that includes me. It’s humbling in the backdrop of an unapologetic autocracy at several levels of government.

At my best, I sought input from students and families, which provided for the best learning experiences in our classes. I settled disputes with a multitude of techniques well honed by the latter parts of my career (save, perhaps that one year I was under a teacher improvement plan). Kids would debate, if not loudly argue, with each other about math. I’d laugh it off because they were as excited about math as they were about their favorite musicians and sports. I didn’t need to “discipline” or “manage” in the traditional sense, either. I just pushed students to rely on each other and perhaps me to elevate their learning experiences.

However imperfectly, and yes, it wasn’t always perfect.

At worst through my career, it was my way or the dean’s office/after-school detention/dramatic calls home, etc. Sometimes, I thought I was doing right by kids by creating a heavily structured and disciplined classroom. I simultaneously built resentment for not letting them leverage their ways of knowing and talking towards their learning. On a couple of occasions, it created rebellion. When it’s 30 on 1 in our classrooms, the fact that more revolts don’t happen is remarkable.

In those moments, I’d question whether my altruism in teaching gave way for internalized suppression of the people and communities I purportedly serve.

Which makes me think of the pedagogy the Department of Justice is serving the people of DC now. Federal agents are asking people for IDs on their porches, standing in the middle of pedestrian traffic ominously, and posting Black men in handcuffs on official social media accounts. Over the years, some have cheered this type of behavior as necessary for a false sense of safety and security. But as I look at what’s happening in DC, not to mention NYC, Los Angeles, Boston, and Chicago, I wonder what would happen if everyone stopped confusing control for security.

For that matter, I wonder what would happen if our governments would simply invest in everyone’s individual and collective well-being? The relationship between schools and society isn’t perfectly parallel. But what would society look like if everyone was shown a better way to be in community, and for governments to support such a vision?

Here’s something that the best teachers know and teach political leaders, too: forcing students to sit in rows and aisles for long periods of time isn’t going to solve your classroom culture issues. It’s, at best, a temporary fix that might grant stillness for a bit. At worst, it reminds students that the classroom isn’t for them.

That’s a lesson America refuses to learn to this day.

jose, who has found new appreciation for John 10:10 …

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I have a story to tell about comfort zones.

In late June, the High School for Environmental Studies invited me to be their special guest speaker for their graduation. As usual, I did my research on the type of talk I wanted to give to high schoolers. Many of the inspirational talks out there are geared towards college students. Mine needed to feel less like I was talking at them and more talking to and with them. I didn’t finish editing my talk until an hour before I needed to go. I hopped into a suit, took a taxi down to Hunter College, and found my way into the auditorium.

Sari Beth Rosenberg, HSES’ famous history teacher, greets me at the secret entrance and I’m immediately reminded that, yes, I had something to say in this moment. The humidity had me parched. I greeted everyone and made a few jokes, but found myself meditating a bit with my eyes open so I could lock in for the task at hand. Somewhere just beyond my discomfort was a set of things I needed to say to everyone.

Before the speech happened, I agonized over giving the students a sense of hope that felt unmerited. I typically roll my eyes at people who wear rose-colored glasses, particularly those who say the Trump administration will simply come and go. American history has revisited and heightened episodes of domestic and international terror within six short months. The Trump administration has already completed 46% of its stated goals as per Project 2025, and the politics seem more daunting than ever. While mass movements have granted us a sense of awakening for many, they’ve also represented a slowing down of Trump’s agenda rather than a complete stop.

With everything going on, who can withstand the decades of collective antipathy baked into the framework of the powerful and shameless?

In these moments, I collect small instances of kindness and empathy along my path. A set of volunteers is helping a long line of elders, unemployed, and/or unhoused people get food and clothes at a local food bank. A group of organizers is handing out water bottles on the hottest day of the year thus far. Individuals and collectives push back against masked men posing as government entities attempting to kidnap innocent people. A set of mamas and aunties are gathering large sets of people for early dinners in their homes. Some teachers are coming together to set up teach-ins beyond the school curriculum.

In the midst of these sets of kindness, I hear a common refrain: “Thank God you were there.” Right now, governments near and far play god with people’s lives and deaths all the same. Maybe it’s time we each play god in a way that points towards the collective empathy we deserve.

So with that, I sit there, looking at this two-tiered auditorium filled with graduates and their families. The people look like a cornucopia against the beige of the walls and lighting. When Sari introduced me, I didn’t know she would read the breadth of my bio. I had the “adult who would pass down wisdom” slot, just after Linda Rosenthal and Gale Brewer, two important policymakers here in New York, gave remarks.

It took me a minute to take the audience in, but I had to get past my discomfort zone, too. I started with a multilingual greeting to everyone in the audience. Just as I was getting into my call-and-response for the students in the audience, a fire alarm went off. My middle school teacher instincts went off and I glanced around the audience. (Afterwards, I found out someone was stuck in an elevator in the building and it took the fire department a while to get them out.)

Some groaned, but I immediately reminded everyone of my educator background. They laughed. I think I stomped my feet twice, gathered myself, and said, “Let’s get it.”

From there, I talked about the preparation they got from the high school they’re in. The theme of the speech was “Outside,” in the sense that they would take the learning they did “inside” and apply it “outside.” It’s also a reference to some of the memes we’ve seen from New York City lore, particularly Sidetalk and Jadakiss. Like I said, this was about the students, not the adults. (To their credit, the adults also participated, including the principal and the politicians there.)

I offered three lessons: remember who you are, life isn’t linear, and think globally but act locally. I interwove jokes from their generation to things the audience could resonate with, too. I sprinkled some reminders of the things their elders went through to get them here. I didn’t have the luxury of my well known GIFs and slides, but I had a vast array of references up my sleeves. Yes, we would be louder than the perpetual (and literal) noise in our ears.

Also of note: I might have squealed when I saw, to my surprise, some of my former students in the audience graduating from high school.

After the talk, people remarked how me pushing through the alarms encouraged them to keep the ceremony going with what otherwise felt disastrous to any ceremony. I nodded with gratitude. Luckily, the alarms quieted down some for the amazing student speeches. I shook hands with graduates. My three former students embraced me, too. Sari asked if I wanted to leave through the secret entrance and I said, “I’d rather be outside!” She laughed. When we exited to Park Avenue, the otherwise quiet block became a site of exuberance, but also a slice of hope. People of multiple shades, cries, and flags all speaking the same language of celebration and gratitude lined the blocks and slowed down traffic over the next hour or so.

Not only were my former students graduating. I also saw some of my former students who were also siblings and their families as well. As the kids say, I was “in my bag,” overwrought with emotions after seeing these little ones now significantly taller. Even as I’m pursuing academic positions and grants to enhance my organization’s work, I’m reminded that my adult foundation has always centered children and the world they deserve.

That night, I couldn’t watch the news. For a moment, I let myself believe that another world was possible. I imagined that we who celebrated the students would be sending our students into a world that embraced their fullest humanity. But then, I also imagined a world where they would join us in a broader collective coalition to do just that.

In this moment, I’ve been uncomfortable with everything surrounding us. On that evening, it was time for me to push beyond that discomfort. I wish for everyone the same.

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“Mr. Vilson, I’m in a doctoral program, just like you.”

One of my former students posted a picture of a quad at an established university. I inquired about her current work there. She said she was studying engineering. As she passed through undergrad, she’d check in about milestones: her applications to big universities, her matriculation into grad, then doctoral programs. By the time Columbia University conferred my degree back in October of 2024, she was well into her doctoral journey.

As I’ve recounted to her a few times, our first interaction back in her eighth grade year wasn’t as heartening. In fact, when she first walked into my classroom, she made a face that even Peppa Pig would consider cross. My deadpan face didn’t give it away, but internally, I did a “Oh, here we go.” After that moment, I recognized she had a preternatural gift for numeracy and making meaning of the math in front of her. I often found her explaining the work to her fellow students. Among gifted students, she shone brightly. I’m glad I kept reading the book beyond the cover, metaphorically speaking.

Furthermore, after she graduated from my class, one of her high school teachers is a good friend and colleague (shout out Sendy Keenan) whose insights pushed my thinking about my doctoral work. I’ve said how academia could do a better job of naming the teachers and other adults who we learn from and publish about. Academics and people with larger platforms have a responsibility to share how they acquired their frameworks. On the one hand, research methods must allow for a level of anonymity and generalizability. Naming people and places introduces all sorts of risks. At the same time, when people name ideas, they often attribute it to the writer, not the practitioner.

But a question: what do we owe students in our funds of knowledge? In particular, how do students teach us about the phenomena we’re putting out in the world?

In my dissertation acknowledgements and here, I’ve named how my teaching is a conglomerate of all the teaching I witnessed as a student, the teaching I observed in my colleagues’ classrooms, and practices I absorbed from my studies. Yet, I’m also a believer in social learning theory i.e. we learn best when we learn with others. As a sociologist, I didn’t just observe other teachers and chose what I wanted to do. I’m also a reflection of how students received my pedagogy, curriculum, and assessment.

I didn’t just learn from a select few students. I learned from all of them in ways large and small.

I’m thinking about one of my first students who couldn’t articulate that he was being bullied outside of my classroom. Me not seeing it didn’t mean it wasn’t happening. Before he left, his mom told me in a mix of fury and frustration that the school had done him a disservice. I was a first year teacher without the tools to address it then. But it taught me about my responsibility as a community-engaged teacher for both the “bully” and the “bullied.”

I’m also thinking to the brilliant student in my fourth year of teaching who’d ask “What does this have to do with real life?”. She had a reputation for whining in the school, but I went home and reflected on it. Over the next few weeks, I decided to work on giving her access to the math. As she arrived at her “oh!” moments, she asked better questions and participated more. I learned to reframe “whining” and to re-ground myself in patience.

I remember when my administration made the decision to move me back “into the classroom” from doing math instructional coaching. Some colleagues complained that I didn’t give them enough materials while others begrudged the idea that they could learn from someone younger than them. When I acquired a new class in November of that year, a few of the students were seen as thugs. People told me to fear the class. Some of those kids just needed a word of affirmation. I learned to assess my students first thing in the morning about their mental health. My door stayed open to them for the rest of that year.

Even in my book where I lay out some of the disasters in my teaching, I recognized places where I’m learning. Those losses were lessons I needed to become a better practitioner.

As the rain came down on us during Columbia University’s commencement, tam and robe drenched, I carried these memories. When I walked across the stage at United Palace Theatre, I gave them a shout-out in my mind, hoping they’d hear me (I taught a mile north of . I opened my phone and saw students who I hadn’t seen in a decade congratulate me, some of whom couldn’t believe I remembered them. I’m older, so I get it.

But I spent the last four years at Teachers College not just studying dead white men tell us about ourselves. (Yay, sociology!) I also spent it reconciling how I as a teacher understand my work against the backdrop of teaching over a thousand students. Then, I worked on how other teachers like me understand their relation to students like mine and perhaps students unlike mine.

I’m still working on learning. I can’t account for every student I’ve ever taught. It’s a miracle that many of them still want to keep contact, really. But I’m infinitely more brilliant by having 30 or so students for long periods of time to bounce ways of knowing off of. That’s culture, too. I wish more of us gave ourselves the opportunity to give credit where it’s due.

It’s funny because I reached out to the aforementioned student for this piece and she wished not to be named. Her journey as a doctoral student isn’t done. Mine is, but my work as an intellectual stewing in these nuances is not.

In that sense, we both have so much more to go. And the rest of us, too.

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Let me take it back to 1994.

I was in the seventh grade and, at the time, my mom took our family to her first barrio in Santo Domingo almost annually. Los Mina felt like a time out from the hustle and bustle of New York City. Rectangular houses no taller than two stories, dusty roads with their not run parallel, and roosters telling us the time characterize my imagination of the place. The slowest, soulful bachatas would play from the durable radio, still around from the 1950s. My grandaunt wondered whether her American-raised kids wanted mangú with salchichón or frosted flakes (yes, an alternate brand) for breakfast. We were still in poverty, but the matriarchs knew to feed each other nevertheless.

In the summer, my grandfather or uncles would drive to any of the nearest beaches so the sun would add a darker coat on our skins. In the winter, we had a full 12 days of Christmas, streets shut down for days on end with people eating and dancing in the streets. On the flight home, I’d come back bearing gifts like iron cups or dulce that I’d enjoy for days after.

When we flew back home, I’d carry those memories with me until the next trip. This narrative was common among my fellow Dominicans, many of whom still had houses there. The pilgrimages kept the culture alive in new contexts wherever two or more Dominicans were gathered.

Unfortunately, that’s not often enough to be fully seen as having “culture.” In the seventh grade, my Spanish teacher of Spanish background asked us to write a mini-biography about our family. In my first round of questions, my mother responded enthusiastically. I couldn’t stop taking notes about the pride she felt about the obstacles she overcame to get from Santo Domingo to Miami to New York City. My first draft seemed to go well enough. We then had a second round of questions, to which my mother had a harder time responding. She not only felt ill on the due date, but seemed to evade details for her inquisitive child.

I pieced together what I could, but it wasn’t enough.

A few days later, my Spanish teacher decided to correct the name of the barrio I knew well. Strike one. He then told the class that I lost ten points for not completing the assignment to his liking. Strike two. Now, as an educator, I don’t even recall him following up privately to address his concerns pre- or post-humiliation. Strike three.

Degrading one of his best students wasn’t enough. He also had to take a swipe at the culture. I’ve been out on the culture of “Spanish” skeptically since.

That nonsense sat with me for decades, especially in times when my people weren’t seen as enough. But the communities we grew up in, the foods we ate, and the people who carried this culture said otherwise. That includes the legendary singer Rubby Peréz.

When you’re Dominican, there isn’t a party you’ve been to in the last half-century that didn’t feature Rubby Peréz’s tenor. So when many of us woke up to the horrific news out of Santo Domingo, we instantly remembered everything from the hot apartments with the rickety floors or the large community halls hosting the baby shower, birthday party, or other rite of passage. Peréz along with a list of Dominican artists from the 1970s to the 1990’s solidified an era of signature music with connective melodies, poetic lyrics, and attention to artistry.

But he and the now hundreds of people who died that day leave behind stories and the people who remember. For people hearing the news sans this context, it’s sad amidst our current societal malaise. For people who share this connective tissue, we feel these deaths viscerally. My friends and former students have been sharing photos and stories over the last two weeks. I’m seeing videos of Peréz’s last performances or him dropping by people’s houses. Elders are sharing the times they went to a significant performance of his. It’s not uncommon for famous Dominican folks to be one or two degrees from other folks we know.

For Dominicans, Peréz’s music felt like an anchor, whose music connects people of a shared experience across times and spaces. When “Buscando Tus Besos” or “Volveré” comes on, we know what to do, where to go, how to move ourselves.

Over the years, I’ve because of my personal and educational journey navigating my own. Of course, we can’t let our nostalgia mask some of the murkier parts. Post-tragedy, people see the disparity between wealthy citizens who’ve been able to properly bury their dead after the Jet Set tragedy while others are still scrounging for funds. Some Dominicans have also named a fascist and xenophobic thread among the people that doesn’t feel familiar to longtime residents and the Dominican diaspora more generally. It feels pernicious to see both the elevation of darker-skinned Dominicans like Peréz take center stage when anti-Blackness still lingers among us.

And none of this makes our culture any less than the cultures that get exalted as “better” across the world.

In a time when people want to restrict and narrow cultural norms through anti-truth laws, many of us hold steadfast to the ties that bind us. At their best, these ties ground us in the best version of ourselves so we have anchors while we sail out there. Whatever there means for you or us.

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A few days ago, the New York State Education Department rebuked the Trump administration’s efforts to pull federal funding. Namely, the federal administration has ratcheted up efforts to scrub policies related to diversity, equity, and inclusion on multiple fronts. The strongly-worded rebuke was swift and refreshing for several reasons. It’s important to note that NYC has the most billionaires per capita in the world. New York State has the second-most billionaires in the country. In other words, New York can afford to fully fund our public schools. Secondly, New York citizens have had a decades-long battle about school funding. Despite whatever political alignments people think New York City has, the political will has never been right nor just.

But for a moment, can we imagine that some level of government believes in listening to the people it serves?

Contrary to the way history usually gets taught to us, governments rarely if ever simply came to their senses when it comes to our educational rights. In education history, locally or otherwise, marginalized people have always had to engage in a battle for educational rights. These identity-centered struggles have perpetually had implications for everyone, not just the group that fought for the hard-fought win. Social movements made it possible for co-ed K-12 classrooms, culturally responsive and inclusive curriculum, math and higher order content across schools, and (dis)ability services.

None of these happened just because time passed. If anything, people forced times to change incrementally. Plus, many of the people didn’t get to see the change they influenced.

How do we imagine the word “public” in public schools in New York City and elsewhere? For that matter, to borrow from bell hooks, how do we bring the margins to center? Over the last quarter century, we’ve seen the bipartisan effort to tighten control of schools via multiple accountability measures. In the 20 years I’ve been in education, I’ve seen teaching go from “testing is just one component of teaching” to “testing is teaching.” Efforts to narrow curriculum and pedagogy have had mixed results. Our schools has also come under conflict with the same president twice for serving undocumented children.

To his credit, Mayor de Blasio fought against that pressure. To his folly, Mayor Adams would rather fight against those willing to fight for public schools.

We’re seeing how New Yorkers don’t collectively share an authentic notion of “public.” For every parent who just wants a school that cares about their child’s academic and socio-emotional well-being, there are a small but powerful few who rather render the majority of voices invalid. For every educator who wants to teach children well in the contexts that they’re in, there are others who voted for the fascism we’re seeing now. While a good number of principals and superintendents want to support their schools well, another set prefer to preserve power and only seem to care about undocumented children when it comes to attendance and putting on a façade of equity.

At the heart of the “public” question is whether or not those in power want everyone else to get educated.

Critics of public schools provide a litany of issues with this set of institutions, some with better appraisals than others. Some like to name these schools “government schools,” a name that conjures up sets of people who prefer Black people not get an education. Others bring up how, in their narrative, the United States used to be #1 in the world in education. Yet, the folks who, again, prefer to keep people uneducated keep holding on to the fantasy.

But among the more poignant assessments fall in line with identity-based (i.e. racial, gender, disability) justice. In their minds, public schools disproportionately neglect Black and Latine children across grade levels. Even though students of color comprise 85% of the NYC public school student body, teachers of color comprise about 43% of the teaching staff with no signs of change. NYC high schools with more students of color have more metal detectors and school resource officers. Informally, parents I speak to note how schools shove their students into persistent detention for behaviors that may not have qualified if their child was white and wealthy. Oh, and the reinforcement of deficit thinking through perpetual standardized testing only makes the schooling experience worse for kids.

I hear these and often agree with the heart of these assessments. But the answer is to improve these institutions, not privatize or shut them down.

That’s why we prefer to fight for public schools because the public is us. We have laws and policies that, when followed, bring a level of transparency and input that privatization closes off. Public means that people should have a level of engagement with the education process to be full participants in their children’s education. Contrary to popular belief, I believe parents who send their kids to public school care about their children’s education. But now it’s time for policymakers to match and surpass that energy with better resources, better funding, and more sustained policy regardless of who’s mayor, governor, or president at the time.

And, when public doesn’t feel public, then we the public demand that things become so.

Jose, who’s a proud advocate for New Yorkers for Racially Just Public Schools

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What do we do when our public schools are under attack?

A couple of weeks ago, the new Secretary of Education Linda McMahon leveled significant cuts to the US Department of Education in an ostensible effort to shut EdGov down. McMahon is the latest in a string of the least qualified and/or the most subservient selections for important positions. In the same week she threatened hundreds of EdGov jobs, she was still learning education policy including IDEA and the work of school boards. While we ridiculed the nomination with clips from her WWE days, her first week in office presents a clear threat to public education in many of our lifetimes.

The “othering” of so many people across identities happens among both supporters and critics of public schools. That’s why we need to get right and get right now.

But this dynamic aligns well with President Trump’s plans for the 14,000 or so districts across the country. Many of these districts have threatened to wipe out their systems via vouchers altogether. The role of the US Department of Education has been discussed at length, but few have made it plain. The federal role in schools is to ensure at least a modicum of equity to our nation’s schools. This means every and all schools where specific groups of children may find themselves underserved by that institution or state. That matters for civil rights and education policy for everyone.

As a sociologist, I’m seeing some things that are worth your attention:

Reducing empathy is a clear pathway for authoritarians. Even a simple search of “empathy” and terms like “Christian nationalism,” “Trump,” and “fascism” brings up the drudge from our societal well. Some pastors and preachers are signaling empathy as weakness to their congregations. Some influencers are taking advantage of people’s personal hurt to punch down or to the side, but never up. Policymakers and enforcers alike use xenophobia in their commercials as a clarion call for national identity.

This, too, makes it to children’s eyes and ears.

The attack on socio-emotional learning and diversity, equity, and inclusion points to people not seeing each other as human beings. Ruthlessness breeds mistrust and allows for us to speak in dystopian terms. This includes people across protected classes, and really, any other person who doesn’t fall 100% behind a specific ideology. Folks who fought for integration often named public education as an empathy project as well towards a shared humanity.

We don’t even have to name conflicts that started World Wars to cite a societal lack of empathy if only because we have a plethora of examples domestically. Which means …

Suppressing marginalized groups (across race, disability, gender, etc) internationally and domestically means rendering their humanity as invalid. We’ve already seen a number of instances where this administration has used people they’ve deemed second-class citizens to hammer at long-standing policy, including the Constitution. Immigration officials deported a professor at a prestigious university despite her having a valid visa. NYC’s mayor gave permission for those officials to enter public schools at will, and ordered administrators to step out of the way. A list of students partly developed by people on Elon Musk’s platform sits somewhere on Tom Homan’s desk.

Even without mentioning the identity of the groups and individuals affected, we can see the peril we’re currently sitting in. The more they feel the permission to strip people’s rights and liberties, the more they can isolate whose opinions —and power— matter to them. And us.

Secretly, attendance rolls have decreased across schools due to these dynamics. Our public education systems —flaws and all— are the most enduring social safety nets we have for these groups. Not coincidentally, as our schools become more racially diverse, politicians turn the heat up on fear mongering.

This leaves them and us more susceptible.

I’ve said this for decades now, and it remains true. Focusing narrowly on test scores in math and English Language Arts — as opposed to a well-rounded curriculum — doesn’t allow our students to make critical connections between what’s happening around them and things that happened before them. To wit, science and social studies are applied math and ELA, and look how they’re devalued now. Even in this moment, we’re labeling anything that looks like “kill and drill” as “science of …” To be clear, it’s nonsense. This idea of “competing” belies how the United States has never really competed and won on international measures.

Plus, if policymakers really wanted a competition, they’d make bigger and better investments in schools, especially in personnel and curriculum.

The problem goes beyond basic literacy. It’s the whole endeavor of education, which is different than schooling. If the whole project of schooling is towards a malleable populace, then our narrow visions for schooling make norming students for societal inhumanity simpler.

Put all together, this creates conditions of a less-educated and easily controllable populace – one that you can continue extracting labor from – across the board. Knowledge, curiosity, and empathy are real keys. Don’t lose em. Let’s get to knowing this.

This dynamic is not new, just the next stage in the onslaught’s evolution. Over the last 15 years, I’ve documented some of the insidious ways that education reform opened the door for privatization. Unfortunately, even the most well-meaning reformers didn’t pay close attention to their narratives. Specifically, the consistent bludgeoning of these institutions gave permission for those with ill intention to disband public schools —and the “public” part of schools— completely. On the flip side, many who advocated against these education reforms rarely built coalition with children who attend public schools as well.

The Martin Niemöller poem “First They Came For …” was a lesson in keeping our eye out for the way society’s most powerful people can structurally marginalize people across multiple identities. Unfortunately, too many people have waited for the last line before getting activated. Even the mention of race and/or gender sends people into defensive mode as opposed to taking a proactive learner stance. As movements raged in the streets for human and civil rights across America in 2020, people bought books, attended the lectures, and made commitments.

My immediate question then was “Will you take the next step forward?” This is as good as any to get the “public” activated in our public schools.

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Can we talk about Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl Halftime performance for a bit?

Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime show stirred America’s cultural pot over the last two days. Naysayers’ opinions have run the gamut from “I didn’t get it” to “It was too Black for me,” a sure sign that Lamar’s performance worked.

Nothing about Lamar’s musical tapestry suggests he would dilute his discography for people who refuse to get it. His resplendent use of America’s flag colors against his dark skin and his 400 co-performers’ skins including SZA and Serena Williams, was a body blow to President Trump’s enterprise. Co-President Musk and a plethora of unseen agents attempt to erase the legislative, intellectual, and economic gains of civil rights movements.

Therefore, Lamar’s artistry was the clarion call to cultural and interpersonal arms many of us needed.

Isn’t it wild that the same country that has both an illiteracy and an anti-intellectual problem has spent the last half-day dissecting Kendrick Lamar’s Halftime performance? Analyses have run rampant since Lamar’s 13 minutes were up (here’s one from David Dennis Jr. that works). It speaks volumes about the ways we construct educational experiences. When you read the meanings folks are making from the performance, you see the ways people are integrating knowledge from expertise and experience and forming holistic narratives about this electric display.

The disparate reactions make me skeptical that we “all want the same things” for an education.

They’ll say “But, Jose, we’re not Kendrick Lamar.” You’re right. But if you listen to a teacher who taught Lamar, you recognize that we have multiple Kendricks in our classrooms. According to this interview, Mr. Inge explains how he views all of his students as capable of success. In fact, in other videos, we see Mr. Inge’s pedagogy as firm, direct, and loving at once. These analyses seem based on skills learned from reading whole books and looking at math problems holistically, not simple passages.

It’s a good lesson for schools. Some have derided holistic pedagogies as soft or inefficient. Yet, some of our most brilliant works have come from the amalgamation of these content areas. For instance, treating science and social studies as applied English Language Arts and math gives us keys from which to make our lessons more engaging and exploratory.

Of course, post-NAEP score release analyses have focused on drilling students with skills, but that’s not new. “Drilling” advocates have pushed for efficiency and regimentation of skills as opposed to a slower, more social, and student-led set of inquiries into their work. I’m not asking us to abandon skill-based lessons altogether. Yet, some people want to teach kids to read small passages, but not expand their capacity for character- and world-building. Why are we limiting students’ literacy when we’re seeing evidence that whole books are central to students’ desire for literacy?

I’m asking for a reformation of what we consider education. I want the spectrum of what’s possible in our classrooms and schools. Akin to how Kendrick Lamar approaches his music.

It’s worth naming how our current contexts haven’t helped. American culture has moved from testing as one mechanism for assessment to testing as the education. While the Common Core State Standards have anecdotally raised academic expectations, its implementation left much to be desired. As the public school population becomes more racially diverse, the teaching population has become less so, which decreases the likelihood of a Mr. Inge and so many others in our schools. Administrators who committed to culturally responsive education a few years ago have dropped even the faintest hints of “equity” from their lexicon.

As overt fascism seeks to take a stronghold of our federal government, a better-educated populace would have used their literacy and numeracy skills to connect the historical, global, and contemporary dots. But people around the world have seen this and can’t believe America has allowed it anyways.

Kendrick Lamar sent floodlights out to the rest of the world that some of us been knowin’.

What would it take for us to move towards tapping more into curiosity and exploration? It starts with adults believing every student deserves experiences with curiosity. Schools with more students of color or students in poverty seem to never have permission to do “progressive” pedagogies. From there, we would do well to see how our lessons provide those student-led opportunities. It also means that we need to expand notions of “assessment.” The best teachers I know have a strong sense of students’ skills, but also their potential and how to elevate it.

But also, we should introduce more social learning i.e. the extent to which students learn together rather than individually.

The community learning element means students get to reach out to one another to solve problems and gain perspectives they otherwise wouldn’t. Imagine if that was a principle we embraced towards a more authentic democracy. Breaking out of silos means we should interrogate who put them there in the first place. Unifying a nation by stripping othered people of their rights, liberties, and communities’ expressions is no unity at all. We have multiple opportunities to exemplify this for our students in our institutions of learning i.e. our schools.

Kendrick Lamar sent America a message about what we know. A teacher gave him the skills to disseminate this to one of the world’s largest audiences. Up to now, many more classrooms are banning students from this pedagogy.

Will America listen?

The post The Pedagogy of Kendrick Lamar at the Super Bowl Halftime Show appeared first on The Jose Vilson.

As President Trump dropped executive orders at an alarming rate, I celebrated my life.

On January 24th, I took time to sit with myself and reflect on the past year. I read messages and took phone calls from friends new and old on my phone. I’ve traded bottles and blaring speakers for DayQuil and napkins after recent spats with the flu that passed through our family. Then, I enjoyed our quiet breakfast, ignoring the TV and the constant buzzing from this and that news for a respite.

This feels asymmetrical to the doom and gloom I would lead this writing with in times like these. However, I’ve learned a lot over the last two decades, it’s that “shock and awe” tactics are a multipronged approach to get people to stop fighting back. We need to get clear, see beyond the tactics, and point towards the bigger vision. That is to say, we can do better.

As a veteran educator turned sociologist, I find it important to say that humanity has been here before. Even in the last twenty years, uncertainty reigned at critical periods and sometimes, only the worst solutions seemed to win the day. Lessons from ancestors living and passed on can teach us to hold joy amid the tyranny. Here are some notes I’ve picked up through my journey:

1. Build your intuition. Intuition is the nexus between intellect and experiences. These days, it feels like we’re getting a lot of noise and not enough clarity about what we need to listen to and what we’re listening for. Some of the most remarkable folks we know synthesize big ideas and engage deeply with what’s in front of them. It starts with intuition. It’s true that what we commonly refer to as intuition is a “gut feeling.” However, the folks with stronger “guts” are also those who’ve had experience and got better at learning over time.

2. Read well. When I say “read,” I don’t mean just books. If you have children, read aloud with them. If you’re on your own, read articles. Gather ideas from what you read and engage with it. Ask how it either gives you a new perspective on a concept or conflicts with it. Audiobooks matter, too. Read slowly where possible, too.

3. Resist complete isolation. Humans are social creatures. Pretending that we can stop socializing with others to get a clearer mind negates how we build better with others. You don’t have to start something new; there are a plethora of opportunities to engage people on and off-line. If you don’t see it, yes, start a squad. It doesn’t have to be 100 at first. It can just be five.

4. Remember your people. Facebook tempts us to throw in a happy birthday once a year. I’ve developed a habit to occasionally call someone and send a voice note to ask how my people are doing. As an introvert, I know it’s difficult. I also feel like our devices give us a false sense of connectedness that we could improve by just picking up the phone for its original intent.

5. Take long timeouts from social media. Every time someone does the extended time out, they’ll ask “What did I miss?” And I’ll say “Everything and nothing.” Our rush to collect followers and grow engagement sometimes takes us away from becoming better people. For what it’s worth, I delete my social media apps during my breaks and it feels like a reboot for my mind. Speaking of which …

6. Learn how to tell people how you feel about them directly (or don’t say anything at all). A few years ago, I started a “no subs” policy in my work. For context, “subbing” means you’re writing an indirect sentiment or insult at someone hoping or knowing someone else knows who you’re talking about. Sometimes, people sub hoping that the person it was intended for catches it, too. Great. But I find it more effective and efficient to just tell the person you’re thinking of how you feel. It’s what we would want for ourselves. Also …

7. Have an abundance of grace for others. Grace is an important virtue for building community. The grace extends not just for others who can’t articulate the same values as you, but also for yourself when you make mistakes. Accountability is fine, but self-flagellation is an insidious cycle. Grace means that we get to show up as our fullest selves, mistakes and all.

8. Stay principled beyond laws. It’s evident that people on several levels of government would rather abdicate their responsibility to the laws of the land than serve the majority of their constituents. For that matter, some of us know that being lawful is not the same as being just. Thus, it matters when we have principles that serve as lenses for the work we want to do and the people we want to be.

9. Pick just one institution or domain we want to defend or strengthen and get really smart about. Too many people think we need to have it all together or know all the breaking news. Most people don’t have time or mind space for that. But if you’ve already picked that one thing and focused on doing it better, more humanely, and more justly, then that’s good work.

These are just notes, for sure. It’s an inexhaustive list and, amid the many lists out there, this one is for my people through my experience and lens. In other words, it’s as much for me as this is for you.

A couple of days ago, I might have considered what I did on my birthday as boring. But I appreciated the stillness of the day and having a semblance of control over how I reacted to the inhumanity. It’s not toxic positivity. It’s the idea that, contrary to their wills, my people and I have lives worth living.

And we don’t need permission to live these lives of ours. And I won’t be waiting for another revolution around the sun to make that happen.

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