John B. King Jr. is the legacy of educators, both literally—through mother Adalina King, a guidance counselor at New York P.S. 276; father John Sr., New York City’s first Black deputy schools chief; and other kin—and figuratively, through the teachers who shaped his views on education as an engine of change.
His new memoir, Teacher By Teacher: The People Who Change Our Lives, tracks King’s growth from a gifted but grief-stricken boy coping with his mother’s death and father’s dementia, to a socially conscious high school social studies teacher, and from an early charter school leader and advocate to New York state and ultimately federal education leadership. In 2016 he succeeded Arne Duncan as the 10th U.S. secretary of education.
He led the Obama administration’s implementation of the Every Student Succeeds Act, and efforts to advance more rigorous teacher-evaluation systems and common standards. He also oversaw My Brother’s Keeper, an public-private initiative to reduce discipline disparities and achievement gaps and improve mentorship for boys, particularly boys of color.
At every stage, King describes the teachers who supported him, challenged him, and helped him develop as a professional. The new memoir highlights the importance of teachers in building students’ intellectual curiosity, civic engagement, and resilience to trauma.
In an exclusive Education Week interview, King, now the chancellor of the State University of New York, answered questions about his tenure leading the U.S. Department of Education and on the evolution of teaching. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
School was an escape for you from a lot of trauma as you grew up. How can teachers support the growing share of children with trauma and mental health issues in schools?
On one level, it’s crazy that we have schools where the ratio of students to counselors is like 500 to 1; that’s just not tenable, so we ought to invest more in that kind of direct mental health support. But second, I think teacher preparation and teacher professional development has to address supporting students through the things that they’re experiencing outside of school.
There’s this notion of trauma-informed practice—having an understanding of what kids may be going through and what strategies in the classroom may help students be successful, be resilient through the things that they’re dealing with—and in my observation, it’s not integrated enough with the strategies around academic success. In too many places they’re talked about as two separate things, when in fact, I think one of the things that you see in [King’s P.S. 276 elementary teacher] Mr. Osterweil’s classroom and Ms. D’s classroom or the environment we tried to create at Roxbury Prep [a Massachusetts charter school King co-founded] is how you approach the academics can also help to create that space of safety and nurturing for students.
As U.S. secretary of education under the Obama administration, you focused on infusing diversity, equity, and inclusion into federal education grants—something that the Trump administration is dismantling. How do you see the future of these programs in schools?
I’m still hopeful that Congress will step up to protect the crucial functions of the Education Department: Title I and IDEA funding, Pell grants and the student loan system, civil rights enforcement, and then data transparency. We need to know how we’re doing, and we need the data to be disaggregated so we know how we’re doing in terms of different groups of students.
All of those things have a bipartisan tradition. And I think states continue to have a responsibility to make sure that all students are served well and to address gaps where they exist. That responsibility is in the federal law, right? That’s still built into the Every Student Succeeds Act. But it’s also a moral responsibility that they have.
More than a decade after the My Brother’s Keeper initiative sought to boost achievement for boys of color, boys continue to lag girls in many academic and social areas. Why has it been so hard to close those gaps?
There are some very significant cultural challenges where boys and young men are getting a lot of messages that are negative about school and academics. And we’ve got to find ways to counter that and reduce some of the social pressure that results from being awash in social media and online content.
I’m very pleased that Gov. [Kathy Hochul] in New York has put forward a proposal ... to ban cell phones bell to bell ... because the social media and online activity is often distracting from school. It is producing an epidemic of depression and anxiety that often manifests differently for boys and girls. It is very worrisome, when you see these young people absorbed down this rabbit hole of online engagement, and they’re not building social relationships. They’re not building relationships with mentors. They’re often not able to concentrate on their academics. All of that, I think, could be improved by less online exposure.
Is there a tension between the desire to reduce online time and the proliferation of 1-to-1 devices in schools?
Yes. I think if we’re honest, that kind of proliferation of technology hasn’t yielded the academic benefits we thought and may well be undermining academic success. That doesn’t mean there aren’t times when you want to get a bunch of extra practice in math, so you use a tech tool for that purpose, or in your Spanish class, if you want students to have a dialogue with students in Spain or Costa Rica, [or] amazing Puerto Rico.
But if what’s happening is students are spending hours upon hours each day on a video game or on social media where they’re comparing themselves to other kids, that’s not good. And so we have to see technology as a tool that has its place, but not allow it to dominate kids’ lives.
You were very candid in the book about how public opinion turned sour on your Education Department work on common standards and teacher-evaluation initiatives. What would you do differently if you had it to do over?
If you look back on the Obama years, particularly 2009 through 2013, a lot was asked of states and districts, and a lot was asked of them with a very short time horizon. States and districts were adopting new standards. They were changing practices around English instruction, changing practices around math instruction. They were in many cases implementing new models in high-needs high schools that had chronically low graduation rates to try to turn them around. They were implementing new data systems in many cases. While each of the things that were asked made good policy sense, doing them all at the same time really was overwhelming for states and districts—and I think contributed to the challenges for implementing teacher evaluation.
For teachers who are adjusting to new standards, sometimes new assessments, to then also have an adjustment to a new evaluation system was very difficult. So, you know, I think one of the major lessons that I talked about in the book is about pacing: trying to make sure that reform efforts are properly paced so that people don’t become overwhelmed.
Second, any evaluation system has to have buy-in from the people being evaluated, and while I think there’s still a strong consensus that part of how we should think about teacher performance is, how are the students doing, there was not sufficient consensus developed about how we would answer that question. You can’t have an evaluation system be successful if the folks being evaluated reject the premise.
Many of your memories of great teachers revolve around meaningful class discussions about challenging issues. In the current political climate, we see more teachers feeling uncomfortable having these kinds of conversations. What lessons have you seen from the teachers you’ve known about how to do that?
One component is establishing a set of habits or routines in the classroom for how to have difficult conversations, things as simple as listening to the other person to understand their ideas, rather than just waiting for your turn to speak to say yours—habits around active listening.
I think then there’s the question of figuring out how to structure the content in ways that will engage students in thinking critically about their own ideas. One exercise that my daughters did at Montgomery Blair High School in Montgomery County, Md., was they had an assignment in 9th grade where you have a controversial topic, and you took one side of it and you wrote an essay in support of that side—you know, laying out your thesis, your supporting evidence, responding to potential counterarguments.
Then in 10th grade, you wrote the same paper from the other side, and it was a very good exercise in making you really sort through the evidence. My younger daughter observed that she was different writing the paper the second time: She matured, she had different thoughts about the world, and so she brought a different lens to the paper herself. I think we need to do more things like that ... to get students into the habit of thinking critically about arguments and ideas.
You come from a family of educators, and you and your wife are educators. At this stage, would you still recommend teaching to young people?
Absolutely, yeah. You know, I didn’t really have a personal connection to my father’s professional life, even though he was a teacher and the first Black principal in Brooklyn, a very senior administrator of New York City schools. After my mom passed, he was struggling with Alzheimer’s, and so he wasn’t, for me, the person he was in his career.
But at his wake, this man approached me, who was probably in his late 50s who had been my father’s student. ... He talked about what a great teacher my father was and how meaningful it was for him as a Black man, to have a Black male teacher who was such an example of academic excellence. And that was really impactful for me. It really showed me how profound an impact a teacher can have on a child’s life.
When I think about young people who are thinking about teaching or even new teachers, sometimes it’s very daunting. I hope what they see in the book is that years later you may find that you profoundly shape people’s lives. ... Teaching is an amazing profession that makes all other professions possible.
