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Jose: So! Mr. Vilson: So. J: So … MV: Awkward, isn’t it? J: Right. So … what would you like to tell everyone about this moment? MV: Well, I’ve officially resigned from the NYC Department of Education. It wasn’t an easy choice, but it was the choice presented. I applied for study leave and they rejected it, so it was only a matter of time. It’s fine. This felt inevitable given that I got a full scholarship to “King’s College …” J: Another Hamilton reference. MV: I do that. J: But why here? Why now? MV: Contrary to what people might think, it wasn’t due to COVID. I would have loved to step into a fight like this. Let me remind you that we’ve taught during several emergencies. There wasn’t a fight I wasn’t willing to break up, a stairwell I wasn’t willing to clear out, a student I wasn’t willing to go visit. We taught through a transit strike, sleeping over a cousin’s house. During a fire drill, we were a couple of inches away from getting run over by an SUV because th...

On November 29, 2016, we had a Single Session workshop for the entire Math for America community entitled “A Continuing Conversation: Race, Equity, and STEM Education.” A few weeks prior, you witnessed the country that once felt so full of promise reject its stated values in favor of a man and an administration that outwardly espouses white supremacy and all of its branches. The rest of us had been so accustomed to your unassuming and pensive presence in the spaces you led. But on that night, you took the opportunity to speak up and loudly about the urgency of our conversation and why we were gathered. We could no longer settle for passive voices in the city and in the country you grew to love to grow disappointed in. An auditorium full of the most decorated educators in New York City was a captive audience while you held the tensions of being a white Jewish woman elevating her more racially marginalized counterparts while holding your white counterparts accountable to stepping up in t...

This post is sponsored by WE Teachers , made possible by Walgreens. All opinions are my own. The last conversation I had with students before the official end of the school year was between me and a few of my seventh graders. We talked about summer plans over Cardi B and Juice Wrld. We shared a snack together. The boys jockeyed for position as “best” virtual game player. The girls talked about the ways they’d miss school and their least favorite teacher. I didn’t participate in that one. As I ended the phone call, I winced at having to hang up. What does it mean to have an unofficial, face-to-face, end-of-school back in March then have an official, virtual end-of-school hangout in June? One thing’s for sure: that episode wouldn’t have been possible without the relationships I had already established from September to March. In different circles, I proposed that schools shouldn’t start classes with some of the usual routines we’ve seen and heard. Schools should take a good inventory ...

It was my first time in months riding the bus with my son since school shut down. Normally, when I’ve run an errand during the pandemic, I’ll do it on my own, mask on, huffing and puffing to make it back inside. On this errand, my son and I saw a crosstown bus sitting there, so we hopped in the back. Pre-COVID, we rode the bus home from his after-school program, so we were excited to have this sliver of normalcy. As soon as we got to the next stop, we got a quick education on what happens outside our bubble. Every stop told a new story. At the first stop, an elderly woman hops on, grumbling underneath her mask about having to wear one and surveying the rest of the passengers to make sure they had one, too. At the second, a man meekly walks in to the front while onlookers wondered why those without canes had to get in the back. At the fifth, a mother with two teenaged children hopped on. The daughter had on her pink plastic covering, the rest of her family members came in uncovered an...

There’s a meme out there suggesting that I become the next Secretary of Education for this country. I use the word “meme” in the original sense where something gets repeated often. Some of it might have started from my pictures with then-presidential candidate Senator Elizabeth Warren and Julian Castro, but the more recent uptick ostensibly comes from Peter Greene’s Forbes article . In it, he takes on Liat Olenik’s original proposal – which then turned into a core tenet of Warren’s educational plan – and builds on it. Greene has a few criteria that such a person should meet: A traditional public school teacher A venerated veteran teacher, at that A teacher who hasn’t been dubbed an edu-celebrity (an educational figure who amassed tens of thousands of social media influence in seemingly inauthentic ways) A person who has more years as a school-based educator than one who hasn’t been school-based A person who can delve into the big picture issues, the minutiae, and everything i...

This one is dedicated specifically to my educators of color and conscience, When I became a teacher, I inherited a tradition of Black teaching that spans this country’s history since time immemorial. Similar to Black people in any official government role, Black teaching came with the complications of the job. From the standards and curriculum to the policy mandates handed down to us from administrators from every government level. Like so many of those roles, we are truly agents of the state working at the behest of the tax-funding apparatus. Unlike the other professions, Black teaching has just enough of a wedge for us to do so subversively and, in many instances, outwardly activist. Teaching with justice in mind doesn’t necessarily contradict the job itself, unlike, say, law enforcement. Once I learned what it meant to teach through my identity at my center, not simply as an aside, I noted the difference in my expressions of said teacher. I, like many of you, found elements of m...

Contrary to my own public activism and advocacy, I propose that we move the nation’s largest public school system into a completely online endeavor forever and a day. I know this may come as a shock to everyone who’s been following me for years, but I might have developed outright envy for some of my most fervent detractors. I’m jealous of the way they speak, walk, and work as if they’ve got their theory of online schooling fully figured out. Instead of having to fight them amongst the various contrarians in this little line of mine, I’m now squarely in agreement with them. That is to say, rather than my favorite sweaters and slacks, I’ll teach in sandals and pajamas from home. With no exceptions. At first, I thought it a ludicrous idea. Before the pandemic, I couldn’t have imagined that tens of thousands of working adults could convert 1.1 million students from full human beings with all their complexities into digits and images shifting about our monitors, but I was wrong. In a w...

If you’d like to watch the video, you gotta go to them . Thanks to the 800+ of you who attended and the other 3000+ of you who’ve watched it afterward. I’m so deeply appreciative. Some thoughts about this work. Last year, I set to elevate a conversation about belonging within the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. For almost a decade, I felt like NCTM didn’t belong to me, but to other people who saw themselves as mathematicians in classrooms. I also recognize that education has sought to center the equity conversation more intentionally lately, even if the conversation only swims on the shallow end of the pool. At some point, I also sought to change the math conversation from “How can we make sure kids learn math” to “How can we include more ways of knowing math?” That explicitly asks us to push past exclusive narratives of what a good math student looks like, but also includes narratives of what a good math teacher looks like. Sometimes, people adhere to the stereotypes ...

The New York Times recently did a study on confirmed coronavirus cases across the city and found that COVID-19 cases are hitting lower-income neighborhoods the hardest. Some people have taken it to mean that we need to make more concerted efforts to keep these neighborhoods at home. (In some cases, by martial force.) Others have taken it as a sign of indifference as if the denizens of these specific neighborhoods had an opportunity to voice their opinions on this matter. Others still have taken to yelling at pictures of crowded subways and grocery stores as evidence that these neighborhoods simply can’t be bothered with the death toll that’s sure to disproportionately affect their own neighborhoods. This isn’t all that different from the pre-COVID era, either. Our country should have created policies – and can still create policies – that protect our citizens most directly affected by environmental racism. Those who live closest to pollutants and congestion, those who live in or nea...

There must have been a cumulative gasp from every educator in the city when we found out Dez-Ann Romain passed away . If we don’t know her personally, we know an educator like her. Young, energetic, helpful, a team player. Once we clear this curve, may we remember the moments when we sacrificed the helpers we sought out. Those of us who showed up for the three-day ad-hoc professional development training last week all knew we would put ourselves at risk for the same energy that carried us through any number of disasters. For many of us, if “essential workers” like nurses, doctors, grocery store workers, bus drivers, conductors, police officers, firepeople, and other municipal workers had to show up, educators would count ourselves in the number. Little did we know that we’d be one to two degrees away from knowing someone who’s been affected by COVID, if not ourselves. For NYC teachers, disaster is another one of those unwritten stipulations in our contracts. We have big budget movi...

Last week, I had the privilege of doing a mini-residency as part of the Las Vegas Public Education Foundation Teacher Leadership Academy. It’s a solid chunk of time where I get to flex my pedagogical skills while building community with educators who I might not otherwise have a chance to work with. It’s weirder when I’m usually the only “current classroom teacher” facilitating sessions like this because these workshops tend to be led by folks who’ve already left the classroom. In these sessions, I leave lots of open space in my “plan” to allow for teachable moments among adults. I flourish in those uncertain spaces where I know where we need to get to, but no one has any idea how we’ll get there. In one of those moments, we were discussing the obstacles of teacher leadership. Most of the attendees shared how their roles differed based on who you asked: students, peers, or administrators. Ursela Gavin, National Board Certified Black educator, revealed how she had often been told she...

At 2:45 pm, the students have already left the classroom. The door is slightly ajar, just open enough to let the teenage energy dissipate from this great green room. A whiteboard displays equations, diagrams, and words in different color markers. Desks once rigidly paired are slightly misaligned with untucked chairs and random doodles on them. The random handout, pencil shaving, and returned assignment lay on the floor. This teacher sits at his desk, still decompressing from another day of more than a hundred students over the course of eight periods. Two large stacks of ungraded papers and lesson plans hide his hands from the casual passerby. He’ll need a few more minutes. He’ll shake it off. He’ll do this again tomorrow. He’s passionate. He’s tired. Millions of other teachers get it. I get it, too. It’s February. There’s a whole litany of reasons for why children and the adults charged with caring for them are tired. After 100 days of having to with and for one another, we all nee...

I became a math instructional coach, went back to the classroom a few years later, graduated hundreds of students, achieved National Board certification, received the Math for America Master Teacher Fellowship, spoke at over 100 venues, was the first current classroom teacher to keynote the American Education Research Association annual meeting and the National Council of Teachers in Mathematics conference, wrote a best-selling book This Is Not A Test: A New Narrative on Race, Class, and Education , was the “first” or “only” in a bunch of other places, jumpstarted #EduColor (the name of the movement and the organization), went to the White House and Gracie Mansion on multiple occasions and the United Nations as an invited guest, helped finalize and invested in a Syracuse University scholarship for Latinx students, and either wrote or appeared in most major news publications including The New York Times, ESSENCE, CNN, and The Atlantic. I became a father and husband, got my driver’s lic...

The Center for American Progress in collaboration with Education Reform Now invited me and a host of other citizens with opinions on education to speak about education and racial equity . I’m honored and thankful they asked me to represent current classroom teachers as so few of us – if any – get opportunities to inform policy and practice on a regular basis. Below are notes that turned into my opening remarks for the panel. The conference’s theme this year centered on the 400th anniversary of the first person enslaved arriving in the colony of Jamestown, VA. Good morning, class. My name is Jose Luis Vilson, math teacher in Washington Heights, New York City, and this is my fifteenth year teaching students math at IS 52. In addition to writing extensively on these issues extensively, including the book This Is Not A Test: A New Narrative on Race, Class, and Education, executive director and co-founder of EduColor, I’m also a father to a second grader who also attends public schools. ...