Journal of a Black Teacher

  The future will not be determined by whether artificial intelligence becomes more powerful. It will be determined by whether Black people remain capable of recognizing one another in a world increasingly filled with digital noise. By Don Allen I live in St. Paul, Minnesota, a state that seems determined to find itself in the national headlines every week for one reason or another. Every day brings another controversy, another scandal, another public embarrassment, or another issue that many people simply do not want to discuss honestly. Take government accountability. When billions of taxpayer dollars disappear through fraud or mismanagement, my concern is not merely with the individuals who exploited the system. My concern is with the people sitting behind government desks who approved the funding, failed to monitor it, and ignored the warning signs. Accountability does not begin with the thief. It begins with the gatekeeper. But that is a discussion for another day. What c...

By Don Allen, Ed.S., M. A. Ed., MAT (ABD) The NAACP’s “Out of Bounds” campaign may be one of the most politically theatrical - and intellectually incomplete activist campaigns launched in recent years. Not because voting rights are unimportant. They are critically important. Not because racial gerrymandering is fake. It is real. But because the NAACP decided to weaponize Black college athletes as symbolic political leverage while conveniently skipping over every adult inside the educational ecosystem who actually understands how these institutions function. Where were the teachers? Where were the professors? Where were the assistant coaches? Where were the academic advisors? Where were the trainers, tutors, custodians, support staff, and campus employees? Where were the Black faculty unions? Where were the Black studies departments? Where were the longtime HBCU scholars? Where were the actual educational practitioners? Instead, the NAACP appears to have built ...

  By Don Allen, Ed.S., M.A.Ed., MAT Something has gone terribly wrong in Minneapolis Public Schools, and we can no longer afford to keep pretending that everything is fine. For decades, the Minneapolis Public School (MPS) system has been in a state of institutional collapse, a crisis unfolding in plain sight. Despite countless initiatives and promises of reform, the achievement gaps for Black children continue to widen, and a significant majority are not acquiring basic literacy and numeracy skills. This is not merely a systemic failure; it is, as I have argued, the operation of a "social cabal" that actively harms learning, prioritizing bureaucratic self-preservation and political expediency over the educational well-being of our most vulnerable students. The current state of affairs is masked by a veneer of public-relations spin and superficial metrics such as graduation rates, which conveniently obscure the deeper reality of student disengagement and inadequate learning ou...

By Don Allen, Journal Of A Black Teacher (2026) Let me say it plainly: people aren’t reading anymore. They’re reacting. They’re scrolling. They’re believing whatever shows up between a swipe and a double-tap. And the feed, cold, calculated, algorithmically precise, is winning. I was going to say, "Knowledge is power." But in the past decade or so, we’ve learned to rely more on visibility to convey power. The perceived authenticity of information is sometimes as important as its actual veracity, and indeed, its mere publication. Ultimately, if something is seen, it becomes more credible than if it hasn’t been revealed at all. And in today’s information era, an imaginative graphic or creative clip is all you need to give that information the visibility it deserves to be seen and believed. As a Black American man, I see this trend having particularly pernicious effects in the Black Community. It’s not that Black People are unintelligent or uninterested in reading. The problem is...

  Socialization . The Internet . 

“When people talk about how education's getting better, they use words like 'growth' and 'progress.' They say things like ‘ student engagement ’ and ‘ pathways to success ,’ and let's not forget, ‘ credit recovery ,’ as if to say something was ‘lost’ in need to be rediscovered. These words sound good. Sometimes they are just used to avoid talking about whether students are really learning.” By Don Allen, Ed.S., M.A.Ed. MAT When people talk about education these days, they often throw around a lot of numbers. Attendance and graduation rates are usually the things they mention. You see these numbers at meetings in school newsletters and even on signs that say a school district is doing a great job with your child. The truth is, attendance and graduation rates do not really show how much a student is learning. Many schools think that if students show up and graduate, they are doing their job. They do not really think about what students can actually do after they...