I have attended commencements of all kinds throughout my career, and I can tell you that some of the best are in prisons.
Over and over, I have spoken at these commencements with incarcerated men and women who acknowledge the awful choices or stupid mistakes they made, the strangers or loved ones they hurt, yet emerge from prison renewed through higher education. While 95 percent of the people incarcerated will come home one day, they often return to the same cycles that led them to prison in the first place. Through college coursework, they are able to reflect on their past, develop a clearer vision for their future and gain the skills to contribute to their families and communities.
One student told me that pursuing college while incarcerated was the first time he had moral and academic credibility with his family. The potential for higher education in prison to change lives is the reason that I worked to expand these programs when I was the U.S. secretary of education and president of a national education civil rights organization, and do so now as chancellor of the State University of New York.
I believe so deeply in the transformative power of education because teachers saved my life.
When I was 8 years old, in October of 1983, my mother died suddenly from a heart attack. It was indescribably devastating. I then lived alone with my father, who was struggling with Alzheimer’s until he died when I was 12. During those years with my father, no one outside our home knew he was sick, and I didn’t know why he acted the way he did.
Some nights he would talk to me; some nights he wouldn’t say a word. Other nights he would be sad or angry, or even violent. Home was scary and unstable, but I was blessed to have New York City public schoolteachers who made school a place that was safe, nurturing, academically rigorous and engaging.
If not for Allan Osterweil, my teacher in fourth, fifth and sixth grade at P.S. 276 in Canarsie, Brooklyn, I would be in prison or dead. Amid the darkness of my home life, Mr. Osterweil gave me a sense of hope and purpose. In his classroom, we read The New York Times every day. We learned the capital and leader of every country in the world. We did productions of Shakespeare and Lewis Carroll.
The language of both plays was incredibly difficult, but the joy of learning our roles and staging the productions helped us not only to enlarge our vocabularies and hone our public speaking skills, but also to fall in love with the arts. Field trips to the American Museum of Natural History, the ballet at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden adjacent to Prospect Park exposed us to a world beyond our own.
But what made Mr. Osterweil’s classroom magical wasn’t just the content, it was also the relationships. He was genuinely curious about what 8- and 9-year-olds had to say about the Cold War or famine in Africa and engaged us in serious conversations, asking probing questions, listening carefully. He brought in fantastically elaborate seashells he had collected with his wife on beaches around the world because he wanted to help us appreciate the beauty of nature and to share his passions with us.
It was very unusual in the New York City schools of the time for a teacher to stay with a single class for multiple years, but Mr. Osterweil’s decision to “loop” with us helped deepen our bonds. When I didn’t feel love or security at home, I found them in Mr. Osterweil’s classroom: It was a place I could be a kid, full of joy and wonder, when I couldn’t be a kid at home.
After my father died, I moved around between schools and family members. Thanks to great teachers, I always found solace in my schoolwork. They would help me find an escape through a novel, push me to make my way through a seemingly impossible math problem or captivate my curiosity with a pig dissection or a debate about American foreign policy in the Caribbean and Central America. And more than that, they were the adults who provided stability, the source of encouragement and reassurance that things might be OK.
Even with all that support, I struggled as a teenager, as do many students who have experienced trauma, oscillating between intense sadness and seething anger. I got in so much trouble that I was kicked out of high school. It would have been easy for others to have looked at me — a Black and Latino young man with a family in crisis and no respect for authority — and given up, but I was lucky that teachers and a school counselor were willing to give me a second chance. In fact, I benefited from much the same kind of second chance prison higher education programs seek to offer: the classroom as a place of rebirth.
If not for the role teachers played in my life, I would never have become a teacher, a principal or a member of President Barack Obama’s cabinet. Teachers had more faith in me than I had in myself; they changed my trajectory. But my story is not unique.
From our earliest days as a country, America has believed in public education as a vehicle for upward mobility. From the one-room schoolhouses of 18th century New England to the ambitious vision for public higher education in Lincoln’s Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862, from Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 to President George W. Bush and Senator Ted Kennedy’s bipartisan No Child Left Behind law, America has sought with each successive generation to expand the circle of educational opportunity. The poor student, the immigrant, the first-generation college student, the veteran or the single mother working her way through community college: We have tried to make space for them all, because we know access to education will enrich their lives, expand our economy and strengthen our democracy.
Yet now the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency are seeking to abandon education as a national imperative. Whether it is purging half of the staff at the U.S. Department of Education, threatening to eliminate the Head Start early childhood education program, telling teachers to stop teaching the hard parts of our history or slashing funding for research at our universities, the Trump administration is trying to unravel one of our greatest national achievements. This isn’t a debate about efficiency; it is a debate about what kind of country we want to live in. Should schools be improved? Of course. Are there federal education programs that haven’t worked as intended that should be redesigned or eliminated? Of course. But the Trump administration’s goal is to destroy, not to improve.
In the face of student performance stuck below where it was before the Covid pandemic began, a national crisis of chronic absenteeism, spiking depression and anxiety among kids and teens, and yawning gaps in achievement between low-income students and their more affluent peers, we ought to be having a national conversation about how we find and keep more teachers like the ones I had. We ought to be talking not about dismantling the Department of Education but about making teaching degrees free for people who commit to working in low-income urban and rural communities or in hard-to-staff subjects. We ought to be raising teacher pay and improving working conditions, ensuring that there are enough counselors, especially in schools serving neighborhoods afflicted by poverty and violence. We ought to be figuring out how to create more space for inspiring teachers who want to create new programs or school models — focused on arts, career and technical education, learning multiple languages and more — that will spark students’ passion for learning and make school a place they want to be.
After all, protecting and accelerating the transformative power of education is what’s essential — and irreplaceable — about the federal role. Without the funding for vulnerable students the federal government provides, teachers in schools serving low-income students will be laid off and enrichment programs will be eliminated. Without the Pell Grants and student loans the federal government administers, low- and middle-income students will be locked out of higher education. And without federal leadership safeguarding students’ civil rights, identifying schools that are succeeding (so their practices can be scaled) and shining a spotlight on places that are struggling (to ensure states and districts intervene), performance gaps will never close.
At a time when we desperately need leadership and innovation that values and lifts up great teaching, the Trump administration’s campaign of destruction is going to make it harder to find and keep the Mr. Osterweils of the world.
John B. King Jr. is the chancellor of the State University of New York, a former U.S. secretary of education and the author of “Teacher by Teacher: The People Who Change Our Lives.”
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