Essays
Notes on leading under pressure, on ethnic matching and the research behind it, and on how these questions get measured.
What Your Calendar Says About Where Authority Actually Lives
You already delegated the work. Whether the authority moved with it is a question last month's calendar can answer in twenty minutes, using evidence you…
Leading a Team When You Have Lost Confidence in the People Above You
Your team already knows something is off. What stays open is what they conclude, and that part belongs to you.
The Hero Leadership Trap: Why Absorbing Chaos Destroys Teams
When a leader becomes the human shock absorber for every crisis, the organization does not speed up. It freezes.
Escalation Is Not a Confidence Problem
When capable people check with you before acting, they are reading the system accurately. It taught them to.
What Forty Years of Research Already Knows
A pre-release note on Season 3 of The Cultural Context of Knowledge. Twelve episodes, one through-line: ethnic matching, what the research has settled…
AI as the New Gatekeeper: Whose Knowledge the Model Was Built to See
A high-school junior types a question into a chatbot and gets back three confident paragraphs.
Still Searching for a Match
A note on my new article in Urban Education's 60th-anniversary issue, which returns to a question I first raised in 2009 and asks what ethnic matching…
Leadership Without Stability
Thirty years of watching institutions has taught me that what the conventional account calls stability is better understood as the temporary absence of…
Lifting as We Lead: A Preview
A preview of a forthcoming chapter on Black male deans mentoring Black male faculty — the benefits, the structural costs, and what the institution's…
Why Most Leadership Models Fail in Chaos (And What Actually Works)
Most leadership models assume stability, time, and clarity. Real leadership does not happen in stability — it happens in chaos.
Purpose That Actually Works
A purpose statement that can be recited is not the same as one that can resolve a trade-off.
Ethnic Matching Beyond the Classroom
The matching research has begun to extend from K-12 classrooms into college transitions, faculty-student mentoring, and academic leadership.
How do you actually measure belonging in a classroom? A note on methods.
The word shows up in every grant proposal and half the conference titles. Here is what the instruments actually measure, what they can't, and the one I…
The Cost of Being Indispensable
The leader who keeps everything together through personal effort is running a unit whose capability lives in one person.
Twenty Years on Ethnic Matching
A retrospective on how the ethnic-matching field has matured over two decades — from the correlational critiques of the early 2000s to the rigorous…