Written by Dr. Rahesha Amon

Black History Month is often treated like a celebration, reflected in posters, playlists, and a few well‑chosen quotes. For me, it is something different. It’s a moment to honor the wisdom passed down through generations of Black educators who taught in church basements, overcrowded classrooms, and underfunded schools. It’s making space to recognize those who have always seen education as protection and a possibility for our children, even when the law or budget said otherwise. It’s about keeping the main thing, the main thing.

I lead as a Black woman, a fourth-generation New Yorker, a mother, and a lifelong educator. I can’t (and won’t) leave my identity at the door. The leader I am today has been shaped by my community and by the educators who came before me.

So what does it mean to carry their wisdom forward?

The Village

My leadership story starts before I had a degree or title. 

When I was four, my mother survived a horrific car accident. She spent over a year in the hospital, burned and partially paralyzed, relearning how to live. 

She was a single mother and, later, a career educator. Our living room and kitchen were full of my mother’s community of educators who understood what it meant to carry other people’s children in their hearts. 

And the men in my family, mostly entrepreneurs, taught me about disciplined risk-taking: doing your homework, building safety nets, learning from mistakes, and being willing to act when standing still would cost more.

Long before I had language for it, I witnessed a distinctly Black tradition of education at work: one built on steady care and informed risk. With decisions grounded in context, community, and a clear understanding of the possible consequences.

It looked like people creating informal safety nets for children and for one another, making choices no job description ever required, and taking responsibility for decisions the system was unwilling to carry, while leaning on community to make that responsibility sustainable.

What I saw in our home wasn’t new. It echoed in freedom schools and segregated classrooms that functioned as community lifelines when public systems excluded, failed, and, at times, actively harmed Black communities.

From that early season of my life, two truths stitched themselves into me:

• You do not do hard things alone. My mother built a village—doctors, neighbors, colleagues, friends—and she leaned on it without apology. Shared risk is how people survive challenges that are too heavy to carry alone.
• The work is heavy, and you do it anyway. Watching her fight to walk, work, and parent again taught me that leadership is not glamorous. It is the daily discipline of choosing persistence, adaptation, and care, even when the risk of failure is real.

Those lessons now shape how I define what makes a school work.

For me, a ‘good’ school is one where adults take calculated risks together. Where the risks are grounded in preparation, shared responsibility, and an unwavering focus on children.

Centering Children in a System that Often Doesn’t

In many of the communities City Teaching Alliance serves, students live with economic instability that shows up long before a test score ever does. Educators see it in tired faces, in late arrivals, in behavior shaped by an ecosystem outside of their control. 

When those students walk into a classroom, they are not encountering an abstract “system.” They are meeting us: individual adults who choose to see the whole child just as they are, every single day. 

The stakes are different here; we are not manufacturing cars or producing the next trendy piece of clothing. Every decision we make affects somebody’s child—someone’s entire world. 

This is why education is a compassion industry. The work asks adults to hold academic rigor, emotional care, and political reality simultaneously and consistently, in front of children who are watching closely.

For Black educators in particular, this has never been optional. From the days when it was illegal to teach enslaved people to read, through the era of “separate but equal,” Black educators have always been required to carry more. To teach while navigating systems that excluded our children, and to provide care in spaces shaped by inequity.

Doing that work demanded more than skill. It required a deep awareness of self—of power, of limits, and of impact—because in classrooms and communities under pressure, adults set the tone. When adults are not okay, children pay the price, and Black communities have always understood that cost.

My pastor, the late Reverend Dr. Calvic O. Butts, often reminds me: ‘Get a checkup from the neck up.’ In a compassion industry, caring for our mental health and well-being is our responsibility to the children and communities we serve. I’m constantly challenging myself to share this sentiment, not simply as a reminder, but as an act of love.

What I’m Choosing to Carry Forward

I came to leadership through lived experience and disciplined study, molded by community wisdom and years of practice in classrooms and institutions. 

Now, as the CEO of City Teaching Alliance, I sit in different rooms, but my questions stay the same. How are children experiencing the decisions we make? How are educators experiencing them? Who is carrying the weight, and who is allowed to look away?

The world around us will keep shifting. Politics, leadership, and initiatives will always change. 

What matters is whether educators are supported in ways that allow them to carry responsibility together—clearly, consistently, and with children at the center—through practices and supports that help them stay and thrive.

Keeping the main thing, the main thing. 

This is the throughline I see across generations: adaptive leadership rooted in community, clear-eyed about risk and inequity, committed to seeing things through; and, above all, remembering the impact you have on the child in front of you.

Black History Month, for me, is an invitation to organize our decisions, policies, and leadership around the wisdom that is still here. Because our children are our future. And they’re counting on us, their village, to show up.