From Turnaround to Tech Leadership: Why School Leaders Must Lead the AI Shift
By Uche L. Njoku, EdM
Principal, Author of AI-Enhanced Leadership, Founder of The AI Starter Lab
Presented at Synergy in the City | May 30, 2025
When I was first invited to speak at Synergy in the City: Using AI to Empower Your Educational Leadership Journey, I didn’t know how deeply personal the conversation would get. This wasn’t just another panel or tech showcase. It was an evening of educators, disruptors, and dreamers gathering to ask: How do we lead into the unknown with clarity and courage, especially when the future is arriving faster than we can catch our breath?
I stood in front of that room of leaders in New York City not just as a principal from the South Bronx, but as a child of immigrants, a student once labeled with special needs, a turnaround leader who once walked away from the profession, and now, a passionate advocate for AI-enhanced school leadership.
From a Dirt Road in Nigeria to the South Bronx
I was born in northern Nigeria, on a dirt road in a town many people may never hear of. My family immigrated to Los Angeles in the 1980s, but like many immigrant stories, ours was not smooth. We returned to Nigeria. Came back again. I eventually made it through high school in Inglewood and earned a scholarship to the University of Rochester. There, I abandoned biomedical engineering for film and media studies, a move that left my father speechless. Literally.
And yet, it was that exact decision that led me to education. When I moved to the Bronx 20 years ago as a New York City Teaching Fellow, I thought I was just passing through. I was wrong.
Three Schools, Three Turnarounds, One Obsession with Innovation
My career has taken me from MS 318 in District 12, to John Jay in Brooklyn, and now to MS 224 in District 7, the lowest-performing middle school in the South Bronx when I arrived in 2023. The school had 5% math proficiency, high staff turnover, and was already on the closure list.
There were fights on my first day, and by week two, a teacher walked into another teacher’s class and squared up. It was chaos.
But I saw something else: possibility. I saw students hungry for relevance. I saw staff worn down by a lack of clarity. I saw a system on the edge of collapse, yes, but also on the edge of transformation.
The Secret Weapon: ChatGPT and My AI Obsession
Months before I stepped foot into MS 224, I started experimenting with ChatGPT. I had been feeding it data, asking it questions, seeing what it could do. So when I officially became principal, I asked my superintendent, Dr. Roberto Padilla, for every piece of data he could share with me, attendance, IEPs, suspension records, you name it.
I digitized it, fed it into ChatGPT, and asked:
“Act as the greatest school consultant on Earth. What are my options?”
It gave me clarity. It helped me see root causes, not just symptoms. It generated a 30, 60, 90, and 120-day turnaround plan that I customized with my own leadership style. I didn’t outsource thinking, I enhanced it.
Since then, I’ve had thousands of AI conversations. I’ve built full school plans, created feedback loops, even generated summaries of data dashboards and synthesized school-wide observations. All of this helped me get my team aligned. It’s helped me lead without burning out.
But Let’s Be Clear, AI Is Not a Gimmick
We’ve all seen what happens when innovation becomes buzzword soup. But what I’ve learned is this: AI isn’t here to replace us. It’s here to refocus us.
I use AI to:
Plan school-wide strategy
Support my staff in real time
Translate documents for families in seconds
Generate newsletters and community messages
And most importantly, help students and teachers become confident, creative thinkers
Our students now podcast and interview high-profile guests like Dr. Miesha Ross-Porter and Neil deGrasse Tyson, and use AI to shape scripts and questions. Our teachers use it to differentiate instruction and reduce prep fatigue. Our leadership team uses it to refine school culture and track progress on complex initiatives.
We Are Not Experts, We Are Architects
I told the room at Synergy in the City, and I’ll tell you now, I am not an expert in artificial intelligence. I am an addict. A prompt engineer. A school leader obsessed with the future, and with making sure that our Black and Brown students are not left out of the AI revolution.
This technology has been around since the 1950s, but only now is it accessible to all of us. And if we, as school leaders, don’t step up and lead with it, we will be complicit in the next widening of the equity gap.
Let’s Stop Saying 21st-Century Skills
That phrase is dead. Our job is not to prepare students for the 21st century, we are already two decades in. Our job is to prototype the future with them, alongside them. To create systems that are agile, just, human, and yes, technologically fluent.
So here’s my challenge to every educator reading this:
Stop fearing AI
Start experimenting with it
Model it for your staff and students
Demand equity through representation, not just access
And most importantly, lead boldly, because the future will not wait
Want to start your journey? Join me in the AI Starter Lab.
Registration is open now at: www.njokucoaching.com
Spots are limited to 25 participants for our summer cohort.
Keywords:
AI in education, ChatGPT for schools, turnaround leadership, instructional innovation, prompt engineering, urban education, equity in tech, school transformation, digital leadership, principal leadership, educational futurist, AI-enhanced leadership, NYSAWA, NYSALAS, student voice, South Bronx schools
