Am I The Problem Here?: A School Leader’s Reckoning with Discipline, Data, and the Patterns We Inherit

Am I The Problem Here? is a leadership reckoning told from inside the discipline office, where “fairness” is often measured in spreadsheets and silence. Dr. Dwight David Reynolds II writes as a practitioner, not a theorist. He has been the teacher, the dean, the disciplinarian, the administrator, and by his own admission, “the problem and the solution in the same day.”Beginning with a blunt success story, a school that reduced out-of-school suspensions from 315 to a fraction of that total, the book follows what happened after the applause: the hallways still carried the same energy, the same conflicts resurfaced, and the “numbers changed; the temperature didn’t.”Through scene-based chapters and sharp interludes, Reynolds examines how schools learn to perform fairness through policy, procedures, and data, while quietly reproducing the same patterns through habit, comfort, and inherited instincts. He interrogates the leadership reflex to reach for “proof” instead of proximity, to protect ourselves with compliance, and to call quiet “progress.”This is not a framework or a guidebook. It is a mirror, asking one persistent question: if outcomes look better but people do not feel better, what exactly did we fix and what did we avoid facing? Read more