– Fall 2025 Grad Spotlight | Dr. Deartis Barber III –
By the time you read this, I’ll have “Dr.” in front of my name.
That still feels a little surreal to say.
Earning my EdD in Leadership and Policy Studies from the University of Memphis is something I dreamed about for a long time. But if I’m honest, that dream didn’t always feel like a beautiful, peaceful thing. Sometimes it felt nightmarish.
I don’t mean that in some dramatic, external way. The nightmare was internal. It was me versus the lesser version of myself — the one that procrastinates, that gets overwhelmed, that tells me, “You can do it tomorrow.”
To finish this degree, I had to confront that version of me every single week. I had to find balance. I had to work when I didn’t feel like working, write when it would’ve been easier to scroll my phone, dig into data and scholarship when my body said, “You’re tired, you’ve done enough today.”
When we dream, we usually picture the success: the cap, the gown, the handshake, the title. We don’t always picture the nights of doubt, the internal arguments, the moments we want to walk away. For me, this doctorate is all of that wrapped into one — both the dream and the nightmare, ending with me waking up and realizing: I made it through.
And yet, I don’t feel like this is a final destination.
They call it a “terminal degree,” but to me, this is not the end. It’s the end of chapter five and the beginning of chapter six. I wrote five chapters for my dissertation.
Now it’s time to write the chapter that lives out what I learned through how I lead, how I fight for equity and how I serve children and families in my community.
New Chicago, McDonald’s at Home, and a Strict, Loving Mom
I grew up in North Memphis, in a community called New Chicago. As a kid in the late ’70s and ’80s, I didn’t know we were poor. That realization came later.
Back then, what I knew was this: I never missed a meal, and I knew exactly where my mama was going to be every night.
I might not have gotten McDonald’s as often as I wanted, but I got “McDonald’s at home” — those square pieces of bread and French fries cut from real potatoes that never quite looked like they did in the commercials.
One of my earliest memories is from Sunday mornings before church. I’d be in the bedroom with my mom, Sonja Hall Barber (later Sanes), surrounded by purses spread out on the floor. To me, it felt like a game:
“Mom, I found a quarter!”
“Look, I found a dollar!”
What we were really doing was searching for enough money for Sunday school and the offering plate. As a child, I just thought we were playing. As an adult, I realized my mother was doing the best she could as a single parent, modeling excellence even when resources were scarce.
My grandmother was the one obsessed with the house being spotless and beds being made. My mother had a different focus: learning. I didn’t have to make my bed every morning, but I did have to make sure my homework was done. If I watched a sitcom, I had to write a summary of it afterward. My mom was a CLUE (Creative Learning in a Unique Environment) English teacher for gifted kids, and from fifth through ninth grade, I basically did CLUE English at home whether I wanted to or not.
That’s where my love of words and performance began.
I always loved music, and in seventh grade I formally joined the band. That led me to Overton High School, a creative and performing arts school here in Memphis. I played trombone and piano, but more than that, I learned how to perform. Things like how to stand in front of people, how to communicate with my voice and my body, and how to move an audience.
I didn’t know it at the time, but those years in band and the arts program were training me for the proverbial classroom stage I stand on now at a middle school in Frayser.
Running From My Calling, Then Running Toward It
If you had met me in 1987, you wouldn’t have heard me say, “I want to be a principal.”
That was the era of the Buppy — the Black yuppie. I wanted the briefcase, the suit, the $50,000-a-year job right out of college, which was serious money in ’87.
I went into business administration. I got into a program called Inroads and landed an internship with Kroger. While the minimum wage was $3.35 an hour, I was making $8.50, 40 hours a week in the summer, and that wage went up each year. For a young man from New Chicago, I felt like I had arrived.
The problem was, I didn’t love it. It wasn’t my purpose. It wasn’t filling my cup.
I bounced around some. I went to University of Tennessee, Martin. I came back to Memphis State (before it became the University of Memphis) and found myself overwhelmed walking into economics lectures with 300 students at 8 a.m.
I was not ready. I wasn’t developed or mature enough yet to handle that environment.
I did one semester as a business major at LeMoyne-Owen, and then that quiet internal voice started talking: “Deartis, what job are you really preparing for? Is this really you?”
I took a practicum course in education that sent me into an elementary school to observe and help. I got to interact with children. The teacher let me do a little mini lesson. And just like that, I was hooked.
I wasn’t playing trombone anymore, but I was back on stage. I was constructing words and activities that captured students’ attention; that made them laugh and think and learn. They thought they were just playing, but I knew they were learning. My brain lit up with dopamine at the realization:
I can get paid to do this.
That’s how I found my calling as an educator.
Today, when I say I’m a servant leader, here’s what I mean in simple terms: I don’t see my work as something I have to do. I see it as something I get to do. I get to serve children well. In the role of a principal, I get to influence how other adults serve children, too.
I know not every parent I encounter is a great parent. But I also know this. Even the parents who struggle want the best for their children, even if they don’t yet know how to advocate for it. My role is to stand in the gap for their desires, for their child’s present learning and future life. The three years my students spend in middle school help set up the next four years of high school, and those seven years together help shape the next forty of their lives.
That’s the weight of this work. That’s why I lean into it.
Turning Around a School and Turning Into a Better Man
When I agreed to become principal at Grandview Heights Middle School in Frayser, a lot of people thought I’d lost my mind.
At the time, Grandview was the lowest-performing middle school in Tennessee. My mentor, Dr. Sharon Griffin — the principal who first gave me a chance as an assistant principal — was leading a cadre of schools called the iZone, and Grandview was one of them. She said, “Deartis, I need you to go to Grandview.”
I told her, “If I go to Grandview, I’ve got to take a gang with me.”
She let me bring a team of people I’d worked with at multiple schools over more than a decade. Folks still joke that I should be a car salesman because of how I recruit people to come with me. To me, I wasn’t selling a lemon; I was promoting a possibility.
The line that hooked me was simple: “No school in Frayser has been turned around yet.”
That’s all I needed to hear. Challenge accepted.
Those first months at Grandview were tough. The students felt like, This is our school. You’re just more adults passing through. It became a battle of wills about what kind of school we were going to be.
We eventually earned a Level 5 designation from the state. People said the school had been “turned around.” Some wondered why I didn’t leave, why I didn’t cash in that success and go somewhere easier.
The answer is simple: if I understand the assignment and commit to the mission, then I’m a soldier. I don’t leave just because the first good report comes in. I stay until we either truly reach the destination or I’m relieved of duty.
I explain it like this: if you and I leave Memphis intending to go to Jackson, Miss., and we get on I-55, but four hours later we’re in St. Louis — what happened? We were on the right interstate, going the wrong direction.
When Grandview came off the priority list, that was us getting off the exit and turning around. It didn’t mean we were at our destination. It just meant now we were finally heading the right way.
Along the way, there’ve been moments that remind me why I do this and why my dissertation had to confront the injustice of an accountability system “blind to inequities.”
I think about the mother during COVID who stopped her car to tell me her daughter had tested positive but her younger son was inside eating breakfast. I advised her (based on the guidance we had) to take him home too, just to be safe. A week later, that mother passed from COVID. The next week, both of those children were back in school.
I think about great-grandmothers trying to raise three children on their own. I think about teachers burning out from the weight of students arriving two, three, four grade levels behind. And I think about the way we “punish” schools in poor Black and brown communities while rewarding boutique schools that only accept students already in the 90th percentile.
Those realities shaped my dissertation: “The Interrogation of an Accountability System Blind to Inequities.” It lets me take the work I live every day and use data and scholarship to speak truth to systems that rarely account for zip codes and opportunity gaps.
This journey has also reshaped me as a father. I had three sons by the time I was twenty. I was still a kid myself, trying to work, trying to go to school, trying to grow up. I provided what the court said I needed to provide, but fatherhood is more than a payment.
Years later, when my youngest son, Dylan, was born, I was more stable, more mature and more present. He’s the only one who’s lived under my roof from birth until now. With him, I’ve had the chance to be a better dad, and I thank God for that second opportunity.
When I talk to my students, I often use a time machine exercise: “Ten years from now, what would your 24-year-old self tell your 14-year-old self?”
If I could go back and talk to my younger self in New Chicago, here’s what I’d say:
Every morning the Lord wakes you up, you’re given two gifts — a choice and a chance.
The choice to be better than you were yesterday. The chance to make that choice real.
Be the best version of yourself today. Make the most of it. And when the nightmare part of the dream shows up, don’t run from it. Work through it.
One day you’ll wake up and realize you’ve not only changed your own life, but you’ve also helped change the lives of thousands of other people, too.
