Alumnus Channels Celebrity Cachet Into Teaching High School History
Nicholas Ferroni has been a featured guest on MSNBC, the TODAY Show, collaborates often with The View and has gone viral for a classroom lesson
Nicholas Ferroni, once hailed as the “Sexiest Teacher Alive” by People magazine, is a fixture on ABC’s The View, a nationally recognized activist and education influencer who regularly rubs elbows with the glitterati.
It’d be easy for the Rutgers alumnus to cash in on his good looks and celebrity status. He’s received offers to trade his classroom at Union High School, where he’s taught history and cultural studies for 22 years, for more prominent, higher-paying roles.
Instead, Ferroni chooses to channel all his cachet into his passion: making a difference in the lives of students from his hometown and championing education reform.
“This town, this school, my teachers and coaches are the reason I am the person I am. I feel there is no greater thing you can do than to invest in the community that invested in you,” said the former Union High School (Union County) student and quarterback. “It wouldn’t be selfish to take a more lucrative opportunity, but it would be self-serving, and most educators are not self-serving people.”
The 2002 Livingston College graduate, who majored in history and minored in English, had a brief stint as an actor after Rutgers, appearing on the daytime soap All My Children. But the experience left Ferroni feeling “unfulfilled.” He decided to return to his old high school as a substitute and football coach while figuring out his next career more, and within a year took the alternate route to become a teacher.
“I thought about quitting every week my first year,” he said. “But once you get to the summer, you think about how much you love it and forget about the lack of resources and everything that goes with being an educator.”
Ferroni engages his students through a unique blend of storytelling, immersive experiences and the occasional celebrity substitute – from Z100 DJs to actor Paul Rudd. His goal is to encourage his diverse student body to think deeply about the world around them. That’s what some of the most influential educators in Ferroni’s life did for him, including his now- retired Rutgers professor John Chambers. Chambers’ instruction, he said, as well as courses he took with other professors on African American history and women’s history still shape the way Ferroni teaches today.
“His classes were an epiphany. My mind was blown,” he said. “I used to think history was very black and white. It’s not. What happened depends on who controls the narrative. Learning about the oppression and disenfranchisement of marginalized groups and women made me much more empathetic and understanding of the current society we live in.”
Ferroni can pinpoint the moment that sparked his interest in becoming a history teacher: interviewing WWII veterans, including alumnus Dick Hale, for the Rutgers Oral History Project.
“Dates and wars and battles are important, but so is understanding the people behind them,” he said. “Hearing Dick Hale’s story, meeting him, spending time with him and his wife in Edison, it made me realize history is the most interesting subject in the world if you tell it the right way.”
Ferroni drew on those lessons he learned at Rutgers when developing “Teach the Truth,” a campaign to incorporate more underrepresented groups in high school history lessons. He was included in the book "100 Making a Difference" for ensuring his students learn about pivotal moments in American history that were not covered back when he sat in their desks – from the Tulsa Massacre to the Stonewall Riots to the bicycle’s role in women’s independence.
“Growing up I thought white, straight, Christian men did everything, and women and minorities were a footnote,” he said. “Education is the ultimate equalizer.”
That sentiment is the throughline intersecting all Ferroni’s award-winning, headline-grabbing moments as an educator, including launching Union High School’s Gay Straight Alliance and Feminist Club in the mid-2000s.
“As a straight white male, my biggest asset, the best thing I can do, is to use my privilege to help bring awareness,” he said of his decision to help create and oversee safe spaces for these student groups.
The move sparked cultural shifts at the school, earning him an “Upstander Award” from the Human Rights Campaign in 2017 and the “Champion of Change” award from the United Nations’ Women’s Division in 2018. But it was Ferroni’s 2016 interactive lesson on gender inequality in Congress that went viral and made him a media darling.
To help his students understand the imbalance of power in Congress, where women were outnumbered by their male peers 27% to 73%, Ferroni flipped the script on a group of students. Creating a majority female “Class Congress,” he asked the group to vote on whether to implement several new school policies – all of which were decidedly anti-male. Not surprisingly, the majority female class overwhelmingly supported these initiatives, and male students cried foul within minutes of “losing power.”
Ferroni’s TikTok reel on the teachable moment racked up nearly a quarter million views, including The View’s Whoopie Goldberg, who hailed it as “the best social experiment ever.” It led to his first appearance of many on the show, giving him the chance to share his expertise and stump for education reforms in front of a national audience. It also gave the national media a chance to swoon over the chiseled teacher.
Men’s Fitness featured him alongside actors Bradley Cooper and Joel McHale as one of the 25 fittest men in the world in 2011. Ferroni used the opportunity to give one of his former students – a budding photographer – experience shooting his photos for the magazine. That exposure led to People’s request to include him in their 2014 “Sexiest” edition as the “Sexiest Teacher Alive.”
At first, Ferroni turned the magazine down.
“I felt like it devalues everything you work for to just be a pretty face. I didn’t want it to affect how my students and families view me,” said Ferroni, who is not married but has a longtime girlfriend. “Plus, if I were a female teacher, I would have been fired. That inequity isn’t lost on me.”
But after talking it through with his mom, some colleagues and an editor at People, Ferroni, realized the sexy shots would grab a lot of eyeballs – and hopefully ears willing to listen to his ideas about education.
It worked. He has been a featured guest on MSNBC, the TODAY show, collaborates often with The View and is working on a reoccurring segment with CBS Sunday Morning, where he discusses everything from his “Truth in Teaching” tactics to tips on how to solve the teacher shortage. Ferroni also puts his social media megaphone (233.8K followers on TikTok; 86.3K on Instagram) to frequent use, advocating for the Pay Teachers Act, a bill to ensure that teachers are paid a livable and competitive salary throughout their career and celebrating the many unsung and underpaid heroes in his profession.
“I’m not the best teacher in this school or state or this country. All I meet are amazing individuals giving their hearts, souls, knowledge and more to amazing schools,” he said. “The best way to give back to them is to makes sure their issues and obstacles are brought to society. Part of my job is sharing these stories of amazing educators.”
