TC Today - Teachers College Columbia University

Playing It Forward
Mary Skipper believes schools need to work together to succeed.
She has a fan in the White House
When President Obama visited TechBoston
Academy this past March, he singled out
founding Principal Mary Skipper for y
special praise.
Speaking to an audience of teachers, students and
visiting dignitaries, Obama called the Academy, a highachieving
school in one of Boston’s poorest neighborhoods,
“a model for what’s happening all across the country,” and
added, “at the helm is Mary Skipper, who is doing unbelievable
work. Love ya, Skip!”
It was a moment that any school leader would have
savored. But for Skipper, a doctoral student in TC’s Urban
Education Leaders Program, the day’s real highlight came
later, when Obama cited TechBoston as an antidote to the
nation’s educational inequities. “The motto of this school is,
‘We rise and fall together,’” the President said. “Well, that is
true of America as well.”
“That really made my day,” Skipper, a petite, blondhaired
woman of 43, said afterward. “It’s going to be the
opening line of my dissertation.”
The motto of this school is,
‘We all rise and fall together.’
Well, that is true of America y
as well.
~ President barack obama
“Working together” may sound corny or superficial, but
in Skipper’s hands, it’s a sophisticated entrepreneurial strategy
that may indeed represent the best hope for improving
the nation’s educational system in an increasingly cashstrapped
era. The basic idea: schools too often function
as isolated units striving only for their own success. They
end up competing against one another for scarce resources
instead of looking for ways to share in-house expertise—
which costs districts money and penalizes students.
The antidote, which Skipper is detailing in her dissertation,
is a systems-focused approach to leadership in urban
school districts, centering on promoting collaborations
between high-achieving schools and under-performing ones.
“In Europe there’s a real framework for working that
way,” says Skipper, who attended a conference in China in
2006 with 100 other principals from around the world, led
by David Hopkins, an architect of the United Kingdom’s
widely admired systems approach. “But in the U.S. it’s kind
of a fresh concept.”
But not totally unheard of. In 1998, Skipper and a colleague,
Felicia Vargas, built a special unit within the Boston
public school system that was dedicated to introducing
advanced technology courses to schools across the city.
Called simply “Tech Boston”—as distinct from “TechBoston
Academy,” the school—it offered high school students
professional-level certification in software programs such as
Microsoft Office, Adobe Products and Cisco Networking.
On the most immediate level, that enabled teenagers to
command office wages of $25 per hour and up—but they
weren’t just learning secretarial skills.
“We all think we know Microsoft Office, but most of
us know about a tenth of what the program can really do,”
Skipper says. “Professional certification puts you in a whole
different league.”
Students learned graphic and Web design, certified
network administrator skills and computer programming
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photograph by lisa farmer