TC Today - Teachers College Columbia University
TC Today - Teachers College Columbia University
TC Today - Teachers College Columbia University
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Playing It Forward<br />
Mary Skipper believes schools need to work together to succeed.<br />
She has a fan in the White House<br />
When President Obama visited TechBoston<br />
Academy this past March, he singled out<br />
founding Principal Mary Skipper for y<br />
special praise.<br />
Speaking to an audience of teachers, students and<br />
visiting dignitaries, Obama called the Academy, a highachieving<br />
school in one of Boston’s poorest neighborhoods,<br />
“a model for what’s happening all across the country,” and<br />
added, “at the helm is Mary Skipper, who is doing unbelievable<br />
work. Love ya, Skip!”<br />
It was a moment that any school leader would have<br />
savored. But for Skipper, a doctoral student in <strong>TC</strong>’s Urban<br />
Education Leaders Program, the day’s real highlight came<br />
later, when Obama cited TechBoston as an antidote to the<br />
nation’s educational inequities. “The motto of this school is,<br />
‘We rise and fall together,’” the President said. “Well, that is<br />
true of America as well.”<br />
“That really made my day,” Skipper, a petite, blondhaired<br />
woman of 43, said afterward. “It’s going to be the<br />
opening line of my dissertation.”<br />
The motto of this school is,<br />
‘We all rise and fall together.’<br />
Well, that is true of America y<br />
as well.<br />
~ President barack obama<br />
“Working together” may sound corny or superficial, but<br />
in Skipper’s hands, it’s a sophisticated entrepreneurial strategy<br />
that may indeed represent the best hope for improving<br />
the nation’s educational system in an increasingly cashstrapped<br />
era. The basic idea: schools too often function<br />
as isolated units striving only for their own success. They<br />
end up competing against one another for scarce resources<br />
instead of looking for ways to share in-house expertise—<br />
which costs districts money and penalizes students.<br />
The antidote, which Skipper is detailing in her dissertation,<br />
is a systems-focused approach to leadership in urban<br />
school districts, centering on promoting collaborations<br />
between high-achieving schools and under-performing ones.<br />
“In Europe there’s a real framework for working that<br />
way,” says Skipper, who attended a conference in China in<br />
2006 with 100 other principals from around the world, led<br />
by David Hopkins, an architect of the United Kingdom’s<br />
widely admired systems approach. “But in the U.S. it’s kind<br />
of a fresh concept.”<br />
But not totally unheard of. In 1998, Skipper and a colleague,<br />
Felicia Vargas, built a special unit within the Boston<br />
public school system that was dedicated to introducing<br />
advanced technology courses to schools across the city.<br />
Called simply “Tech Boston”—as distinct from “TechBoston<br />
Academy,” the school—it offered high school students<br />
professional-level certification in software programs such as<br />
Microsoft Office, Adobe Products and Cisco Networking.<br />
On the most immediate level, that enabled teenagers to<br />
command office wages of $25 per hour and up—but they<br />
weren’t just learning secretarial skills.<br />
“We all think we know Microsoft Office, but most of<br />
us know about a tenth of what the program can really do,”<br />
Skipper says. “Professional certification puts you in a whole<br />
different league.”<br />
Students learned graphic and Web design, certified<br />
network administrator skills and computer programming<br />
10 T C T O D A Y l s p r i n g 2 0 1 1<br />
photograph by lisa farmer