From a Windsor childhood and a short football career to two of Ontario’s largest school boards and a new chapter in Chicago, the educator has kept making one argument.
CHRIS SPENCE HAS SPENT nearly forty years arguing one point, and the point has not changed: a school should be judged by what it does for the students it finds hardest to reach. He made the case as a teacher in Toronto in the early 1990s, as a principal, as the director of two of Ontario’s largest public boards, and in a run of books that began in 2000. He makes it now from the Chicago area, where he has spent recent years putting the same idea to work in schools, in a mentoring program, in a literacy effort, and on film. The setting has changed. The argument has not.
Spence was born in England to Jamaican parents and moved to Canada at three, growing up in Windsor, Ontario. He took a criminology degree at Simon Fraser University and was drafted by the BC Lions in 1985. An Achilles injury ended his football career after three seasons, and he went back to school to become a teacher. A degree in education from York was followed by a master’s from the University of Toronto in 1993.
His early reputation was made as principal of a middle school in one of Toronto’s higher-needs neighborhoods. His 2002 book On Time! On Task! On a Mission! is a record of that period, and it is telling that the memorable passages are not about policy. One describes taking a struggling teenager out for fried chicken and a game of basketball because nobody else was going to. People who worked with him then describe a coach’s instinct applied to a school: high expectations, plain language, and meeting a kid at his level. Gary Crawford, a Toronto trustee when Spence was later hired to run the board, put it in three words: kids loved him.
That reputation carried him into senior leadership. He ran the public school board in Hamilton from 2004 to 2009, then took over the Toronto District School Board, the largest school system in Canada, with a budget near three billion dollars. His agenda there was built around the students the system talked about least, Black boys above all. He pressed for early literacy, for keeping students connected to school through sport and the arts, and for putting achievement data in plain view so that gaps could be named and worked on. Leading With Passion and Purpose, published in 2009, set out the thinking behind it: every student can learn, and a school that quietly gives up on some of them has failed all of them.
It is the kind of work that decides whether a fifth grader on the South Side ever writes a line of code.
The Chicago years have been quieter, and in some ways closer to the ground. Spence works as an educational consultant with NextWave STEM, a company that supplies schools with courses in drone coding, robotics, 3D printing and related fields. It is an approved vendor for Chicago Public Schools and, by its own count, has worked with more than 500 schools, libraries and community centres. Spence designs and rolls out programs a school can run without a specialist teacher on staff, with equipment, lessons and instructors included. In practice, that means the schools with the least are the ones that can use them. It is not glamorous. It is the kind of work that decides whether a fifth grader on the South Side ever writes a line of code.
Alongside that, he has kept writing and has started making films. Jail or Yale: Young, Black and Out of Options? is a 40-minute documentary he directed and produced, built on interviews with students and teachers and organized around a claim he has been making for decades: what gets called an achievement gap is an opportunity gap, and the difference matters. He has published a run of books for young readers, among them The Adventures of Bobby Allen, about a boy starting school in a new country, which reads as a lightly fictionalized version of his own arrival in Canada. He gives his time to Boys 2 Men Chicago, a mentoring program for boys and young men, and to Read 2 Succeed, a literacy effort with the modest aim of getting boys to read because they want to. Pedro Noguera and Antonio Ellis, two serious names in American education research, have invited him to contribute a chapter to a collection they are editing, and he hosts and speaks at education summits.
What holds all of this together is consistency. Spence has never been much interested in the parts of education that make headlines. He is interested in the boy at the back of the room, and in the adults who decide, usually without saying so, whether that boy is worth the trouble. Nearly four decades in, from Windsor to Toronto to Chicago, he is still making the case that he is.
