Michael McGill is a founding member of Rural Solutions, an initiative aimed at economic renewal and preserving the quality of life in the northwest corner of Connecticut. He is also a consultant to the Tri-State Consortium, an organization of high-performance public school districts in Connecticut, New Jersey and New York that are committed to continuous improvement through self-study and external review.
McGill was formerly a Senior Fellow in Leadership at the Fordham University Graduate School of Education and Director of the Metropolitan School Council (MSC), a Fordham affiliate that “seeks to realize the ideal of an America in which all children have equal opportunity and are deeply educated.”
He was Superintendent of the Scarsdale (NY) public schools from 1998 to 2014 and was New York State Superintendent of the Year in 2007. He was previously Superintendent of the North Shore (LI) Schools, head of the Hopkins School in New Haven, and head of the Mt. Greylock Regional School District in rural western Massachusetts. In the early 1970’s, he was director of an anti-poverty/education program in New Hampshire. He began his career in education as an English teacher in Lexington, Massachusetts.
A 1965 honors graduate of Williams College, McGill received his master’s and doctoral degrees from Harvard University in 1967 and 1973, respectively.
He has also taught classes at Williams College and Yale University and served on the faculty at the Bank Street School of Education. He is the author of Race to the Bottom: Corporate School Reform and the Future of Public Education (Teachers College Press, 2014) and numerous articles, and has been a trustee of the Educational Records Bureau, The Tri-state Consortium and the Windward School. He is interested in issues of leadership, education policy and education reform.
A resident of Litchfield County, Connecticut, McGill is married to Pucci Meyer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. He has two children, David and Erin, and three grandchildren.