With Harvard fellowship, Booker will promote the role of school superintendents

By Chuck Gordon

Dr. Russell Booker '91 believes deeply in the power, and necessity, of public education.

"Two hundred and fifty years we're going to celebrate this year," he says, of the nation's semiquincentennial. "I think people forget that we created public education, common schools, because we knew we had to have an educated citizenry if we were really going to have a strong democracy."

Booker retired in 2020 after nearly 14 years leading large school districts as superintendent, but he never really left public education. He's also busier than ever, though "just not in crisis mode" these days, he jokes.

Booker's work as CEO of the Spartanburg Academic Movement (SAM) - and the collaborative development of Spartanburg County, S.C., as a whole - has gained national attention. That work has led Booker to secure his second senior fellowship with the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) and the EdRedesign Lab.

Over the next two years, Booker will work with the HGSE and EdRedesign Lab and the Initiative on Superintendent as Civic Leader to explore ways that school superintendents around the country can act as lynchpins of community development.

"As I think about all the polarization we're dealing with right now," Booker says, "the one common thing that we still share that everybody cares about - I don't care about your race, I don't care where you live, I don't care about your political affiliation - is our children. And superintendents are positioned to play a key role in helping pull communities together around this incredibly important public institution called education."

Booker should know. He led York School District One for three and a half years before returning home in 2009 to lead Spartanburg School District Seven, which he ran for 10 years before retiring to take the reins of SAM.

SAM is a remarkable community effort to energize a community by nurturing children "from cradle to career." It acts as a fulcrum, or a "convener," bringing together a wide variety of community stakeholders - businesses, faith leaders, healthcare providers, nonprofits, the mayor, social workers, mental health counselors and, of course, school administrators - to figure out how to best serve schoolchildren.

"I was fortunate to retire at 50 years old," he says. "I pondered whether to continue supporting children in my role as a school and district leader or focus this work in a more comprehensive way. Recognizing that less than 25% of a child's life is spent in the schoolhouse, I was drawn to spend this next chapter focusing on the other 75% of what is shaped by so many other critical factors. The Spartanburg Academic Movement allows me to live the best of both worlds: community and school."

SAM aims to achieve three primary goals by 2030: increase school readiness to 65 percent of preschoolers, from 50 percent now; increase two- and four-year college enrollment to 70 percent of high-school graduates; and support two focus neighborhoods within the City of Spartanburg. This plan, titled Movement 2030, brings together dozens of partners all aligned around a common agenda.

SAM has helped Spartanburg gain national notoriety over the past decade for its community-improvement initiatives, from articles in the New York Times and Forbes to a recent documentary by Dream On. The organization has brought in $100 million in funding from a variety of philanthropists to support Movement 2030 and acts as "the backbone" and aligner of resources to boost educational outcomes and economic mobility in Spartanburg.

Booker will take the experiences he had as a superintendent and those he's had with SAM into meetings at Harvard to explain the role that superintendents can play in improving not only educational outcomes but the community as a whole.

"At the heart of this work, because so much centers on education and the schools, superintendents have to be central to it," he says.

"The role of superintendents has fundamentally changed in the past few decades," says Jennifer Cheatem, lead for Initiative on Superintendent as Civic Leader and a senior lecturer and faculty chair of Field Engagement at HGSE. "They now play a leadership role in stewarding their communities through transformative change by cultivating the public will to engage, adapt and co-create the future of learning. This takes the kind of leadership skills Russell has modeled, skills we are eager to teach and share with more superintendents across the country."

Booker has so much going on with SAM and his work with national organizations that he recently declined the chairmanship of the Wingate University Board of Trustees, a role he would have stepped into after serving as vice chair the past two years. He will remain on the board and will continue to serve on the executive committee.

"I would have been the first African American chair of that board," he says, "but I just had to think about capacity."

Booker is laser-focused on improving Spartanburg, but his work with Harvard is about taking SAM's work to other places. Superintendents, he says, are uniquely positioned to improve their communities, because education is paramount to community improvement.

He's careful, though, not to put responsibility solely on the schools. For years he was implored to "fix the schools," but he says it works in reverse too: If communities improve - in terms of housing, crime, opportunity - schools improve as well.

"It became this, 'What comes first, the chicken or the egg?" he says. "'Strong schools, stronger communities' or 'strong communities, stronger schools.' And the answer to that is that what comes first is the nest. Our role here at SAM is to bring this community together to make sure we build a strong, nested civic infrastructure where kids and families can thrive. We're all about building that nest first. You have to do both at the same time: You've got to work on the communities. You've got to work on the schools. They've got to work together. Superintendents are the ones that can really help to bring both groups to the table."

June 11, 2026