Kerry Decker has been a school principal across grades pre-kindergarten through 12. In addition to having taught elementary and middle-school students in Illinois and Kuwait, she has thirteen years of experience working as a school principal, as well as one year as a leadership coach in some of the nation’s poorest urban schools, with a high percentage of English language learners, special needs students, and diverse students. Her previous positions of note include:
assistant principal, MS 51, Park Slope, Brooklyn
pre K–8 principal, PS/IS 126 MAT in Chinatown, Manhattan
K–5 principal of a bilingual school in Neenah/Menasha Wisconsin
High school principal, The Urban Assembly School for Green Careers in Manhattan, New York.
Kerry earned a BA in Spanish and English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a Masters in Teaching at National Louis University, and an M.ED in Educational Leadership at Teacher College, Columbia University. Since 2009, she has presented at numerous conferences across the country and in New York City on the topics of literacy; engaging avoidant and low achieving learners; accountability, equality, autonomy, and responsibility; leadership; desegregation of classroom reading practices; harnessing social norms; and school reform. Kerry partnered with New York University in 2007, and through her close collaboration with NYU over the last decade and her own scholarship and practice “in the trenches” of school reform, Kerry has developed an in-depth theoretical and pragmatic knowledge of educational learning and literacy theory and practice. Kerry penned a New York Times Letter to the Editor boldly criticizing the New York City School Chancellor entitled, “More Autonomy for Principals.” Kerry currently writes and consults NYC school principals from Paris where she lives with her husband and her four children, ages 2, 5, 11, and 13, while her husband works on a short-term expatriate assignment that ends in 2019, at which time she will return to the New York City schools.