Dr. Glen “Max” McGee served in K-12 roles ranging from substitute teacher to principal to superintendent before becoming the Illinois State Superintendent of Education. He subsequently led the top-rated Illinois Math and Science Academy and a school district in California. These positions fueled his dedication to cultivating humanity in high schools, confronting student suicide, developing the potential of historically underrepresented youth, and supporting education leaders through turbulent times.
Dr. McGee is a prolific writer and book author. He currently serves as Board Secretary for the nonprofit Center for Success in High-Need Schools and as Past President of Hazard, Young, Attea & Associates, a consultancy focused on assisting boards of education and educational leaders.
As a teacher, Dr. Glen “Max” McGee was often assigned the challenging students—not because he was the toughest, but because he wove compassion into the daily fabric, creating a community within the classroom.
He noticed mental health issues dissipated when children felt they had a safe place to go where someone cared about them. He brought the emphasis on community and connection with him to leadership roles at the building, district, and state levels.
But McGee’s own hardest struggle came at his superintendency in Palo Alto, California, where shortly after arriving, he was faced with a cluster of suicides among high school students. “As superintendents, we often say, ‘I'm honored and humbled,’ but authentic humility is not a trait of many superintendents, myself included,” he said. “You're not humbled until you're working with a family who has lost a child and teachers who have lost students, and you’re seeking to understand the root causes of the turbulence and the associated mental health challenges for students and staff.”
The Palo Alto district had 13,000 students across 18 schools, and the devastating impact rippled across all of them. They became a community built on grief and loss. “What was really helpful was the importance of listening and following the Stephen Covey maxim ‘Seek first to understand, then to be understood,’” McGee said.
The district implemented strategies toward the goal of understanding, helped by a full-time fellow from the neighboring Stanford d.school, an institution that has become famous for tackling urgent problems through human-centered design.
The district’s leaders invested countless hours in listening to children and their teachers. All board members and administrators shadowed students for a day to gain perspective on their experiences from the time they boarded the bus until they returned home. McGee even set up a table on the high school campus and held outdoor open office hours.
The conversations informed his takeaways. “Too often, we’re not proactive. We’re too reactive, and we’re not transparent enough. That’s my recommendation to education leaders—you have to be proactive and courageous. Going back to W. Edwards Deming’s quality principles, you have to confront the brutal facts.”
Otus’ commitment to giving everyone in the learning community the necessary insights to make an enduring difference in students’ lives is one of the key reasons McGee joined the Otus Advisory Board. “Personalization and customization as a way to enhance learning, belonging, and connection put Otus way ahead of the game,” he said.
McGee intended to become an engineer when he enrolled in Dartmouth College in 1968. “In high school, I was a math and science guy,” he recalled. “But my parents were social justice advocates long before anybody even knew what that was, and I had it in my DNA.”
During his second semester, he worked with a program that welcomed 12 young men from Harlem to New Hampshire for the term. McGee and another Dartmouth student shared a house with them, and an adult couple who also lived on the property helped supervise.
“I still remember half their names,” McGee said. “We had a big old car, like the Griswold station wagon, and we drove them to school, took trips, played basketball, listened to music, ran a study hall, and put the kids to bed at 11 o’clock at night. That was the hardest job,” he joked.
The semester changed the course of his life. “I saw that with opportunities and access, these kids could do anything. Their potential was basically unlimited. And I learned so much from them about music, about culture, about opportunity, and about what they needed to be able to succeed.”
Throughout his career, McGee has continued to gravitate toward the subjects he loved in high school. For instance, he served as president of the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, and he has fond memories of the assemblies where all 650 students would shout the mission statement in unison: “To ignite and nurture creative, ethical, scientific minds that advance the human condition.”
But as much as he is drawn to data, he is also aware of the many other factors impacting learners’ trajectories, such as what’s happening in their homes and neighborhoods. “That's really an important part of data management,” he said. “We need to understand areas for growth as well as how to capitalize and build on students' assets and strengths.”
In addition, McGee recognizes information overload as a significant problem for teachers and school leaders. He is enthusiastic about the potential of artificial intelligence to address this challenge. “AI can really bring clarity to decision-making, analyzing data patterns, and modeling and building scenarios,” he said.
He uses AI for his own large-scale projects, such as analyzing thousands of surveys containing open-ended comments. He thinks it could also be instrumental in questions facing school leaders, such as whether cell phone bans actually increase student engagement. “AI can really help synthesize stakeholder feedback and inform judgment. It’s really good for helping to clarify decisions and set priorities for education leaders,” he said.
At the individual level, McGee credits Otus with consolidating data such as real-time feedback on student work for informing teachers’ decisions around personalization, differentiation, scaffolds for struggling learners, lesson planning, and more.
“This is why I really think Otus has a leg up on the field,” McGee said. “The potential for transformative instruction is basically unlimited.”