Pierre Orbe

Q&A with New York State High School Principal of the Year, a Doctoral Candidate in Russell Sage College’s Educational Leadership Program

Pierre Orbe was a science teacher heading to medical school until a mentor urged him to stay in the education field. He has seen his choice to stay affirmed in powerful ways.

This spring, Orbe, now principal of Dewitt Clinton High School in the Bronx and a candidate for a doctorate in Educational Leadership at Russell Sage College, was named New York State High School Principal of the Year by the School Administrators Association of New York State. Just as meaningful was hearing from his first students, whose invitation to their upcoming reunion was another reminder of the impact he has had. 

In this Q&A, he talks about the unexpected connections between what he’d thought he’d do in medicine and what he’s been able to do in education. 

You have said that you started teaching to save money for medical school, but what  started as a practical detour became a personal calling. What shifted your mindset?

My biggest “why” has everything to do with my family and my brother. My older brother was born on the spectrum for autism and he has a variety of learning disabilities. We knew we would have to rally around him and my way of rallying around him was to study for a profession that offered interventions to help him. So I studied neuroscience. I was focused on how the brain works.

When I started teaching, it was simply to save for medical school. But in my first classroom, I ended up applying everything I knew about learning and cognition to help my students learn. I found myself practicing what I thought I would do in a medical practice in the classroom and I loved going to work. I was only there for two years, and my students from 2001 reached out to my secretary this year to invite me to their reunion.

At my next school, I found an amazing mentor-principal, Deena Forman. I told her I didn’t intend to stay. I said, “I’m just going to be here to get good results for this group of students, and then I’ll go to medical school.”

She told me when students talked about teachers they liked, my name kept coming up. She was tasked with turning around the school. She impressed upon me that it was an important place that she knew could be turned around with people like me on board, and she offered to mentor me as a future administrator. She made an investment in me that changed what I saw as a detour. Education became the place where I could apply my “why.”

What put Sage’s Educational Leadership program on your radar?

I had believed that the principal role was where I would make the biggest impact, but I started to think I need to start pushing myself a little bit more, toward educational leadership on that next level, even if it’s further away from the students.

I was nominated for a Cahn Fellowship [an advanced leadership development program for public school principals in large metropolitan areas]. In that program we’re required to look at a problem of practice. I looked at a problem of practice through the lens of what I would do to improve a school district, and I began to study developmental assets that students have and how they align with school leadership.

I earned a Harvard certificate for advanced educational leadership so I could learn the data side of things that may be applied to educational leadership. And as I started to do all that, I thought, I need to find the program that really brings this all together. 

I wanted to continue to research developmental assets, and I wanted to be writing sooner rather than later. I wanted to be developing a portfolio, and when I looked at Russell Sage’s program, they were very structured in how they prepare you to get to the point. I started out with one thing that I want to focus on. Now I have five or six things on a list, with outlines!

Another thing that attracted me to Russell Sage is the professors are not theorist-based. They have been in the field. They are former superintendents, their deputies, deputy chancellors, people who have done this work. As the kids say, “Real sees real.”

It was very clear to me that Russell Sage would develop me in the ways that I wanted, so that I could walk into a school district not just with a doctorate, but reputable in my research.

The Principal of the Year announcement from the School Administrators Association highlighted several improvements at DeWitt Clinton under your leadership, from graduation rates to school culture. Is there an achievement that feels especially meaningful to you?

There’s a lot of people who care about this place, a lot of generations of families come here and there’s famous people who’ve graduated from this school — James Baldwin, Ralph Lauren, Stan Lee, Tracy Morgan. But the school was in danger of being closed by the state. 

The first thing that I learned from this community was how important it was to them. We sat down together, the historian of the alumni association, students from student government, parents from the parent association, and teachers. I listened, and it meant everything to me to make sure that this community knew that we would show demonstrable gains to ensure that the school stayed open.

At first our gains were small, like we went from a 48% graduation rate to a 50% graduation rate, but the next year the same staff achieved a 69% graduation rate, then close to 80%! We reached as high as 97%!

The students were also asking for access to job training, better college preparation. We now have students becoming nursing assistants, realtors, and computer programmers and college enrollment has surged to 65%. 

And the headlines about our school have started to change. So what’s meaningful to me, what makes this special, is it’s a recognition of the collective work over the last eight and a half years, to make what the school community asked for come true.

Is there anything you would like to add?

I made that decision to walk away from an aspiration, and it was the right decision in the long run. I will still complete a doctorate that stands for the work that I always wanted to pursue, which is to create an environment that will lead, hopefully, to a better development for children.