The educator, author, filmmaker, and former school-system leader is bringing a lifelong commitment to literacy, belonging, and equitable access into classrooms and communities across the Chicago region.
For more than three decades, Christopher M. Spence has challenged educators to reconsider one of the most familiar phrases in public education. What is often described as an achievement gap, he argues, is more accurately understood as an opportunity gap. The distinction matters. An achievement gap can invite people to focus on what a child appears to lack. An opportunity gap directs attention to the learning experiences, relationships, resources, and expectations that adults and institutions provide or fail to provide.
That belief has become the through-line of Spence’s work as a teacher, principal, director of education, researcher, author, filmmaker and community leader. Today, it is taking practical form across the greater Chicago and Northwest Indiana region, where he works at the intersection of literacy, the arts, mentoring and emerging technology. The settings have changed over the years, but the central question has remained constant: What becomes possible when young people are genuinely seen, heard, challenged and supported?
Spence’s perspective was shaped by movement, sport and education. Born in England to Jamaican parents and raised in Windsor, Ontario, he learned early how identity and belonging influence a young person’s sense of possibility. Football later took him to the Canadian Football League, where he was drafted by the BC Lions in 1985. A career-altering Achilles injury forced an unexpected transition, but it also redirected him toward education. What followed was not simply a second career. It became a life’s work.
He began in the classroom and moved into school leadership, earning a reputation for combining high expectations with visible, relational leadership. As principal of Lawrence Heights Middle School in Toronto, Spence and the school community used clear expectations, frequent progress reports, student voice, mentoring, family engagement, athletics and music to strengthen both belonging and academic focus. The work reflected an idea that still defines his leadership: accountability is most powerful when young people know the adults around them believe they can succeed.
Spence later served as director of education for the Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board and the Toronto District School Board, leading two complex public systems while continuing to write, speak and advocate for equity. His books, including The Skin I’m In: Racism, Sport and Education, Creating a Literacy Environment for Boys and Leading with Passion and Purpose, connected research to the realities of classrooms, schools and communities. Across those roles, his message was consistent: public education must not merely offer access; it must create the conditions in which every student can participate, belong and learn.
His current work shows how that philosophy travels from systems thinking to direct service. Across the Chicago and Northwest Indiana region, Spence helps develop literacy, visual arts, and music experiences that invite children and families into learning. The work rests on a simple but consequential premise: engagement is not an extra. A book placed in a child’s hands, a choir that gives a student a place to belong, or an arts experience that allows a young person to express an idea can become an entry point to confidence, connection and sustained learning.
He also supports access to future-focused learning by helping schools bring programs in robotics, drone coding, 3D printing and artificial intelligence into their classrooms. These hands-on experiences can make emerging fields accessible to students who might not otherwise encounter them. For Spence, their value extends beyond technical skills. They allow young people to imagine themselves as designers, problem-solvers and creators. Opportunity becomes tangible when a student can build, test, revise, and discover that an unfamiliar field is not reserved for someone else.
Literacy and mentoring remain equally central. Through initiatives such as Read to Succeed and Boys to Men, Spence continues to focus on boys and young men who are too often discussed through statistics rather than engaged through their interests, strengths and aspirations. His approach treats reading as social, relevant, and connected to identity. Conversation, choice, culturally meaningful texts and trusted adults are not rewards added after learning; they are among the conditions that make learning possible.
That practitioner experience also informs his recent scholarship. His 2024 qualitative phenomenological research examined the experiences and perspectives of African American males and the school, family, and community conditions that influenced their educational journeys. The work later informed To Be Seen and Heard: Uplifting Our African American Males from Boys to Men, published in 2025. Rather than reducing young men to deficits or outcomes, the research centers their voices and highlights the importance of mentoring, affirming relationships, welcoming schools, family support, and credible pathways to college, employment, and adult purpose.
Film has given Spence another way to advance the same mission. In Jail or Yale: Young, Black and Out of Options?, released in 2019, students, educators and young men speak about exclusion, aspiration and the choices that institutions help expand or constrain. Other projects, including Silence the Violence, The MixTape and Dear B, use storytelling to explore youth voice, family, identity and community. The camera, like the classroom, becomes a place where people who are often spoken about can speak for themselves.
Taken together, this is not a collection of unrelated projects. Literacy opens access to ideas. The arts create expression and belonging. Mentoring builds trust. STEM expands the range of futures a student can imagine. Research makes lived experience harder to ignore, while film carries those voices beyond the walls of a school or program. Each form of the work addresses a different part of the same opportunity structure.
Spence’s career has included achievement, scrutiny, change, and renewal. What has endured is not a title but a commitment to learning and service. His work today is grounded in the belief that leadership is ultimately measured by what becomes possible for other people, and by whether institutions create real routes back into learning when a young person has struggled, disengaged, or been underestimated.
That is what Christopher M. Spence is building in the Chicago region: not a personal reinvention, but a connected body of work shaped by decades in public education and renewed through direct community engagement. It can be seen in a child choosing a book, a choir finding its collective voice, a young man meeting a mentor, or a student programming a machine for the first time. These moments may appear small in isolation. Together, they form the architecture of opportunity.
