Ray McNulty

Ray McNulty is a past senior fellow and past president of the International Center for Leadership in Education. Prior to these roles, he was a senior fellow at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where his work with leading educators from around the country focused on reinventing and improving our nation's high schools. McNulty is also a past president of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) and currently serves as dean of the School of Education at Southern New Hampshire University.

A dynamic keynote speaker, McNulty addresses the need for school systems to help students become creative thinkers. He is committed to helping schools and school systems embrace the process of change, raise performance standards for both students and teachers, and build solid connections between schools and their communities.

McNulty has worked in education for the entirety of his career. He began as a classroom teacher, vice principal, and principal in Massachusetts before becoming superintendent of Windham Southeast Supervisory Union in Brattleboro, Vt. McNulty held the position of superintendent for 11 years and was named Vermont Superintendent of the Year in 2000. From 2001–2003, he served as Vermont’s education commissioner where he worked to align the Department of Education with the key issues of early education, educator quality, and secondary school reform.

McNulty earned a bachelor’s degree in education from Bridgewater State College and a master's degree in education administration at Johnson State College. He holds a certificate of advanced graduate study in administration and planning from the University of Vermont (1983), and is a charter graduate of the American Association of School Administrators National Superintendents Academy (1984). In 1996, he completed the Early Education program at the University of California at Los Angeles’s Anderson School of Business and received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Marlboro College in 2002.

McNulty is the author of It’s Not Us Against Them: Creating the Schools We Need, published in 2009 by ICLE.