The former superintendent devoted his career to developing school and district leaders who are passionate about creating opportunities for all students.
This September marked 60 years since Dr. Irwin Blumer began working as a Master Teacher and Team Leader at the Timilty Junior High School in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, in 1966. Irwin already had classroom experience, having worked as an intern, student teacher, and teacher in Easton and Wayland, but his two years at the Timilty would help ignite a lifelong passion for equity and racial justice in public education.
Irwin was placed at the Timilty as part of the first cohort of educators in the National Teacher Corps, a program created under President Lyndon Johnson to recruit and train teachers to work in high-need urban, rural, and reservation public schools. Irwin recalls walking into the under-resourced Timilty every day, ready to teach students from low-income families who were “99% Black” and seeing buses on their way to a school up the street with students who were “99% white.”
“So when people ask whether segregation in Boston schools was deliberate,” Irwin said, “Yes, there’s no question it was deliberate.”
He remembers that many of the nearly all-white faculty “didn’t particularly like Black kids and didn’t think they could learn very much.” So he gravitated to a small group of teachers who were “really committed, really engaged, and gave 150% to what they were doing.”
The day after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Irwin said the students essentially took over the school in protest, refusing to go to class “to express the rage they felt about his assassination, which was specifically directed towards the school.”
As a young teacher, only a few years after graduating college himself, Irwin considers that experience a defining period that would set the stage for a decades-long career devoted to equity and anti-racism in public education.
Last summer, Irwin announced his decision to retire fully from all of his professional commitments, after having served with great distinction in public school districts, higher education, and numerous volunteer roles.
Strong Values from Humble Roots
Even before he became an educator, Irwin said many of his core values were formed through his experiences growing up in the mostly low-income city of Chelsea, just outside of Boston.
“The common ingredient in Chelsea was that everybody was poor, with the exception of one small section of the city,” said Irwin. “It was incredibly diverse. There was a Black population and a Hispanic population. There was the Polish church, the Irish church, the French church, as well as several Protestant churches and synagogues. I didn’t think about it. I just figured: That’s the way it is, right?”
Irwin’s parents were very clear about what it meant to live in a diverse community. He recalls them saying often: “You don’t judge people by what they look like. You judge people by how they behave.”
He also credits his parents with instilling in him a strong work ethic.
“My father was a window cleaner,” he said. “He got up at 3:30 in the morning to clean windows. Then he would come home, get a couple of hours sleep, we’d have supper together, and then he would go back to Boston to clean offices. We had food, we had clothes, but there wasn’t any surplus money.”
Growing up in a city as diverse as Chelsea, Irwin said, was part of what inspired him and his wife to plant roots and raise their own children in Framingham in the 1970s, because of its racial, ethnic, and socio-economic diversity. (Irwin’s wife Deborah, who served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives, died in 2006. Irwin met Andrea Haynes in 2009, and they married in 2019.)
Distinguished Career in School Districts and Higher Education
Irwin earned Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Northeastern University and a Doctorate in Education from Boston College, with a focus on Counseling Psychology.
After two years in the Teacher Corps, Irwin worked as a guidance counselor, assistant principal in New York, assistant principal in Newton Public Schools, and principal in Brookline Public Schools. Those experiences working in wealthier suburban communities also galvanized Irwin’s commitment to educational equity. He remembers students of color enrolled in predominantly white districts through the METCO program, “and they weren’t being treated right, from my perspective.”
He added, “So we started taking kids from the METCO program who might have been in the second reading group or the third reading group, and putting them in the first reading group, and saying, ‘OK, now to be successful, what does this kid need?’”
The lessons learned from those experiences, he said, would significantly influence his belief that core values are essential to effective leadership. “What does this school system stand for?” he would ask. “What are the behaviors that reflect those values?”
In 1980, Irwin was hired for his first central office role, as Director of Curriculum & Instruction for the Concord and Concord-Carlisle districts, where he went on to serve as interim superintendent and superintendent for eight years. In 1988, he became superintendent of Newton Public Schools, a job he would hold for nine years.
It was during that time that Irwin was approached by the Dean of the Graduate School of Education at Boston College, who invited him to apply for an opening in the educational leadership program. Irwin declined, telling the Dean he enjoyed being a superintendent.
“The next month, she called again,” he said. “And I realized I was ready to go back to the classroom, this time to teach people who want to be principals and superintendents.”
And so began a 15-year chapter in higher education, teaching courses in human resources, the principalship, and the superintendency, among others, to Master’s and Doctoral candidates. When Boston College launched the Lynch Leadership Academy to develop school and district leaders, Irwin served on the Steering Committee and oversaw coaching in the program.
One of the advantages of working at Boston College, he said, was the opportunity to work closely with principals in the Boston Public Schools. During that time, he helped to launch the Boston Principal Fellows program.
Immeasurable Contributions to M.A.S.S.
Although he has invested his time and talent in many organizations, Irwin singles out his involvement in M.A.S.S. as among the most rewarding. He became a member of the association during his earliest years in district leadership positions and became more active in 1988 as Chair of the Tri-County Superintendents’ Roundtable, which would be the start of a nearly 40-year tenure on the M.A.S.S. Executive Committee.
Irwin went on to serve in officer roles, including President during the 1996-97 school year, when he was named Massachusetts Superintendent of the Year. While it is typical to step down from the Executive Committee after serving a year as Past President, Irwin had become such a valued member of the team that he was asked to remain on ex officio, a position he maintained until June 2026. Irwin said that serving on the Executive Committee enabled him to remain connected to the field after his move to higher education.
“The meetings were thoughtful, discussions would be respectful, and the focus was always on what’s in the best interest of kids from all over the state,” he said.
Irwin said he’s been encouraged to see the association evolve over the past few decades, particularly to become less of an “old boys’ club.”
“We’d go to the meetings, and you could count the number of female members on two hands, and not use all of your fingers,” he said.
Today, Dr. Mary Bourque serves as the first female executive director of M.A.S.S., and several female superintendents have been elected President of the association. Irwin noted that there is more work to be done to ensure more racial diversity among the superintendent ranks in Massachusetts, but he is encouraged by the Racial Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (REDI) work through M.A.S.S., in which he has been an active participant.
Irwin credits past executive director Peter Finn with shifting M.A.S.S. to become “more of a professional organization.” He said it was during Tom Scott’s tenure in the position that M.A.S.S. truly established credibility statewide, particularly as a trusted voice among state leaders on key educational issues – a reputation that Mary Bourque sustains today, he said.
Irwin was part of a group that created the New Superintendent Induction Program (NSIP) for M.A.S.S., and he served as a coach in the program from 2010 until last year.
Reliance on Core Values
During his tenure in Newton, Irwin and his team adopted a set of four core values that he said guided all of their work: centrality of the classroom, respect for human differences, collegiality, and communication.
“What I finally recognized,” he said, “was what the superintendent does is build a culture that’s based on core values, and the key to that is changing behavior – changing adult behaviors, not the kids. The kids will follow suit if the adults are on the same page.”
When mentoring new and aspiring leaders, Irwin stressed the importance of each of those values, but he considers the focus on the classroom truly foundational.
“The most important thing that happens in a school district happens in a classroom between a teacher and kid,” Irwin said. “That means teachers have to be involved and have a voice in any important decision, because they’re closest to the kids.”
It’s fair to say that Irwin was ahead of the curve – especially as a white male educator – in identifying and prioritizing some of the equity issues that are discussed far more widely in education circles today. He and his team were talking about closing achievement gaps and creating anti-racist schools long before those terms hit the mainstream.
“I feel strongly that what makes this country great as a country is the diversity of so many different kinds of people living here,” he said, “but if you believe that, you have to teach that.”
Another important lesson Irwin said he learned on the job – and would later instill in his students and mentees – is the importance of maintaining work-life balance, particularly to protect time with your family. He said that whether you’re a principal or a superintendent, it’s important to set boundaries at the outset, to establish expectations about how much of your time you will devote to the job. For Irwin, that meant limiting his professional responsibilities to weekdays, as much as possible, especially so that he could attend activities like his children’s cross-country meets, field hockey matches, and football games.
“You have to make time for the people that are most important to you,” he said. “Otherwise you’re going to burn yourself out, and you’re not going to be any good to yourself, your significant others, your job, anybody. That was a really important piece of what I taught in class and what we taught in the New Superintendent Induction Program.”
Only a few months into full retirement, Irwin said he is cherishing more time with family. He and Andrea walk every morning, travel, enjoy their backyard pool, go to blues and country music shows, and spend time with their five grown children, seven grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren – most of whom live close by in Framingham.
Irwin’s son, daughter-in-law, and grandson are all public school teachers, and one of his daughters was a public school principal. Seeing them in their roles, and reflecting on his long career developing leaders, Irwin said he believes the future of public education is in good hands, despite the enormous challenges facing schools and districts today.
“What always made me hopeful – when I was teaching people who wanted to be superintendents, and in all my years with the association – was the integrity of the people who take on the job,” Irwin said. “They could make much more money doing something else with probably less grief, but these leaders have a belief that they’re responsible for the education of all kids. That’s what it’s all about.”