Biography of School Director Barbara MacPhee

Public education has always been the focus of Barbara MacPhee's professional life.

After graduating from the Harvard Graduate School of Education with a masters degree in 1968, and teaching high school in the Boston area, she and her husband moved to North Carolina where she worked for HGSE graduate and then Superintendent, Wilmer Cody (later Louisiana Superintendent of Education under Governor Roemer) of Chapel Hill, North Carolina public schools at a time critical in its history: the desegregation of the faculties and students in its public schools.

During the years that their two sons were too young for school, Barbara worked as a free lance writer for The Ford Foundation, The Carnegie Corporation, The Southern Education Foundation, the Legal Defense Fund of the NAACP and the Superintendent of the NOPS, Dr. Gene Geisert.  In 1982 she and her family lived in Scotland for a year where Barbara returned to her childhood interest of playing the French horn.

For the next five years, Mrs. MacPhee operated a reading improvement program in 13 different New Orleans Public Schools for an outside advocacy agency, The Southern Coalition for Education Equity.  In 1988, the first black superintendent of public schools, Everett Williams asked her to join his cabinet as his special assistant.  In that capacity, she was part of the meeting requested by three local professors who were interested in starting a science & mathematics high school.  The cabinet turned down the idea, citing lack of funds, but the professors (ironically with Barbara's advice) pursued the idea until the OPSB voted unanimously to allow the school to form.  Barbara was selected for the position of founding principal and in August of 1993, the New Orleans Center for Science & Mathematics opened for its first class of freshmen as a half-day program serving 30 different schools in Orleans Parish specializing in science, mathematics and technology education.

It ranks as one of only a few Open Admission science & mathematics schools in the nation.  Hurricane Katrina forced a change in structure and support.  At the end of October, 2005, NOCSM applied for an was granted a charter to open as a full-day high school, specializing in science and mathematics, but offering all subjects toward graduation.  A whole new chapter in her life and the life of the school began.

The school has been effective as evidence by the state exit exams (GE) in which NOCSM students have done as well or better than all of the public high schools with one exception and that is the highly selective Benjamin Franklin High School.  The founders and staff of this school consider this very good news for the City of New Orleans.  As Barbara often says, "There is very little wrong with our students.  Given engaging, even rigorous classes with opportunities to improve and sustained support, all students will do well!"