Featured Alumni

TOM BOASBERG

The Broad Superintendents Academy Class of 2009
Superintendent
Denver Public Schools
The Broad Superintendents Academy Intensive Fellow

"We must face the sobering fact that we are failing the civil rights challenge of our generation: to ensure that all of our students, regardless of ethnicity or income status, graduate from our high schools prepared for college or career. Now is the time to accelerate our reforms, to sharpen the focus on student achievement, and to get all of our children on track to walk across the commencement stage armed with everything they need to forge a great future for themselves."

In January 2009, Tom Boasberg was appointed superintendent of Denver Public Schools, a district with 161 schools serving more than 78,000 students. Formerly, Boasberg served for two years as the district’s chief operating officer. In his time as superintendent, Boasberg has focused on improving efforts to retain, recruit, develop and reward high quality teachers and principals, increasing students’ participation and achievement in Advanced Placement and concurrently enrolled college courses, turning around under-performing schools, and introducing high-performing new options. Prior to his time in Denver, Boasberg worked for eight years at Level 3 Communications, where he was group vice president for corporate development, responsible for the company’s mergers and acquisitions and strategic partnerships. Prior to that, Boasberg served as legal adviser to Reed Hundt, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. He played a leading role in the establishment of the E-Rate program, which provides over $2 billion a year to high-poverty schools across the country to pay for telecom and internet services. He also served for three years as chief of staff to Lee Chu-Ming, Chairman of Hong Kong's largest political party, working on constitutional and political issues relating to Hong Kong’s change of sovereignty in 1997. Boasberg has a bachelor’s degree in history from Yale College and a Juris Doctorate degree from Stanford Law School. He is a 2009 graduate of The Broad Superintendents Academy Intensive.