Alexander McNeece is director of instruction and state and federal grants for Garden City School District in Michigan. He is also a children’s book author and award-winning former principal of Douglas Elementary School. He and his staff used the concepts and vocabulary from Anthony Muhammad’s book Transforming School Culture to move from being labeled a failing school in 2006 to making adequate yearly progress every year since and receiving an A grade on the Michigan EdYes assessment in 2010. Dr. McNeece strives to eliminate the achievement gap by using motivational reading material, developing engagement-driven pedagogy, and integrating 21st-century technology into every facet of his teachers’ teaching and his students’ learning.
Video production and media literacy are also focal points of Dr. McNeece’s career. As a teacher, he integrated video production with the Michigan English Language Arts Curriculum, culminating with his students writing, acting, directing, and editing their own feature-length film, which was released at a local movie theater. His school pioneered a video-production intervention program for struggling students called The Douglas Show. That program and the hard work of his teaching staff led to the elimination of student retention at their school, 100 percent of the school’s students were academically successful from 2008 to 2010.
He holds a bachelor's and master's degrees in curriculum and instruction from Michigan State University. In 2017, Dr. McNeece earned a doctor of philosophy degree in educational leadership from Eastern Michigan University with his dissertation, "Michigan's Quantitative School Culture Inventories and Student Achievement."
