Michael Pisseri has spent more than two decades in public school buildings, and he will tell you the work does not begin in a classroom. It begins in a hallway, in a data meeting, in a conversation with a teacher who has stopped believing in what she/he is doing. The turning point, for a school the way it is for a student, is rarely dramatic. It is accumulated. It is slow. It is built deliberately.
The Building That Changed Everything
When Michael Pisseri arrived at Davenport Ridge Elementary School in Stamford, Connecticut in the summer of 2011, the school’s performance metrics placed it among the lowest in the city. The hallways were functional. The staff were present and working hard; always focused on the children. The structure was in place. What was missing, Pisseri would later come to understand, was a shared belief that the building could become something different and more special than it was; it could truly become a community.
It took seven years. By the time Davenport Ridge was recognized by the State of Connecticut as a School of Distinction for its test scores in 2019, and had already earned a Banner School Award for positive school climate in 2016, the transformation had been built on what Pisseri describes as a process-over-panic philosophy. No single intervention explained the shift. No single grant, curriculum, or administrator could take credit. The change came from consistent, patient, structural work.
That philosophy did not arrive fully formed. It had been developing since Pisseri’s earliest years in front of a classroom.
Where It Started
Michael Pisseri grew up in Eastchester, New York, in Westchester County, the oldest of four children. His father spent 50 years as a pharmacist in the Bronx. His mother worked for years as a nurse at Lawrence Hospital in Bronxville. They were working professionals with practical values, and they raised their children to be self-reliant.
Pisseri had his first job at 14, stocking shelves and working the floor at a Grand Union grocery store while playing sports and keeping up with school. By the time he was a senior, he was working 20 hours a week and had been selected to the National Honor Society, one of ten students out of a hundred to receive the distinction. He was the only child in his family to earn the honor. His mother still mentions it.
He attended public schools his entire life and remains, in his own words, proud of that. There is something in that pride that runs through his entire professional identity: a belief that public education, properly resourced and properly led, can do what it promises.
Building the Foundation
Pisseri earned his undergraduate degree at Fairfield University in 1997, a Bachelor of Arts in History with minors in Political Science and Spanish. He stayed on, completing a Master of Arts in Education in 2000, then added a Certificate of Advanced Study in Administration from Sacred Heart University in 2006. While still an undergraduate, he served as a student senator.
His early career moved through several Connecticut districts. He taught Social Studies at David Wooster Middle School in Stratford before joining Coleytown Middle School in Westport, where he became a Curriculum Leader for the Social Studies department in grades six through eight. He ran department meetings, designed professional development, managed budgets, and served on the district curriculum and leadership team. In 2005 and 2006, he was nominated for Westport Teacher of the Year.
During those Westport years, he led a Black History Commemorative Stamp Project that reached well beyond the district. The project was featured at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, the National Negro League Hall of Fame in Kansas City, Missouri, and on News Channel 12. Rachel Robinson recognized Pisseri for his work raising multicultural awareness in Fairfield County. It was the kind of result that does not come from a single lesson. It comes from a teacher who understood that education happens in context.
From Classroom to Office
In 2008, Pisseri moved into administration, joining Ponus Ridge Middle School in Norwalk as Assistant Principal. He helped build a school growth plan, led the development of multiple technology grants, and designed district professional development around the new SRBI program. He coordinated events with the parent and student organization and focused on building teacher leadership from within the school.
When the principal position opened at Davenport Ridge in 2011, he took it.
The Work of Turnaround
Pisseri led Davenport Ridge for 14 years. During that time, he built a PBIS-based school climate framework, deepened the school’s STEM programming through ongoing collaboration with the GE Foundation and the National Science Teachers Association, and participated in NSTA conferences including a presentation on elementary STEM implementation in Orlando in 2017.
He helped establish a School Governance Council, launched a pre-kindergarten program at the school, supervised three aspiring administrators through their administrative certification programs, and coordinated the school’s participation in Connecticut’s Early Literacy Grant and Alliance Initiative. The 2016 Banner School Award recognized the climate. The 2019 School of Distinction recognized the academic results.
In 2024, Pisseri was selected to present at a national STEM conference at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, organized in partnership with NASA. It was a long way from Eastchester. It was also a direct line from the kind of teacher he had tried to be two decades earlier: the one who believed what happened in a classroom could reach further than its walls.
Back in the Classroom
Since the 2025-26 school year, Pisseri has been working as a Social Studies and Intervention Teacher at a New York City Public Schools middle school in Harlem, serving students in grades six through eight. He teaches social studies alongside reading intervention, using programs including Rewards and Orton Gillingham for small-group literacy instruction. He presents staff data from the iReady assessment system.
For someone who spent 14 years as a principal, the return to classroom teaching is not a step backward. For Pisseri, it is consistent with how he describes his own career arc: keep going, keep learning, stay close to the students.
What Michael Pisseri Carries Forward
Outside the school building, Pisseri has completed two half marathons, one in Brooklyn and one in Fairfield, Connecticut. He follows the athletic careers of his two sons, both baseball pitchers. His older son was named team captain as a junior at Mount Saint Mary’s College in New York. His younger son appears headed toward Division I competition.
Those details are not incidental. They speak to something Pisseri has said about the relationship between personal and professional life. Balance, in his view, is not about splitting time evenly. It is about alignment: ensuring that the demands of work and the shape of a life are pointing in the same direction.
That orientation has defined how he has approached every school building he has walked into, every student council he has advised, every staff meeting he has led. The process matters more than the outcome because the process is where the actual work happens. That is where teams get built. Where plans get tested. Where belief, over time, becomes something you can measure as well as celebrate.
