Hugh Jerome Scott was born in Detroit in 1933 and taught in its elementary schools before he was thirty. In 1970 he became the first African American Superintendent of the Public Schools of Washington, DC. From 1975 until his retirement in 2000 he was Dean of Programs in Education at Hunter College of the City University of New York.
His 1980 book The Black School Superintendent: Messiah or Scapegoat?, published by Howard University Press, remains the defining study of what the country asks of Black administrators and what it does when they cannot deliver it.
He returned to that argument for the last time in 2013, in an essay he called SCOTTISMS — that schools cannot be made to repair, alone, what racism and poverty do to children, and that expecting them to is “both unsophisticated and disingenuous.”