About the candidate
Candidate for the Detroit Public Schools Community District School Board
Public service, board experience, and proposals for Board consideration. Celebrate what is improving. Measure what still needs attention. Ask for what we don't yet know.
Ph.D.
Organizational Leadership
M.B.A.
Business administration — budgets, operations, financial statements
Graduate certificate
Organizational Development
M.A.
Christian Ministry
B.Sc.
Technology Education
C. A. Hubbard, PhD, is a Detroit educator whose background includes nonprofit board service, board chairmanship, and years of institutional shared governance. His professional records document multiple faculty-governance terms between 2014 and 2019 and a nonprofit board chair role beginning in 2024. He lives in the Historic New Center neighborhood and is running for the Detroit Public Schools Community District School Board.
Across more than 15 years of professional experience, his work has spanned education, nonprofit leadership, public-sector advising, and community engagement. His responsibilities have included student support, assessment, organizational policy, budgets, workforce development, partnerships, and translating institutional priorities into implementation plans.
Board and shared governance
Nonprofit board service, board chairmanship beginning in 2024, and multiple faculty-governance terms documented between 2014 and 2019.
Inside DPSCD classrooms
Mathematics interventionist in DPSCD, using assessment evidence to plan targeted support for K–8 learners in collaboration with teachers and families.
Business professor and researcher
Teaching undergraduate and graduate business students, advising adult learners, and conducting ethnographic studies of dental health practices and nonprofit organizations — including work on dental culture and emotional intelligence.
International experience
Twelve years in Chicago, plus Evanston and the North Shore, nearly three years in Texas, and time in China and Vietnam; youth-board governance and research travel across New Mexico, New York, Mexico, Africa, and Europe — perspective on how other systems educate children.
Community and organizational work
Facilitating discussions among people with different responsibilities, developing policies and working processes, and supporting public and nonprofit initiatives — including organizing public learning events, coaching speakers, and coordinating volunteers and community partners.
Hi, I’m Allan. Detroit is where my story starts.
I’m a Detroit educator and former business professor whose life has taken me from Seward Avenue to Chicago, China, and Vietnam. I’ve spent years leading youth programs and serving on boards. And I know what it means to need a second chance.
I attended MacDowell Elementary and Hally Open Magnet Middle School, spent 1993–94 at Cass Technical High School, and attended summer school at Mumford.
At fifteen, I dropped out.
At fifteen, a religious experience changed how I saw my future. Around that same time, Coach Charles Spann reached out and recruited me to attend Charles E. Chadsey High School. Faith gave me direction. Coach Spann helped me take a concrete step back into school.
He became my coach and my mentor at a turning point in my life. His invitation connected me to Chadsey, to a team, and to the possibility of finishing what I had started. When I talk about the difference one adult can make, I’m thinking about someone who actually reached out to me.
Under Coach Spann, I earned three varsity letters as a starter. Our Chadsey teams won Public School League division titles and reached the Class A state playoffs in each of my three seasons. Those years gave me a place to put my effort, contribute to a team, and keep moving toward graduation. My BGSU football biography records those seasons with Coach Spann.
His influence extended across Detroit football. Spann entered the Michigan High School Football Coaches Hall of Fame in 2000. His induction biography credits him with 190 victories over 31 years of coaching at Northwestern, Cooley, Chadsey, and Benedictine. Read Coach Charles Spann’s Hall of Fame biography.
I graduated from Chadsey with honors in 1997, earned eight athletic scholarship offers, and chose Bowling Green State University, where I played football for the Falcons. I later earned my degree in technology education there.
Coach Spann is part of the reason that journey became possible. His mentorship helped turn a return to school into a path forward. I carry that lesson into my own work with young people: reaching out matters, and what we help a student do next matters just as much.
My education kept taking turns. I entered seminary, left for full-time ministry, and returned to earn a master’s in Christian ministry at North Park Theological Seminary alongside an MBA at North Park University. Later, I earned my doctorate in organizational leadership at The Chicago School.
Through ministry and youth leadership, I served on and led boards responsible for programs, budgets, and opportunities for young people. That work took me through Texas, where I lived for nearly three years, and through New Mexico, New York, Mexico, and Africa. Chicago became home for twelve years, along with Evanston and Illinois’ North Shore, where I lived and worked.
In Chicago, I moved from advising adult learners to teaching management and leadership at North Park University. I advised more than 120 adult degree-seeking students and guided more than 50 applied leadership capstones. I also served in Faculty Senate leadership. Helping people finish a degree, put an idea to work, or make a shared decision became the everyday substance of my career.
Some of my most useful lessons came from being challenged myself. In leadership classes in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, my mentor Catherine Marsh encouraged me to make more room for direct conversation with students. I listened and changed my teaching. A good classroom gives students room to think aloud, question, and contribute.
My colleague Rupe Simms also brought me into conversations with undergraduates about civil rights and the work of Derrick Bell. And with colleagues, I helped bring TEDxNorthParkUniversity to life, organizing an event that convened more than 500 participants and coaching more than 20 speakers. Those experiences strengthened my interest in whose voices get heard and how people turn ideas into action.
I also lived in China and Vietnam. In Bengbu, China, I taught Economics of Leadership at Anhui University of Finance and Economics. In Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, I lived and worked at RMIT University Vietnam, teaching innovation and design, cross-cultural management, global trade, and political economy.
My research travel took me across Europe, including Brussels, Belgium, where I presented work on goal-setting and career success. In Vancouver, Canada, I presented on the organizational economics of business education.
Living abroad made me a more attentive educator. I learned to question my assumptions, listen across differences, and pay attention to what students bring into the room. I want Detroit children to build that same confidence: to understand their own community, learn from others, and see a world of possibilities ahead of them.
As a business professor, I also conducted ethnographic business studies involving dental health practices and nonprofit organizations. I spent time inside workplaces, listening and observing how people made decisions, handled tension, and worked together. I studied dentists, dental workplace culture, and cultural and emotional intelligence. Some of those observations became “A Dentist’s Spouse” in Aesthetic Dentistry Magazine.
That work sharpened a habit I bring to education: get close enough to understand what people are experiencing. Ask what is getting in their way. Then work with them on what needs to change.
Back in Detroit, that means helping children from kindergarten through eighth grade build mathematics skills, using assessment to target support, and working with teachers and families, including multilingual learners. My international experience helps me approach those relationships with curiosity and connect learning to opportunities beyond the classroom.
I want a school board that connects a child’s learning, a family’s experience, a principal’s working conditions, and the use of public dollars. That is what I mean by Whole-Health Leadership.
Faith remains part of my life. I’m a recent convert to Catholicism, and I’ve shared this Detroit Free Press article for anyone interested in that part of my story. I also study Latin, a subject I took at Cass.
And if we’re talking food, my favorite is the Bibim Bop Rice Bowl at Blind Faith Cafe: spicy grilled seitan, marinated vegetables, brown and jasmine rice, and an over-easy egg on top.
I’d love to hear your story. Tell me about your school, your child, an idea you have, or a question you want answered.
Hubbard describes his approach to education as Whole-Health Leadership: considering academic development, student well-being, fiscal sustainability, governance, and community relationships together rather than as separate concerns. His professional philosophy emphasizes understanding students and the systems around them, identifying barriers, and measuring the results of changes.
Celebrate what is improving. Measure what still needs attention. Ask for the information we don't yet have. Then put informed questions before the Board.
Where the Board needs a measure and the public cannot readily find it, we do not fill the space with a weaker statistic. We ask: do we know?
A board's job is not to be certain. It is to ask, on the record, for what we do not yet know.
A deliberately small set of headline indicators, each sourced to DPSCD's own published materials — including the places where the measure we need does not yet exist.
Academic & developmental
14.1% / 20.1%
Third-grade reading and math proficiency, 2026
Both improved year over year. Early literacy and numeracy remain the clearest early signal of whether the system is working for the students we have now.
Source: DPSCD published results
Student well-being
30.6%
“Loved, Challenged, Prepared,” 2024–25
DPSCD's own districtwide student-experience measure: 27.6% (2022–23), 29.1% (2023–24), 30.6% (2024–25), with targets of 32.1% for 2025–26 and 33.6% for 2026–27. It asks whether students experience school as a place where they are known, challenged, supported and prepared — not merely whether services exist on paper.
Source: DPSCD strategic plan
Attendance
54.5%
Chronic absenteeism, 2024–25
Down from 66.1% in 2022–23, with a 42.9% goal for 2026–27. Average daily attendance rose from 81.8% to 85.9% over the same period. Attendance is the bridge indicator: it belongs to neither academics nor well-being alone, but sits at their intersection.
Source: DPSCD strategic plan
Future readiness
83.2%
Class of 2025 four-year graduation rate
Against a Michigan rate of about 84%. College-and-career-readiness course participation reached 59.8% in 2024–25 against a 70% target for 2026–27. These are high-school outcomes. What happens after graduation is a separate question, and the data is not yet public.
Source: DPSCD strategic plan
Principal & organizational health
Data gap
Principal turnover, vacancy and tenure
DPSCD maintains a Principal Eligibility Pool, and its own postings describe principals as responsible for instruction, school culture, student social-emotional support, budgets, improvement, operations, family communication and community feedback. But an eligibility pool tells us nothing about how many schools lack a permanent principal or how long principals stay. Teacher salary and vacancy figures are evidence of workforce health generally — they are not evidence about principals, and we will not borrow them.
Source: DPSCD careers postings
Fiscal & facilities
Sourced directly
Facilities need against available funding
We retain the facilities need-versus-funding comparison and source it directly to the current Facility Master Plan rather than to secondary summaries.
Source: DPSCD Facility Master Plan
Governance
Transparency measures
Published materials, published timelines
We use observable transparency and accountability measures — were materials published in advance, were the district's own deadlines met — rather than inventing a “governance health” score that no one else reports.
Source: Board practice
We use three kinds of evidence rather than one dramatic statistic: student experience (“Loved, Challenged, Prepared”), attendance, and access to support infrastructure. One operational fact belongs alongside them: for 2026–27 DPSCD requires students and visitors entering school buildings to undergo screening, which can include metal detection and bag inspection.
In May 2026 the district notified families of increases in bullying, threats and attacks involving students, families and staff, and incidents involving edibles brought to school. That notice contains no counts, so we treat it as context — not as a quantitative claim.
Do students experience their schools as places where they are known, challenged, supported, and prepared?
Where the board needs a measure the public cannot readily find, the gap itself becomes the governance question.
We know
We know the Class of 2025 graduation rate: 83.2%.
We need to know
We need to know where graduates are 6, 12 and 24 months later.
We know
We know the district recruits principals through an eligibility pool.
We need to know
We need to know principal stability, tenure, vacancies and turnover — school by school and over time.
We know
We know DPSCD measures whether students feel loved, challenged and prepared.
We need to know
We need to know what those results reveal about safety, belonging, mental health, and differences among schools and student groups.
So the Principal Proposal rests on the condition of the principal workforce rather than on statistics borrowed from teachers.
So safety and belonging claims rest on a current, independently administered survey rather than on a single district-administered instrument.
So the 13th Year Proposal responds to demonstrated transition patterns instead of presuming them.
Whole Health is the through-line: academics, well-being, attendance, staffing, buildings, and life after graduation. Each proposal is written so any board member, of any belief, can second it. These are campaign proposals for future Board consideration — not adopted district policies.
I
A modern compact between the district, its educators, and its families — written for the workforce the classroom actually has.
II
DPSCD graduated 83.2% of the Class of 2025 — a milestone worth naming out loud. What those graduates are doing 6, 12 and 24 months later is not public. This proposal asks for that data first, then builds an optional district-supported transition year around what it shows.
III
Standard, transparent, competitive pay for principals — and, before any claim about instability, the numbers the district has never published: turnover, vacancies, interim appointments, and median tenure. We will not borrow teacher statistics to describe the principal workforce.
IV
A public, honest accounting of district property — what we hold, what we lease, what should return to the neighborhoods around it.
V
Curriculum and partnership commitments that recognize the First Peoples of this land in more than a single unit each year.
Every figure on this site is labeled by its source — District-reported, State or federally reported, or Independently measured. Government data is not the same as independent evaluation. Where a measure does not exist, we name the gap instead of substituting a weaker statistic.
Paid for by AllanForAll.Com Committee to Elect Christopher Allan Hubbard, PhD, MBA, MA, 700 Seward, Apt. 708, Detroit, MI 48202 (Historic New Center Neighborhood)