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NOVEMBER 2004

Out of the Past in the Sunshine State
By Jill Levy, President, CSA

There I was, sleepily channel surfing while lazing before the television during a recent vacation when I thought I heard voices from the past: members of the old NYC Board of Education. I knew that was impossible because a) I was in Florida and b) that Board no longer exists. So why would the cable programmer run videos of meetings at 110 Livingston St.?

Well, of course they wouldn’t. The board meeting in question was the Miami-Dade County School Board. But it could have been any NYC school board meeting of the past 20 years, so familiar were the school lingo, pedagogic jargon and strategic proposals. And leading the presentation was none other than Dr. Rudy Crew, the new Superintendent of Schools in Miami-Dade County and a former Chancellor of the NYC Board of Education.

Now that caught my attention! Talk about, to quote Yogi Berra, “deja vu all over again.”

As I listened to Superintendent Crew, I remembered the passion and hope that every Chancellor in recent years brought to our system. Dr. Crew, Dr. Ramon Cortines, Dr. Joseph Fernandez—they and their predecessors all set out to reshape NYC’s schools backed by support from the community-at-large, politicians and from school personnel.

But they all quickly departed, with incomplete plans and goals unattained, leaving behind a school system adrift, communities disappointed and school leaders angry and betrayed.

Dr. Crew’s voice brought me out of my reverie as he introduced a plan to use technology to determine how students fared, how schools were meeting student needs and how this would help failing, “priority schools”. My trip down memory lane continued when Dr. Irving Hamer appeared on the screen. A former NYC Board of Education member, Dr. Hamer’s presentation sounded awfully familiar. I quickly recognized his plan was “Chancellor’s District” redux. (The Chancellor’s District was probably the only strategy employed in NYC that helped failing schools become more successful.)

The presentation soon became tiresome but only because I had witnessed it first hand in the mid-1990s. I wish Dr. Crew and his team success. The children of Miami-Dade desperately need a strong advocate; the educational problems they face are similar to NYC’s.

This program fit in seamlessly with my recent musings on the history of our chancellors. This retrospective began a few months ago when I met former Chancellor Ray Cortines, an educator whose only interest was in the children but who understood the investment of the various stakeholders in our schools. A vicious Mayor Guiliani bullied Mr. Cortines out of NYC. In retrospect, it was a great loss for our schools.

After a long history of chancellors from within the educational profession (with the noted exception of Frank Macchiarola), we seem to have moved away from educational leadership.

In 2000, Citigroup lawyer Harold Levy took over, and in 2002, our current Chancellor, a prosecuting attorney and CEO, was handed the reins. Is there a pattern here? Will the next Chancellor be a real estate attorney? Will a Chancellor with an education background become persona non grata at Tweed Hall?

I think that’s a shame if that’s the case. Our earlier chancellors, all with high levels of expertise and many with good ideas, were broken by NYC’s politics not because they were poor candidates for the job. Under the new system, with the city’s Mayor and Chancellor working together, a Ray Cortines or a Rudy Crew could bring not only good management skills to the table, but pedagogic talents as well.

Since education is supposed to be at the core of what a school system provides, it would seem to make sense to have school system leaders who are both administrators and educators.#

Jill Levy is president of the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators.

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