With the old/new news that Carmen Farina is up to her
old tricks, I thought that I would post Wikipedia's history of NYC Chancellors. See below. Quite a bunch,
totally unaccountable for their actions. I think it is way past the time to get rid of the Mayor appointing the Chancellor, and we need to have a citywide vote on both the schools job and the NYC Board of Education, brought back under new rules of accountability but VOTED in, not appointed.
See
this post as well. These people are in charge of the
process known as the rubber rooms, and
The Gotcha Squad. These people, in charge of $25 million+ and a network of padded pockets underneath, are extremely dangerous to the health, safety and welfare of kids, especially under the inept political-media-industrial complex Mayor Bill de Blasio works for.
Betsy Combier
betsy.combier@gmail.com
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| NYC Current Chancellor Carmen Farina |
 |
| Carmen Farina and Mayor Bill de Blasio |
Who will control New York City public schools on July 1?
The question has become
a referendum on Mayor de Blasio’s leadership. De Blasio requested permanent
mayoral control of the schools last year. In June, an unimpressed state
Legislature renewed it for a single year.
De Blasio was
essentially on probation.
At an Albany budget
hearing last week, de Blasio floated a seven-year extension — ensuring his
control through a second term — when this year’s renewal runs out. A
still-skeptical Senate
Majority Leader John Flanagan responded that he “supports mayoral control . . . but not at any price.”
Flanagan and his
Republican colleagues are put off by de Blasio’s antagonism toward charter
schools. They’ve also called for more scrutiny of the city’s education
spending.
De Blasio, then, hasn’t earned a longer leash. Why not?
A primary reason is his
handpicked schools chancellor, Carmen Fariña.
Fariña is a celebrated
educator, but good educators are not necessarily good leaders. She may be
comfortable in a classroom, but she’s clearly in over her head when it comes to
running a system with a million students. Here are her main weaknesses:
Vision. Her piloting of the system is opaque and sloppy. Her central
idea is a “capacity framework” that “fundamentally changes” schools through
values such as “honor[ing] the fact that students are more than just a test
score” and “bring[ing] together the strengths of schools and their
communities.”
She’s got progressive jargon, not a strategy.
Competence. Her oversight of low-performing Renewal Schools has been
ruinous. Her team wasn’t even able to release the Renewal plan until two months
after the program was scheduled to start. Nor did she publish academic targets
for the schools until more than a year into the program, and only after
Chalkbeat reported that she had refused to release them. And it soon became
clear why.
Goals touted as
“rigorous” turned out to be absurdly easy to meet — for example, giving schools
three years to meet targets designed for one year. Fariña validated low
expectations and failure for disadvantaged students while making it more likely
that the initiative — and administration — will appear successful when goals
are met.
A year and a half in, the only achievement that Fariña has been willing to cite
is a decline in chronic absenteeism.
Rigor. Meanwhile, Fariña reinstituted the centralized
command-and-control structure of the past — shifting authority away from
principals and back to superintendents who report to her — ending a decade of
gains in school autonomy and accountability.
Fariña doesn’t rely on evidence in making these decisions. She requires Renewal
schools to use her favored reading program even after a study found poor
students performed better using a different program.
She dismissed four-year
randomized trials showing that the Bloomberg-era small schools produced large
student gains as merely “one view of things.” She suggested that charters push
out low-performing students before state tests and then refused to provide
evidence or to retract.
Urgency. Nearly 80 percent of city high-school graduates attending
community college require remedial coursework. About 10,000 Hispanic and 7,000
black students who should have graduated in 2015 — roughly one-third of each
cohort — either dropped out or are still in school with diminishing odds of
success.
Fariña echoes a time
when education was even less organized to serve the interests of children, a
feeling driven home by a recent report in The Post that at least one
old-fashioned “rubber room” — in which teachers accused of misconduct spend
their time, on full pay — has resumed operation in Queens under her watch.
Of course, Fariña was
hired in the first place because she was willing to maintain common cause with
the teachers union and lend her credibility to City Hall-driven initiatives
like pre-K.
Appointing Fariña was a
safe political choice for the mayor — at the time. Now he needs to get serious.
Facing an oppositional
governor and Republican caucus in Albany, a union president publicly predicting
failure and mayoral control ending in six months — not to mention the potential
for a humiliating state takeover of city schools under a new receivership law —
de Blasio must show results, and fast.
Will he be enough of his
own man to bring in a big thinker, someone who knows what citywide improvement
looks like and can convince people it’s possible?
With due respect for her
service, that person is not Carmen Fariña.
Campbell Brown is the
co-founder and editor-in-chief of The 74, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news site
covering education in America.
New York City Schools
Chancellor
Contents
History of position under city Board of
Education[edit]
Citing what he called a "confidence
gap" with the Board of Education, Scribner announced in December 1972 that
he would leave his post as Chancellor when his three-year contract ended on
June 30, 1973.[2] Before going on a
terminal vacation starting on April 1, 1973, Chancellor Scribner named Anker,
then Deputy Chancellor, to serve as Acting Chancellor.[3] Anker was then named
permanent Chancellor in June 1973.[4]
After taking office in January 1978 as
Mayor of New York, Ed Koch forced out Anker as
Chancellor in favor of Frank Macchiarola, a
key Koch advisor who had been a vice president of the CUNY
Graduate Center and deputy director of
the New York State Emergency Financial Control Board for New York City; Anker
would serve until his contract ended on June 30, 1978.[5]
Alvarado was named as Chancellor in April
1983, the city's first Hispanic Chancellor.[6] Alvarado resigned as
School Chancellor in May 1984 in the wake of professional misconduct charges,
including allegations that he had borrowed $80,000 from employees in coercive
fashion. Nathan Quinones was selected as
Chancellor, having served in the position on an interim basis after Alvarado
placed himself on leave two months earlier.[7]
Quinones was pressured to resign in 1987,
in the face of criticism for his management of the district and its finances,
with mayoral candidate Carol Bellamy saying that he
"consistently failed to provide the leadership or sound management we
need".[8]
Harold O. Levy was the last Chancellor
to be selected directly by the Board of Education, serving during the final
years of Mayor Rudy Giuliani and the early part of the
Bloomberg administration.
History of position under Mayoral control[edit]
Joel Klein was named as Chancellor
in July 2002 by Mayor Michael Bloomberg,
the first to be named in the reorganized system in which the Mayor of New York
was given direct control of the Board of Education.[9]
List of New York City Schools Chancellors[edit]
Individuals who have led the New York City
school system include:[13]
·
Dr. Harvey Garner (Interim) July - August
1993
·
Dr. Joseph A. Fernandez 1990-1993
·
Bernard Mecklowitz 1989
·
Dr. Charles I. Schonhaut 1988
·
Richard F. Halverson 1983
·
Nathan Brown 1969-1970
·
Calvin E. Gross 1963-1965
·
Bernard E. Donovon 1962-1963, 1965–1969
·
John J. Theobald 1958-1962
·
William Jansen 1947-1958
·
John E. Wade 1942-1947
·
Harold G. Campbell 1934-1942
·
William J. O’Shea 1924-1934
·
William L. Ettinger 1918-1924
·
William H. Maxwell 1898-1918
 |
| Anthony Alvarado |
MAN IN THE NEWS; AN INNOVATIVE SCHOOL ADMINISTRATOR: ANTHONY JOHN ALVARADO
By MARCIA CHAMBERS
Published: April 29, 1983
A month ago Anthony J. Alvarado did not believe he had the
slightest chance of becoming the head of the largest public school system in
the country. Yesterday the Board of Education selected him as Schools
Chancellor, and celebrations erupted in Mr. Alvarado's East Harlem office,
where he has served as school superintendent of District 4 for the last decade.
Mr. Alvarado, who will be 41 years old in June, has won his share
of accolades for the innovations he has brought to the schools of East Harlem,
where most of his 14,000 students are black or Hispanic.
He has created schools within schools, so-called mini-schools.
These schools focus on a particular area, such as dance, music or art. Mr.
Alvarado says his mini-schools have become so successful they attract children
from outside District 4.
In 1981, Mr. Alvarado received a $5,000 tax-free prize from the
Fund for the City of New York, which honors city officials it considers
outstanding achievers. The number of children who could read at or above grade
level in the district rose from 25 percent in 1979 to 48 percent in 1982, a
leap that led educators to heap praise upon Mr. Alvarado's leadership
abilities.
In redesigning District 4, Mr. Alvarado, who is Hispanic, has
realigned the leadership of his schools, placing many Hispanic teachers in
supervisory posts. This has led to charges of discrimination against him and
his school board.
In 1975, the State Division of Human Rights held that Mr. Alvarado
and his school board had discriminated against Samuel Peyer, who is white and
was then the acting principal of Public School 171. Mr.Alvarado had replaced
Mr. Peyer with Elsa Lurie, a native of Puerto Rico. Mr. Peyer sued, and the
state eventually ordered that Mr. Peyer be reinstated.
''I was given back pay and my seniority,'' said Mr. Peyer, who is
now the principal of Public School 124 in South Ozone Park, Queens. Other
Complaints Cited
Ted Elsberg, the president of the Council of Supervisors and
Administrators, the supervisors' union, said there had been other
discrimination complaints by assistant principals and principals in District 4.
''We have acted on these complaints,'' he said. ''We have had our
differences with Superintendent Alvarado in the past, but we look forward to
having a good working relationship with him.''
In 1977, Irving Anker, then the Schools Chancellor, said Mr.
Alvarado had too many highly paid supervisors in his district.Mr. Alvarado
defended his hiring practices, saying they were a necessary part of the
district's philosophy of creating smaller schools for students whose
educational needs had been neglected in the past. He maintained that he was not
spending more money than other district superintendents. In recent years,
however, he has gone over his budget.
Mr. Alvarado said his guiding philosophy in running a school
district was ''to increase the expectation of success'' for pupils and teachers
alike. Sense of Accomplishment
He says that the way to rebuild the school system with its nearly
one million students is to instill a sense of accomplishment among students and
teachers. He has pledged to help restore the vitality of the city's high schools,
which are supervised by the central Board of Education and not by the city's 32
school districts.
Anthony John Alvarado was born in the South Bronx on June 10,
1942, the son of a factory worker. He attended St. Anselm's Catholic School,
Fordham Preparatory School and Fordham College, where he received a Bachelor of
Arts degree in English in 1960. He later was awarded a Master of Arts degree in
English from Fordham University and has also taken education courses at Hunter
College.
He began his career as a teacher in the public schools in 1965 and
with the exception of a brief stint at the City University, has remained in the
system.
He taught English, first as a substitute teacher in the Bronx, and
then for one year at James Monroe High School in the Bronx. He quickly rose
through a series of administrative posts, first at the board's headquarters in
Brooklyn and then in District 9 in the South Bronx. He became the
superintendent of District 4, on Oct. 1, 1973. Wife Is Community Liaison Aide
He is married to Ellen Kirshbaum, who once headed Distict 4's East
Harlem Performing Arts School. She now works as a community liaison for the
district, she said yesterday.
The Alvarados live in a brownstone in Park Slope, Brooklyn, with
their children, Rachel, 4 1/2, and Emily, 18 months old. Mr. Alvarado has two
daughters from a previous marriage, Maria, 13, and Gloria, 11.
Miss Kirshbaum said yesterday that with two careers, theirs is an
''egalitarian household.'' They divide responsibilities and her husband often
does the marketing. On occasion, Mr. Alvarado plays a little racquetball, she
said.
Mostly, he likes to read in his spare time, she said. ''He is an
avid, unbelievably fast reader,'' Miss Kirshbaum said. ''He has been studying
the Civil War for a long, long time.''
