Wrong man, right idea
It was terribly embarrassing, sadly hilarious and strangely mesmerizing: On live TV, Miami’s Alberto Carvalho left Mayor de Blasio at the altar, rejecting the biggest job in public education hours after de Blasio staffers told the media and a week after Carvalho had made a commitment to the mayor.
Alberto, we hardly knew ye. In fact, we didn’t get to know ye at all. But after that self-indulgent Hamlet act, we’re pretty sure we wouldn’t have liked ye very much.
The kooky show that was the Carvalho Carnival — one day only! — risks obscuring something important that almost happened here. Namely, that de Blasio, whose cocksure leadership of the city schools has so far been wanting, made up his mind to tap an independent-thinking education reformer with a strong track record of results.
The fact that it blew up in his face on a fluke thanks to this flaky fellow’s fealty to Florida must not deter Hizzoner from trying something similar in the do-over.
Over the last four years, de Blasio, in partnership with spirit animal Carmen Fariña, has spent gobs of energy and piles of money distinguishing his education-reform strategy from that of his predecessor Mike Bloomberg.
In a few areas, they deserve unalloyed praise. They swiftly scaled up universal pre-K. Smartly eschewed the anti-testing opt-out movement. Brilliantly worked to expand Advanced Placement classes to ever more high schools.
Far more dubiously, they scrapped letter-grade evaluations of city schools and curtailed principals’ autonomy and authority.
They’ve turned the city’s largest public school system from an electromagnet for the country’s best charter-school innovators into a place decidedly more hostile to them.
They’ve poured nearly $600 million into an effort to rescue nearly 100 schools. The results of that Renewal Schools experiment have been decidedly mixed, with five newly set to close despite the funds lavished.
And they’ve made it far harder to suspend disorderly youngsters, a shift that school climate surveys show is resulting in more unruly classrooms.
Graduation rates are rising. English and math scores, too. But progress is too slow. Hundreds of thousands of kids deserve and demand far better.
Though it’s easy in retrospect to see the Carvalho pick as sheer folly, de Blasio had the right idea.
This was a man who, in a decade as superintendent of the nation’s fourth-largest school system, has embraced charter schools and many other alternative learning models.
Who crafted an intelligent plan to deliver bonuses to the best educators. Recall: New York’s teachers union pitched a fit when Bloomberg dared to even tiptoe in that direction.
Who has been on the leading edge of bringing personalized learning tools — which let kids learn at their own speed, with aid of computers — into more and more classrooms.
Carvalho may be flighty, but as a schools chief, he is energetic, open to evidence and unafraid of upending public education orthodoxy. If de Blasio wants to serve New York’s children, he’ll go back to the blackboard and find someone similar.