As someone who grew up reading Ms. magazine, I feel especially invested in the career of Cathie Black.
Among her many accompishments, Black was the first publisher of Ms., a risky move for someone interested in the fairly corporate side of magazine ad sales and management. Black helped develop a generation of ad saleswomen, and to break barriers in advertising for women - such as convincing car companies that women might be more interested in whether a car runs well than whether or not it's pretty.
Black went on to a series of jobs running women's magazines at Hearst, until eventually she ran the publishing side of Hearst's operations. She oversaw Good Housekeeping and Harper's Bazaar, among many, and was considered quite good at what she did.
So when Michael Bloomberg announced that he was making Cathie Black Chancellor of New York City schools, I too was torn. Here's someone I deeply admire in one context taking on a role in another that just seemed well, completely wrong for her. And for New York.
I folowed the travails of Black's nomination, more out of annoyance with Bloomberg and his ham-handed management style of late - it's the fashionable thing, in his third term, for New Yorkers to complain about him - than anything about Black. Even as it turned that she had no education credentials, that she'd have to get special waivers to fill the job, that her kids went to private school... still, I figured there must be some reason she was taking on this huge role.
As the story unfolded, I thought a number of times about writing about it. I haven't written about education in a while, and I thought this would be a way into the story... but as I kept reading about the issues, and watched Black flail, my ideas for writing never quite came together.
And now, 3 months into her tenure, Black's resigned and been quickly replaced, and New Yorkers are left bewildered, wondering what just hit us.
Educationis the issue that threatens to loom over our politics - at the local level it's the big problem of government money, at the state levels it's a question of equal educational opportunities being missed, and at the federal level it's question of federal involvement and emphases on testing and measurement. All of these issues are compelling... yet education still seems to never quite take center stage as the prevailing issue of the moment.
I've long thought the problem is twofold: first, as a society we're still struggling to define just what we thinks schools ought to do and what subjects ought to be taught and two, the problem is that we know what education programs bneed to succeed, and mostly, it's money we don't have.
The rapid rise and fast fall of the Cathie Black saga has really been part of a larger story about upheavals in the major municipal school systems - from New York to DC to Chicago to LA, the major urban school districts are struggling to find solid leadership, and manage major systems. Joel Klein's decision to walk away after 9 years running New York City was, in its way, kind of abrupt and unexpected, and it was joined by the one tangible result of the 2010 elections that was all about education as a local issue: the election of a new Mayor in Washington DC who immediately fired Michelle Rhee, their controversial head of schools.
Rhee's been the most interesting free agent on the market, who quickly moved on to fresh gigs; but her confrontational style - critical of teachers and their unions, plain spoken in her assessments, aggressive in her actions - has come to symbolize the tensions in public education and the struggle to manage a rapidly changing environment.
It was never clear what Cathie Black was supposed to do to NYC schools, or just what constituency Bloomberg thought would be appeased with her choice. Like Klein, she seemed to be about continuing corporate, private sector approach to managing public education; but she lacked his sense of providing a clear-eyed, sensitive notion of how education works. If she was meant to assuage the concerns of upper middle class parents in Manahttan, her appointment was an immediate disaster - none of the parents groups advocating school choice and special options for privileged kids seemed to trust that Black was on their side. The American Federation of Teachers also made clear that Black - and Bloomberg - were not on their side.
New York's school system, the largest in the country by far (we are very parochial, in New York, about being biggest, by far), faces multiple problems on a variety of fronts and may, very well, be ungovernable. Too many kids, too many different lifestyles, backgrounds and vast disparities in wealth and class make for a system that barely delivers anything to anyone like they probably need. Though Bloomberg has made a mission of ending some of the most egregious practices, particularly "social promotion" of kids who don't meet basic, grade level standards and reducing dropout rates, New York students still test poorly and many are not considered preparedfor either college or careers upon graduation. Bloomberg's Education department has created a raft of Charter and other specialized schools, with little to show for shuffling a variety f students around. Allowing charter schools in Harlem, for instance, to cream off a small subset of striving middle and lower middle class kids has left the remaining non-charter schools grappling with the most difficult populations and the enormous challenges of special education. Black, naturally, was nowhere on the nuances of these issues.
The "big piscture" story of Black's failures - that she was aloof, unaware, and glib in her dealings with various constituencies, including students - make for a colorful illustration of flaming out, but I suspect the failure was far more complete: if Black had any kind of coroporate expertise that could be applied to educational issues, it was never especially apparent, and a few gaffes in meetings and speeches is probably just the tip of a very big iceberg of failures. What's wrong with public education, especially in an urban system of such vast proportions as New York, though, is something no one could solve, not even Cathie Black, or whatever fantasy of Cathie Black existed that Bloomberg thought he'd chosen.
The post I never wrote about Cathie Black - why her? why now? - is, I realize, a post that doesn't need to be said; what's ailing public education is what's ailing America generally. We're a nation unconcerned with helping others in need, with a privileged elite that has the money and means to protect its own interests at the expense of others. And into the breach have stepped "reformers" like Chris Christie and other Republican governors (though Andrew Cuomo, too, may well go this route) who make teachers the enemy and pit local communities aginst one another. Almost everything about our schools, in a better world, would change: they'd be managed more centrally, resources allocated more effectively, with less intrusion into classrooms and a better sense of general, achievable goals for educating kids. And in the context of those enormous issues, Cathie Black isn't just some minor detail... she was, and is, utterly irrelevant.
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