Harold Levy Tackles the City Schools

New York, NY —

Harold Levy Tackles the City Schools By Beth Fertig

Next month could be critical for 250,000 New York City public school students, who risk being held back if they don't catch up during summer school. Tonight at 8 p.m., Schools Chancellor Harold Levy will host a forum called "School's In For Summer," to be broadcast live on WNYC AM 820and Channel 13. But summer school isn't the only challenge facing the newly appointed chancellor. WNYC's Beth Fertig has this profile of Harold Levy... a corporate lawyer who now finds himself heading the nation's largest public school system.

On his first day as Chancellor of New York City's public schools, Harold Levy went back to his old junior high school. As he walked through the halls of Junior High 52 in the upper Manhattan neighborhood of Inwood,where he grew up, Mr. Levy noticed a broken water fountain. Which he pointed out to principal Jose Rivera.

LEVY: Seriously how long? RIVERA: It's been like that for several years.LEVY: You've got to be kidding!

The new chancellor was shocked to learn that the school of 1500 students had given up fixing its water fountains, because repair crews only made the situation worse. He called it, systemic idiocy. LEVY: "It makes me angry. I mean, it's emblematic of the problem to walk into a building, which is obviously a nice building, and well painted,lots of facilities, and the kids eager to learn and discover that the damn water fountains don't work. It's silly but it's representative of the larger issue. If you don't hold people to account they think, well,anything will do." Harold Levy is not a typical school administrator. Until this year, the 47year old attorney was head of global compliance for Citigroup. But he also served as a member of the state Board of Regents. And while his own two children attend private school, he insists this does not undermine his commitment to public education. LEVY: "Urban education is like what going to the civil rights movement was once or going to the peace corps was once."

That comparison might sound like an exaggeration. But the challenges cannot be underestimated. One point one million students are packed into eleven hundred aging and crumbling buildings. More than fifty percent of elementary and middle school students are reading below grade level. And nearly 250 thousand will have to go to summer school next month, as the system prepares to end social promotion - the old policy of letting failing students move on to the next grade.

Meanwhile, at this critical juncture, experienced teachers are retiring or fleeing for better paying jobs in the suburbs. That's why Mr. Levy says his first priority is to hire 54 thousand teachers over the next five years. LEVY: We need to hire the best. We need to get the absolute best people coming out of the universities today to choose to come into teaching. And if we don't get the best people now this year, next year when we've got this huge demographic shift of older teachers leaving the profession in large numbers, then we're going to lock in mediocrity for a generation.Because they will get tenure, they won't have any place else to go and then we'll be stuck with them. Cause once they have tenure they're impossible to get rid of. One test of this commitment to teacher quality will be the union's contract, which expires this year. Mr. Levy won't reveal his bargaining tactics. He does say he plans retrain nearly eleven thousand teachers who aren't yet certified... removing those who can't make the grade. But Mayor Rudolph Giuliani wants merit pay for teachers. Back in January,he unsuccessfully tried to block Mr. Levy's appointment as interim chancellor. After other candidates dropped out and the board of education voted to give Mr. Levy the permanent job in May, the mayor offered qualified support. GIULIANI: "He's doing a good job administratively. You know day by day in running the system. He is not advocating the things that I'd like to see long term for the system. Maybe we can reach some agreement on that." Mayor Giuliani is still lobbying for taxpayer-funded vouchers, so student scan attend private schools. Mr. Levy hasn't said whether he agrees, though he says vouchers will not be a priority. Political feuds like these played a big role in the ouster of Mr. Levys' two predecessors, Rudy Crew and Ramon Cortines. Those tensions may have relaxed, now that Mayor Giuliani has given up his bid for the U.S. Senate.But some observers say the new chancellor is still facing other obstacles. CONNELL: "One of the things I say about the NYC school system is that the red herrings are as big as whales." Noreen Connell is Executive Director of the Educational Priorities Panel.As New York City prepares to launch the biggest summer school program in the nation, she believes the board of education could help failing students even more by lowering class sizes throughout the year. And she points to 150 million dollars in government funding which is not being used. CONNELL: "What they're doing now is they're taking money that could be used for class size reduction to help these kids come up at grade level and instead they're just using it for summer school and for keeping the kids over another year in same the grade. So they're going to make overcrowding worse." Ms. Connell believes nearly 60 percent of elementary schools are over crowded, many with classes of more than 30 students. But Chancellor Levy says there just isn't enough money for building and leasing new classrooms... because the city cut his capital budget. What's left, he says, doesn't come close to providing the resources he needs. LEVY: "I've got more square footage under management - my management -than the Post Office. I have more buses than the Metropolitan Transit Authority. I order more food on a daily basis than the department of defense. That's the magnitude we're talking about and we need to build many, many, many more classrooms. We're not close to being where we need to be. We still have a lot of overcrowding. No question. We need to fix that. No question. But can we get the system to perform at an higher level even with those problems, you betcha."

So without more resources, Mr. Levy is adopting what he considers a creative strategy. Instead of building more classrooms, he says teachers may team up, to give students more attention. He's also tried to enlighten his staff, recently sending 43 superintendents to Carnegie Hall for a violin lesson by Isaac Stern. The chancellor wanted them to get excited about arts education.

There are some who see Mr. Levy as a bit of a self promoter. He certainly welcomes the media. And he's been reaching out to parents and political leaders with forums, like the one tonight. Former Chancellor Ramon Cortines worked with Mr. Levy on a study of school facilities. He says his old friend has passion and leadership skills. But he says the city should be more realistic. CORTINES: "People are very impatient. They want instant cream of wheat.And teaching and learning is just not an instant thing. It is a progressive thing. It is a building block thing."

Mr. Levy admits he can also be a little impatient. The board of education is notorious for its black hole of a bureaucracy. And the system has gone through twelve chancellors in just 20 years. LEVY: Sure I come in as business person with perhaps not as much tolerance for let's wait let's study it. That's because I don't have time. I don' t know when I vaporize out of this job. So I'm not going to take the risk that here was something I could have done and but it was on the plans to do it. I need to do it right away as quickly as I can, as forcefully as I can because the opportunity is now. Success, he says, will depend on following the roadmap his predecessors set in establishing higher standards, while also pushing the boundaries.For WNYC I'm Beth Fertig.