Cereal Instead of Meat
As Farina Follows Lam
To School in One Week

Henry J. Stern
March 15, 2004

Why three articles in eight days on education—

1)  It is the most important city function, along with police.
2)  It is at a crossroads, with rapid changes in personnel taking place.
3)  The people in charge are making serious errors of judgment, relying on professors whose values are politically correct to the point of deconstruction.

Last week, just as the "The Sopranos" returned to the air, the Department of Education became the scene of some high-level bloodletting in the most dramatic episode in the 21-month history of the new mayoral agency. On Monday, Deputy Schools Chancellor Diana Lam departed from her fifth job running a school system, and Chancellor Joel Klein named his assistant Michele Cahill to take her place temporarily. On Wednesday, Mr. Klein's general counsel was asked to resign, which he did with grace. And the State Department of Education said it would be illegal to give Ms. Cahill a waiver of the state rule requiring a background in education for a school superintendent. In 2002, Mr. Klein had received that waiver, as had Harold O. Levy, his predecessor, who had been a Citibank compliance officer.

A glimpse into the past: (skip this if you know the story) The only mayoral designee for whom the state denied the waiver of credentials was Robert F. Wagner, Jr.,whom Mayor Koch sought to appoint in 1985. Koch had previously referred publicly to the state education commissioner, one Gordon Ambach, as "pigheaded" in connection with another dispute, and Mr. Ambach may have wanted to prove him right. Koch then appointed Wagner president of the Board of Education, where he served four years, until Mayor Dinkins replaced him in 1990 with Gwendolyn Calvert Baker, a YWCA official, who in a year or so gave way to Carl McCall.
 
Back to the present: On Thursday, Klein appointed Ms. Carmen Farina, a regional superintendent in Brooklyn, as the new deputy chancellor for instruction. Ms. Farina required no waiver—she was a career school official who had risen from teaching to become principal of P.S. 6 in Manhattan and then advanced within the education bureaucracy. Ms. Farina has three advantages over Ms. Lam: 1) She is local talent, and has made many friends during her long career in New York City schools; 2) She is being paid about one-third less than Ms. Lam's $250,000. Farina is receiving an appropriate salary for a deputy chancellor, and the savings will provide salaries for two teachers; 3) Her husband is retired, and is not seeking employment in the school system.
 
There are, however, some potential problems with the appointment. For one thing, Ms. Farina said she was "150 percent" behind the Lam curriculum, which many educators as well as federal education officials view as dubious. Second, she does not have high regard for nonbelievers in her educational dogma, referring to them as "fanatics" in an article she wrote for El Diario/La Prensa last February. Third, her ardent advocacy of bilingual education is contrary to the mayor's campaign promises to eliminate, or at least reduce, this expensive, anachronistic practice, which despite its pretense of transition keeps thousands of poor youngsters illiterate in English, the language of the country in which they now live. This program is a particular bonbon for 'teachers' whose fluency is not in English. Ms. Farina's success will depend on how she trims her ideological sails to face the realities of thousands of children not learning to read well or write clearly in any language..
 
Today's crisis at Tweed is over the Panel for Educational Policy, successor to the Board of Education, which is meeting tonight to discuss the chancellor's plan to limit social promotion. One step that Mr. Klein and Ms. Lam did take to carry out the Mayor's agenda was, in a limited way, to end the practice of promoting children to the next grade regardless of whether they could read or write. Promotions may have made the children and their parents content, but the pupils who could not do third grade work are completely unable to do fourth grade work, which depends heavily on reading ability. Richard Schwartz covers the subject with logic and literacy in his Daily News column today.

Klein's proposal is opposed—by the far left, a group called "Time Out From Testing," and so-called advocates for children, who are instinctively averse to any judgments anyone makes on anyone else's abilities, for whatever reason or on the basis of whatever data. At the City Council hearing on this issue, which I attended on March 3, they argued that 1) Tests don't measure anything; 2) Even if they do, a child should not be punished because the teacher is incompetent; 3) Children left back would suffer loss of self-esteem (a major purpose of education); 4) The Department of Education is too inept to handle the program properly and so the wrong children would be left back; 5) The policy would impact minority students disproportionately, and is therefore racist on its face; 6) Whatever special classes or tutoring or anything else the school could do to bring the children up to grade level would be inadequate; and 7) The real killer is large class sizes, and how can children be expected to learn to read in 2004 under these conditions, just because they were able to learn 50 and 100 years ago.

What I found fascinating at the hearing was the way the councilmembers pandered to the protesters. No one wanted to disagree with them on any substantive issue. The only targets were Klein and Lam, who were treated as if they were Con Edison executives explaining the electrocution of a pedestrian. It was bizarre to see the two of them, who are as progressive as can be, being criticized as overly strict, insensitive, unaware of the needs of youth, etc., etc.

This dispute shows how hard it is to do anything in New York City schools without offending one group or another, and how craven politicians are whenever enough people complain loudly enough. A former councilman told me that the hearing showed Klein's limits; he should have brought a couple of hundred parents who agree with him in order to even out the pressure. But that is something he could not have learned from fighting Microsoft, and, as in many agencies, there is no deputy commissioner or senior advisor for common sense or political tactics.

That is why the Bloomberg administration, which is very good on most issues—honest and free of clubhouse patronage, independent of most of the permanent government, and dedicated to improving New Yorkers' quality of life—is not liked by many people, although the poll in today's Daily News was most encouraging for the mayor. My prediction is that the strongest case for his re-election will be the qualifications and character of his Democratic opponent.

But even so, in order to win, one must make wise moves every day, rather than waiting to be overtaken by events. The decision to fire Ms. Lam showed new toughness in Mayor Bloomberg. It is now up to him to do for education what he and Commissioner Kelly have done with crime. But if he sticks to the Lam script, the educational results we all desire urgently are highly unlikely to be attained. The mayor must look at the matter closely, and bring the intelligence he showed in a superb career in business to the subject he is responsible for today - how best to teach young childdren to read and write. It is too important to delegate; the voters elected Michael Bloomberg, and it his mind that will be essential to solving this problem.