School Superintendents: The Outsiders Take Over

Last week Roy Romer, 71, former Governor of Colorado, was appointed to what might be the second most difficult job in America: superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District. Only a month ago, another educational outsider, Wall Street lawyer Harold Levy, 47, was officially named New York City schools chancellor, No. 1 on the mission-impossible list (he had been serving as interim chancellor since January). The two had never met, so last week TIME introduced them through an early-morning conference call. Excerpts:

ROMER: How long have you been on this job?

LEVY: Almost 140 days.

ROMER: I've been on the job here 18 hours. You and I have a similar problem. We might have management experience, but we're not professional educators. How do you structure your relationships from your office to your 32 superintendencies?

LEVY: When I got here, there were 16 people reporting to the chancellor. There are now six. It's better to identify half a dozen people who are responsible than to leave it go, shall we say, in somewhat "collegial" a fashion. Another thing that I found invaluable is to come in with not a big team but two or three people who you could turn to. I know your reputation within your state is such that you will attract a lot of people willing to do that with you. That is a powerful place you should pivot on.

ROMER: I'm interested in how you focus on long-term professional development.

LEVY: Let me be blunt: I think you need ruthless leadership that is prepared to tackle really ancient problems of management in order to get the best teachers teaching those who are less able to get performance out of students. I have intentionally used the language of management for the reason that I think it evokes a whole different response. If you've got branches or distant offices that don't work well, you put your strongest managers there. In this industry--if I can call it that--we do the opposite. We take our youngest teachers, our weakest managers, and we put them into the weakest schools. Our weakest schools here in New York City are the schools with the most uncertified teachers, with the least experienced principals.

If you believe the data that certified teachers do better at getting children up past these objective exams than people who are perhaps not as well qualified, then you've got to put a whole bunch of money into professional development. It is also a question of salaries. We're going to need to pay the prevailing wage so that we make teaching a valued profession again. Twenty-five years ago, the difference between the starting salary for young lawyers going into the big firms and the starting salary for teachers going into the New York school system was $2,000. Today the incoming class of lawyers is getting $156,000, and our beginning salary is $31,000. It should surprise no one that we're not going to get the best people.

ROMER: Let me turn to the issue of social promotion.

LEVY: Last year the Board of Education voted to do away with social promotion on the theory that children were not being helped by simply being passed along. Starting in third grade, children can be held back. We now have almost a quarter of the system going to summer school. Unfortunately it's only four or five weeks. I wish that it were longer so that those children who need it could get year-round help.