How Macchiarola Set a Standard for Schools — Without Mistaking<br>Himself for God

Frank Macchiarola, who passed away this week at the age of 71, is remembered for his successful five-year tenure as Chancellor of the New York City public schools, the yardstick by which his successors will be measured in the future. That tenure undermines Mayor Bloomberg’s dictum that during the time that the old Board of Education ran the schools, there were “no good old days, only old days.”The fact is that Macchiarola’s time at 110 Livingston Street marked a high point, as scores increased and morale improved following the deepest budget cuts the system has had to absorb before or since. His success is widely believed to have emanated from his own abilities and force of his personality. The result was the high regard he is held in, even to this day, nearly three decades since leaving the post.In little more than a year, a new mayor will have to reorganize a broken school system that in many ways is now at a historic low point. Test scores are about to plummet, yet again, as tougher standards (standards not nearly as tough as those faced by Macchiarola) are being implemented.Not having Frank Macchiarola’s wise counsel as the necessary changes are made to salvage public education here will be a challenge unto itself.Macchiarola was appointed as chancellor by Mayor Koch, shortly after Mr. Koch took office in 1978, and embroiled the schools in quite a controversy at the time. Macchiarola was not the choice of the powerful United Federation of Teachers. Its choice was the then-Superintendent of District 10 in the Bronx, Theodore Wiesenthal.This was at a time when Albert Shanker, the legendary U.F.T. leader was riding high. He had demonstrated his union’s power during the Ocean Hill-Brownsville crisis, and then used his clout to help the city emerge from the depths of the fiscal crisis.Even in those days before mayoral control, this episode disclosed just how potent the power of the mayor was. Despite the fact that Mr. Koch himself could only appoint two of the Board of Education’s seven members, both of whom he inherited from his predecessor, Abraham D. Beame, he still managed to defeat the U.F.T.’s man by adroit political maneuvering. The systemic tension that resulted from this, in retrospect, was a positive force that helped drive the system to greater success.So close was this contest that, I’m told, Mr. Wiesenthal headed downtown to the critical meeting, fully expecting to return at the end of the day as chancellor. The true story is that Mayor Koch’s political team managed to win over the decisive vote the old-fashioned way: through the promise of a cushy job to a board member, in this case, Isaiah E. Robinson, who was appointed to the Board of Educatin by the president of Manhattan, Percy Sutton.Mr. Koch, writing of these events years later in his book “Mayor,” paints a different picture. He denies having even met Robinson (who passed on last year) before these events. In his account, Mr. Koch implies that somehow Robinson was always going to support Macchiarola. I don’t believe that this was true. I served with (and under) Robinson on the City’s Human Right Commission, and this was not the story I heard around the corridors there. Shortly after Robinson cast his controversial vote, he was named by Mr. Koch as chairman of the city’s Human Rights Commission, a lucrative and much-desired patronage post.George Washington Plunkitt, that great sage of Tammany Hall once said that “politics is as much a regular business as the grocery or the dry-goods or the drug business. You’ve got to be trained up to it, or you’re sure to fail.” Both Mayor Koch and Macchiarola were well-trained in these arts, and in this instance the people’s business was well-served by the questionable deal that ended with the choice of Macchiarola as chancellor.It is telling that when Mr. Macchiarola left his post five years later, Shanker was among those begging him to change his mind and stay. The contrast in style between Frank Macchiarola and, say, Joel Klein, couldn’t be more stark. Mr. Klein gave people the impression that he thought he knew all the answers. Macchiarola would have been the first to admit that he didn’t. At the time he headed the school system, it was the responsibility of the chancellor to appoint the principals of the city’s high schools (the principals of elementary and middle schools were then chosen by elected school boards).To better understand how the high schools worked, Macchiarola himself took over the helm of Jamaica High School for three months, before he chose a successor. Contrast this with Mr. Klein’s ill-conceived “Leadership Academy,” run initially by outsider business types such as Jack Welch and Robert Knowling, with predictably disastrous results.By the best measures available at the time, the Macchiarola chancellorship was a success. And in the many accounts that have appeared since his retirement, and now in death, there is hardly a word of criticism of the job he did.While Macchiarola would never openly criticize one of his successors, he counseled caution to Mayor Bloomberg and his team when they took over the schools: “As chancellor I constantly prayed not to confuse myself with God,” Macchiarola was quoted in the Times as saying. “They need to find a chancellor committed to providing leadership but who never shuts the door to someone’s ideas, or to the people who harangue and torture you. Otherwise, you end up defending something just because it’s yours.”

How Macchiarola Set a Standard for Schools — Without Mistaking<br>Himself for God

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