In Sunday's New York Times, Bob Herbert ranted about Cathy Black, the new schools chancellor for New York City. Black is fabulously wealthy — Park Avenue penthouse, $4 million home in Southampton, fancy jewelry, and she's been brought in to manage the school system of New York, which primarily serves poor and working-class children. Herbert was ticked off that American aristocrats are running our governments and cashing huge bonuses, while the rest of America is unemployed and under-water.
I am ticked off by another tidbit in Herbert's column. He mentioned that Black sent her own kids to private boarding schools. She's not the only one. Half of the politicians in DC send their kids to private schools.
Many are annoyed that Black, who lacks any classroom experience, is running the school system in New York. I'm more annoyed that she lacks experience as a parent in a public school system. If you haven't attended a PTA meeting, struggled to get a proper writing program in your schools, convinced your elderly neighbor that they should vote for the town school budget, or attended an IEP meeting, then you don't have the chops to run a school. You lack vital experience. If you believe that public education is a fine thing, but not for your child, then you aren't going to work hard enough to improve the system.
Apt. 11d 
I dunno … what about situations where the schools are simply too dangerous, or terrible? Isn’t it possible to support the schools without putting your kids thru that? This is another way of saying, as long as you’re willing to pay the taxes and be invested in public school, shouldn’t you be able to do what’s best for your own kids? Particularly if you view it as a transitional thing it seems defensible to me.
I agree that you’re particularly invested when your own kids are in the system. But if we make this a litmus test, it will just drive more parents out of the political process. Not a good thing.
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I’m not so sure. Can you be a magazine executive if you don’t read “People”? Can you be commander-in-chief or secretary of defense if you’ve never been in the armed forces? Can you head up Human Services if you’ve never been on welfare? Can you be a judge or lawyer if you’ve never been arrested? I don’t see a bright line rule lurking in all this, but maybe someone else does.
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I disagree. But, of course I do, because I send my kids to private school. I think there are lots of people who will be making decisions about lots of things they don’t have personal experience about.
Black may not have adequate experience to run a public school system, but I don’t see where she sent her kids to school as being at all relevant to judging that qualification, especially in NYC. Is she really less qualified to serve all the students in NY because she didn’t manage to negotiate her kids’ entrance into one of the “acceptable” schools in NYC? If her kids had gone to Hunter college high school would she be much more qualified to serve?
I think that direct, personal experience with all the things on your list is relevant, but not a bar to being an effective leader. People who haven’t had personal experience can indeed learn and people who have had personal experience can be strangely blind to the experiences of others.
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I would say that you shouldn’t be a judge or a lawyer, if you fail to observe the laws that most Americans obey. You shouldn’t be the head of a car company, if you don’t drive a car (as most Americans do). You would make lousy choices about ice-cream flavors, if you were the head of Ben and Jerry’s, but were lactose intolerant. You would make a lousy book publisher, if you never read books. I do think that the a head of Human Services would make much better decisions regarding poverty, if he/she had indeed spent some time in poverty. Parks department leaders should spent a day in a public park.
It’s absurd that our politicians are divorced from the reality of average Americans. I believe that politicians would make better decisions regarding schools, if they had direct investment in them and hands-on knowledge of how they worked.
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I would have to agree with Laura to an extent. If her children didn’t attend public school, then the other way to become qualified would be to be an educator. I think some direct contact with a public school system is needed experience to really have a deep understanding of the flaws and triumphs in public education. I’ve seen far too many politicians come in and want to run a school system “like a business”. Well, guess what, it’s not a business. Children are few too valuable to be considered merely a product.
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Laura’s proposed standard sounds to me pretty similar to “You can’t become head of food safety unless you’ve suffered from salmonella poisoning.” It also assumes that, if your kid is in a public school system, your experience will be comparable to Laura’s. I just don’t think that’s the case.
1. I went to an excellent “magnet” school in an otherwise crappy urban public school system, such that I got a great public education — possibly to some degree at the expense of other schools. (But if they didn’t have such a magnet school, my parents would have either moved to the suburbs or else paid for private school.) Does that experience increase the qualifications of my parents to run a public school system?
2. My younger sister, who has a learning disability, had a crappy experience as a Kindergartner in the public schools. My parents fought (and won) for the public schools to pay to send my sister to private school to deal with her issues for the next 12 years. Does that interaction with the public schools qualify my parents to run a school system?
3. I send my kids to an awesome public school in a ritzy suburb. I never have any complaints because we all agree to pay high taxes and have great programs in small classes. Does that make me more qualified to run a school district?
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Here are a few points:
1. There are some awfully fancy public schools out there, which is where the politicians kids would be going if they weren’t going to a fancy private school.
2. Likewise, there are a lot of financially-strapped private schools (although that is not where big politicians’ kids go).
3. The more high-powered someone’s career has been, the less likely it is that they’ve been the go-to parent for school.
4. Don’t elite private schools have some things to teach public schools? For instance, a principal can teach, and teaching can be a part-time job. A lot more bright, educated people (for instance mothers) would be much more interested in teaching if it weren’t a total commitment.
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Unsurprising. No teaching certification. No educational administrative experience (as far as I’ve been able to determine). Are we surprised that this person has no parental experience with the public schools?
It’s all part of the fetishization of private industry experience. Somehow that’s a sure guarantee to fix anything in the public sector, according to this mixed-up mindset. Even if we acknowledge the many problems in both sectors, the structures and laws governing the public sector always bring the “private sector white knights” to a bruising fall.
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“Even if we acknowledge the many problems in both sectors, the structures and laws governing the public sector always bring the “private sector white knights” to a bruising fall.”
I’m not a huge Michael Bloomberg fan–I didn’t vote for him the last election–but it would be a little overstated to describe him as having had a “bruising fall.” I would say the same about Jon Corzine–as I recall, he got our hostess’s vote the last election–and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
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Actually, I’m on the fence about business leaders leading public bureaucracies. I would like to see some actual studies on their effectiveness. There are probably as many successes as failures. The successes may not be due to the fact that business leaders are so wonderful, but because traditional administrators are so poorly trained.
My biggest problem with Black is that she didn’t use the public school system. It sets my teeth on edge that political leaders dole out a product that a vast majority of Americans use, but refuse to consume the product themselves. Here, people, eat your government cheese. It’s perfect good for the likes of you. But I shant eat it myself.
So, part of my issues with Black is the hypocrisy angle. The other part is that being parent with a child in the school system is a form of experience. It’s not the sole criteria that I would use to judge the qualifications of a school leader, but it is a component.
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Someone near us who homeschools ran for a school position. My first reaction was “what’s good enough for my child is not good enough for yours and now you’re going to come fix it for us?”
That said, he didn’t get my vote for other reasons. I can’t fault public officials for choosing private school when my own public experience as a child or parent is not the norm. If those in power were in public school they’d likely be in the elite ones and possibly less sympathetic to the woes of the typical school than if they were too terrified to try them at all.
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“what’s good enough for my child is not good enough for yours and now you’re going to come fix it for us?”
Or, alternately, he’d like to fix the school so that it would be the sort of place he’d send his kids to. What would be less excusable is if the homeschooler were in principle opposed to school for his kids.
I think the boarding school is quite a bit different than day school and you really have to distinguish between the two.
Now that I think of it, are we prepared to say that a childless person (or at least a childless non-teacher) should not be in the upper echelons of school administration? Because if a private school parent can’t lead a school district, a fortiori a non-parent should not.
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Even Tony Blair, the poshest and most aristocratic of Labour leaders since Attlee, had to send his kids to state (public) schools — in the 80s and 90s it was standard for labour politicians in the UK to resign if their kids went private. Liberal opponents of school vouchers whose kids go private (Landrieu for example) are vulnerable to hypocrisy charges. Mainly because they are, usually, hypocrites.
As for Black — its something she should be embarrassed about, but not necessarily a disqualification. Many superintendents have had their kids attend public schools which reek of privilege much more than many private schools (private schools on the public dollar).
My dad was a superintendent of a relatively affluent school district in the UK and sent me to the school with the highest teen pregnancy rate, the highest rate of court orders (restraints on violent kids, almost all boys) and among the worst three (of 50 or so) in terms of outcomes (O-levels and A-levels which are content-based tests). It was SO much better for me (academically and intellectually) than the highly selective and affluent school I was moved from. Mark you, at both schools the most terrifying boy in the whole place befriended me, so that spared me one source of anxiety.
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“are we prepared to say that a childless person (or at least a childless non-teacher) should not be in the upper echelons of school administration? Because if a private school parent can’t lead a school district, a fortiori a non-parent should not.”
I think that a parent of public school kid would have an important experience that a non-parent wouldn’t have. Like I said, hands-on public school parent experience is one factor among many that I believe makes a good school leader.
In some ways, non-parents have an edge over parents in politics. They don’t have to worry about nanny-gate issues. They don’t have the hypocrisy problem w/public schools. Then there’s the whole job security problem. (Rahm Emmanuel’s wife is apparently ticked off about moving back to Chicago again.)
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My dad was a superintendent of a relatively affluent school district in the UK and sent me to the school with the highest teen pregnancy rate
Instead of to just explaining sex to you, he could hand-off the task to sexy, promiscuous strangers. Sure, it worked for you. But not every father is willing or able to send their boys to the schools with the shorter odds.
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“Instead of to just explaining sex to you, he could hand-off the task to sexy, promiscuous strangers. Sure, it worked for you. But not every father is willing or able to send their boys to the schools with the shorter odds.”
Veering off topic, I recently learned that the nice 20-something kid who’s been working for some relatives of mine became a father at 16 years old. He’s bright but not ambitious, and he’s been living under the radar since he left home (for instance, spending several years couch surfing on an Indian reservation). He’s got some nasty wage garnishments for child support to deal with, so there’s not a lot of motivation to get paid over the table, or to make much of himself.
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MH — No, no-one was explaining anything to me. It remained as mysterious when I left as when I arrived.
My point is that the data that I gave were extremely poor indicators of the quality of the school. In fact it was excellent, not just for me but for the other small number of middle class kids. Interestingly, although all the parents of the middle class kids I knew were lefties of some sort, all of them had also investigated the quality of the school in a more sensible way.
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…all of them had also investigated the quality of the school in a more sensible way.
We just asked around and talked to the teachers. I’ll just quickly note that our public school superintendent left his job six months before his kid hit kindergarten age and I have no idea if those two facts are related.
Also, just today I saw a lamp-post ad for a production of Hobson’s Choice. I have no idea if there is a relation or not. The poster described it as “A funny version of King Lear” which means my school didn’t teach King Lear right.
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It’s interesting that a significant number of our school board members have chosen to send their children to private high schools or boarding schools. I’ve heard through the grapevine that in our sister town, at one time, the majority of PTA heads elected to “go private.” Their children began in the public schools, but the parents elected to switch during their terms of office.
Would they qualify? It does send a message when the elected board members privately display a lack of confidence in the system they’ve been elected to lead. On the other hand, their children were at one time enrolled in the public schools, and I don’t think any of them intended to go private at the time they were elected.
Another parent, a friend of mine, stood for election, but was not elected. I believe voters did not elect her because she had a special needs child. I think she would have been a great school board member, but the electorate didn’t agree.
To scale the heights of business, you must spend a lot of time working, and networking. If she had enrolled her children in the public schools, would she have a better understanding of the issues facing ordinary parents? I don’t know. I assume the children’s nannies or the housekeeper or tutor would be speaking with the teacher more often than the parents. I don’t know Ms. Black, but the high-powered business lifestyle is only possible with competent, trustworthy help. It is a “nanny-gate” issue, in a way. Would we demand that a businessman be a member of the PTA, if he were nominated for the same position?
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“Would we demand that a businessman be a member of the PTA, if he were nominated for the same position?”
The problem with Black is not that she’s not a public school parent or that she’s not an educator, but that she has no demonstrable experience with public education. I said that I don’t think it’s a bar at all not to have had your own limited sample of kids in the public schools, but I do think that’s one of the ways that you can gain experience in the system (as is being a teacher, or a board member, or a PTA president, or a researcher).
Black seems to have no relevant qualifications that I’ve seen detailed (though mind you I’m not following the story closely). I think rather than pointing out one thing she doesn’t have, I’d like to see arguments for what she does have that we think qualifies her to run a large school system.
The difference I think, between Black and Corzine and Bloomberg is that governors and mayors are elected. So, the electorate gets to decide whether the lack of relevant qualifications is relevant or not. The superintendent (or the surgeon general or the head of NIH ) is different because someone other than the voters have to make the decision.
But, I guess this can be another experiment in whether the superintendent choice can bring down the mayor.
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I have pretty strong suggestive evidence that everyone with my last name is related (eg, the Samoan branch, which emigrated there nearly 200 years ago, went from Derbyshire, but have originated in Ormskirk, which is where my side comes from about 80 years ago — still lots in Ormskirk. A New Zealander (whose side of the family went there from Samoa) who noticed my name in a journal she is a managing editor for, sent me a picture of her 60something year old brother, who resembles me uncannily. Everybody in my secondary school read Hobson’s Choice in 8th grade. That was fun for me! The author was from Lancashire (where Ormskirk is) so I’m sure there’s a family connection somewhere. He was a fierce supporter of women’s suffrage (you can tell from Hobson’s Choice) and a lefty, so that’s good news. But I got Harry from my mother’s side. The only other HB I’ve heard of is mentioned in a book called “Forgotten Lunatics of World War One” (I am not kidding).
All this for MH.
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And, stupid as I am, I never noticed the connection with King Lear, but its blindingly obvious (I was only 13, and didn’t read Lear till I was 17).
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I agree Laura. It drives me nuts. Private schools do not have to take everyone, the parent/teacher relationships are different and the peer relationships are constrained.
Some towns have residency requirements in order to be a town employee. Because really, unless you have some skin in the game, you might not really care as much.
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Harry, thanks. I’d never heard of that play until I saw the ad for it.
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I don’t follow this closely, but I thought I heard or read that Bloomberg can’t run for election again. Thus, his appointee is likely to have a limited term, no matter what happens.
I’m not arguing that his appointee is qualified for the job. I suspect that anyone whose career had prepared him or her for the job is not interested in taking a really short term position. Why take on all the blame for changes made earlier in Bloomberg’s term, with no time to make any constructive changes?
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“He’s got some nasty wage garnishments for child support to deal with, so there’s not a lot of motivation to get paid over the table, or to make much of himself. ”
One would hope that the motivation would be to, you know, support his child.
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If politician’s children and grandchildren had to attend the public schools, the public schools would be transformed, particularly if the VIP children were placed by lottery. On the other hand, those changes might not be applauded by some.
Public schools would gain much more freedom to exclude students. I predict that very few politician’s children would be excluded.
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Chicago has residency requirements for lots of different jobs, and the very lottery system Cranberry describes for many of the best schools. The result is not kids storming the local schools and overall improvement. The result instead is twofold. First, an amazing waste of energy and huge volume of stress as thousands of families fill out volumes of paperwork, submit to all kinds of testing, and go on open houses and tours, trying to get access to the few schools they trust. Secondly, a massive out-migration of talent (both parents and children) as it becomes clear very few are getting into one of the few good school buildings in the city. Do I even have to mention the obvious stuff here — that this whole process greatly favors people who have time (read: workplace flexibility) to do all this stuff? Or that it favors “hustlers”, or extroverts, or the extremely competitive? Just imagine the kinds of people who actually end up in these schools. The overt competitiveness of the parents at these exam elementary schools is very off-putting, and I don’t believe necessarily the best for the kids or the education. Blech, all the way around.
Let’s face it – if people feel their kids’ futures are in jeopardy, they will make major changes. Many will totally, happily leave politics behind if it’s what’s best for their kids. I don’t see how you can fault them for that. (Imagine the comments we’d be making if it were the reverse?)
On the other hand I have no patience for people who send their kids to private school and then are happy as clams to see the public schools go down the toilet. There must be a middle ground here.
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I send my son to a private school and I’m sad to see the public schools go down the toilet.
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“One would hope that the motivation would be to, you know, support his child.”
You would hope so, but since he barely make enough to feed himself, there is a strong temptation to go underground and stay there. It’s not a good longterm plan, but neither is fathering a kid when you’re 16, so there’s a certain consistency. He’s also (at 20-something) a recovering alcoholic. Last I heard, he was living out of a car and (very slowly) renovating a cabin that belongs to somebody else for the possibility of living there until the tourist season starts. Somewhere along the way, his new girlfriend (that had been living out of the car with him) got fed up and moved into a place of her own. Of course it would be better to get a bit more education, move out of the car and into a home with running water and heating, pay child support, etc. Hopefully a long, cold, lonely winter in the car will suggest that to him. He is bright, has a nice personality, and is a good worker, so there’s still hope.
(I’m not sure how the mechanics of this, but apparently the state paid the mom when the father was a kid and then the state comes directly after him.)
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Somewhere along the way, his new girlfriend (that had been living out of the car with him) got fed up and moved into a place of her own.
Women are so picky.
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When Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, was chief executive of the Chicago Public Schools, his office kept a log of nearly 40 pages listing the local politicians and business people and others who sought help getting children into the city’s most selective public schools. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/24/education/24chicago.html
I don’t think others would approve of the changes I’d recommend for the public schools. I’d end “star” sports such as football, and the really expensive extracurricular activities which only benefit a few students. I’d use the money to support no-cut sports, and extracurriculars open to all students, not just to the children of fee-paying parents.
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“the parent/teacher relationships are different and the peer relationships are constrained”
I think that needs some expansion.
1. How are parent/teacher relationships different?
2. How are peer relationships constrained?
I think #1 is true in a lot of cases (but not all), with public schools tending to have a hierarchical relationship to parents. At my kids’ current private school, I feel more like a colleague of my kids’ teachers than I felt when my oldest was in public pre-K (although we probably weren’t long enough in the public system for this to be a fair judgement). There’s more of a sense that parents have expertise that they can share with the school. I send books to school and the head of the elementary school has (believe it or not) watched my (very long) Howard Glasser video seminar on positive reinforcement. She’s a big fan now.
I’m not at all sure how to understand #2. Our private school is small (preK-11 and 220+ kids), but that’s the only form of limitation in peer relationships that I’m aware of. The school does try to keep the kids from being mean to each other, but that’s a good thing.
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Just for the record, Obama’s kids go to private school. There’s something about the man lecturing me to tighten up my wallet for the good of the country when none of the belt tightening seems to apply to him. My sense is that the new public school commissioner is going to have a rough go with the teacher’s union when she tries to persuade them to accept less for the good of the kids or the system when she herself on some level undoubtedly thinks of the system as a filthy cesspool that’s not good enough for her own little preciouses.
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I currently (this week) believe the schools charge what the market will bear. I did a quick estimate of how our property taxes would compare to tuition, over the time period our children were in the public schools. It came out to be very close, per child, to the cost of tuition for a good parochial school. The longer we stay in town, without children in the school system, the more expensive the “tuition” to the good local public school system becomes, which explains why people do move out of “good school systems.”
If our children had remained in the system from K-12, the cost per child would have remained fairly constant, as our town has increased the tax rate over time. Interestingly, 2/3 to 3/4 of the property tax (per year, per child) is very close to the average cost to the system per non. sped child.
We could have enrolled our children in a parochial school, and moved to a town with much lower property taxes. The cost, to us, would have been pretty much a wash. (Back of the envelope guesstimate.)
My conclusion, today, is that for each income level, there’s a percentage of the family budget which supports the children’s education. I assume Ms. Black had a very generous income, and thus, even if she had chosen to send her child to public schools, it would have been in some district or school which delivered services at least as good as competing private schools. The ability to pay for extracurricular activities and tutors would mean that her child’s public school experience would be, er, different from the norm.
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I should specify that when I wrote, “the schools charge what the market will bear,” I mean the private schools and the public school systems, i.e. the town’s budgeting process. Good public schools are the magnet which draws families interested in 3 bedroom family homes to a district.
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“There’s something about the man lecturing me to tighten up my wallet for the good of the country when none of the belt tightening seems to apply to him.”
*sigh* He’s president of the frickin’ United States. Is he really supposed to send his kids to public schools to show how he’s “tightening his belt”? Do you have any idea how ridiculous that sounds?
Obama is a wealthy man. Is he supposed to spend less money or more money? If he’s supposed to spend less money, how does that square with the idea that tax cuts for the wealthy are supposed to “stimulate” the economy? If he is supposed to spend more money, then hey, isn’t it better that his money is going to support a private school that supplies jobs?
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With an estimated 2009 income of $5.5 million, I don’t think his children’s private school tuition makes a huge difference in his life.
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I heartily agree with Cranberry’s back-of-the-envelope math. When we made the decision to stay in the city of Chicago, I did a spreadsheet that compared (frankly really low) city taxes + parochial tuition to (without exception higher, sometimes shockingly higher) suburban taxes without tuition. It was cheaper to stay in the city, but only because we’d been in our house for 8 years and had a low payment. If we’d been relocating it would have been a wash.
I have a whole theory that one of the unexpected side effects of birth control is that people – even people who eventually become parents – spend a larger portion of their adult years unfamiliar with the parenting experience. Of course we all know that birth rates are down overall, for non-immigrant women in the States. But let’s even set that aside. I don’t know about you, but when I was single I was not focused on whether my tax dollars were supporting public ed appropriately. In the 1950s I would have spent a couple of years with that perspective, tops. But in the 90s I spent 12 years lacking an understanding, and making political decisions appropriately. (This dynamic is also part of what makes the airport so horrible for parents. I am invariably stared down by a horrid twentysomething professional when my kids cry in public. The grandparents are usually fine with it.)
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“I have a whole theory that one of the unexpected side effects of birth control is that people – even people who eventually become parents – spend a larger portion of their adult years unfamiliar with the parenting experience.”
That sounds right. The only people who’ve got your back are the minivan and SUV manufacturers.
“This dynamic is also part of what makes the airport so horrible for parents.”
I don’t think I’ve seen enough said about how terrible the security screening process is with little people (although I don’t think childless people are at fault in this particular case). My kids are just big enough that they can take responsibility for a lot of it and we don’t have to deal with car seats anymore, but oh my goodness–take everybody’s coats off and put them in bins, take everybody’s shoes off and into bins, take the baby out of the stroller, fold the stroller, stick it on the conveyor belt, explain the baby’s milk to security, carry the baby through the metal detector, get the stroller, unfold it, put the baby back in, put everybody’s coat on, put everybody’s shoes on, etc. We took a couple years off from flying as a family of four when the youngest was a toddler. I wish Temple Grandin would design some security check points.
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Just to add to jen’s obervation, most of you will live 30-40 years after no longer having kids in public schools, much longer than your great gradnparents, and considerably longer than your grandparents. (Me, I’ll be 62 when the last one leaves, and don’t expect more than 15 or so more after that, tops)
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