State and City Had Fruitless Talks on Deputy to Aid the Chancellor Pick

In the days before an advisory panel and the state’s education commissioner expressed doubts about Cathleen P. Black’s qualifications to become the New York City schools chancellor, state officials and the Bloomberg administration held secret talks about the possibility of appointing an experienced educator to her side, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
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Chad Batka for The New York Times

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State officials proposed that City Hall consider the second appointment to settle concerns about Ms. Black’s lack of experience in education, these people said Wednesday. But talks fell apart by Tuesday, and that afternoon David M. Steiner, the education commissioner, hardened the state’s position by saying publicly that he was disinclined to approve Ms. Black unless she had an official with education experience to help her run the system.

Ms. Black needs a waiver from Dr. Steiner because she lacks the educational experience that state law requires of chancellors.

On Tuesday, an advisory panel appointed by Dr. Steiner also expressed reservations about Ms. Black’s fitness for the job, with four of the eight members recommending that Dr. Steiner deny the waiver, two saying he should grant it and two voting to deny it “at this time,” with a possibility of reconsidering it under new conditions, including the appointment of a chief academic officer “with real autonomy and leverage.”

The people with knowledge of the discussions declined to be identified because the talks were continuing, having resumed in light of the developments on Tuesday.

Dr. Steiner declined to discuss his plans or thinking on Wednesday. A spokesman for the mayor also declined to comment.

In appointing Ms. Black, 66, to succeed Joel I. Klein two weeks ago, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg cited her long and successful career in business; she is the chairwoman of Hearst Magazines and has been on the boards of Coca-Cola and I.B.M. But resistance from some elected officials and parent groups has been fierce because she has no experience running or working in a public school.

Although the city’s Department of Education has several deputy chancellors with deep backgrounds in education, it remains unclear whether the mayor will accept any conditions on his prerogative to choose the leader of the city’s 1,600 schools. The entire premise of his control of the school system, experts said Wednesday, is that clear lines of authority lead to accountability for the person in charge.

It is also unclear how such a compromise would work, in practice, if a person reporting to the chancellor on matters like curriculum and teaching is also expected to have autonomy from the chancellor.

“That’s creating a two-headed dragon,” said Fredrick M. Hess, an education expert at the American Enterprise Institute. “Either you make the case for Ms. Black and let her build her staff, or if you can’t, then she’s not the right fit for the job. All the rest of this strikes me as trying to find some kind of patch that will dodge the central issue.”

Ultimately, experts said, it will depend on the details. No one knows exactly what Dr. Steiner envisions in a No. 2 post. Many cities, including Chicago, San Diego and even New York, have had a version of the position, an experienced educator serving as a lead deputy and academic guru to a superintendent without traditional education credentials.

But, experts said, in none of those places was the hiring of a chancellor or superintendent conditional on creating such a post, which could undermine Ms. Black’s authority. It is also very rare for a deputy and a superintendent to be anything resembling equals. In the few places where power was shared, like Albuquerque, the idea proved so ineffective that it was ultimately abandoned, said Michael Casserly, the executive director of the Council of Great City Schools.

“It’s not an unusual arrangement to pair a nontraditional superintendent with a deputy with strong instructional experience,” Mr. Casserly said. The setup can work, he said, but they “have to share the same agenda for how to move the school district forward.”

And, he said, “in all of those situations it’s always clear who the boss is. One person headed the district, and the other guided the instructional program, but was accountable to the C.E.O.”

Having an autonomous No. 2 official, if it were to be enforceable or backed up by anything more than a handshake, would require a change in state law, to say that Ms. Black “is something less than the chancellor,” said Joseph P. Viteritti, a public policy professor at Hunter College who has advised many chancellors. That does not seem feasible — and even if it were, he said, he believes that the mayor would almost certainly withdraw Ms. Black’s candidacy rather than agree to it.

In some cases, Mr. Bloomberg has agreed to apparent nicks in his authority, only to go on to create institutions with no teeth, like the Panel for Educational Policy, which votes on school policies but is controlled by mayoral appointees, and multiple citywide parent councils, whose opinions he is not required to take into account.

And in the New York City schools, the lines of authority have always been clear between deputies and the chancellor, as Mr. Klein himself reiterated in remarks on Wednesday.

In 2002, Richard P. Mills, then the state education commissioner, expressed concern about Mr. Klein’s lack of education experience when he granted him a waiver for the job. Though it was not a requirement, Mr. Klein appointed a chief deputy chancellor, Diana Lam, who earned the same salary as he did.

But Ms. Lam proved to be controversial, pushing through a reading program that was later revoked. She was forced to resign after she was found to have helped her husband get a job in the system.

“I had a chief No. 2 person when I started,” Mr. Klein said on WNYC radio Wednesday morning, “but let me tell you, I moved to a very different system, one in which I think we are getting much better, more robust discussion and policy.”

“There’s no question that she will need supports, just as I needed supports,” Mr. Klein said of Ms. Black. But, he said, with six deputy chancellors already at the Department of Education, “I would let her build her team around that.”

Michael Barbaro and Javier C. Hernandez contributed reporting.