With the Board of Education saying it wants to reappoint Schools Chancellor Ramon C. Cortines, the Giuliani administration has begun a campaign intended to make the Chancellor so uncomfortable that he withdraws his name from consideration, mayoral advisers say.
In the rotunda of City Hall yesterday, Deputy Mayor Ninfa Segarra, who is also a board member, and Herman Badillo, who monitors school finances for the Mayor, accused Mr. Cortines of refusing to give them information on how the Board of Education spent money in its last fiscal year. They threatened to subpoena the documents and suggested the public be wary of a Chancellor who would not disclose spending.
And last week, Mr. Giuliani assailed Board of Education bureaucrats in one public forum, saying he was willing to "kick the living hell" out of them, while in another, he suggested a referendum on who should control the school system -- the Mayor or the Chancellor. He also made his frustrations with the Chancellor known at a round of meetings with newspaper editorial boards.
Anticipating the assault, Carol A. Gresser, the board president, last week took the unusual step of saying that there was majority support on the seven-member board for retaining Mr. Cortines. And public officials ranging from the Staten Island Borough President, Guy V. Molinari, a Republican, to the Manhattan Borough President, Ruth W. Messinger, a Democrat, have rallied to the Chancellor's side.
Mr. Cortines was chosen to be Chancellor by Mr. Giuliani's conservative allies on the Board of Education in September 1993, several months before he was elected Mayor. But the two men have had an increasingly strained relationship since April, when the Chancellor briefly and dramatically resigned after a midnight confrontation at Gracie Mansion over budgeting and control of the school system.
They clashed again when Mr. Cortines named Barry F. Sullivan, a banker who was a deputy mayor in the Dinkins administration, to oversee the day-to-day management of the school system. And aides of Mr. Giuliani said the Mayor was angered again when the Chancellor gave emotional testimony to the City Council last month, saying that if a proposal for a $190 million midyear budget cut wasn't scaled back, as many as 2,000 teachers, or an average of two in every school in the city, might have to be dismissed.
"That isn't so," Mr. Badillo contended yesterday, calling the Chancellor's testimony a "scare tactic." "It isn't going to happen."
Mr. Cortines yesterday characterized Mr. Badillo's comments as "political grenades." He said he was "reluctant to direct school system staff to do hours and hours more work for Mr. Badillo" because he believed that a report released by Mr. Badillo showing that 9.9 percent of board financing had gone to central administration was erroneous and overstated. He added that the Mayor's budget office already had access to the information that Mr. Badillo was requesting.
The looming confrontation will most likely determine whether Mr. Cortines will remain as Chancellor for virtually all of Mr. Giuliani's first term. The Chancellor's contract expires at the end of June, and the board is to vote in January on whether to ask him to serve another two years.
Mr. Giuliani's aides concede that the administration does not have the votes on the board to stop Mr. Cortines from being offered a new contract. That fact was underlined by Ms. Gresser, who said last week that "a majority of the board wants to publicly state their total and unwavering support for the way Chancellor Cortines has conducted the affairs of the school system."
But Mr. Cortines has left his own intentions a mystery, and the Giuliani administration hopes to dissuade him from staying by forcing him to think about whether he wants constant strife with City Hall.
Several mayoral advisers conceded that an out-and-out battle with the Chancellor could be politically risky, raising more questions about Mr. Giuliani's leadership style and opening up the possibility of defeat by the Board of Education on the heels of a draining battle with the City Council over the budget. But one City Hall official said that the Mayor, who has made clear that he considers Mr. Cortines a captive of the educational bureaucracy and the status quo, believed he had to go ahead with the fight.
"Either you're going to reform the system or you're not," the adviser to the Mayor said, speaking on the condition of anonymity, adding that Mr. Cortines "hasn't shown ability to reform the system." Of the risks of defeat, the adviser said, "You've made your try, and people who judge the system will know you wanted something different."
It is virtually a New York City tradition for mayors and chancellors to clash over control of the school system and to battle over the schools budget, which now totals $8.4 billion. But the battle has been particularly acute this year because the city's $2.3 billion budget deficit has left Mr. Giuliani struggling to find savings.
The Mayor's aides said they had not found the Chancellor responsive enough to the city's fiscal woes. "The Chancellor didn't seem to understand that the fiscal situation in this city is critical, that he can create an actual crisis in this city if he's not willing to work with City Hall," Ms. Segarra said during an appearance on the New York One television channel.
But Mr. Cortines's many defenders say the Mayor has not paid enough attention to the Chancellor's strengths as an educator and his work to raise educational standards in the nation's schools. "None of this has anything to do with education, all this criticism," said Ms. Gresser, once an ally of Mr. Giuliani but now firmly in Mr. Cortines's camp.
They also point out that the Chancellor has ultimately made the cuts the Mayor has wanted to whittle down the schools bureaucracy. "It's one thing to put appropriate pressure on a quasi-independent city agency to ask for accountability," said Ms. Messinger, who has come out in support of Mr. Cortines. "It's another thing to be in a sort of public war with anybody, particularly when the Chancellor has made a high number of cuts at the central board and put forward plans for further cuts."
Some officials held out the possibility yesterday that Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Cortines might yet learn to cooperate. "What I told the Mayor is that I think the city needs both of these men," said Claire Shulman, the Queens Borough President. "The Mayor because he's a good Mayor and Cortines because he's a good Chancellor. Hopefully, they can learn to live with each other."
