During the showdown between the Mayor of New York City and the Chancellor of the country's largest public school system, the parents of the Manhattan School for Children, a small alternative public school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, met to discuss the important issues of the day.
They debated whether to introduce Chinese or Spanish as a second language. They discussed whether it was appropriate to hold a candy sale to raise money. They decided to stop bringing in bottled water after testing showed that the school's drinking water was not contaminated with lead after all. They got an update on grant applications.
What these sophisticated middle-class parents did not do was waste a breath on the question of whether the city's seventh schools chancellor in 10 years, Ramon C. Cortines, had earned a second contract or should be cast out of office by Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani.
Mr. Cortines, as it turns out, held on to his place at the top. But in New York, as in other large urban school systems, there is a vast gap between the schools and the distant chancellors, superintendents and bureaucracies that nominally run them. It a gap big enough to raise the question of whether boards and superintendents make any difference at all in how children are actually educated.
"No chancellor is going to solve the problems of the public school system," said Raymond Domanico, executive director of the Public Education Association and an advocate of shifting more decision-making to the school level. "Chancellors differ in the baggage they bring, in the things they cause us to argue about. But they never differ in their impact on kids. Since about 1984 all performance measures have been stagnant, moving up a few points one year and down the next."
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Robert Berne, dean of the Wagner School of Public Service at New York University, said that "in most large systems, the chancellor, if nothing else, is a rallying point for the public school system, a leader who helps shape public perceptions of the school system and makes the case for supporting it."
"The chancellor is one piece of a large puzzle," he said. "We know a bad chancellor can stop almost anything positive from happening. But no one knows how effective a good one can be. We know no one has a magic bullet to turn the system around."
Indeed, as school-based reform has become a popular cause in public education, more and more experts have come to believe that school communities are such complex social organisms that significant changes can best work from the bottom up.
"Our success has very little to do with the chancellorship," said Roberta Kirshbaum, the principal of P.S. 75 on West 96th Street in Manhattan, an elementary school in the midst of a middle-class revival. "It is too far removed. The immediate community of my school is very similar to a small town. Each school has its own community, culture and values and its own sense of what is important to that school. We have our own sense of where we are going. There are too many layers to get that sense from a chancellor."
Ms. Kirshbaum views the school headquarters on Livingston Street as a place that mostly sucks up time with demands for forms and red tape and seems to sponge up resources that could make a difference at the school level.
In New York, the gap between figurehead and followers is particularly large, not only because the system is so huge, but also because the city has a convoluted governance system in which power is nominally shared between a central board and community boards. Chancellors can draw up plans -- issuing curriculums on tolerance for homosexuals, for example -- but have little ability to enforce their edicts.
And in practice, much of the power has been siphoned off by other forces -- unions with contracts that determine how many teachers and how many administrators must be assigned to each school, or court decisions mandating spending on special education, or the overseers of the state budget.
This diffusion of power has allowed the growth of a grass-roots school renaissance that began in the 1970's in East Harlem, spread through many other districts and is now creating at least 50 small new high schools, supported in part by a $50 million grant from the Annenberg Foundation.
Inertia Rules
But the governance structure has also allowed scores of failing schools to continue to fail year after year in many districts. One result: across the system, a little more than a third of all students graduate from high school within four years.
Mr. Giuliani had urged the Board of Education to deny Mr. Cortines a new contract so that the Mayor could hire a spokesman more committed to his own goals of slashing school bureaucracy.
But the Chancellor's supporters say that in his own quiet style, Mr. Cortines, who came to New York last year after retiring as the Superintendent of Schools in San Francisco, has been pressing for many of the same goals that the Mayor, in a more contentious way, has espoused. They laud Mr. Cortines for setting high standards for students, keeping the focus on the process of teaching and learning in schools, and establishing uniform criteria to judge schools.
Mr. Giuliani and his staff said they wanted to be free to appoint a new, strong leader who could take charge of the school system -- much as the Mayor's new police commissioner, William Bratton, took charge of the police department -- and then shift resources and power to individual schools.
Michael Casserly, executive director of the Washington-based Council of the Great City Schools, which represents the nation's largest school districts, said that making schools work is a more complex task than running a police department and may require judgments and qualities that are hard to quantify.
"Spending more money or reducing class size or paying teachers more do not necessarily improve schools," he said.
Mr. Casserly said the average urban school superintendent has been in office only two and a half years, as civic leaders have sought superintendents modeled after the new generation of corporate leaders, who are expected to get results or get out.
And he noted that in a Philadelphia, often looked to by Mr. Giuliani as a model for New York, the new school superintendent, David Hornbeck, agreed to make 5 percent of his $160,000 salary contingent on improving student performance in the third and fourth years of his contract.
