In recent weeks, the Chancellor of the New York City public school system has been heavily criticized, especially about cost overruns in school construction. The sharks have been circling, and the New York Times ran an editorial defending him (a sure sign that he is in big trouble). I'd like to say a few things in his behalf.
Harold O. Levy, as everyone knows by now, is from the business world. He is a lawyer who worked for a major banking firm with global interests. He has a passionate commitment to education and to kids. He brings a different perspective to the job of chancellor because he still has the capacity to be amazed when things go wrong and to insist that they go right.
I have appreciated his love of literature, poetry, music, and the arts, and his unembarrassed insistence on quoting Plato or some other classic writer to make a point.
He is not a company man, and it shows in his readiness to jump in and try to make things happen.
Although I have not spoken to him in a long while, I have a sense that he has had a long and rude awakening; that he discovered that the chancellor is not able to make things happen quickly; that good will and intelligence go only so far when faced with entrenched interests and bureaucratic inertia; that the chancellor is in some sense a flea on an elephant, and that the elephant outlives many fleas.
Forgive me if I express an unabashed affection for this man who has tried so hard to show that one man can change the system. And forgive me too for a somewhat cynical belief, born of long study of the history of this school system, that the system will not be changed by tinkering and that it will survive virtually intact despite the best efforts of one good man.
