With more than a million students and 137,000 employees spread over 1,100 buildings, the New York City school system is more complicated than most cities are. In his first 17 months, Schools Chancellor Harold Levy managed the system well and avoided political land mines. The climate changed just recently, however, when the City Council accused him of tolerating administrative bloat at 110 Livingston Street and City Hall attacked him for allowing the school construction budget to rise unchecked.

But the political problems may be easier to solve than the pedagogical ones, especially in a time of budget cuts. To move this system to its next level academically, Mr. Levy will need to expand instructional and curriculum improvements beyond the early grades and into the troubled middle and high schools. To do that effectively, he must reach out more consistently to parents and local school officials, many of whom view the chancellor as inaccessible and aloof.

Mr. Levy has fared remarkably well considering that the Board of Education hired him over the objections of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who had already run two chancellors out of town. Mr. Giuliani initially accused Mr. Levy of being too close to the teachers’ union, a claim that was disproved when the chancellor hammered out an agreement with the union that expedites the process by which incompetent teachers can be removed from the classroom. Unfortunately, this valuable agreement has been tabled until City Hall and the union can negotiate a teachers’ contract.

School officials are confident that the accusations of administrative bloat will subside once Mr. Levy releases a long-anticipated study of the schools’ management structure, showing where the system is lean and where it can be shrunk. The controversy over school construction will probably abate once the School Construction Authority reworks its capital budget so that building costs can be more closely tracked. The authority also needs to show that this year’s increases were caused by a building boom that forced up costs on public and private projects citywide.

The Board of Education has historically sought educators for the position of chancellor. But in hiring Mr. Levy, a former executive with CitiGroup, the board made a deliberate decision to stress management skills over pedagogy. The decision paid off last summer when, under his guidance, the system instituted a summer school program for more than 300,000 students. That session made dramatic improvements in transportation, staffing, record-keeping and attendance over the previous year.

Faced with a profound teacher shortage, Mr. Levy has established teacher training partnerships with both the City University and State University systems. A separate teacher training program aimed at attracting mid-career converts is expected to yield 1,500 new teachers in the coming year. An international recruitment effort should produce 1,000 more teachers. But much else will need to be done.

Mr. Levy has made important changes in bilingual education, a troubled area that traditionally trapped children in foreign-language ghettos and never let them out. The revamped system offers substantially more English-language instruction with the goal of moving students more quickly into English-only classes. For the first time, parents entering the system can choose among those programs or opt out of them.

Rudy Crew, the previous schools chancellor, and his predecessor, Ramon Cortines, set down an impressive blueprint for renovating the curriculum in the early grades. Mr. Levy’s challenge is to extend those improvements to the middle and high schools. This project needs to be well under way by 2003, when high school students all over the state have to pass five Regents Examinations — in English, math, American history, global history and science — to graduate. The science preparation is especially problematic in New York City, where the shortage of qualified teachers is acute and many schools lack science laboratories. Mr. Levy will have to continue to lobby the state for the money to improve science instruction — a task that has been made substantially more difficult by a city budget that cuts school aid.

Mr. Levy has communicated with the business community and New York’s most powerful citizens more effectively than his predecessors did. But community groups have criticized him for not reaching out to local schools and neighborhoods as vigorously as have previous chancellors. Dr. Crew and Mr. Cortines were ubiquitous in the schools, shaking hands and talking with students, parents and teachers alike. Those surprise visits gave them a firsthand view of the system — and reassured parents that the top man cared about the schools and their students. As Mr. Levy goes forward, he should strive to do the same.



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