Other Jobs Cathie Black Is Qualified For

With his new pick of Cathie Black for school chancellor in New York City, Michael Bloomberg has reaffirmed the bizarre ideology that you don’t need to be an expert on the things you lead. You don’t need to be an educator to be in charge of an education system. You don’t need to have spent time with teachers and students to be in charge of teaching and learning.

By this logic, an anointed upper tier of the business sector is qualified to do literally anything. Since Cathie Black ran a media corporation (like Bloomberg), here are some other ideas for her after her time with NYC schools is over:

• Lead the American Bar Association
• Lead the American Medical Association
• Become Secretary of Agriculture
• Become a White House adviser on Iraq
• Become an executive for Rupert Murdoch (*again following in Joel Klein’s footsteps)

Do the first four suggestions sound comical and impossible? If they do, it’s because it is crystal clear that specialized knowledge and experience is indispensable to perform them capably. And yet, drafting Black to lead over a million students and 1,600 public schools with no education experience apparently works in politically invincible three-term Mayor Bloomberg’s universe. (She doesn’t even get a star for sending her kids to public school—they went to private schools.)

You can’t swoop in from the publishing industry and take over schools and expect to do a better job than a well-chosen education expert. Maybe education is so disrespected because everybody has experience in classrooms— as students. But it’s really not good enough. Ideology (especially placing high-stakes testing above all) inevitably fills the expertise vacuum. It’s discouraging for people who understand schools on a firsthand level.

Comments

[Gary S. Stager]

Dan,

I've written about how "unqualified is the new qualified" in education policy a great deal over the past few years.

Here are a few links:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-stager/wanna-be-a-school-reforme_b_765199.html

http://stager.tv/blog/?p=770

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-stager/education-nation-ideologi_b_739106.html

http://www.stager.org/articles/whenirunthenavy.pdf

[Dan Brown]

Thanks Gary. I will check these out.

[Sally A. Friedman]

Can't argue with that!

[Sally A. Friedman]

See other instances of unwisely appointed education administrators in my book, "The Education and Deconstruction of Mr. Bloomberg, How the Mayor’s Education and Real Estate Development Policies Affected New Yorkers 2002-2009 Inclusive," available at Amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, borders.com, on the Kindle, on other e-books and in book form.

Please visit my book blog at http://educationanddeconstruction.com/?p=143 and https://www2.xlibris.com/bookstore/book_excerpt.aspx?bookid=81047 to read excerpts. Thank you.

[Kristin]

She doesn't just send them to private school. She sends them AWAY to boarding school out-of-state (where she has a second home). Can she identify with the parents whose children come home nightly with hours of homework? Can she empathize with working parents who go from one or two jobs into hours of making dinner, making lunches, quizzing math facts, reviewing spelling words, getting kids to sleep, getting them up, getting them to the bus ...

[Paul McKenzie]

The next thing they'll do is put actors in the Whitehouse :P