Impossible expectations

I just got Jonathan Kozol's new book, The Shame of the Nation, enticed by The Daily Howler's description of one chapter, titled "False Promises." After reading just that chapter, I already have to cite one of its points.

Kozol decries "the high set of expectations that attach themselves to changes in the topmost personnel" in school leadership — what I call, less elegantly, the media gushfest. This all seemed so traumatic in San Francisco, but it's actually the usual routine. The new hire soars into town in a shining chariot borne aloft by glowing press coverage, sets to work on a set of intractable societal problems, turns into an sweating, beaten-down, flawed human, and is run out of town in disgust or rage.

Arlene Ackerman has fared quite well compared to the standard pattern, as a large portion of the community continues to think highly of her. Barring a significant shift in public opinion or some shocking revelation, the hindsight view will be that one faction drove a successful, committed leader out of town in a power grab. The fact that much of the community will regret her departure deviates from the usual storyline.

Kozol describes Joseph Fernandez, New York City schools chancellor from about 1990-'93, who arrived "greeted with ... extravagance of praise." The New York Times, in a story headlined "New Chancellor, New Hope for Schools," enthused: "It's a thrill to hear Joseph Fernandez talk about his plans..."

Kozol continues:

A month later, Newsday noted that some critics were complaining that Fernandez was "beginning to behave less like a city schools chancellor and more like a city schools czar."

At the time, Newsday defended Fernandez.

But, Kozol continues:

Three years after he arrived, Dr. Fernandez was dismissed, his manner of leadership now retroactively described as "arrogant, abrasive or aloof," according to the Times. "He made too many enemies," said Newsday. "His greatest strength — a sometimes imperious distaste for compromise — became his fatal flaw."

Kozol (who can write, by the way) tells the sadder story of Fernandez' predecessor, Richard Greene, who "was received with high praise from the New York media and from the city's private-sector leaders. Soon enough, he started to incur the criticism that he was too cautious, too methodical, and not sufficiently aggressive. He began to have the stricken look of someone who could barely breathe; and this, it turned out, was literally so." Greene, still in the job, died suddenly of an asthma attack in 1989.

A Fernandez successor, Rudy Crew, talked to Kozol about being "greeted with a chorus of applause" on arriving, and later fired after a "bludgeoning" that gave him a "sense of visceral insult" and that he views as "tinged with racial condescension." Crew, who is African-American, was in the running when Ackerman was hired here and is now in Miami, the nation's highest-paid superintendent. And surprise — now he's falling out of favor in Miami. (Presumably he won't be applying again for the SFUSD job given the humiliating pay cut he'd have to swallow, probably accompanied by local protest demanding that he take even less.)

Kozol does not fear "playing the race card," as any mention of this issue in SFUSD is immediately, scathingly labeled. (Richard Greene was also African-American, as is Arlene Ackerman, and Joseph Fernandez is Latino.)

James Baldwin had written of black leaders who were given a limited degree of power to control and, if they could, relieve some of the miseries of Harlem 50 years ago. Speaking of "the nicely refined torture a man can experience from having been created and defeated by the same circumstances," Baldwin wrote, "the best that one can say is that they are in an impossible position" and that those "who are motivated by genuine concern maintain this position with heartbreaking dignity." That precarious sense of dignity, often protected by reliance upon hyperbolic claims and a progressively more glazed and fragile smile, may be noted among good black and Hispanic school officials to the present day. Too much is expected of them when they come; too little is accorded to them when they leave. The structures of apartheid and inequity that have defeated them remain unchanged."

That's Jonathan Kozol's "race card," not mine.

&mdash Caroline