Tough Guy for a Tough Town

By Ezra Bowen

The tall man in the dark double-breasted suit stood ramrod straight while Edward Koch introduced him at a city hall press conference. Then Richard R. Green, freshly appointed chancellor of the New York City school system, biggest (939,142 students) and arguably the baddest in all the land, said to the mayor, "Why don't you be seated?" Koch complied, like a schoolboy whom the principal has put in his place. And when His Honor tried later to rise, the Big Apple's new headmaster froze him with a turn of the hand.

That's how things tend to be when Richard Green, the first black to hold the New York chancellorship, steps forward. Green, 51, has ruled for the past eight years over the 55-school Minneapolis system, where 40% of the 40,000 students are minority youngsters and where the quality of education had sagged badly through the '70s. After first putting in 16 months of planning, Green moved so firmly that in Minneapolis, B.C. also means "before the change."

He shut down 18 underused schools, imposed a citywide curriculum and instituted achievement tests for kindergarten through ninth grade. Those who failed were held back, including almost 10,000 kindergartners over five years. Green negotiated millions in corporate gifts to the school system. And he broke segregation patterns with busing, magnet schools and careful (some thought rigid) monitoring of racial balance. To halt white flight, he organized tours of a turned-around school for real estate agents. They were impressed. So are education observers, who now rate the system among the nation's best. Even his critics, who consider him arrogant and closed-minded, are grudgingly admiring. Says Len Biernat, a law professor who ran unsuccessfully for the school board as a Green opponent: "He's a strong, strong person and can stand up to the heat."

New Yorkers figure he will get plenty of that. Minneapolis is one thing, they snort, New York City is something else. Despite islands of excellence maintained by devoted principals and teachers, the system is a Balkanized wasteland that destroys rulers who would grapple with 32 autonomous districts and a $5.2 billion budget that evaporates with few observable results. "The dimensions of the system can be overwhelming," admits former Chancellor Nathan Quinones, who decided to give up last August. Says a high school teacher: "The three best things about the job are June, July and August."

Consider, as Green must, the realities of the other nine months. Dropout rates approach 90% in some ghetto schools and -- depending on who is counting -- 30% to 55% citywide. A surfeit of aging buildings crumble in disrepair. Desks occasionally spill out of overcrowded classrooms into hallways prowled by student hoodlums who "have been bringing weapons to school for years," says one principal. An overpowerful custodian's union, whose president was killed last year in what police described as a gangland-style rubout, dictates the hours schools will be open. Tenured high school principals cannot be fired without interminable hearings. Under a 19-year-old decentralization plan, elementary and junior high schools enjoy wide latitude in curriculum and administrative matters -- which has resulted in a chaotic absence of accountability. Nevertheless, the central bureaucracy keeps a stranglehold on orders for such bedrock necessities as textbooks and Xerox paper.

Unlike most school systems, whose funding is independent of other revenues, New York City's school budget must be bargained from general funds, with all the political infighting that implies. The school board, which theoretically might control the show, is a creature of political patronage, with single appointments by each of New York's five baronial borough presidents and two by the mayor. It is therefore responsive to countless pressure groups but, like the lower and middle schools, accountable to no one. And any teachers brave enough to opt for service in this swamp must first run an obstacle course of both city and New York State examinations, waiting up to five years for tests in certain subjects.

Lest the new man in town doubt the depth of these divisive influences, the board squabbled for four months before deciding to offer him the job by a shaky 4-to-3 majority. This margin came only after School Board President Robert Wagner Jr. suggested privately that he would resign if he could not get the man he and the mayor wanted. None of this seems to faze Green, however. He is accustomed to tough sledding. A street-fighting Minneapolis ghetto kid with a reform school experience he will not discuss, he was raised by a mother who worked as a maid. Deciding that brains, not fists, were the best ticket out of poverty, Green studied his way to a teaching post. When he was accepted by Harvard in 1970 for Ph.D. studies and could not afford to go, he banged on foundation doors to raise the money.

New York is simply another challenge. Asked if he feels the system is manageable, he quips confidently, "Was the Depression manageable?" To sweeten the task, he will receive a salary that is anything but depressed: $150,000 annually ($40,000 more than the mayor) on a three-year contract with a liberal entertainment allowance. But the money is not the draw. "Public education is on trial in America," he says. "If there is a better place to try the case, I don't know where it is."

He has already begun to sway some members of the jury, including, apparently, the school board, which ultimately approved him with a 7-to-0 official vote after the chancellor's masterful debut at the press conference. Board Member Amalia Betanzos thinks he just might pull off a miracle for the Big Apple. "If you had asked me before he told the mayor to sit down, I might have said no. Now I say yes." New York's staggering schools, however, may be miracle-proof. To think he can turn the system around "is just silly," wrote New York Daily News Columnist Bob Herbert sadly. "Green should hang on to his house in Minneapolis." The new chancellor has not yet put his nine-room split level on the market.

With reporting by John E. Gallagher/New York and Marc Hequet/Minneapolis