Harries Readies School Reform 2.0

Principals will have more discretion over how to spend their money under the new administration, Garth Harries pledged as he took over as New Haven’s schools superintendent.

Harries, who started his job as superintendent Tuesday, also pledged to delegate more decisions — a departure from his predecessor, 21-year Superintendent Reggie Mayo, who required his approval on all decisions, big or small.

“I’m a different kind of leader,” Harries said. ​“I want to be a leader that empowers decision-making in the organization more. For me, that’s how you get people to rise” and develop.

Harries made the remarks in an interview Wednesday, his second day at the helm of New Haven public schools. Harries laid out a few priorities for the district, including helping ​“disengaged kids,” building kids’ social-emotional skills, and improving parent report card nights.

He planned to elaborate on that vision in a press conference planned for 9:30 a.m. Thursday at the Fair Haven School.

In a video interview Wednesday at his eighth-story office at 54 Meadow St., Harries also answered some doubts people have about the 40-year-old, white Yalie and lawyer taking over the city’s public schools.

Click on the play arrow at the top of the story to hear his replies.

Transparency

Harries joined the New Haven public schools four years ago to serve as the architect of a new school reform drive.

He began Tuesday as interim superintendent; the school board plans to hire him on a one-year contract as soon as they can negotiate benefits. He now oversees a school district of 20,000 kids and 47 schools.

In an interview, he outlined a few areas he plans to focus on as superintendent.

• Transparency. Though the district budget is now broken down school by school, it doesn’t reflect all the funding spent on each school, Harries said. He called for ​“deepening the work around site-based budgets” so that it becomes clearer how much money is being spent on each school.

• Equity between schools. Clearing up the school budgets will help clear up the inequities between how many resources different schools get, and allow the district to better tackle that problem.

• Autonomy. ​“I want to work on schools having more discretion to redirect resources” from one area to another, Harries said. Principals should have ​“guided control” of their budgets, so they can use their dollars where they see fit.

• Social-emotional development. Kids need more help develop non-cognitive skills that research shows will affect their long-term success.

• Disengaged kids. The kind of education kids get when they’re suspended from school — and especially when they’ve been expelled — needs to be ​“more meaningful.” Kids who are expelled get only two hours of instruction per day, at home. Harries called for doing more to help kids adjust to school when they transfer mid-year or come back from being locked up or expelled. He said the district has already begun to strengthen its alternative schools, by overhauling Urban Youth into Domus Academy and putting a new principal in at New Horizons. Next, the district has placed new leaders at Polly McCabe and Dixwell/ New Light, alternative high school programs for pregnant teens and kids returning from incarceration.

In his four years in New Haven, Harries has designed a new way of grading teachers and administrators; a new way of grading schools into three ​“tiers”; and a new way of managing schools differently according to how they fare. This has included turning six low-performing schools into ​“turnarounds.” In some cases, new management — a teachers union, a social services agency, a charter management organization —has taken over a school. In other cases, public school principals have stayed, with new authority to replace their staff and change work rules.

Harries vowed to continue those initiatives.

“We’ve got a fabulous foundation, but the work is far from done,” he said.

“We need to be more urgent” to take the city’s school reform drive to the next level, he said.

Harries conducted the interview in his 8th-floor office — one that he’ll be vacating this summer according to his promotion.

On his office wall hang two portraits by a New Haven public school student, Jorge Lopez, of Betsy Ross Arts Magnet School. (Titled: Double Bubble: Am I In Trouble? Digital Saturation Manipulation #1 and #2.)

A small bookcase in his office includes: What I Learned In School by James P. Comer, a New Haven child psychologist who founded the Comer Method of addressing kids’ social-emotional needs; A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future by Daniel Pink; The State of Charter School Authorizing, a manual from 2010; the Connecticut Register and Manual of state laws, from 2009 to 2012; ​“The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen Covey; and A Black Man’s Guide To Law Enforcement in America by Shafiq Abdussabur, a local city cop.

A ​“Balanced & Careful” Approach

Harries also addressed a few doubts about him — doubts one might read in the Independent comments section.

Harries replaces Mayo, an African-American with a doctorate in education who worked for four decades as an educator in New Haven public schools.

Mayo took over the superintendent’s job with 20 years of experience in education. He rose through the ranks as a janitor, teacher, assistant principal and principal. Harries, by contrast, has only 10 years’ experience in education, all in upper administration except for one year teaching at a private school. Harries has an undergraduate degree from Yale and a law degree from Stanford. Harries worked a consultant for McKinsey and Company before signing on to the New York public school system as a top advisor to Joel Klein in 2003. (Read his resume here.)

Below are excerpts from the interview with the Independent.

NHI: You’ve taught only for one year at a private school in Colorado. How are you going to run a school district?

Harries: Being superintendent takes a ​“broad range of skills.” It takes ​“being thoughtful and strategic” and having a strong team with complementary skills.

NHI: How will a white guy from out of town run a school district that’s 86 percent black and Hispanic?

Harries: ​“I know I’m a white man who grew up in Philadelphia and who had a really privileged education. …Over the last four years, I’ve come to make strong connections” in New Haven. ​“Frankly, I have stronger connections in the minority community than I do in the Yale community right now.”

NHI: You spend weekends on your wife’s farm in Ridgefield (called The Hickories). How much time do you spend in New Haven?

Harries: ​“I spend a few days a week there” in Ridgefield ​“but most of my time is here in New Haven.”

(Harries owns a condo in Wooster Square.)

NHI: Were you ​“run out” of New York public schools?

Harries: No.

He said he took interest in New Haven’s nascent school reform effort — and wanted to be close to his wife’s family farm, where his wife works and where her mother’s ashes are buried.

Harries was also asked about his ties to the modern-day “reform” or “accountability” movement. Harries is a 2009 fellow of the Broad Academy, run by billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad. The Broad Foundation has been a major powerbroker in the reform movement, supporting merit pay, charter schools and school turnarounds. Harries also sits on the board of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers. He has been teaching about educational leadership at the Yale School of Management.

In New York, Harries served as a top advisor to international reform icon Chancellor Joel Klein, where he developed a “portfolio management” of schools, which calls for running different schools with different types of management, and closing those that fail. Klein, an attorney and CEO by training, ran the school system like a free market, where schools competed for students and for their own survival. As the “chief executive for portfolio development,” Harries oversaw the closure of hundreds of “failing” schools. He worked with reform powerbroker the Gates Foundation to create small high schools. In all, he created 333 new district schools and 63 new charters.

In coming to New Haven, Harries brought with him the “portfolio” approach to running schools he had developed in New York, though with slower implementation—one or two schools per year instead of 15 to 20. Unlike in New York, Harries has found a way to make significant changes without declaring war on the teachers union.

Harries has practiced a very different kind of school reform in New Haven—one that some in the reform community call “soft.” He has won over skeptical teachers and parent activists by listening, collaborating, and building consensus. However, some remain concerned that in time, he’ll bring in a style of reform that looks more like New York, and that works more closely with the big foundations and advocacy groups of the reform movement.

He was asked if New Haven will see more school closures and more charter management organizations taking over public schools under his leadership.

“We’ll continue the work we’ve been doing, which is to welcome outside groups where we see they have value,” he said.

Harries promised to continue a “balanced, careful approach.” “I think there’s too much heat and not enough light” in the modern-day school reform debate, he said.

Harries also answered a question about his credentials for the job: He earned his 092, or intermediate administrator’s certificate, from Southern Connecticut State University in 2011. He just earned his 093, or superintendent’s certificate, earlier this year, from the University of Connecticut.

Harries was asked if he’ll end up with the same trouble reform rockstar and former Bridgeport Superintendent Paul Vallas has had: After critics sued, a court ruled that Vallas’s superintendent’s certificate is not valid, booting him from his Bridgeport job.

Harries said he obtained his certificate through a regular course at UConn, along with fellow students from across the state — not through a special tailored program like the one designed for Vallas. Click on the play arrow to hear his explanation of his studies.

On his first day on the job Tuesday, Harries attended CompStat, the weekly police crime-information-sharing session that includes dozens of public safety and community members many agencies across town. He said he plans to show up in public a lot to hear feedback about the schools and the city.

Harries announced plans to launch a listening tour this summer featuring a series of superintendent’s nights out where the public can get to know him and share concerns. He also plans to continue to spend time in schools, and on neighborhood canvasses, knocking on doors of incoming kindergarten kids and those who’ve been missing from school.

He said he’ll ask three questions of each audience: ​“What are three things you’d change and three things you’d keep about New Haven public schools?” ​“What do you want me to do — and not do — as superintendent?” and ​“What else do you want me to know?”

Harries said he is committed to continue listening past his official listening tour — and to stay in New Haven long-term.

He said he has passed up job offers at ​“bigger, high-profile” school districts over the past four years. 

“I’m planning to spend my career here,” he said.