De Blasio Looks to Miami for Next Schools Leader

NEW YORK — Alberto M. Carvalho, who rose from unauthorized immigrant and day laborer to superintendent of the Miami-Dade County Public Schools, has found a bigger stage: He will become the next New York City schools chancellor, Mayor Bill de Blasio’s office announced Wednesday.

Carvalho will oversee the nation's largest system, one made up of 1.1 million children, many of whom face similar challenges to those he has overcome. Over 70 percent of New York City students come from families that are on some form of public assistance, and 1 in every 10 students was homeless at some point in the 2016-17 school year.

Carvalho, 53, has led Miami-Dade, the nation’s fourth-largest district, for nearly a decade and has a remarkably successful record. The high school graduation rate has increased to 80.7 percent in 2016-17 from 60.5 percent in 2007-08. In 2014, Carvalho was named the National Superintendent of the Year. In 2012, the district won the Broad Prize for Urban Education, which recognizes districts that have shown major gains in student achievement.

“Alberto Carvalho is a world-class educator with an unmatched track record of success,” de Blasio said in a statement on Wednesday evening. “I am very confident that our extensive, national search has found New York City the best person to lead the nation’s largest school system into the future.”

Carvalho’s national profile is higher than that of de Blasio’s current schools chancellor, Carmen Fariña, when she was appointed four years ago, and he is seen as politically savvy and ambitious. People aligned with the education reform movement and other critics have faulted Fariña’s approach for lacking vision. The mayor may hope that Carvalho, who last year considered running for Congress, will be a more effective salesman for his education policies than Fariña was.

Carvalho has pursued rather different plans than Fariña’s, but within a very different political context, and it is hard to know whether his appointment signals a shift in direction for New York City.

Carvalho has pushed a different agenda than Fariña’s, expanding the number of charter, magnet and other choice schools and programs, and promoting the use of technology in the classroom. He started a school called iPreparatory Academy where students work at their own pace, partly led by teachers and partly using online curriculum. De Blasio is a critic of charter schools; Fariña has not pursued opening new schools or programs, and technology has not played a large part in her plans.

Although test scores and graduation rates in New York City have steadily improved in recent years, the school system faces major challenges, including persistent racial and economic achievement gaps and segregation.

Shortly before de Blasio made his announcement on Wednesday, the Miami-Dade school board called an emergency meeting for Thursday morning “to discuss the stability of the executive management leadership.”

After de Blasio made his statement, a spokeswoman for Carvalho, Daisy Gonzalez-Diego, said only that he had been offered the job but had not accepted and would not comment until after he had met with the board.

In an unusual move, rather than scheduling a public announcement of the chancellor pick, the mayor’s office said that de Blasio had no scheduled events on Thursday.

De Blasio’s choice was first reported by Politico.

In 2008, around the time that Carvalho was being appointed to the superintendent job in Miami-Dade, emails surfaced between him and a then-Miami Herald education reporter that led to speculation that the two had had an affair. Carvalho initially said that the emails were doctored, then said that they might be real, but denied that there had been a romantic relationship, saying they were each merely being “playful.” The reporter, who had since moved on to The Boston Globe, resigned from her job.

City Hall was aware of the allegations, said the mayor’s press secretary, Eric Phillips.

Carvalho’s appointment drew praise on Wednesday from diverse segments of the education universe.

Shael Polakow-Suransky, the president of Bank Street College of Education and a former senior deputy chancellor of the city's education department under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, described Carvalho as an “inspired choice,” saying that he “combines a strong commitment to equity, savvy political instincts and a willingness to try innovative approaches that deeply engage students in their own learning.”

Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, said that, despite leadership at the state government level in Florida that she described as “overtly hostile to public education,” Carvalho “has had an open door towards educators and toward partnership and teamwork and has been able to move the Miami-Dade system because of that.”

Miami-Dade serves roughly 345,000 students, over 90 percent of whom are Hispanic or black and more than 70 percent of whom qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. In New York, nearly 70 percent of students are Hispanic or black, and a similar percentage qualify for the lunch benefits.

Carvalho earns a yearly salary of $352,874 in Miami compared with Fariña’s $234,569. Phillips said Carvalho will be paid $353,000, to match his Miami salary. Carvalho grew up poor in Lisbon, Portugal, and was the first in his family to graduate from high school. At the age of 17, he flew to New York on a visa that he then overstayed. In New York he washed dishes and worked as a busboy in restaurants. He made his way to Florida, where he worked in construction. He has said that at one point he spent a month being homeless, sleeping in a friend’s U-Haul truck. In a restaurant where he worked as a waiter, he met Rep. E. Clay Shaw, a Republican congressman from the area, who helped him gain a student visa.

Carvalho has spent his entire career in the Miami-Dade school system, starting as a teacher at Miami Jackson Senior High, where he taught physics, chemistry and calculus. He went on to become an assistant principal, a lobbyist for the district, and an associate superintendent. He took over the district from Rudy Crew, himself a former New York City schools chancellor.

He has been an outspoken critic of President Donald Trump’s immigration policies and defender of unauthorized immigrants.

“Over my dead body will anyone walk into our schools and yank any child from the sanctity and the protection that schools, as sanctuaries of the young, provide,” he said in a speech last November. (This was perhaps more political rhetoric than a practical statement of policy. As a general rule, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents do not go into schools, which are considered “sensitive locations.”)

New York City’s most prominent chancellor in recent years was Joel I. Klein, whom Bloomberg appointed in 2002, shortly after he won mayoral control of the schools, and who served until 2010. Klein was considered a leader in the national education reform movement, and pioneered the practice of closing low-performing schools and replacing them with new schools on a large scale.

Phillips said that Fariña would leave in the next month but that Carvalho did not have an official start date yet. Phillips said that the mayor and Carvalho met twice, once in January and once in February. Both meetings were at Gracie Mansion, including one that included dinner.

De Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, was also involved in the decision, Phillips said. McCray has played a role in many of de Blasio’s important hiring choices and recently has spoken along with the mayor at the news conferences to announce them.