Education: An Innovator in Trouble

Unorthodox loans lead to a school chancellor’s suspension

It began with a shot in the dark. Early one morning in late February, John Chin, a New York City board of education employee, was arrested after allegedly firing a gun through a Manhattan neighbor’s window. In a search of Chin’s apartment, police found drugs, a gun and two uncashed checks, totaling about $10,000, made out to Chin by Anthony Alvarado, 41, the city’s popular, innovative chancellor of public schools. They also found the title to the chancellor’s 1980 Toyota.

Alvarado claimed that he had borrowed money from Chin between 1976 and 1983 to meet personal “financial obligations.” But within a week he had disclosed a slew of additional loans: a total of $63,000 from a dozen other people, eight of whom were working for him at the time. The city’s department of investigation declared that Alvarado had “demonstrated a disturbing disregard for many rules governing professional and personal conduct.” Last week the board of education suspended the chancellor from his $95,000-a-year job pending an administrative hearing.

The case has received wide attention not only because New York City supports the nation’s largest school system but because Alvarado is no ordinary educator. Eleven months ago, he became the city’s first Hispanic chancellor, after working educational magic as superintendent of East Harlem’s Spanish-speaking District 4, one of the city’s poorest sections. In just a decade, Alvarado’s energy and imagination improved student performance dramatically and attracted talented teachers. He became known as an administrator who made fast decisions and had little use for bureaucracy. The only serious reservation about Alvarado’s ability to manage the New York City school system, with its nearly 1 million students and 50,000 teachers, was that he had consistently gone over budget as head of District 4.

As chancellor, Alvarado increased his popularity among poor and working mothers by extending half-day kindergartens to full-day programs. He brought in volunteers and businessmen to work with city schools and began to combat the city’s 45% dropout rate with pilot programs providing personal counseling for students. Says Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers:

“Alvarado’s plans and actions reflected a real educator’s concern for the schools.”

But his “risk-taking style,” as one city education official puts it, apparently also governed his personal life. The department of investigation’s preliminary report claimed that the chancellor solicited loans from District 4 employees “in a manner that was inherently coercive and frequently deceptive.” His former secretary complained that she had made several loans to the chancellor, but had not been repaid. More damaging, investigators found that the eight school employees who lent Alvarado money had received a total of at least $65,000 in overtime pay in 1982 and 1983. They had in fact worked the hours, but most of the overtime earned was above the school district’s average. To all this, Alvarado answered, “I never used public funds or the public system for personal gain.” He maintained that his District 4 staff “functioned as a family” and told the New York Spanish-language newspaper El Diario that North Americans do not understand the Hispanic values of family and mutual assistance.

There was even more bad news in the investigators’ report: $1,200 in unpaid parking tickets, 38 building-code violations on rental property owned by Alvarado, and failure to disclose personal debt and child-support payments in mortgage applications. The district attorneys in Brooklyn and Manhattan have reportedly begun investigations for possible criminal charges.

Alvarado has started to pay off his debts, and hired a friend, former Abscam Prosecutor Thomas Puccio, to handle his defense at the department of investigation hearing. While Alvarado fights for his professional life, the board of education has named Nathan Quinones, 53, executive director of the city’s high schools, as acting chancellor. Quinones, a conservative educator, has already announced that he will re-evaluate Alvarado’s plans; many teachers fear that imaginative programs to improve education in the city’s poorest areas will be dismantled. Says Luther Seabrook, superintendent of Harlem’s District 5: “There’s a personal tragedy with Tony—but dammit, it’s a greater tragedy for the rest of us in the system.”