2011年4月24日星期日

In the New York schools Chief, a talent for quiet negotiation

She called him "Dirt" - and said it with affection. Play in a recreational League in the 1970s, his teammates, Dennis M. Walcott remember a walking detergent commercial, was constantly making tackles.

During a game as he is at his feet moved to sack the quarterback, suggested sucker-opposed him in the jaw. The benches cleared, and Mr. Walcott saw him friends - the almost white only in black team in a League to Staten Iceland - a signal. But he shook it out.

"We were not fighting," he said. "It was a race would have."

After the early work of mentoring children in Queens and searing briefly in Harlem to houses find babies for crack - he even two children of an addict adopted - Mr Walcott rose to the Presidency of the New York Urban League, one of which the city Premier civil rights groups. But in the racial turmoil of the years Giuliani, performed always in addition to scores of politicians and other black leaders in demonstrations against the brutality of the police arrested Mr. Walcott. He chose the embattled police chief behind the scenes to trust that its muted approach would be more likely to win results to advise.

All together, his trademark was indulgence, and in his new role as New York City schools, Mr. Walcott Chancellor, will test, whether the nation's full-tilt approach on urban education reform is ready for a different kind of leader.?But in the last nine years as Deputy Mayor of whose main task it was, leaving only the slightest of fingerprints in a time of significant changes to the schools has to monitor the Department of education.

In a long interview of Mr. Walcott to fight to name all the achievements for which he the driving force was finally relying on the creation of an early reading program for children in social housing and a mayoral Office of adult education.

A town hall with visionary strategists, Management Assistant, and publicity magnets Mr. Walcott was populated none of those. Work between a strong-willed Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, and a stubborn Chancellor, Joel I. Klein, he seemed more comfortable in a role as Deputy Mayor for Mollification: mediation disputes, soothing tensions and hear endlessly.

Which, of course, may be just at this moment is needed: Mr. Walcott takes over the nation's largest school system after a disastrous experiment with Cathleen p. Black, in a time of low mayoral polls and teacher layoffs and other retrenchments in sight.

Mr. Walcott, 59, but admits that despite his years in the Town Hall, there is little record on which to judge whether he is to defend the right person, and Mr. Bloomberg's education improve the test-based accountability agenda, welcoming charter schools and close those fail.

Mr. Walcott said "People spine will question,". "I am decision making and toughness very confident about." "Are my actions which have it, you look in the next two and a half years to determine whether it spine or is not."

In two worlds

Backyard Baseball with a stump for home plate. Trombone in the School Orchestra. Biking on the road under the watchful eyes of friendly neighbours.

It was "Leave it to Beaver", but black, Mr. Walcott described his childhood in the Addisleigh Park section of southeastern Queens, a destination for ambitious emigrants from Harlem and Brooklyn, already with celebrities such as John Coltrane became H?renElla Fitzgerald, and W. E. B. Dubois.

Dennis Malcolm Walcott was 1951 born an only child, Dennis C. and Eleanor Walcott. His father was an exterminator for housing authority of the city, never high school, balanced and nicely done. his mother, a social worker, the hard-nosed family "Enforcer."

The couple wanted Dennis successfully in a white world, so she farm work camp in the Catskills, sent worked him for three summer at Lincoln in the teenager on construction projects. The children of Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee were there, but almost everyone else knows, and was wealthy, he said.

Mr. Walcott attended Francis Lewis high school and thought, he could be a psychiatrist. At the University of Bridgeport, in Connecticut, he went from a small seaside campus not too far from home. But neither his parents saw him graduate. His father fell ill and died in 1971 at the age of 60 years. In the following year home was on spring break from his last year, Mr. Walcott, dead find his mother, 48, the living room on the ground floor. He wanted no autopsy, so the cause was never determined.

Her body was under a window onto the street. "The theory was, that they wait come to me in, was sitting on the Chair," he said.

Mr. Walcott abruptly changed his diet, cutting things that he thought diabetes could bring to the, which had beaten many of the men in his family. These days, he avoids red meat and rarely eats anything other than a salad for lunch. He once preferred old grand father and Colas, but now rarely touched alcohol and non-smoking.

With a master's degree in education, he found a job teaching kindergarten to a new church run school in Queens. He was not enthusiastic about the work, recalled a friend. But he pulled through the desires of the young, who had no fathers at home, and he created his own "brother to brother"-program.

Mr. Walcott is a television station to broadcast a free advertising during the "soul train," said he, and the flood of interest of single mothers and male volunteers was more than he could handle. Exiting the program.

In 1977 he married Denise St. Hill - they met as young children and by chance on a party - had inserted exactly how he work began to program in social work at an agency to promote care Manhattan as part of a master. He interned later at the greater New York Fund, the arm of the United way, the nonprofits from grants to smaller pass.

Sharon Otterman, MOSI secret and Rebecca white contributed reporting.


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