By DAVID M. HALBFINGER, JAVIER C. HERNANDEZ and FERNANDA SANTOS
Published: April 23, 2011
This article was reported by David M. Halbfinger, Javier C. Hernandez and Fernanda Santos and written by Mr. Halbfinger.
Mr. Walcott at the State Capitol in Albany this month. He has been a defender of Bloomberg administration policies.
Dennis M. Walcott will bring a trademark forbearance to his role as New York City's schools chancellor, testing whether the nation's approach to urban education reform is ready for a different kind of leader.
During one game, as he pulled himself to his feet after sacking the quarterback, an opponent sucker-punched him in the jaw. The benches cleared, and Mr. Walcott’s buddies — the only all-black team in a nearly all-white league on Staten Island — looked to him for a signal. But he shook it off.
“We weren’t there to fight,” he said. “It could have been a race war.”
After early work mentoring children in Queens and a searing stint in Harlem finding homes for crack babies — he even adopted two children of an addict — Mr. Walcott rose to the presidency of the New York Urban League, one of the city’s premier civil rights groups. But in the racial turmoil of the Giuliani years, Mr. Walcott refrained from getting arrested alongside scores of politicians and other black leaders in demonstrations against police brutality. He chose to advise the embattled police commissioner behind the scenes, trusting that his subdued approach would be more likely to win results.
All along, his trademark has been forbearance, and in his new role as New York City’s schools chancellor, Mr. Walcott will test whether the nation’s full-tilt approach to urban education reform is ready for a different kind of leader. But for the past nine years as a deputy mayor whose main responsibility was to oversee the Department of Education, he has left only the faintest of fingerprints during a time of momentous changes to the schools.
In a lengthy interview, Mr. Walcott struggled to name any achievements for which he had been the driving force, finally citing the creation of an early-literacy program for children in public housing and a mayoral Office of Adult Education.
In a City Hall populated with visionary strategists, managerial wizards and publicity magnets, Mr. Walcott was none of these. Working between a strong-willed mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg, and a tenacious chancellor, Joel I. Klein, he seemed more comfortable in a role as deputy mayor for mollification: mediating disputes, calming tensions and endlessly listening.
That, of course, may be precisely what is needed at this moment: Mr. Walcott is taking over the nation’s largest school system after a disastrous experiment with Cathleen P. Black, at a time of low mayoral approval ratings and with teacher layoffs and other retrenchments in the offing.
But Mr. Walcott, 59, concedes that despite his years in City Hall, there is little record on which to judge whether he is the right person to defend, advance and improve upon Mr. Bloomberg’s education agenda of test-based accountability, welcoming charter schools and closing failing ones.
“People will question spine,” Mr. Walcott said. “I’m very confident about decision-making and toughness. It will be my actions they have to take a look at over the next two and a half years to determine whether there is spine or not.”
In Two Worlds
Backyard baseball with a tree stump for home plate. Trombone in the school orchestra. Biking down the street under the watchful eyes of friendly neighbors.
It was “Leave It to Beaver,” but black, to hear Mr. Walcott describe his childhood in the Addisleigh Park section of southeast Queens, a destination for ambitious émigrés from Harlem and Brooklyn that was already dotted with celebrities like John Coltrane, Ella Fitzgerald, and W. E. B. Du Bois.
Dennis Malcolm Walcott was an only child, born in 1951 to Dennis C. and Eleanor Walcott. His father was an exterminator for the city’s Housing Authority who never finished high school, even-tempered and affable; his mother, a city social worker, the tough-minded family “enforcer.”
The couple wanted Dennis to succeed in a white world, so they sent him for three summers to Lincoln Farm Work Camp, in the Catskills, where teenagers labored on construction projects. The children of Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee were there, but nearly everyone else was white and wealthy, he said.
Mr. Walcott graduated from Francis Lewis High School and thought he might become a psychiatrist. He went to the University of Bridgeport, in Connecticut, a small seaside campus not too far from home. But neither of his parents saw him graduate. His father fell ill and died in 1971, at age 60. The next year, on spring break from his senior year, Mr. Walcott arrived home to find his mother, 48, dead on the living room floor. He did not want an autopsy, so the cause was never determined.
Her body was beneath a window looking out to the street. “The theory was that she was sitting on the chair, waiting for me to come in,” he said.
Mr. Walcott abruptly changed his diet, cutting out things he thought might bring on the diabetes that had stricken many of the men in his family. These days he avoids red meat and seldom eats anything but a salad for lunch. He once favored Old Grand-Dad and colas, but now rarely touches alcohol and does not smoke.
With a master’s in education, he found a job teaching kindergarten at a new church-run school in Queens. He was unenthusiastic about the work, a friend recalled. But he was moved by the longings of boys who had no fathers at home, and he created his own “Brother to Brother” program.
Mr. Walcott persuaded a television station to broadcast a free advertisement during “Soul Train,” he said, and the flood of interest from single mothers and male volunteers was more than he could handle. He ended the program.
In 1977, he married Denise St. Hill — they had met as young children and reconnected by chance at a party — just as he started working at a foster-care agency in Manhattan as part of a master’s program in social work. He later interned at the Greater New York Fund, the arm of the United Way that handed out grants to smaller nonprofits.
Friends and bosses marveled at his listening skills, calm and maturity. “He could always talk himself out of sticky situations or stay above the fray,” Nancy Gresham-Jones, a classmate and a co-worker, said.
The fund hired him full time, assigning him to work with recipient agencies to improve operations. One was Harlem-Dowling Children’s Services, the first black-run adoption agency in New York, whose finances were a mess after management changes and a bookkeeper’s conviction for embezzlement.
Mr. Walcott became its executive director in 1985, just in time for the crack epidemic. Staggering numbers of babies were being born with drug toxicity or H.I.V., or were being abandoned at birth. In one day alone, he found foster homes for 30 “boarder babies” left at Harlem Hospital.
He was a hands-on director: watching a child die of AIDS complications; helping a little girl born without a stomach; rushing to a woman’s home to talk her out of suicide. When a wealthy woman offered to do something nice one Christmas, Mr. Walcott said, he sent to her home two children who had never had a hot bath.
“Things like that were emotionally draining,” he said. “It was a trying period in time, and you’re right in the fulcrum of it.”
By the time he took over the New York Urban League in 1990, he had two daughters. But when he heard of a girl named Shatisha, 10, and her brother Timmy, 5, who needed a home, Mr. Walcott and his wife signed up to take them in as foster parents and soon adopted them. He later reconnected the two with their birth mother, who has been clean for a number of years.
A Challenging Decade
Mr. Walcott embraced the Urban League’s mission, even tattooing its logo, an apple with an equal sign, on his right arm. He worked particularly hard to expand city-financed programs aimed at reducing infant mortality, training welfare recipients for work and coaching parents to get involved in schools.
“Dennis moved the league into government contracts it never had before,” said Harvey Newman, then a board member. “I don’t know if it was a swimming success. But it changed the direction of the Urban League.” From 1993 to 1999, state records show, the league’s government financing grew by $2.2 million, or 54 percent.
In 1993, before he lost his re-election bid, Mayor David N. Dinkins appointed Mr. Walcott to the Board of Education, where he served for just over a year. Norman Steisel, a deputy mayor, recalled Mr. Walcott working on a model for mayoral control of the schools that would entail “extensive parental involvement,” but the plan went nowhere.
One of Mr. Walcott’s greatest victories as an advocate was his most fleeting one: a federal court ruling that briefly blocked a subway fare increase in 1995. Represented by a lawyer named Eric T. Schneiderman, now the state’s attorney general, the Urban League and the Straphangers Campaign argued that minorities were being hit harder than suburban whites, whose commuter fares were not rising as sharply.
The decision was overturned the next day. But Gene Russianoff, the Straphangers leader, said he believed it created a political problem for Gov. George E. Pataki that was solved a year later by the introduction of the unlimited-ride MetroCard.
As relations between Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani’s Police Department and minority communities deteriorated, Mr. Walcott retained his access to senior administration aides by rarely criticizing the mayor publicly, and never in harsh terms.
“That was a very activist period of time,” he said. “We had the Korean boycott; we had Crown Heights. My goal was to walk the line.”
Mr. Walcott helped Howard Safir, the police commissioner, come up with a strategy to push officers to use a kinder demeanor with the public, with sting operations intended to weed out surly officers. The slogan he helped devise — “Courtesy, Professionalism and Respect” — remains emblazoned on patrol cars, Mr. Walcott noted with some pride. “Yeah, that was me,” he said.
Yet his restraint earned Mr. Walcott catcalls from other civil rights leaders who said it was doing little good. “The inside road is a hard row to hoe,” said Michael Meyers, the president of the New York Civil Rights Coalition. “But at the same time, you’ve got to show me that you’re being effective.”
Mr. Walcott said his refusal to get arrested after the fatal shooting of Amadou Diallo was one of the toughest decisions he ever made. It also raised questions about whether the Urban League’s reliance on government money for 75 percent of its budget had compromised his independence.
Mr. Walcott denied this. But he acknowledged trying to “protect the league,” and said that taking a more “strident” public stance could have caused “unnecessary pressure or strain on the organization.” Then again, he suggested, perhaps he was being held to an unfair standard.
“I provided services to communities and tried to deal with empowerment and equality, which was part of the mission of the Urban League,” he said. “But defining myself as a civil rights leader — I wouldn’t quite say that. I was in charge of a not-for-profit.”
The City Peacekeeper
In January 2002, Mr. Walcott arrived in City Hall as an odd man out: he was one of few minorities and barely knew Mr. Bloomberg. He wore his differences with pride, sometimes calling himself the “working-class deputy mayor.”
His chief responsibility was limited in part by Mr. Klein’s hands-on style and close relationship with the mayor. So Mr. Walcott became something of a go-between: an ambassador to far-flung corners of the city, a pair of eyes in the department for Mr. Bloomberg and a guardian of Mr. Klein, whose pugnacious style he defended repeatedly in City Hall. Mr. Walcott described his role as being “the glue between two very smart people who have very strong viewpoints.”
He popped in regularly at the department to eavesdrop on meetings or simply to chat. He saw his mission not as coming up with ideas or challenging Mr. Klein, but as working around the edges — reminding officials to call a Harlem politician before proposing a new charter school or pushing for more town hall meetings.
“His style was never to say, ‘No, we’re not going to let you do this,’ ” said Garth Harries, an education official from 2003 to 2009. “It was more like probing and testing to make sure we had done the work and understood the implications of what we were doing.”
When the department was considering closing the Alfred E. Smith Career and Technical Education High School in the Bronx, Mr. Walcott expressed concerns about community opposition. As a result, the department preserved a popular automotive program at the school and phased out other programs.
But when the department faced one of its most contentious decisions, whether to release teacher performance data to the public, Mr. Walcott was conflicted, expressing concerns about denigrating teachers.
Some have interpreted his restraint as excessive deference, even cowardice. Jill Levy, a former president of the principals’ union, grew frustrated with his reluctance to speak up in meetings and to weigh in on issues. “He never disagreed,” she said. “I didn’t see any overt leadership.”
But Dina Paul-Parks, a former aide, said Mr. Walcott was often misjudged. “Dennis is so laid-back that sometimes people tend to think that he is a bit of a wallflower,” she said. “He actually has very, very strong opinions and feels passionately about these issues.”
Still, Mr. Walcott’s knack for peacemaking and consensus-building in tense moments made him indispensable to Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Klein, who each had a habit of alienating other political players.
It was Mr. Walcott, not the blunter Mr. Klein, who was called upon to explain — gently but unapologetically — to parents and community leaders why their schools were being closed for poor performance. So, too, when the fury reached City Hall without warning from the Education Department, it was Mr. Walcott who briefed the mayor, covering for Mr. Klein.
The mayor sent Mr. Walcott to soothe tensions after several crises, including the fatal police shooting of Sean Bell in 2006 — the same year that Mr. Walcott’s son, Timmy Craig-Walcott, was shot in the leg after getting off a bus one night in Queens.
Mr. Walcott’s skills proved critical in 2002, when Mr. Bloomberg wanted the State Legislature to give him control of city schools, and in 2009, when some legislators were demurring over whether to renew that control. Steven Sanders, who was chairman of the Assembly’s Education Committee in 2002, said Mr. Walcott approached the task with the discretion of an attorney guarding his client’s interests.
While Mr. Walcott and Mr. Bloomberg get along, they have never been particularly close, City Hall colleagues say. Mr. Bloomberg has invited him to Yankee games and to the inauguration of Barack Obama. Mr. Walcott devoted his vacation time in 2005 to the mayor’s re-election campaign.
But Mr. Walcott sometimes seemed to have trouble getting the mayor’s ear, telling colleagues he was “stalking” Mr. Bloomberg to sound him out on an issue when other officials had no trouble engaging the mayor in conversation.
Always, he was mindful of being the highest ranking African-American in the administration — even welling up with tears in an interview as he described how much he meant to younger minority staff members. At times, Mr. Walcott acted on that sensitivity, as when he cautioned against laying off cafeteria aides because it would disproportionately hit minority workers. But he disappointed some lower-level staff members who privately said they wished he had done more to help minorities land more senior jobs.
It was during the short tenure of Ms. Black that Mr. Walcott took a more commanding role. He was by her side, or behind a curtain, at tense public meetings, and rolled back her decision to take for the department half of any money saved by principals during the year. (The department is now taking back 30 percent.)
The appointment of Ms. Black was contentious, even inside City Hall. The mayor consulted with virtually no one in his administration before naming her, and Mr. Walcott declined to say whether his input had been sought.
But when Ms. Black seemed unable to grasp basic issues three months into her tenure, Mr. Walcott was part of a small circle of advisers who told Mr. Bloomberg that her chancellorship could not be salvaged, according to a person who spoke with the mayor.
True to form, Mr. Walcott refused to discuss what he told the mayor. “That’s between us,” he said.
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