Alberto Carvalho, who has led Miami’s public schools for the last decade, will be New York City’s next schools chancellor, Mayor Bill de Blasio will announce later on. | AP Photo Miami schools chief Alberto Carvalho will be New York City's next chancellor

Alberto Carvalho, who has led Miami’s public schools for the last decade, will be New York City’s next schools chancellor, Mayor Bill de Blasio confirmed Wednesday.

Carvalho will replace Carmen Fariña, who has spent the last four years at the helm of America’s largest school system after de Blasio coaxed her out of retirement in late 2013. His start date has not been set. The announcement was delayed because of the recent shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla.


De Blasio’s requirements for the role of America’s second-most-important educator were largely unspoken, but obvious: a longtime educator with experience running schools for vulnerable children, a Spanish-speaker and a New York City outsider who is also considered a rising star in the national education world.

Carvalho checks every box.

The current Miami-Dade schools chief is a Portuguese immigrant, and came to America illegally as a broke 17-year-old who had saved up $1,000 for the airfare from Lisbon to New York City. After leaving New York for Ft. Lauderdale and later Miami, he worked as a busboy and a day laborer. Carvalho was the first person in his family to finish high school. Fariña, the daughter of immigrants from Spain, was the first person in hers to earn a college diploma.

Carvalho started his 20-year career in Miami’s schools as a physics, chemistry and calculus teacher at Miami Jackson Senior High, where he earned the nickname “Mr. Armani” for his sartorial presence. He went on to be an assistant principal and deputy superintendent. Along with his current superintendent duties, he’s the principal of two Miami schools. He helped earn his reputation for being a savvy political operator while serving as a communications officer and a lobbyist for Miami-Dade’s schools.

City Hall has been searching for a new chancellor for two months, and there were doubts that the mayor would be able to attract top talent to a job that he himself described as a mission to carry out Fariña’s agenda.

But in Carvalho, de Blasio appears to have found a highly in-demand educator who is at least ostensibly willing to do just that — and likely for about $100,000 less than he earns in Miami now. (Fariña earns $235,000 now; Carvalho makes roughly $345,000.)

That de Blasio was able to nab Carvalho demonstrates the extent of the prestige associated with running New York City's schools.

At 53, Carvalho has established himself as one of the country’s leading educators, and he has the hardware to prove it.

He won the prestigious National Superintendent of the Year award in 2014, which was accompanied by a ceremony at the White House, and earned Miami-Dade the Broad Prize in Urban Education in 2012. In 2016, he won the Harold W. McGraw Jr. prize in K-12 education and Carvalho was appointed to the National Assessment for Education Progress by former Education Secretary Arne Duncan in 2015. NPR has called him “a miracle worker.”

His name has also cropped up on shortlists for Florida’s governor, a county and city mayor in Miami-Dade. He said last year he was considering a bid for Florida’s 27th Congressional District, and was rumored to be a top contender for the role of federal Education secretary under a Hillary Clinton administration.

And with his new promotion, Carvalho will almost certainly be considered for that job if a Democrat or even a moderate Republican wins the White House in 2020.

Carvalho’s ascent to the helm of New York City’s schools adds to a conveyor belt of prominent educators shuffling between New York and Florida.

Carvalho took over Miami’s schools from Rudy Crew, who ran had run them since 2004. Crew served as the New York City schools chancellor for four years under former Mayor Rudy Giuliani. He was forced out as Miami superintendent over a dispute with the school board there; Carvalho patched up that relationship early in his tenure. State Education Department Commissioner MaryEllen Elia came to Albany from Florida’s Hillsborough County. She ran that county’s schools for a decade.

Pedagogical symmetry

Carvalho will take over from someone who possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of New York City's 1,800 schools and 1.1 million students. Fariña has visited 800 of the city's schools over her 52 years as an educator here, and invariably sees a few people she knows well at nearly every school she visits.

Carvalho will have to start from scratch in a new system. But the next chancellor has presided over a district that has much in common with New York’s, which will likely ease his transition from Miami-Dade's school headquarters in squat beige office building on Biscayne Boulevard to the ornate Tweed Courthouse across from City Hall.

Miami-Dade is the nation’s fourth-largest school system, with over 350,000 students in more than 460 schools.

As in New York, the vast majority of students in Miami’s schools are black or Latino — 250,000 of the district’s students were Latino in the 2016-2017 school year, and roughly 25,000 were white. And, like New York, most of Miami’s students are poor: 70 percent qualified for free or reduced price lunch last year.

More than 73,000 of Miami’s students are English language learners and nearly 188,000 students speak Spanish at home. Carvalho is fluent in both Spanish and Portuguese.

Fariña has made strengthening English language and dual language instruction a top priority of her tenure. But as Fariña has struggled to narrow persistent achievement gaps between the city’s English language learners and their native, English-speaking peers, Carvalho has won national accolades for his efforts to narrow the gap in Miami.

In 2016, the Education Equality Index, a national nonprofit group, found that Miami’s schools have some of the lowest achievement gaps between poor students and their wealthier classmates in the country.

“The recognition of our school district’s ability to close and, in some cases, eliminate the achievement gap is really a testament to the exceptional focus and dedication of our teachers and students,” Carvalho said at the time.

His success in narrowing the achievement gap in Miami will no doubt come in handy for what will likely be the most challenging part of his tenure: Addressing New York’s deep-seated school segregation crisis, which is considered the most severe in the nation. De Blasio and Fariña have been criticized by parents and advocates for taking only modest steps to address segregation.

Miami-Dade's graduation rates have also risen steadily to 80 percent under Carvalho’s watch, an all-time high. Fewer than 60 percent of the city’s high schoolers were graduating in 2007, the year before Carvalho took over. De Blasio frequently notes that New York City’s graduation rate — just more than 70 percent — is higher than it has ever been.

Last year was the first ever in which Miami had no schools that were given an “F” rating by the state, and standardized test scores have inched up throughout the last decade.

Many of Carvalho’s priorities as superintendent dovetail neatly with the mayor’s.

Carvalho has pushed for more Advanced Placement courses in Miami’s schools; the AP for All initiative is at the center of de Blasio’s Equity and Excellence agenda, the blueprint for his second-term education plans.

Fariña has rallied for more parent engagement in schools; Carvalho has overseen the expansion of a program called the Parent Academy, which offers workshops and classes to help parents be more involved in their children’s education.

And, like New York’s current chancellor, Carvalho is a strong supporter of professional development for teachers. Like Fariña, he has a knack for firing principals: he reassigned 70 percent of the county’s school leaders after taking over as superintendent.

Carvalho has also been critical of high-stakes testing, questioning the relevance and influence of Florida’s state and local exams. In 2015, he got rid of local final exams for elementary schools and reduced the number of those tests for middle and high schools students from 300 to 10.

“I believe in accountability,” Carvalho said then, according to The Washington Post. “But fewer assessments of higher quality are better. ... What we have now across the country is confusing, hard to navigate and, I believe, abusive of both teacher and student time.”

Carvalho’s rhetoric about the need to have some data-driven accountability while not overburdening students and teachers with too much testing mirrors Fariña’s.

De Blasio campaigned in 2013 on a promise to lower the weight of standardized testing for both students and teachers, but he and Fariña have discouraged students from refusing standardized tests, and have argued that the assessments provide them with valuable information about what the city’s students are learning.

And perhaps most crucially, Carvalho has managed to walk a precarious political tightrope on school choice.

Though de Blasio is philosophically opposed to most charter schools, he learned within his first few months as mayor that the city’s political realities do not give much quarter to his personal opinions on the matter. In the last few years, he has sought to extend an olive branch to parts of the local charter sector he and Fariña approve of, and has mostly avoided criticizing the city’s charter schools, except for Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy network.

It’s a fact of contemporary education politics that no mainstream schools superintendent can be completely ideologically opposed to charters and Carvalho is not.

“Rather than complain about the incoming tsunami of choice, we’re going to ride it,” Carvalho told the Miami Herald in 2014.

Carvalho’s official bio describes him as “a staunch believer in school choice” — which means something quite different in Florida than it does in New York. Carvalho has vastly expanded the number of magnet schools in Miami — nearly 70,000 of the county’s students attended a magnet last year — and created a few district-run charters. He's insisted that the city’s new charters commit to taking all students, including students with disabilities, who have often struggled in large charter networks. Florida's charters are generally not as high-performing as New York City's.

“We will be ever so vigilant about the promise of equity,” Carvalho said last year after the national charter network KIPP announced it would open a Miami location. “It would not be fair to little Johnny, Maria or Tyrone to show up at a school one day and feel that if you make a right turn, you have nirvana, if you make a left turn, you have something less than,” he added, according to WLRN.

But he’s still earned praise from influential voices within the charter school movement.

Pro-charter news outlet The 74 ran the following headline on a 2015 feature about Carvalho: “Miami Turnaround: How One Ambitious Schools Chief Rescued America’s Fourth-Largest District.”

Moskowitz, Success’s CEO, included Carvalho on a list of potential chancellors that she encouraged de Blasio, her political nemesis, to consider.

Political unknowns

Despite all the ways in which de Blasio and Carvalho are in sync, there are still practical and political divides between them.

While Carvalho's relationship with Miami's local teachers union has been mostly solid, he's sometimes strayed from the party line on bread-and-butter union issues.

De Blasio's critics have mocked him for his close relationship with the United Federation of Teachers, and some assumed that either UFT President Michael Mulgrew or American Federation of Teachers boss Randi Weingarten would help select the next chancellor.

That’s not how the search process panned out, which may be a symptom of the small but significant distance Mulgrew has recently put between his union and City Hall.

In 2011, Carvalho helped implement a merit pay system — considered anathema to most teachers union officials, including Weingarten — that tied raises to teachers' evaluation scores and provided bonuses for highly effective teachers. He had occasional confrontations with groups of teachers upset about pay issues and rising health care costs. And he was sometimes at odds with the leadership of Miami’s local teachers union, United Teachers of Dade. After Miami-Dade schools and the union settled a new contract late last year, Carvalho praised the deal while UTD President Karla Hernández-Mats said, “It is absolutely not what our members deserve.”

Part of Carvalho’s plan for turning around some of the county’s worst schools involved getting underperforming unionized teachers out of classrooms and, in some cases, replacing them with Teach for America recruits.

But he’s also been praised by union allies for executing a $2 billion cut to the school district’s central office without firing a single teacher in the process.

Carvalho has also had one notable brush with scandal. Several emails written in 2007 — a few months before he was named Miami superintendent — between Carvalho and a former Miami Herald reporter indicate that the two had an affair while Carvalho was a top deputy in the county’s school system. The reporter resigned from her job after the emails were made public.

And in 2016, a state ethics committee found that Carvalho might have violated Florida law by not reporting gifts he received that were worth more than $100. The committee did not take further action, noting that Carvalho was "forthcoming" about the incident and eventually reported the gifts.

The new chancellor is also a registered independent, and has avoided joining either major party even as he’s eyed runs for elected office. That can be read as a pragmatic stance for a prominent official in Florida’s famously convoluted political system, but it sets the new chancellor apart from the mayor, who is positioning himself to be one of the nation’s leading progressive Democrats.

Still, Carvalho is hardly politically neutral. He's been a sharp critic of President Trump's immigration policies, and has been active in calling for stricter gun control in the the wake of the Parkland, school shooting, which happened just one county north of Miami-Dade.

In November, Carvalho vowed to keep Miami's schools safe from Trump's immigration plans.

“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. Not on my watch," he said. Still, Caravalho insisted he wasn’t taking a political stance: “It’s not a Republican thing. It’s not a Democratic thing. It is a reasonable, rational, compassionate, humane thing, and we need to separate one from the other," he said, according to WLRN.

Carvalho will also be a much more politically ambitious chancellor than his predecessor, which could lead to tension at City Hall.

Fariña, who took the job in her early 70s, has shied away from press coverage throughout her career and mostly avoided wading into local political fights. Carvalho does not share that trait, and may fit closer to the Bill Bratton mold of top City Hall officials — courting the press, exceedingly comfortable at a lectern, and saying what he wants to say when he wants to say it. Carvalho is an active and influential presence in the hallways of the Florida state house in Tallahassee; Fariña was a popular but rare visitor in Albany.

Unlike both Fariña and Bratton, who were each hired to perform a last act of long and illustrious careers and bring stability to the city’s two most important departments, Carvalho is an up-and-coming commodity. That makes his hiring a political victory for de Blasio, but it raises questions about how the new chancellor and his new boss will navigate their individual national political goals simultaneously.

Based on Carvalho’s history, it's likely he will mull a political run or explore one of the few higher-level education jobs in the country by the time his tenure winds down. And based on de Blasio’s recent rhetoric about national politics (and his trips to Iowa) it’s obvious the mayor wants to have a national platform by the time he leaves City Hall in 2021.

In Miami, Carvalho has comported himself much like a mayor.

He updates his 51,000 Twitter followers — about 50,000 more than the actual mayor of Miami has — frequently. Carvalho has posted selfies in his running gear from the Miami Marathon, pictures of his superintendent-branded convertible making its way through a Three Kings Day parade, and artful images of him climbing stairwells in the Florida state capitol. After wading through the previous night's trash during a New Year's Day 5K run in a downtown park, he encouraged his followers to keep Miami's public spaces cleaner: "I have come to the sad conclusion that while we love and celebrate Miami, we need to do more to respect it," he posted.

He's also taken on the role of an unofficial liaison to the city's local and visiting celebrities: Carvalho thanked Drake for donating $25,000 to a local high school, praised Gloria Estefan for being "Miami's voice and sound," and announced a new partnership with fashion designer Naeem Khan, who is planning to open a fashion-focused public school in Miami.

When Carvalho officially takes over in New York, he will wield an enormous amount of influence compared to his peers at the helm of other big urban school systems. New York's mayoral control system allows the chancellor to operate without the politically cumbersome presence of an elected school board.

Despite that newfound freedom, Carvalho will have a very full plate.

Beyond the segregation crisis, he will have the unenviable responsibility of closing over a dozen schools from the controversial Renewal School without setting off protests among parents and community members, and building new and better schools in their place. Carvalho will also have to manage the remaining 46 schools in the program, which have improved somewhat over the last three years but still face long odds.

Though Carvalho will inherit a formula for improving long-struggling schools that he did not create, he has plenty of experience with underperforming schools. He created an office specifically to manage struggling schools, and has matched those schools with wraparound social services, much like Fariña has done by marrying the Renewal program to the city’s community schools initiative.

Carvalho will also be tasked with managing the enormous Equity and Excellence agenda, which is expected to show more substantive results in the mayor’s second term. He will have to manage the largest student homelessness crisis in the city's history, with over 110,000 students living in shelters or temporary housing; Miami, by contrast, has 6,000 homeless students. (In January, Carvalho said of Miami's student homeless problem: "if we, as a community, a country, cannot solve this, we cannot solve anything.)

He will oversee the rollout of 3-K for All, a pre-K program for three-year-olds, which will likely require him to appeal to Albany and the federal government for the $700 million the city needs to make the initiative universal.

All that may leave the new chancellor — who will serve the mayor for about three and a half years at most — with limited time to create an agenda of his own.