Black a 'fearless' straight-shooter: friends By CHUCK BENNETT Last Updated: 10:09 AM, November 11, 2010
There'll be no education babble coming from the city's new schools chief.
Cathie Black, the chairwoman of the Hearst publishing empire tapped by Mayor Bloomberg to become schools chancellor, is a straight shooter who demands accountability from her team.
"She's completely honest and straight forward. There is no mystery about her management style," said Valerie Salembier, a senior Hearst vice president who worked with Black for years.
"She's fearless and she's also fair, which is a great combination," Salembier added.
"Cathie is all about performance. Make the numbers or tell me what kind of help you need to get there."
That's just the kind of attitude that makes an excellent superintendent, said Paul Hill, a Washington University researcher who studied the difference between traditional school superintendents and nontraditional ones.
"Nontraditional superintendents were very good at strategy, very good with organizational change and with dealing with [school] failure and reconstitution," Hill said.
"[Traditional superintendents are] generally very bad at politics and strategy and dealing with challenges that were outside the normal professional concerns of teachers," he added.
But, he said, school chiefs without a traditional educational background must quickly learn how to talk to parents and teachers.
"They didn't know how to talk with teachers and were not particularly fuzzy with parents," he said.
In her 2007 memoir, Black gave hints as to the type of team she might assemble.
"They've got the burn," she wrote in "Basic Black." "I want them ambitious, driven to be successful. Successful people usually stay successful. Losers are probably not going to become successful. Winners have got the burn."
Additional reporting by Keith Kelly