Description: As a non-educator, why are you suited to run the New York City Public School system?

Transcript:  I think for me what I think is that fundamentally the system is a service delivery system and it’s broken, it’s incentives are misaligned, it’s managed poorly, it basically tolerates mediocrity, rewards failure and I think if you’re a change agent then some of the very same principles apply in the Justice Department.  If you’re fundamentally a transformative leader, which I’ve considered myself to be, I thought this was as important an opportunity and quite frankly an opportunity I trained for, for much of my adult life.  I mean I believe so deeply that education is the great leveler and if you get that wrong in almost a Rawlsian sense, you get the preconditions to what it means to grow up in America, you get those wrong and so I had a sense that this was gonna take a systems transformation.  It’s always hard to speak for the mayor on what motivated him but I suppose a combination of his sense that somebody who is outside the system was beholden to the structures that existed, the players that existed, somebody who had a fair amount of managerial experience which I had had in the Justice Department and at Bertelsmann and somebody I hope this mattered to and I had my passion for making sure that education was equitable and that whether you were rich or poor, black or white, you got a fair shot at the American dream.  Something that’s not happening in our country and I hope those are the things that resonated with the mayor.

Recorded on: 3/30/08