Anthony J. Alvarado, Former Chancellor of New York Schools, Dies at 81

Anthony J. Alvarado, a successful educator who served as the first Hispanic schools chancellor in New York City but whose term was cut short when he resigned over personal financial irregularities, died Monday at his home in Coronado, California. He was 81 years old.

The cause was complications from blood cancer and pneumonia, his wife, Elaine Fink, said.

Mr. Alvarado was the innovative, 40-year-old superintendent of an East Harlem school district in 1983, when he emerged from a difficult selection process to lead the nation’s largest school system, succeeding Frank J. Macchiarola. As the first Hispanic educator to hold the city’s top school post, he generated tremendous pride in the Hispanic community. (The city has had several Spanish school chancellors since then.)

Mr. Alvarado was an apostle for more rigorous teacher training and for raising the expectation of success for students and teachers alike. And although his tenure as schools chancellor was shortened, he was nationally praised for his success in improving student achievement in two Manhattan districts and later for his effort to replicate those achievements in San Diego, where he was chancellor of education.

“Adults are responsible for children’s failures,” he said in a 2005 interview with Hedrick Smith, the host of the PBS program “Making schools work.”

“What often happens in American public education with poor children, and especially with poor children of color,” he added, “is that if they haven’t learned, the variables are poverty, the lack of parenting, difficult conditions in the community , socio-economic status, and so on. And interestingly, it never went back to the teacher or the school. And that’s why we let ourselves be fooled.”

He told The New York Times in 2004: “To teach children effectively, you must effectively – and continually – educate teachers on how to teach children effectively.”

As chancellor, Mr. Alvarado introduced full-day kindergarten classes and, among other innovations, initiated a pilot program of individual tutoring for students in upper grades to reduce the system’s 49 percent dropout rate.

But his agenda was undone by his personal financial problems, which were exposed by what would otherwise have been the low-key gun arrest of an aide who had lent him money.

On February 27, 1984, John Chin, a mid-level school board official under Mr. Alvarado, was accused of firing a gun three times through a neighbor’s window on West 95th Street in Manhattan (for reasons still unknown). In Mr. Chin’s safe, investigators discovered two uncashed checks, totaling about $10,000, that had been made out to him by Mr. Alvarado as reimbursement for personal loans.

Mr. Alvarado eventually acknowledged that his tangled personal finances — further stretched because he was supporting two daughters from his first marriage — included some $80,000 in loans he received from subordinates, among other questionable transactions.

The revelation set off skirmishes between the Board of Education and City Hall and fanned the sparks of a heated process that had led to Mr. Alvarado’s appointment in 1983, when he was among four finalists for the job.

After serving in the post for a year and nine days, Mr. Alvarado resigned in May 1984, on the eve of a Board of Education hearing on allegations by the city’s Department of Investigation that he had “a serious deficiency had shown good judgment and created a strong impression’. of impropriety” in accepting loans from subordinates.

He admitted in a resignation statement that he had made a “horrendous” judgment, but insisted he had “never used public funds or the public system for personal gain.” No criminal charges were ever filed.

Mr. Alvarado was succeeded by Nathan Quinones, who was also Hispanic, as well as others who went on to hold the position, including Joseph A. Fernandez, Ramón C. Cortines, Carmen Fariña and Richard A. Carranza.

Previously, Mr. Alvarado, as superintendent of District 4 in East Harlem from 1973 to 1983, had created mini-schools that focused on certain subjects, drawing students from elsewhere in the city to one of the poorest neighborhoods.

The process did not always go smoothly. He exceeded his annual budget more than once. And a white principal in the district, who was replaced by a Hispanic, claimed he was a victim of discrimination and was reinstated.

But Mr. Alvarado oversaw a poor, mostly black and Hispanic district, where the number of children reading at or above district level rose to 48 percent in 1982, up from 25 percent in 1979. The 32 community districts of the city rose from 32nd to 15th.

After resigning as chancellor, Mr. Alvarado felt professionally vindicated when he was hired in 1987 as superintendent of Manhattan’s District 2, which stretched from Chinatown to the Upper East Side.

Once again he invested in training teachers. He recruited experts from New Zealand and Australia, the two English-speaking countries with the highest literacy rates. He held principals accountable not only as principals but as paragons of education, and he cut the district’s central staff. Reading scores rose, and some middle-class families with other options returned to the district’s public schools.

At the same time, he received the cooperation of the teachers’ union. Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, was quoted by Time magazine in 1984 said, “Alvarado’s plans and actions reflected a true educator’s concern for the schools.”

In 1998, after eleven years leading District 2, Mr. Alvarado was hired as Chancellor of Education, the No. 2 position, for the San Diego School District. There he instituted coaching for teachers and increased student instruction in reading and writing. But he was seen by many in the city as an assertive outsider, and he became a lightning rod for opposition to most reforms.

He later served as a professor of education at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, and served on the board of Educational Testing Service, the nonprofit organization that develops and administers standardized tests.

Michael A. Rebell, executive director of the Center for Education Equity and professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, said Mr. Alvarado was “a dynamic and incredibly creative leader in education” in a telephone interview: “He not only had important, innovative ideas, but he could also implement them. He was an inspirational force who turned things around in two community school districts.”

Anthony John Alvarado was born on June 10, 1942 in New York and raised in the South Bronx. His father, Juan Alvarado, a Cuban immigrant, was the manager of a clothing factory. His mother, Victoria (Davila) Alvarado, born in Puerto Rico, was a homemaker.

After graduating from Fordham Preparatory School in the Bronx, Mr. Alvarado earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Fordham University in 1960, followed by a master’s degree in the same subject, also from Fordham.

He began teaching English in the New York City public schools in 1965, first as a substitute teacher and then for a year at James Monroe High School in the Bronx. He was appointed to several administrative posts at the Board of Education headquarters in Brooklyn before becoming superintendent of District 4, a predominantly black and Hispanic area, in 1973.

In addition to his wife, Mrs. Fink, Mr. Alvarado is survived by two daughters from his first marriage, Maria and Gloria Alvarado; two from his second marriage to Ellen Kirshbaum, Rachel Moreno and Emily Alvarado; nine grandchildren; and a great-grandson.

As district superintendent and chancellor, Mr. Alvarado fearlessly challenged a bureaucracy that, he said, had curbed individual initiative.

“There is always the question: Can the octopus ensnare you so much that there will always be an arm around you pulling you from the direction you want to go?” he said when he was appointed chancellor in 1983.

“The octopus is the system, the bureaucracy,” he added. ‘I walk around with a pair of scissors in my back pocket. If I see a tentacle, I take it out.”