Manuel Rivera, the former Rochester schools superintendent who has become Governor Spitzer’s secretary for education, is the subject of a new profile on the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal website.  The author is Peter Meyer, a Hudson-based contributing editor of Education Next, the Hoover Institution’s education journal
In “Mr. Rivera Goes to Albany,” Meyer notes that Spitzer “has more bully pulpit power than legal authority over education policy” in New York.

You’d expect a governor with a tough-guy reputation to appoint a hard-nosed litigator or a master-of-the-universe CEO as secretary for education. Instead, Spitzer chose a mild-mannered, soft-spoken former teacher, principal, and national Superintendent of the Year: Manuel Rivera.

It was a promising sign, perhaps, that the 57-year-old Rivera, a grandfather, had turned down a cushy $300,000 offer to take the reins of Boston’s 150-school district in order to try to fix-with no real power and a mere $169,000 salary-New York’s 4,448 schools. He had to be nuts-a plus when doing real education reform.

The article goes on to note that Rivera gets rave reviews from many who have worked with him in Rochester, where he developed a particularly strong reputation for stressing accountability — also a favorite theme of the governor’s.  The wrap-up:

“Creating great schools is not rocket science,” says Rivera, with a confidence that flies in the face of decades of failures in the nation’s schools. He’s sure that the key lies in “measuring schools against known standards.” Unfortunately, Rochester’s middle and high school students, unlike its fourth-graders, are still failing at high rates-and showing little improvement. The jury remains very much out on whether Rivera was on the right track in Rochester, and we can’t be sure yet if Rochester’s loss will be New York’s gain.