The reformer

Her task, as senior counselor for education policy under Chancellor Joel Klein: improve both the high school graduation rate, which had hovered for decades at about 50 percent, and also what “graduation” meant in the real terms.
“It’s hard to make reform and it’s hard to do it right,” said Cahill, who is 60.
But reform she did bring during her five years at the Department of Education. She helped to close large “failing” schools and create hundreds of smaller schools, and to push the city’s graduation rate past 60 percent.
Cahill said she coped with her onerous set of responsibilities by “focusing intensely on the mission, thinking daily about real kids, how valuable each child and adolescent is, and how important their educational achievements are for their futures.” It helped, too, she added, that she has a “supportive, loving husband and family.”
And in order not to take herself too seriously, she would recall the mantra from the Catholic schools of her youth: “It’s not all about you.”
The work has landed Cahill a new position as vice president for national programs and program director of urban education at the Carnegie Corporation of New York, where she’d previously worked. But she won’t be forgotten anytime soon in the city’s system.
“Michele came to her work at the Department of Education with deep-seated convictions about schooling and equality and she also came with a quite remarkable ability to listen to people with many very different points of view,” said John Garvey, a former associate dean at City University of New York, who coordinated the work of 17 colleges with almost 300 public high schools. “Over the course of the time she was at the Department, she earned widespread respect and admiration for both aspects of who she was.”
In her new job, she leads the Corporation’s “strategy of contributing to societal efforts to create pathways to educational and economic opportunity by generating systemic change across a K-16 continuum.”
Cahill, a mother of two and grandmother of two, has so far logged more than 35 years experience in the area of education reform. And before that, during her early years in Downtown Jersey City she acquired a wealth of experience in community and political activity that proved to be a good preparation for her adult career.

Strong identity
From her new 26th-floor office in midtown Manhattan, she can look directly down unto the spires of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, a reminder of who she is and where she came from. Her father William T. Cahill, who died when she was 7, would be “thrilled” at the view from his daughter’s office. “He told us the Irish built it. It was ours,” she said with a laugh, recalling a childhood visit to the great cathedral. “I’ve very clear memories of him.
“I remember reciting that I was an Irish Catholic Democrat,” Cahill said, referring to her pre-school days. “So, we were given a very strong identity.”
All of her ancestors came from Ireland, mostly in the aftermath of the Famine. Her nearest Irish-born (in County Galway) relative was her paternal grandfather, a church sexton. Her father, who was born in 1900 and didn’t marry until he was almost 50, graduated from Fordham Law School in the 1920s. Her grandmother revealed “in fragments” that, at the behest of his pastor, her son had traveled as a courier to Ireland during the War of Independence in the early 1920s.
“She was born in New York in 1870 and lived to be 94. So I knew her quite well,” the Carnegie Corporation executive said.
Cahill witnessed her mother’s political involvement firsthand. Widowed with three small children, Mae Walsh Cahill held down a low-level administrative county job at the hospital and was also head of the Democratic Party at ward level. It was still an era when people approached the party asking for jobs and other favors.
“It was a very, very tough political machine,” she said of the Jersey City operation. Indeed the writer Thomas Fleming, whose father was a Jersey City politician up to the late 1940s, has said that “the Organization” regarded Manhattan’s Tammany Hall as soft and inept.
By age 8, Cahill was working on elections and helping to get out the vote. “Making telephone calls for candidates and keeping track of voter turnout by precinct are among my earliest memories of activities,” she said.
“You saw how hard the women worked,” she said of that time. “And they weren’t a part of the big jobs.”
At the Jesuits’ St. Peter’s College in her hometown, Catholic social teaching led to her marching against the Vietnam War and involvement in community organizing — this time against the machine, which spawned several politicians that ended up jailed on corruption charges.
She tutored children at a Puerto Rican community Catholic church center and ran its after-school programs. In time, education became a career. But she felt that she needed an academic grounding in the field if she was to help effect real change in urban areas and she obtained an MA from the University of Wisconsin/Milwaukee and a doctorate from Columbia University.
“My degrees in public policy focused on solving urban problems of poverty, governance, service design and delivery,” she said.
Two factors led her to focus on education reform. First, as a college teacher, she wanted to find ways “to accelerate the learning of people who were under-prepared for college and needed to catch up fast.” But, secondly, she came to understand that better schools would have to be at the top of any development agenda for disadvantaged neighborhoods.
Cahill said: “The American education system doesn’t have high enough expectations of everyone. We need to be much more transparent and organize people to have high expectations for their own children and what they demand of schools.”
She said that New York had 30 big high schools that had a graduation rate of less than 45 percent. One of her jobs was to come up with a new, alternative model. “I did a lot of research and development and design,” she said.

Something better
Cahill said it’s important to build the students’ “social capital” by making connections with other parts of the community. So, for a certain Bronx school this would mean contact with Lehman College, the clergy, the Botanical Gardens and citizens advice bureaus.
“We need to have caring relationships with adults, high expectations, engaging curriculum and activities, opportunities for them to make contributions, and continuity,” she said.
Restructuring, though, brought resistance, as in the case of the high school in Bushwick in Brooklyn, which was targeted because of its 25 percent graduation rate. The plan was to create six schools in its place, half of them in the old building. Cahill managed through meetings to convince parents, teachers and community leaders that their values and goals were hers, too.
“I guess what I had to recognize was what people were saying — underneath, what people were saying — was: ‘We don’t believe that you will give us something better, so why should we trust you,'” she said.
Cahill, a parent with experience in the Catholic and public school systems in both New Jersey and her current hometown Brooklyn, sought help from New Visions for Public Schools, a non-profit dedicated to systemic reform in New York City. She hired buses to take parents and others concerned to see some of the schools she’d opened in other neighborhoods.
“And then we tried to make as transparent as possible the new-school development process,” she said.
A few years later, the community had a parade of graduates through streets that were once unsafe.
Cahill is forging ahead at a national level concerned about the high stakes for the U.S. in this globalized economy. The role of college education is now even more important than ever, she said. Jobs for auto workers that pay $30 per hour, without a college education, are gone, she pointed out.
“We’re very fragmented, which is very problematic, in that every state has different standards,” she said.
Cahill approaches these issues now with a particular advantage – five years’ experience working as a reformer in the biggest public-school system in the nation.
“The most important lesson that I am applying [from her time in New York City’s Department of Education] is to drive an innovation agenda coupled with accountability for outcomes,” she said.