Background

Joseph P. Viteritti was born in 1946.

Education

Joseph Viteritti graduated from Hunter College of the City University of New York. He earned a Doctor of Philosophy from the City University of New York.

Career

Joseph Viteritti is the Thomas Hunter Professor of Public Policy and Chair of the Urban Policy and Planning Department at Hunter College of the City University of New York (CUNY). He was the founding faculty chair of the Public Policy Program at Hunter's Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute and is a member of the doctoral faculty in education policy at the CUNY Graduate Center. Prior to joining the Hunter faculty in 2004, Viteritti taught at Princeton University (Politics Department), New York University (Wagner and Law Schools), Harvard University (Graduate School of Education), and the State University of New York at Albany (Rockefeller School). In 1978-1981, he served as a special assistant to the chancellor of New York City public school system. He also was a Senior Advisor to the superintendent of schools in Boston and San Francisco. In 1996, he became a Co-chair and Director of the Program on Education and Civil Society of Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.

Educator and administrator Joseph Viteritti has written and edited a number of books dealing with the bureaucratic structures of both government and public school systems, particularly those in urban areas. A professor of public administration at New York University's Wagner School of Public Service and director of the Program on Education and Civil Society, Viteritti has also served as a special assistant to the chancellor of the New York public schools and was once an assistant for the school superintendents of Boston and San Francisco.

Joseph Viteritti utilized this inside knowledge of how public school systems operate to pen a number of volumes, including Across the River: Politics and Education in the City and Choosing Equality: School Choice, the Constitution, and Civil Society. Viteritti has also edited four books with Diane Ravitch. Two of them, New Schools for A New Century: The Redesign of Urban Education and City Schools: Lessons from New York, focus on the plight of urban schools. Each of the books addresses various social and political reasons behind failing urban schools. One of Viteritti's conclusions is that administrators who want to reform a failing school system or district are often deterred by external influences. Reviewer Jewel Bellush of the National Civic Review quoted Viteritti as saying that he has "a very deep-seated conviction that the major obstacles to change in a large urban school system like New York's are not found within the internal administrative structure but exist in the very complex and turbulent external environment."

In 1979, Joseph Viteritti published Bureaucracy and Social Justice: The Allocation of Jobs and Sendees to Minority Groups, a critically praised effort that details his research into governmental service inequities received by minority groups, such as blacks and Hispanics. He gives an overview of developments in the municipal government of New York City during the course of a decade, as well as discussing important changes that have taken place in public administration in other locales. Viteritti concludes that, because of the way the bureaucracy is set up, government works best for the more affluent segments of society, even when reforms are enacted to help minorities and other traditionally impoverished groups attain more benefits. He suggests that one of the reasons for this is voter apathy among those groups. Literary critics lauded the book for providing an accurate look at how government actually functions.

New Schools for a New Century is a collection of ten essays, edited by Viteritti and Ravitch, detailing innovations being applied in various school systems around the United States. Ravitch contributes an essay that explores the need to provide parents, particularly those in inner cities, with vouchers so they can choose the school, public or private, they want their children to attend. Viteritti revisits the topic of school choice in Choosing Equality, in which he also advocates a voucher system. In the book, he details how such projects, including magnet schools and black independent schools, which benefit from voucher systems, have worked in recent history. In another book coedited with Ravitch, titled Making Good Citizens: Education and Civil Society, Viteritti presents a group of essays that question the idea that public education is important to the health of the nation. Essays selected by Viteritti and Ravitch argue that private schools do a better job of producing critical thinkers who are so important to the success of a society. The authors cite as one of the many causes for the downward direction of public schools the economic and racial segregation that still exists.

Viteritti's book, The Pragmatist: Bill de Blasio's Quest to Save the Soul of New York, chronicles the political career and tenure of the incumbent mayor. Written from a historical perspective, the book traces mayoral leadership through the rise, fall, and regeneration of progressivism in New York City since the time of Fiorello La Guardia.

Achievements

• Joseph Viteritti has an extensive record of public service, having served over his career as a senior advisor to the chancellor of the New York City public schools as well as the school superintendents of Boston and San Francisco. He has been a member or director of a variety of blue-ribbon panels that have reviewed and recommended policies in the areas of city charter revision, education governance, police management, jail reform, municipal secession, civic education, and executive, legislative and judicial compensation. Joseph Viteritti has published widely in social science journals, law reviews, and popular media. His work has been translated from English into four other languages and covers topics that include city politics, education policy, criminal justice, and law. Viteritti is a member of the Hunter College Alumni Hall of Fame.

Works

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  • New Schools for a New Century: The Redesign of Urban Education

    (In this book, a group of nationally renowned scholars dis...)

    1997
  • The Last Freedom: Religion from the Public School to the Public Square

    (In The Last Freedom, Joseph Viteritti argues that there i...)

    2007
  • When Mayors Take Charge: School Governance in the City

    (Large urban school systems have been the weakest link in ...)

    2009
  • City Schools: Lessons from New York

    (City Schools brings together a distinguished group of res...)

    2000
  • Making Good Citizens: Education and Civil Society

    (Americans have reason to be concerned about the condition...)

    2001
  • Summer in the City: John Lindsay, New York, and the American Dream

    (The history, policies, and legacy of John Lindsay, mayor ...)

    2014
  • Choosing Equality: School Choice, the Constitution, and Civil Society

    (The United States is now in the second generation of deba...)

    1999
  • Kid Stuff: Marketing Sex and Violence to America's Children

    (In Kid Stuff, Diane Ravitch and Joseph P. Viteritti bring...)

    2003
  • The Pragmatist: Bill de Blasio's Quest to Save the Soul of New York

    (Joseph P. Viteritti's The Pragmatist is the first in-dept...)

    2017