After discussing how the job of leadership entails applying beliefs to real-world situations, Giuliani gives the New York City school system as an example of how this works out:
The New York City school system was never really going to improve until its purpose, its core mission, was made clear. What the system should have been about was educating its million children as well as possible. Instead, it existed to provide jobs for the people who worked in it, and to preserve those jobs regardless of performance.
That’s not to say that there weren’t committed professionals at every level within the system. There were, and that’s the shame of it. Those with their hearts in the right place were the ones who suffered the most.
Until I could get everyone involved to sit together and agree that the system existed to educate children, fixing little bits of it was symbolic at best. Band-Aid solutions can do more harm than good. The system needed a new philosophy. It needed to say we’re not a job protection system but a system at its core about children’s enrichment.
All rewards and risks must flow from the performance of the children. If you took a broken system and repaired just enough so that it could limp along, you lessened the chance that a real and lasting solution could be reached.