Carmen Fariña

Ms. Fariña has run the nation’s largest school system since Mayor Bill de Blasio took office four years ago. She inherited the Department of Education from the administration of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, which had shredded the traditional playbook for running the city’s schools. It redesigned how students applied to high school, gave more power to principals, closed struggling schools and opened hundreds of new ones. Ms. Fariña invested in a model called community schools, which aimed to raise achievement by infusing schools with social services designed to address the challenges of poverty. Ms. Fariña, a career educator who was a teacher, principal, superintendent and deputy chancellor during her 50-year career, preferred to depend on her intuition, or that of her deputies.