From New York City’s venerable Tweed Courthouse, which now houses the New York City Department of Education, Garth Harries ’00 helps lead one of the nation’s boldest education reform initiatives. This fall Harries will oversee the opening of 73 new schools in the city’s campaign to boost student achievement.

Harries is among a cadre of young Turks, many from investment banks and management consulting firms, who were recruited by education chancellor Joel I. Klein to bring professional management to the sprawling bureaucracy. As chief executive officer of the city’s Office of New Schools, Harries works with educators, parents, and politicians to transform the nation’s largest school system.“

It’s a wonderfully stirring thing we are doing,” said the 32-year-old Harries, who lives in Greenwich Village with his wife, Dina. “The challenge is to create a system of great schools, in an urban setting, where many kids come to us with lower skills and higher needs.”

That challenge is all-encompassing for Harries, who arrives at the courthouse at 7 the morning of June 15 on a workday that won’t end until 9 that night. First, there’s a morning meeting with Klein, followed by another with his staff to discuss plans for charter schools. Then Harries takes the subway to the Bronx to discuss sites for new schools with borough president Adolfo Carrión. After returning for an afternoon meeting in Manhattan, it’s back to the Bronx to confer with parents over the location of a new school which has yet to be finalized.

Klein says Harries has played a crucial role in moving the city’s ambitious reform agenda forward. “Garth is an extraordinary manager,” Klein said. “He is also a caring, committed leader. Our city is lucky to have him.”

Harries wasn’t sure what his career path would be when he arrived at Stanford Law School in the fall of 1997. After graduating from Yale University in 1995 with a BA in ethics, politics, and economics, he taught private school in Vail, Colorado, campaigned for the 1996 Democratic ticket, and worked on economic development projects in Philadelphia.

During the summer following his first year at Stanford, he realized that his legal training might not lead him to practice law. While working for Brancart & Brancart, a fair housing litigation firm located in Loma Mar, California, he was assigned to a case involving a landlord in Bismarck, North Dakota, who was accused of discrimination. But what Harries found most interesting during his stint in the upper Midwest was helping Fair Housing of the Dakotas reorganize its strategy.

Upon returning to Stanford, he took classes in nonprofit management at the business school. The next summer, he worked at the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, and the consulting firm McKinsey & Company. “Stanford was a place where I could experiment and think about different disciplines,” said Harries. “I could use my legal skills for issues that were broader than just legal analysis.”

Though he passed the Pennsylvania bar exam, Harries never practiced law. Instead, he went to work for McKinsey in New York City. While there, Harries coordinated an efficiency program that saved a major insurer $80 million, and helped a large U.S. regional bank devise its corporate strategy.

After three years at McKinsey, Harries grew restless. So he jumped at the offer from Klein, a former assistant attorney general in charge of the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. Klein was brought in by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg to revamp New York’s educational system.

At the Office of New Schools, Harries is leading the effort to break up some of the city’s huge, and often failing, high schools. Only about half of the city’s public school students complete high school in four years. The new schools Harries is helping to create will have fewer than 500 students and provide the kind of personalized instruction that can help improve student performance. Harries is also helping parents create charter schools—experimental public schools that operate outside the dictates of local school boards but are accountable for student progress on statewide tests.

Harries wants New York to be known as a city where educational experimentation can flourish. In a public school system with 1,350 schools, 140,000 employees, and 1,100,000 students, Harries acknowledges that his task is not easy. “Turning around an organization this large takes time,” said Harries. “It’s like moving a flywheel. First you lean your shoulder in, you push, and you generate some motion. You push some more, and there’s movement. And before long you’ve generated real momentum.”