Peter McWalters, Rhode Island’s out-going education commissioner, is well known as a brilliant education philosopher.

Some people believe that this gift has also been his curse, and has distracted him from the grittier administrative work of improving Rhode Island’s troubled schools. I am not among them.

Either way, he’s out of here as of June 30, nudged along by people in high places, after 17 years at the helm. I have two points to make about McWalters and his legacy.

First, however, I should fess up that I just plain like the guy. With passion verging on zealotry, humor, vast knowledge and a great collection of stories, McWalters is the best extemporaneous speaker in the state. He’s also a total pain to interview, because he answers questions with huge run-on sentences, like long cargo trains where each loaded car rumbles past just a bit too fast to get all the details.

And even his worst critics acknowledge McWalters’ deeply genuine affection for children — real children with feelings, needs, tough family situations, goofy impulses and awesome creative powers. Those messy, inconvenient kids drive his philosophy. They drive his insistence that schools become more human, with initiatives like advisories, time for teachers to work together, school-based management. You can’t educate a kid who’s not listening, so quit resenting them and get to the root of the problem. Teachers need time to help each other. McWalters worked to structure schools so the staff could be more like a family working well together. Because that’s good for the kids.

So the first point I’d like to make, looking forward, is that without an unwavering philosophy of affection and concern for the kids, educators lose their way, easily and often. In 2000, when most states confidently established high-stakes tests as the cure-all for otherwise meaningless diplomas, Rhode Island was a national laughing stock. McWalters’ diploma project was “soft and fuzzy” with its different methods of assessing a child’s knowledge, requiring that children demonstrate their proficiency to a panel of local judges. Very fuzzy, since you can’t machine-score such a test.

Years went by and lo, all eyes are on Rhode Island’s innovative experiment. Other states found that the make-it-or-break-it tests produced unintended casualties — more drop-outs, narrowed curriculum, and an almost vindictive pressure on the kids to boost scores. Key to the R.I. diploma project was that for once in education — outside of private schools — kids’ desires, passions, needs, curiosities, and questions came into play. This is vintage McWalters. Quit talking at the kids and get them into the conversation. Retire the old “educational service delivery” institutions. Fashion schools that foster creativity, and the appetite for invention that made America great.

Humanizing, or in his words “personalizing” school culture has been an uphill battle. McWalters depended heavily on improvements in the schools’ cultures to undergird the myriad other initiatives designed to accelerate academic improvements. Mind you, overall the schools are getting steadily better, but could the work have been accomplished faster?

Well, maddening to all of us was McWalters’ efforts to convince, cajole, schmooze, and battle to get consensus with every constituency — the parents, unions, superintendents, politicians, teachers and so forth. Oh, he could get into a fine Irish temper and come out swinging when he had to, but mostly he tried to defuse adversarial warfare. We all wished he’d go to war with some constituency we considered useless, but then we all belonged to a constituency considered useless by some other. Like high-conflict marriages, education wars don’t build healthy foundations for kids. So McWalters’ efforts to achieve consensus were philosophically right, if terribly frustrating.

A great vision is an invaluable rudder. New officials always want to put their personal stamp on an office, often ignoring the good work that has already been done. So my deep wish is that the new education commissioner makes the office his or her own by the clever, politically astute implementation of the existing philosophy — the only one I know of in the U.S. that so honors flesh-and-blood kids.

My second and last point. In recent years, I was talking with a newly hired and frantic superintendent, who’d come from out of state. This super flew into a litany of tales about trying to straighten out all kinds of no-brainer problems, only to find insane obstacles blocking every way forward. The super concluded by hollering three times: “You can’t get anything done here!”

And so you can’t. I dare you to show me a R.I. official, administrator, or politician who is doing a bang-up job of working through and clearing away the thick muck of absurd laws, established practices and power struggles in which R.I. leaders operate.

Years back I accused McWalters of surrounding himself with too many lawyers who were only thickening the bureaucracy. He barked back that without every single legal duck lined up, and every contingency considered, no initiative could survive this state’s voracious appetite for court battles. He’s not wrong. Some dad, or teacher, or school committee member had only to phone a legislator, and the greater good of the kids would be put on hold while the issue worked its way through the mire of R.I. government. Similarly, I got snippy about why McWalters’ excellent Hope Order wasn’t presented as a template for all secondary schools. McWalters got snippy right back, retorting that only if Hope High proved that the practices actually produced results — indisputably and with hard data — would any other schools be willing to follow suit. He wasn’t wrong.

I mention this as a caution to the new commissioner. Outsiders tend to look around R.I. and see a bunch of yahoos who can’t quite seem to get out of their own way. Do not be deceived. The endlessly redundant layers of bureaucracy only mask many networks of you-scratch-my-back relationships, networks so frustratingly powerful that for the sake of the greater good, Mother Teresa herself might have had to turn to crime.

Yes, progress has been slow. But the obstacles to humanizing schools remain, no more reduced by getting rid of McWalters. He and his steadfast philosophy get full credit for pushing our hidebound culture to change at all. He gave hope and what help he could to the other educational crusaders out there, still laboring in the vineyards.

They and I will miss him.

Julia Steiny, a former member of the Providence School Board, consults for government agencies and schools; she is co-director of Information Works!, Rhode Island’s school-accountability project. She can be reached at juliasteiny@gmail.com, or c/o EdWatch, The Providence Journal, 75 Fountain St., Providence, RI 02902.