The news that Caroline Kennedy will step down as the chief executive of the Office of Strategic Partnerships, a division of the New York City Department of Education that enlists private donors to fund projects within the public school system, is as good a moment as any to congratulate her achievements in that job.

Ms. Kennedy, who worked for a dollar a year, has headed the Office of Strategic Partnerships since October 2002. Under her leadership, the office has raised more than $65 million in donations from the private sector, including the Partnership for New York City, a business group whose members contributed $30 million to a principal-training academy. The president of the Partnership, Kathryn Wylde, told us that Ms. Kennedy “did an excellent job of communicating to the private sector how important it was to structure a coordinated and centralized effort to assist the public schools.” She brought to the job “access and credibility,” Ms. Wylde said.

In a statement released by the Department of Education last week, Ms. Kennedy said she looks forward “to continuing to work for better schools for all our children in my role as vice chair of the Fund for Public Schools.”

New Yorkers will look forward to that, too. But we can take the occasion of her departure to thank her. And to remark that it is a tribute to the possibilities illuminated by Mayor Bloomberg’s campaign for New York’s public schools that it has been able to attract people of Ms. Kennedy’s caliber.

Like her mother, who devoted herself to New York City with such projects as the campaign to save Grand Central Terminal, Caroline Kennedy made the choice to do something good for New York. As Schools Chancellor Joel Klein said of Ms. Kennedy, “Our kids and our city are in her debt.”