You will not like this post about Joel Klein.
It is impossible to write a sentence that includes the words “Joel” and “Klein” in succession without upsetting people. Lots of people, in fact. More than six years into his run as New York City Schools Chancellor, minds are largely made up. Ask someone in New York City for their opinion about the Chancellor and you will hear “no one cares more and is willing to fight harder for always doing what is best for kids.” (Whitney Tilson) Or else you will hear about a “ruthless dictatorship” and “a disaster for our schools.” (Leonie Haimson). Klein has passionate supporters and detractors, and they are not shy about expressing their opinions.
Hey, it’s New York. You got a problem with that?
Like so many controversial contemporary figures in education, your opinion about Joel Klein says a lot about how you feel about a specific set of education reform ideas. You like merit pay? Charter schools? Alternative certification? You’re probably a Klein fan. Not so big on incentives and test-driven accountability? The Chancellor is not your cup of tea. But our panel of education observers recognize that Klein’s impact has been deep and broad, earning him the #3 slot on our list of the most influential people in education in 2008.
“Klein continues to do his thing, and he is a love/hate schools chancellor,” notes Patrick “Eduflack” Riccards. “He probably deserves more credit for the data than he receives, since moving an organization like NYCDOE is so difficult. And he is never one to back down from a fight.” Sol Stern, often at the vanguard of Klein critics, listed the Chancellor as his top pick for the most influential person in education this year ”for the most radical changes, though not necessarily change we can believe in.”
At one level, it’s hard to understand why Klein evokes such strong negative response in some people. Unlike Michelle Rhee, who seems to delight in rhetorical excess and leading with her chin, Klein makes a habit of sounding reasonable, even candid, as he did in a recent interview with U.S. News:
The most important thing that we can do to change high school outcomes is improve the education of kids before they get to high school. People who have a high school-only strategy are going to fail. And the second most important thing is, we have got to finally crack open the nut and say, these are the standards and these are the assessments of what it means to have successfully completed high school. Anybody can get you a high school degree; all they need to do is keep lowering the standards, and more and more kids will graduate. We’re fooling ourselves, and it’s time to get serious about national standards and national assessments.
But where supporters see a hard-nosed reformer, willing to “break some china,” others see a Bush-like refusal to admit error and a nuance-averse brand of ed reform. ”Bloomberg and Klein placed all their bets for school improvement on market-style accountability reforms,” Sol Stern wrote last summer in City Journal, “such as granting principals greater autonomy over budgets, making schools compete against one another for letter grades, and offering bonus pay to administrators and teachers who boosted student scores.” In the view of New York Times columnist David Brooks, Klein is “the highly successful New York chancellor who has, nonetheless, been blackballed by the unions.” Deborah Meier on Bridging Differences says “NYC’s ‘reform’ has been at best a waste of precious years, and at worst a disaster.”
These are not subtle differences of opinions. And so it goes. And will continue to go.
A multiple choice question: Where previous NYC Chancellors would have been well-advised not to purchase green bananas, Joel Klein has held the job over six years. With Mayor Bloomberg having made his path straight for a third term, it’s possible Klein will be with us for years to come. This will make people in education:
a) Giddy with excitement
b) Rend their garments and gnash their teeth
c) All of the above
The correct answer is c.
Recent Comments