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.
My sense is that its a bit late for Klein to be “Educator of the Year.” He’s no longer new and different, and he’s coming close to failing the “can he put controversy behind him and solidify accomplishments” test.
Though I’m skeptical of Rhee’s approach, she’s a more “of the Year” person in my book.
Comment by Rachel — December 30, 2008 @ 4:40 pm
this is a slow time of the year so why not throw out some musings? Somehow, Klein doesn’t bother me as much as Rhee. In law they say tough cases make bad law, and in education we should assume that the size of NYC or the severe problems in D.C. are such tough cases that they should never be seen as precedents. But DC is only a 50,000 person district and Rhee is actually trying to destroy the oppostion. I might be completely wrong, but I guess I assume a combativeness that is the norm in the huge systems of NYC. Also, (and again this might or might not be be a valid point) I read about the wide reading of Klein. He espouses such holistic approaches. He seems to believe that his reforms are creating opportunites for full learning in NYC. And maybe he is in many schools. He just seems to be more complicated and self-deceptive, while Rhee seems to be an unapologic philistine. She seems to enjoy fighting, and I don’t think she just wants to defeat unions. I see her as a threat to the entire tradition of liberal arts, as well as our democratic traditons.
But I wonder if Klein, although older, is representative of a fundamental shift in governance that seems generational. Federal prosecutors have always enjoyed an amazing amount of power. – the power to destroy anyone – and they know it. As the old saying goes, any prosecuter could indict a ham sandwich. (I have more experience with U.S. Attorneys than Asst. Attotney Generals but the power dimmesion is comparable) Federal prosecutors probably have more unchecked power than any people in America. They are the only Americans with the power of absolute monarchs. Consequently, there are traditions that restrict the power of prosecuters. According to those traditions, prosecutors don’t pursue a case unless the evidence is overwhelming. Besides, the tradition had a practical effect. (By only bringing surefire cases, they enhanced their power becuse anyone caught in their scope was as good as convicted.) I know federal prosecutors aren’t saints and power was always abused. And when a case goes to court there have always been plenty of prosecutors who do anything to win. But in the past, we respected our traditions of checks and balances. And their was a certain rationale. Its better to have bare knuckles fights between power holders than the unchecked power of inquistors, and inquistors who have no doubt in their righteous are the most dangerous.
But look what has happened to those traditions during the Bush years. A new (younger) generation of ideologues set out to destroy the Dems without even knowing anything about our most revered traditions.
Klein knows what evidence is and it isn’t. I believe he wants to do good. But he ignores evidence to the contrary.
During the Nixon years, we had a local prosecutor who liked to say over drinks, “Every person I sent to prison was duly convicted of the crime he committed – or some other crime.” I see the same fight only to win attitude in the so-called “reformers,” who come disproportionately from hedge funds, computers, and litigation. Even the civil rights leaders who support NCLB-type accountability are disproportionately from the 70s litigation phase of the movement where statistics could be considered as proof of discrimination.
So, thinking out loud, maybe I have firmer feelings of antagonism towards “reformers” who see numbers as reality. I want to believe that Klein is not irredeemably reductionsistic. I don’t see much danger that the worst policies in NYC will be so transformative that they will become a threat to the rest of the country. Rhee reminds me of Rudi Guiliani, who started out doing more good than harm but couldn’t keep his self-righteousness in check, or the Grand Inquistors of Europe. I feel more strongly against Rhee because she had the money and the publicity, and the opponent, and the potential to destroy the union and the traditions of teacher autonomy. Had she not overplayed her hand, she could have revealed a strategy that could have been replicated by union-busters across the nation. She’s like the first corporate CEO who convinced the first Southern governor in the early 70s to give tax breaks and to help defeat the unions in return for factories moving from the Rust Belt to the Sunbelt. Had that model not been copied, it would have been “no harm no foul.” But once it was replicated all over, wages and the rights of workers were undermined, and the de-industrialization of America was accelerated. The same would happen to teachers. Plenty of districts would welcome the promise by moneybags “reformers” to pay some teachers $100,000 plus until the union was broken. Then the money would dry up. Again, its primarily younger teachers who are completely unaware of this obvious scenario.
This is rambling but not many people are reading over the holiday are they?
Comment by john thompson — December 30, 2008 @ 8:45 pm
Klein sounds reasonable enough when he says, “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.”
But why hasn’t he cracked this nut already? Why the hesitation? Why are he and Gates just waking up to this?
Why all the time spent enforcing Balanced Literacy, Accountable Talk, the workshop model, and so forth? Why the millions spent on a contract with Schools Attuned? Why so many specifications about wall adornments and seating arrangements? Why the insistence that the teacher act as facilitator?
If Klein does get around to cracking the nut, I hope he looks inside and sees literature, grammar, history, mathematics, science, languages, geography, art, music, and theatre. I hope he recognizes that children do not have to be seated in groups to learn these things, nor do the classroom walls need to be plastered with dizzying lists and charts. I hope he recognizes that students need subject matter, teachers who can teach it well, and books that challenge, inform, and delight.
Comment by Diana Senechal — December 31, 2008 @ 12:28 pm