By Sharon Otterman and Jennifer Medina

(From The New York Times, November 9th, 2010)

Joel I. Klein, who presided over a radical reorganization of the New York City school system and drew praise and criticism for efforts to raise test scores and hold teachers accountable for them, resigned on Tuesday as chancellor after eight years in the job.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg appointed Cathleen P. Black, the chairwoman of Hearst Magazines, as Mr. Klein’s successor. Ms. Black will be the first woman to head the nation’s largest school system, with a $23 billion budget, 135,000 employees and one million students.

The decision was also noteworthy for the fact that Ms. Black, 66, has no educational background, in keeping with Mr. Bloomberg’s preference for executives from the business world. Because of that, she will need a waiver from the State Education Department; Mr. Klein, who had also been a media executive, was granted one when he took over, in 2002.

Mr. Klein, who had long planned to serve only through two mayoral terms, mulled the decision for the last few months and in the past week landed a job as an executive vice president at News Corporation.

“The decision was whether to stay to the end or to give somebody else a chance,” he said in an interview. “I’m 64 years old now and want to have the opportunity to do something new.”

Mr. Klein can make many claims about the successes of his tenure, including rising test scores and graduation rates, and the initial makings of an objective system to evaluate teachers and schools.

The truth of those claims, and their chances of having a lasting impact, will be debated in the months and years to come. His detractors argue that the test scores were inflated, that parents went unheeded and that teachers were derided and marginalized.

But the very robustness of the debate is testament to the fact that Mr. Klein did deliver on a central promise: to challenge orthodoxies, shake up the status quo and risk dislike in the name of progress.

“Did he stir things up?” Mr. Bloomberg said Tuesday. “You betcha. That was the job, and the great beneficiaries of that stirring were our children.”

Mr. Klein benefited from two historic conditions. He was the first chancellor appointed by the mayor and, as such, was answerable only to him, which gave him power and security. And he was part of — and widely considered a leader in — a national effort for greater accountability in public education shared across partisan lines.

Mr. Klein said he made a final decision to join News Corporation in the last week, a hire that puts a respected official with Democratic credentials — he was a top antitrust lawyer in President Bill Clinton’s Justice Department — in the executive suite at Rupert Murdoch’s conservative-leaning news media giant. A person familiar with the negotiations at News Corporation said Mr. Klein would be charged with pursuing “entrepreneurial ventures” that cater to the educational marketplace.

Despite the mayor’s praise and an apparent deep admiration for Mr. Klein, one former senior Bloomberg administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he did not want to jeopardize his relationship with City Hall, said that many people in the mayor’s bullpen were dissatisfied with Mr. Klein because “he’s been a political load for a while.”

One of the first concrete signs that Mr. Klein was not long for the job was the appointment of Sharon L. Greenberger as the Education Department’s chief operating officer in April — something that, according to the official, “was imposed over Joel’s objection.”

Mr. Klein will remain with the city until the end of the year to help with Ms. Black’s transition. In an interview Tuesday, Mr. Klein was clear about his accomplishments as chancellor. When he accepted the job, he was part of a rising educational reform movement that drew lessons from the corporate world, like increasing parent choice through innovations like charter schools, weakening traditional union protections like tenure and bringing numbers-based accountability to schools to evaluate and rank them and to improve teaching.

“It’s a much more performance-driven system, and a much more professional system, and less politicized than when I started,” Mr. Klein said.

With the mayor, he dismantled the unwieldy system of local control that created 32 school districts. Power was centralized in the central Department of Education office, relocated from Brooklyn next to City Hall to emphasize its importance. The city’s 1,000-plus principals were given unprecedented authority over large sections of their school budgets.

From nearly the day he started, Mr. Klein attacked the union’s core principles — seniority, tenure and a set pay scale. During the 2005 contract negotiations, he was able to end the long-standing practice of giving teachers with seniority the ability to select which schools to work in. But that decision created a pool of floating veteran teachers who received full salaries without a permanent position, costing the city tens of millions of dollars annually.

Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers and former head of the city’s teachers’ union, said that while she believed Mr. Klein was sincere in his efforts to improve student achievement, he had difficulty garnering support for his changes, both from educators as well as political leaders.

“Joel has a great intellect and did not suffer fools,” Ms. Weingarten said. “Sometimes what was lost was the ability to lead a great system in a way that you win the hearts and minds of the people who work in it and parents who send their kids there.”

In 2006, he introduced a system of A-to-F report cards, which rank most schools nearly exclusively on their progress on test scores. He chipped away at teacher pay based only on seniority, getting the union to agree to bonuses for schools that showed strong progress.

Some advocates and policy analysts said that Mr. Klein was a transformative force, turning the city’s public education system into something that people who had given up on it could believe in again. They said he welcomed talented educators to the back office and schools alike.

Joe Williams, executive director of Democrats for Education Reform, an advocacy group that supports charter schools and that has been often aligned with Mr. Klein, put it this way: “Joel Klein made public education sexy again.”

But Mr. Klein stumbled along the way, as when he adopted a reading curriculum of questionable efficacy early in his tenure only to reverse course after it did not produce good results.

Merryl Tisch, the chancellor of the State Board of Regents, frequently sparred with Mr. Klein — though largely privately — about his style of forcing change in the city. But Ms. Tisch said Mr. Klein successfully took a “dysfunctional system and gave it some management credibility.”

The city also benefited from Mr. Klein’s role as a national symbol of school reform, Ms. Tisch said, with private donors giving millions of dollars to help create new projects and experiments, like teacher performance bonuses and cash rewards for students who did well on exams.

“Joel will go down as one of the great urban educational reformers of this century,” Ms. Tisch said. “Not just because he fought hard fights, but he did it in New York City, which people had really written off.”

Yet, at every turn there was controversy. Schools were put under tremendous pressure to raise graduation rates or face closings. There was widespread concern that principals were inflating their numbers by granting credits to undeserving students.

“He is leaving us with a legacy of classroom overcrowding, communities fighting over co-located schools, kindergarten waiting lists, unreliable school grades based on bad data, substandard credit recovery programs and our children starved of art, music and science — all replaced with test prep,” said Leonie Haimson, the head of Class Size Matters, an advocacy group and a critic of Mr. Klein’s.

The opposition was further emboldened when the state announced this summer that the test scores on which Mr. Klein’s accountability system hinged were inflated because the exams had grown too easy to pass.

A correction brought test scores nearly back to the starting levels of the mayor’s tenure, replacing a narrative of historic gains with one of slow progress.

While Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Klein said their achievements — opening 470 new schools, and raising graduation rates by 20 percent, for example — were beyond question, they acknowledged that there was much more to be done.

Asked whether he will be remembered as a divisive leader, Mr. Klein said, “I didn’t think you could make big changes to a $22 billion system — close down schools, hold people accountable, reward excellence — without pushback and controversy.”

“People will remember me differently,” he added. “They will remember me as a man who was committed to changing an educational system that was failing vast numbers of people. This was the most comprehensive school reform that has happened in this country.”

Reporting was contributed by Jack Begg, David W. Chen, Javier C. Hernandez, Fernanda Santos and Brian Stelter.

(From Crain’s Insider, April 9, 2010)

By ERIK ENGQUIST and DANIEL MASSEY

President Obama has said teacher unions cannot stand in the way of education reform, but he gave them a way to do just that in his Race to the Top contest. The contradiction helped doom New York’s initial application for $803 million in federal money, and could come into play again as the state applies for $700 million.

Bids were scored partly on how much labor support they had, so unions could sabotage them by withholding endorsements. The New York Times reported online that union representatives signed on to the state’s application in only 61% of districts. Union support was 100% and 93% in the two states that won grants. The United Federation of Teachers was a major holdout.

Unions are wary of Race to the Top because it promotes charter schools and calls for reforming the way that teachers are evaluated. New York’s evaluation system is primitive: Teachers are deemed satisfactory or unsatisfactory by principals. The White House would like tenure and salary decisions to reflect a more nuanced process that considers student test scores.

Charter schools are a sticking point because they’re mostly nonunion. Unions also say that charters pick off students who are easier to teach. But they are willing to amend their admission lotteries to draw more special-education students and new English speakers, says Joe Williams, executive director of Democrats for Education Reform, a political action committee that supports Race to the Top.

Race to the Top also demands better data analysis. New York lacks a statewide system to track student performance over time. New York City has such a system, but exporting it to the other 57 counties would be complicated.

In addition, Gov. Paterson hasn’t sold reforms to a recalcitrant Legislature, which assumed that the imperfect New York application would be awarded funds. “We don’t have a functioning governor right now,” an insider says.

(From The Wall Street Journal, March 27, 2010)

By BARBARA MARTINEZ

A judge on Friday halted a plan to close 19 New York City schools, a ruling that could place New York state in an unflattering light as it competes for hundreds of millions of dollars in federal Race to the Top funding.

State Supreme Court Judge Joan B. Lobis in New York County ruled that the nation’s largest school system had failed to properly inform parents and the community about the impact the school closures would have on students.

“We plan on seeking an immediate appeal,” said Michael A. Cardozo, New York’s corporation counsel, in a statement.

He defended the city’s Department of Education against the suit filed by the United Federation of Teachers and the NAACP, among others.

Mr. Cardozo said the city believed it had followed all the procedures required to close the schools, and that unless the ruling was reversed, the city would have to “keep open schools that are failing our children.”

Joel Klein, the city’s schools chancellor, has made school closures a hallmark of his turnaround strategy, having closed more than 90 since 2002.

“It’s very unfortunate that in order to protect jobs, the union is trying to force kids to go to what are clearly failing schools,” said Mr. Klein. “I think it goes against the clear thrust” of what the Obama administration has been advocating–to close “the bottom 5% of schools, the dropout factories.”

While closing schools with low test scores and graduation rates, Mr. Klein has opened smaller schools that tend to outperform the schools they replaced, according to the education department.

In December, the education department, which oversees 1,600 schools with nearly 1.1 million children, said it would close 20 schools “that have failed to advance student learning.” One of those schools was subsequently reprieved after the local community made its case to keep the school open.

At one school slated for closure, William H. Maxwell CTE High School, only 43% of students graduated in 2009 and average attendance was 72%, according to the education department. At Middle School for Academic and Social Excellence, 30% of the students were proficient in English language arts, and fewer than 40% were proficient in math.

Michael Mulgrew, the president of the teachers union, said some of the schools “had an extreme difference of opinion” about the data the education department used to measure the schools–and the department should have had a full airing of those differences. “This was a very simple thing,” he said. “They should have followed the law.”

The judge’s ruling underscores the concessions New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg had to make last year at the state capital to retain mayoral control of the schools.

“It’s clear now that the mayor and the chancellor don’t have as much control over what happens in their schools as they thought they did,” said Joe Williams, executive director of Democrats for Education Reform, which advocates closing persistently low-performing schools.

New York is a finalist for as much as $700 million in funds in the government’s Race to the Top competition. The U.S. Department of Education is expected to announce the winners on Monday.

Observers expect New York to lose because it hasn’t made certain legislative changes, such as raising the cap on the number of independently run public charter schools allowed, and letting student test scores play a role in teacher evaluations.

(From City Journal, January 22, 2010)

By CHARLES UPTON SAHM

Unconscionable. Shameful. Deplorable. Despicable. Those are just a few adjectives that come to mind to describe the New York State Legislature’s failure to pass commonsense education reforms that would have qualified New York for a share of the federal government’s $4.35 billion Race to the Top initiative. As a result, New York taxpayers have probably lost out on some $700 million in federal education funding, and the state has missed a golden opportunity to improve the educational prospects of its neediest schoolchildren.

When the Obama administration announced the criteria for its Race to the Top grants competition last summer, it seemed that the education-reform movement had reached a tipping point. Here was a Democratic administration backing cutting-edge reforms like rigorous academic standards, data-driven instruction, performance pay for teachers, and the takeover of struggling schools. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan made it clear that states that inhibited the growth of charter schools or prohibited the use of students’ test scores when evaluating teachers would be deemed ineligible for Race to the Top grants.

Most states responded by embracing the tenets of Race to the Top. Tennessee, Rhode Island, Louisiana, and Massachusetts passed charter-friendly laws that lifted caps on the number of charters and allowed public money to be used for their construction. California, Indiana, and Wisconsin scrapped laws that barred the use of student test scores in teacher assessments. Just two states still have such data firewalls: Nevada and New York.

And late last year, it looked as though New York would join the wave of Race to the Top-inspired reform sweeping the country. In December, Merryl Tisch, chancellor of the state’s Board of Regents, and David Steiner, the state’s education commissioner, proposed a broad framework for Race to the Top reforms. Then Governor David Paterson initiated the legislative action needed to put those reforms into place. Paterson’s proposed bill would have eliminated the state’s cap on charter schools, presently set at 200; let the state finance charter-school capital funding; encouraged the Board of Regents to take control of persistently low-performing schools; and immediately rescinded the law, already set to expire on July 1, that prohibits using student performance as a criterion for evaluating teachers before they receive lifetime tenure.

Just days before the January 19 Race to the Top application deadline, however, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, doing the bidding of the state’s powerful teachers’ unions, submitted what must be one of the most cynical pieces of legislation in Albany’s long history of deceitful and corrupt politics. Silver’s bill, which mirrored proposals put forth earlier in the month by the New York State United Teachers and New York City’s United Federation of Teachers, would have raised the charter cap from 200 to 400. But several “poison pills” inserted into the legislation would effectively kill the state’s charter schools. The bill would have imposed some half a dozen onerous new restrictions on charter schools, including making it nearly impossible for them to share buildings with traditional public schools, as two-thirds of New York City’s charters do now. It would also have removed the power to grant charters from the New York City schools chancellor and the board of trustees of the State University of New York–which together granted 29 of last year’s 31 charters–and instead given controlling authority to approve any future charters to the Board of Regents, whose members are appointed by the Legislature. And the bill would have subjected charters to a restrictive new request-for-proposals process that predetermined the schools’ size and location. “This bill, masquerading as a charter cap lift, instead would have shackled chartering beyond recognition,” said Peter Murphy of the New York Charter Schools Association. “The teachers’ unions narrowly missed terminating charters, practically speaking.”

The state senate’s majority conference leader, John Sampson, introduced identical legislation there, and it looked as though this fraud of an education-reform bill might pass until two Democratic senators, Craig Johnson from Long Island and Ruben Diaz, Sr. from the Bronx, joined Senate Republicans led by Dean Skelos and blocked the bill from coming to the floor for a vote. In the end, Albany’s dysfunction prevailed and nothing was done. So while New York was among the 40 states to submit Race to the Top applications by the deadline this past Tuesday (another round of funding will take place later this year), it’s doubtful that the state will receive any funding. Indeed, it shouldn’t, if Race to the Top is to live up to its name.

While it’s clear that the teachers’ unions fear competition from the mostly nonunionized charters, it was stunning nonetheless to see such a brazen power play–especially since New York’s charters are unquestionably succeeding. A recent study by Stanford economist Carolyn Hoxby revealed that students in New York City’s charter schools outperformed their traditional public school counterparts by substantial margins. Indeed, charter schools like KIPP and Harlem Success outperform public schools in New York’s toniest suburbs. Tens of thousands of students are on waiting lists to enter the city’s 99 charters. Little relief is in sight for them, since this fall, the state and city will hit the Legislature’s cap of 200 charter schools.

New York’s Race to the Top debacle highlights a growing divide within the Democratic Party. On one side are anachronistic Tammany Hall-type pols like Silver, with their longtime obeisance to the reform-resistant teachers’ unions. On the other is a growing cadre of Democrats–at the national and local levels–who are championing an aggressive education-reform agenda. Democratic assemblyman Sam Hoyt from Buffalo, for example, introduced a comprehensive education-reform bill in November that could have catapulted New York to the head of the Race to the Top competition.

How can New York recover from this embarrassing episode and join other states in adopting commonsense education reforms? Joe Williams, director of Democrats for Education Reform, believes that voters must start paying attention to which politicians are on the side of the teachers’ unions and which are on the side of the children. As he puts it: “Right now, the only people holding elected officials accountable on education are the teachers’ unions–and the teachers’ unions are driving public education into the ground.” It’s time for New Yorkers to get angry and start holding officials accountable for obstructing real education reform.

Charles Sahm is a program officer at the Manhattan Institute.

When I was a freshman in college, one of my buddies woke up one morning after a rowdy night on the town and decided, while doing a “walk of shame” back to our dorm, that he was going to join a 10-k run that was starting in the middle of our campus. He was hungover (probably still drunk from the night before, but so was I so details are fuzzy), out of shape, and he looked terribly out of place at the starting line. While everyone else was suited up for a marathon, my pal was wearing cut-off jeans and a ripped shirt. On his feet, rather than running shoes, he was still wearing the docksiders he had worn the night before – and no socks. (It was the ’80’s, give me a break!)

He ran for about a half mile and then vomited on the sidewalk.

It simply wasn’t meant to be.

I thought of my friend a lot in the last couple of days, as I watched the New York State Legislature do the governing equivalent of puking up a bunch of Jagermeister on the sidewalks of Albany in the way that it handled itself in dealing with the federal “Race To The Top” contest.

Not that there’s anything wrong with Jagermeister, but clearly my state legislature – like my old college buddy – proved once again that New York was not quite up to the task of competing in a race where everyone else at the starting line was there to win.

I don’t mean to sound too grouchy, and truth be told, none of what has happened in the Empire State comes as a surprise. DFER was quoted publicly on several occasions doubting whether New York politicians had the guts to stand up to our powerful teachers unions and use the “Race To The Top” competition to once and for all declare that enough was enough in our state. There were times that I had hopes that President Obama’s calls for change would be heard in New York, but in the end our elected leaders in Albany served our kids the way they always do. We’re obviously working to change that.

So let’s focus on the positive:

— NY Governor David Paterson hung in there and led the charge to make New York’s application competitive. We are extremely grateful. But now we need him to clean up the funding disparities between public charter schools and district schools that his proposed budget – introduced today – will exacerbate.

— Senators Craig Johnson and Ruben Diaz Sr. fought hard to make sure that our state teachers union didn’t use our legislature to send the real message that it wanted to send to President Obama. Without their guts, public education in New York State would have taken a huge step backwards.

— New York’s Education Commissioner David Steiner and the Board of Regents, despite the lunacy of the New York legislature, managed to do what it could to put together an interesting Race To The Top application. Our hat is off to them, A for effort, etc.

— States all across the country stepped up and delivered strong reform packages that are now leaving New York in the dust unless we can get our act together in the next few months by closing the inequitable funding gap for charter schools in New York, lifting the cap on charters, and taking BOLD measures to make sure that New York is doing EVERYTHING in our power to make sure that our kids are being taught by the best possible teachers.

— President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan deserve tremendous praise for finding the right lever from which to unleash progressive change from the White House. It has been nothing short of incredible watching things play out in the states in which we work. Don’t worry about New York, we’ll catch up someday. For now, we’re encouraged by President Obama’s announcement today that he intends to continue the RTTT contest with even more funding in the future.

New York notwithstanding, we are witnessing a period of exciting reform. This is our best chance in years to truly transition public education so that it can rebound and thrive in the future.

We’ve heard lots of people lamenting how the latest round of (forced?) buy-outs at America’s extremely serious newspaper of record will impact the Times’ education coverage. This in addition to the recent decision at the paper to scrap the weekly education page.

We now have a better picture of what will fill the void: More stories about the potential peril that comes from ditching your shoes and walking barefoot in the park. Oh Anemona, what happened?

The Times could be a significant crusader on behalf of the families who can barely afford shoes for their kids (and the depressing reality that those kids are the ones who invariably end up in our worst public schools) but alas, we’ll have to settle for a campaign against getting planter’s warts from the Great Lawn. Great work Pinch!