Post by Moses on Oct 28, 2005 10:13:52 GMT -5
The NY The Chancellor's Midterm Exam
....Teachers, meanwhile, complained less about the curriculum than about the DOE’s heavy-handedness: about a top-down regime in which everything that took place in the classroom—from the duration of lessons to the size of the “reading rugs”—was specified by the new Tweed bosses. And liberals took umbrage at the panoply of moguls around the Leadership Academy and at Klein’s taste for the social swirl.
The unions moaned about much of this, too, but their laments were more visceral. After decentralization, the teachers and the principals unions had stepped into the power vacuum created by a hopelessly balkanized system and had come to play a central role in education policy. Now Klein was shutting them out, concocting his schemes behind closed doors. Weingarten, a lawyer who fancies herself a reformer and not an old-line labor hack, was enraged by his refusal to treat her as an equal. “The chancellor decided we were the enemy, not a partner,” she says. “That was when the relationship started to rupture.”
Relations were equally rocky with Jill Levy, president of the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators. Levy objected to the Leadership Academy, which she saw as a breeding ground for “brainwashed” anti-union principals. Railing against Klein as an “opportunist” who was “delusional” to boot, she nevertheless reserves her harshest words for Bloomberg. “I had to scrounge for a meeting with him, and then he didn’t shut his mouth for 45 minutes,” she says. “He sat there in his pressed shirt and his unruffled demeanor, dictating to me how the schools should be run . . . I wanted to puke on his shoes.”
Over dinner one night in Tribeca, Klein and I discuss the harsh reception that greeted his maneuvers. Besuited and vaguely rabbinical, with a shiny bald pate and a caramel Hamptons tan, he speaks quickly—and offers no apologies. On criticisms of the curriculum: “You got a couple of pundits, like Ravitch, who knows nothing, she’s never educated anyone. That’s the same rap you can put on me, but now I’ve spent a lot of time on this, and I think my initial instinct was correct: There is no magic curriculum.” On the insularity of his deliberations: “You can’t do reform by plebiscite; it leads to the politics of paralysis.” On micromanagement: “I’ll admit that we have people who implemented things in a ham-handed way. But we’re trying to change practice. [Klein deputy] Carmen Fariña had the best quote: When somebody said, ‘Let teachers teach,’ Carmen said in the New York Times, we tried that—it doesn’t work. Which isn’t to say that there isn’t somebody somewhere who said that the size of the rugs matters. And that person is an idiot.”
I ask if Klein realized that by attaching boldface names such as Kennedy and Welch to his agenda, he was courting controversy.
“I wanted it!” he says. “I knew that if I weren’t making a lot of waves that I was basically tinkering, that I was being an incrementalist, and I didn’t want to be an incrementalist.”
Whatever the merits of Klein’s approach—of not merely breaking eggs to make an omelet but flinging them at the old guard—the resentments he’d unleashed reached critical mass in March 2004. A few weeks earlier, at Klein’s urging, Bloomberg had announced the new policy of halting “social promotion” of third-graders who failed to score above the bottom level on citywide math and reading exams. To get the policy approved by the Panel for Educational Policy, Bloomberg had to fire a pair of his own handpicked appointees who objected to it—a gambit instantly dubbed by the tabloids the “Monday Night Massacre.” That same month, a nepotism scandal arose around Diana Lam, who was nailed for having tried to secure a job under her auspices for her husband. After an internal investigation and a stubborn attempt by Klein to save her, Lam was forced to resign.
In the wake of the twin fiascos, the administration was floundering. As 2004 rolled into 2005, public support for Bloomberg on education was mired at 34 percent; for Klein, it was even lower. And then, to everyone’s surprise, the wind began to shift.
The new breeze started blowing in early June, when Bloomberg and Klein announced the results of this year’s citywide tests for third-, fifth-, sixth-, and seventh-graders. (Fourth- and eighth-graders are tested by the state.) For the first time since 1991, at least half of the city’s elementary and middle-school students performed at or above grade level. In math, the percentage rose 7.5 points, to 50 percent, while in reading, it leapt fourteen points, to 55 percent.
And the news kept getting better. In September, the results of the state math test showed a nine-point bump, to 77 percent, among fourth-graders meeting standards—this on top of a ten-point rise, to 59.5 percent, on the fourth-grade reading test. At a packed press conference at a Bed-Stuy school, Bloomberg enjoyed a Ross Perot moment, employing a potpourri of charts and graphs to hammer home his message: “The era when year-in-year-out stagnant levels of classroom performance were the norm are over.”
Many experts view the test scores less ingenuously (or less strategically) than Bloomberg does. Robert Tobias, for example, knows as much about the topic as anyone in the city. Now a professor at NYU, Tobias spent 33 years as an official at the Board of Education, the last thirteen as director of testing. Tobias is at pains to insist that he isn’t an enemy of the administration or its policies; some he likes, some he doesn’t. What worries him is that the significance of the test scores is being distorted by Bloomberg and Klein. “They’ve essentially declared victory,” he says. “Test scores have become the coin of the realm, and that’s problematic to begin with. But these scores in particular don’t prove what they claim.”
Tobias begins by noting that on the statewide tests, the city’s performance more or less tracked the results in other regions around New York. In math, the city has done a bit better; in reading, a bit worse. “Is that evidence that the Bloomberg-Klein policies have resulted in the improvements? Absolutely not,” he says.
Tobias then turns to the city tests, observing first that math scores began rising before Bloomberg took office. “It started when Harold Levy was chancellor and made math a priority,” he says. In reading, though, the story is different: After five straight years of scores being flat, this time they shot the moon. “To a researcher, any anomaly that great looks like an outlier,” he says.
Tobias suspects that other factors besides Klein’s reforms are at work. He points to the fact that test preparation has become borderline obsessive. Exemptions for students not fluent in English have also increased appreciably. Tobias speculates about a screwup in the scoring process—something that occurred more than once during his time at the BOE. Finally, he says, there is “pervasive anecdotal evidence” that this year’s tests were “more child-friendly” because the reading passages were more engaging. ....
....
When Klein lived in Washington, he was the consummate Beltway creature—a regular on the cocktail circuit, a tennis partner to the likes of Alan Greenspan and Antonin Scalia. But Klein says that one of the attractions of being chancellor was the appeal of being home. “I know the streets of New York, I know the neighborhoods,” he says one day at Tweed. “I can go back to Bensonhurst and talk to people about what it was like at P.S. 205. I can walk into DiFara’s—the best pizza place in New York—on 15th and J in Brooklyn, and I can talk about education, about immigration, about what makes New York a special city.”
As Klein unfurls this reverie, I jot down in my notebook: He wants to be mayor. Klein’s commitment to stick around for two terms has been in place since the start. But even so, he has never taken his sights far off the future. “I was prepared to risk failure with this job,” he says, “because I knew there was life after being chancellor of Education in New York.”
As for what that life might hold, his friends have no clue. “Joel has not progressed on a linear path,” says David Boies. “Would you have predicted that he was going to head the antitrust division and try to break up Microsoft? Or that he would become an executive at Bertelsmann? Or that he would become the chancellor of the schools? None of this, nothing about Joel, was or is predictable.”
Over dinner, I put the question to Klein. “It depends on whether I succeed or not,” he says. “Part of me thinks I want to go back to Washington and become attorney general. That’s the job I’ve wanted since I was old enough to remember.”
Since we’re well past our first glass of wine, I ask about running for mayor. Let’s say that you succeed with the schools—wouldn’t that be a reasonable platform?
Klein blushes faintly. “That would be a very reasonable platform, sure it would be,” he says, grinning broadly now. “I think a lot about it.” Klein then catches himself and offers some caveats: “I don’t love the life in which you’re constantly in the political eye, and I don’t like to raise money, unlike the mayor.” But when I note that he’s a hometown boy, a working-class kid made good—no small electoral advantages—he grins again and says, “I agree. And in that sense, it’s another reason why I think I’ve trained for this all my life.”
A few days later, I float the Klein-for-mayor trial balloon with Jack Welch, and he offers an immediate endorsement: “If he fixes the schools, he can own the city.”
The reality, of course, is more vexing for whatever City Hall fantasies Klein may be nurturing. Though the appearance of progress in the schools has helped Bloomberg, Klein is hardly basking in any warm effusion of public sentiment: According to the Quinnipiac survey, just 40 percent of New Yorkers approve of his performance, versus 33 percent who disapprove. Meanwhile, his brazen treatment of Weingarten has likely earned him an enemy for life—and that alone might be enough to doom him in a future Democratic primary. It might even be enough to complicate his aspiration to be attorney general.
But Klein believes that he is on the right side of the issue—and the right side of history. And although he’d never say so, he believes that, in the end, the city and his party will come to embrace him for what he has undertaken. He believes, in a way, that they will have no other choice; the results will be that unequivocal. Call this vanity, call it arrogance, call it supreme self-confidence. It’s the quality that makes Klein so insufferable to so many—and so relentless in pursuing his objectives.
It also fuels a sense of optimism that borders on pathological. When I ask his reaction to his dismal poll numbers, Klein just smiles and shrugs. “I thought, Wow, that’s a lot of people—three quarters of the people in the city actually know who I am!”
— By John Heilemann
New York Magazine
2005-10-31
www.newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/urban/education/features/14869/index.html
....Teachers, meanwhile, complained less about the curriculum than about the DOE’s heavy-handedness: about a top-down regime in which everything that took place in the classroom—from the duration of lessons to the size of the “reading rugs”—was specified by the new Tweed bosses. And liberals took umbrage at the panoply of moguls around the Leadership Academy and at Klein’s taste for the social swirl.
The unions moaned about much of this, too, but their laments were more visceral. After decentralization, the teachers and the principals unions had stepped into the power vacuum created by a hopelessly balkanized system and had come to play a central role in education policy. Now Klein was shutting them out, concocting his schemes behind closed doors. Weingarten, a lawyer who fancies herself a reformer and not an old-line labor hack, was enraged by his refusal to treat her as an equal. “The chancellor decided we were the enemy, not a partner,” she says. “That was when the relationship started to rupture.”
Relations were equally rocky with Jill Levy, president of the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators. Levy objected to the Leadership Academy, which she saw as a breeding ground for “brainwashed” anti-union principals. Railing against Klein as an “opportunist” who was “delusional” to boot, she nevertheless reserves her harshest words for Bloomberg. “I had to scrounge for a meeting with him, and then he didn’t shut his mouth for 45 minutes,” she says. “He sat there in his pressed shirt and his unruffled demeanor, dictating to me how the schools should be run . . . I wanted to puke on his shoes.”
Over dinner one night in Tribeca, Klein and I discuss the harsh reception that greeted his maneuvers. Besuited and vaguely rabbinical, with a shiny bald pate and a caramel Hamptons tan, he speaks quickly—and offers no apologies. On criticisms of the curriculum: “You got a couple of pundits, like Ravitch, who knows nothing, she’s never educated anyone. That’s the same rap you can put on me, but now I’ve spent a lot of time on this, and I think my initial instinct was correct: There is no magic curriculum.” On the insularity of his deliberations: “You can’t do reform by plebiscite; it leads to the politics of paralysis.” On micromanagement: “I’ll admit that we have people who implemented things in a ham-handed way. But we’re trying to change practice. [Klein deputy] Carmen Fariña had the best quote: When somebody said, ‘Let teachers teach,’ Carmen said in the New York Times, we tried that—it doesn’t work. Which isn’t to say that there isn’t somebody somewhere who said that the size of the rugs matters. And that person is an idiot.”
I ask if Klein realized that by attaching boldface names such as Kennedy and Welch to his agenda, he was courting controversy.
“I wanted it!” he says. “I knew that if I weren’t making a lot of waves that I was basically tinkering, that I was being an incrementalist, and I didn’t want to be an incrementalist.”
Whatever the merits of Klein’s approach—of not merely breaking eggs to make an omelet but flinging them at the old guard—the resentments he’d unleashed reached critical mass in March 2004. A few weeks earlier, at Klein’s urging, Bloomberg had announced the new policy of halting “social promotion” of third-graders who failed to score above the bottom level on citywide math and reading exams. To get the policy approved by the Panel for Educational Policy, Bloomberg had to fire a pair of his own handpicked appointees who objected to it—a gambit instantly dubbed by the tabloids the “Monday Night Massacre.” That same month, a nepotism scandal arose around Diana Lam, who was nailed for having tried to secure a job under her auspices for her husband. After an internal investigation and a stubborn attempt by Klein to save her, Lam was forced to resign.
In the wake of the twin fiascos, the administration was floundering. As 2004 rolled into 2005, public support for Bloomberg on education was mired at 34 percent; for Klein, it was even lower. And then, to everyone’s surprise, the wind began to shift.
The new breeze started blowing in early June, when Bloomberg and Klein announced the results of this year’s citywide tests for third-, fifth-, sixth-, and seventh-graders. (Fourth- and eighth-graders are tested by the state.) For the first time since 1991, at least half of the city’s elementary and middle-school students performed at or above grade level. In math, the percentage rose 7.5 points, to 50 percent, while in reading, it leapt fourteen points, to 55 percent.
And the news kept getting better. In September, the results of the state math test showed a nine-point bump, to 77 percent, among fourth-graders meeting standards—this on top of a ten-point rise, to 59.5 percent, on the fourth-grade reading test. At a packed press conference at a Bed-Stuy school, Bloomberg enjoyed a Ross Perot moment, employing a potpourri of charts and graphs to hammer home his message: “The era when year-in-year-out stagnant levels of classroom performance were the norm are over.”
Many experts view the test scores less ingenuously (or less strategically) than Bloomberg does. Robert Tobias, for example, knows as much about the topic as anyone in the city. Now a professor at NYU, Tobias spent 33 years as an official at the Board of Education, the last thirteen as director of testing. Tobias is at pains to insist that he isn’t an enemy of the administration or its policies; some he likes, some he doesn’t. What worries him is that the significance of the test scores is being distorted by Bloomberg and Klein. “They’ve essentially declared victory,” he says. “Test scores have become the coin of the realm, and that’s problematic to begin with. But these scores in particular don’t prove what they claim.”
Tobias begins by noting that on the statewide tests, the city’s performance more or less tracked the results in other regions around New York. In math, the city has done a bit better; in reading, a bit worse. “Is that evidence that the Bloomberg-Klein policies have resulted in the improvements? Absolutely not,” he says.
Tobias then turns to the city tests, observing first that math scores began rising before Bloomberg took office. “It started when Harold Levy was chancellor and made math a priority,” he says. In reading, though, the story is different: After five straight years of scores being flat, this time they shot the moon. “To a researcher, any anomaly that great looks like an outlier,” he says.
Tobias suspects that other factors besides Klein’s reforms are at work. He points to the fact that test preparation has become borderline obsessive. Exemptions for students not fluent in English have also increased appreciably. Tobias speculates about a screwup in the scoring process—something that occurred more than once during his time at the BOE. Finally, he says, there is “pervasive anecdotal evidence” that this year’s tests were “more child-friendly” because the reading passages were more engaging. ....
....
When Klein lived in Washington, he was the consummate Beltway creature—a regular on the cocktail circuit, a tennis partner to the likes of Alan Greenspan and Antonin Scalia. But Klein says that one of the attractions of being chancellor was the appeal of being home. “I know the streets of New York, I know the neighborhoods,” he says one day at Tweed. “I can go back to Bensonhurst and talk to people about what it was like at P.S. 205. I can walk into DiFara’s—the best pizza place in New York—on 15th and J in Brooklyn, and I can talk about education, about immigration, about what makes New York a special city.”
As Klein unfurls this reverie, I jot down in my notebook: He wants to be mayor. Klein’s commitment to stick around for two terms has been in place since the start. But even so, he has never taken his sights far off the future. “I was prepared to risk failure with this job,” he says, “because I knew there was life after being chancellor of Education in New York.”
As for what that life might hold, his friends have no clue. “Joel has not progressed on a linear path,” says David Boies. “Would you have predicted that he was going to head the antitrust division and try to break up Microsoft? Or that he would become an executive at Bertelsmann? Or that he would become the chancellor of the schools? None of this, nothing about Joel, was or is predictable.”
Over dinner, I put the question to Klein. “It depends on whether I succeed or not,” he says. “Part of me thinks I want to go back to Washington and become attorney general. That’s the job I’ve wanted since I was old enough to remember.”
Since we’re well past our first glass of wine, I ask about running for mayor. Let’s say that you succeed with the schools—wouldn’t that be a reasonable platform?
Klein blushes faintly. “That would be a very reasonable platform, sure it would be,” he says, grinning broadly now. “I think a lot about it.” Klein then catches himself and offers some caveats: “I don’t love the life in which you’re constantly in the political eye, and I don’t like to raise money, unlike the mayor.” But when I note that he’s a hometown boy, a working-class kid made good—no small electoral advantages—he grins again and says, “I agree. And in that sense, it’s another reason why I think I’ve trained for this all my life.”
A few days later, I float the Klein-for-mayor trial balloon with Jack Welch, and he offers an immediate endorsement: “If he fixes the schools, he can own the city.”
The reality, of course, is more vexing for whatever City Hall fantasies Klein may be nurturing. Though the appearance of progress in the schools has helped Bloomberg, Klein is hardly basking in any warm effusion of public sentiment: According to the Quinnipiac survey, just 40 percent of New Yorkers approve of his performance, versus 33 percent who disapprove. Meanwhile, his brazen treatment of Weingarten has likely earned him an enemy for life—and that alone might be enough to doom him in a future Democratic primary. It might even be enough to complicate his aspiration to be attorney general.
But Klein believes that he is on the right side of the issue—and the right side of history. And although he’d never say so, he believes that, in the end, the city and his party will come to embrace him for what he has undertaken. He believes, in a way, that they will have no other choice; the results will be that unequivocal. Call this vanity, call it arrogance, call it supreme self-confidence. It’s the quality that makes Klein so insufferable to so many—and so relentless in pursuing his objectives.
It also fuels a sense of optimism that borders on pathological. When I ask his reaction to his dismal poll numbers, Klein just smiles and shrugs. “I thought, Wow, that’s a lot of people—three quarters of the people in the city actually know who I am!”
— By John Heilemann
New York Magazine
2005-10-31
www.newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/urban/education/features/14869/index.html