This article is long but certainly worth reading
I think it shows what really goes on in the heads of our
"Educational Experts"
I have included my comments at the end.
***********************************
This article originally appeared on The American Prospect.
Former school chancellor Joel Klein's dishonest new book
reflects the corruption endemic in our school system
By Richard Rothstein, The American Prospect
This is a story about a story, of how a fiction about impoverished
children and public schools corrupts our education policy.
The fiction is the autobiography of
Joel Klein, the former chancellor of the New York City Department of Education.
Appointed in 2002 by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Klein transformed the city’s
public-school system by promoting privately managed charter schools to replace
regular public schools, by increasing the consequences for principals and
teachers of standardized tests, and by attacking union-sponsored due process
and seniority provisions for teachers. From his perch as head of the nation’s
largest school district, Klein wielded outsize influence, campaigning to
persuade districts and states across the nation to adopt the testing and
accountability policies he had established in New York. Deputies he trained
when he was chancellor now lead school systems not only in New York but also in
Baltimore, Chicago, New Orleans, Newark, and elsewhere.
Klein resigned in 2010 to develop a
new division at Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation to sell tablet-based
curriculum to public schools. His prominence in national education policy,
though, has not diminished. He is chair of the Broad Center, which is funded by
Los Angeles billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad to train and place school
superintendents who’ve been recruited not only from the education sector but
also from leadership positions in government, the military, and corporations.
The center’s graduates have included the Obama administration’s assistant
secretary for elementary and secondary education, state school superintendents
in New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Delaware, and district superintendents in
Charlotte, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, Seattle, and dozens of other cities.
Earlier this year, Klein co-chaired, with former Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice, a Council on Foreign Relations commission that concluded that the
country’s public schools are in such crisis that they threaten national
security. Klein has also become a contributor to The Atlantic; his latest
piece, in August, denounced “ideological foes of business’ contribution to the
public good” who resist efforts of private firms to sell innovative products to
public schools.
Klein and his allies hold teachers
primarily responsible for the achievement gap between disadvantaged and
middle-class children. In a 2010 “manifesto,” Klein and one of his protégés,
Michelle Rhee, the former schools chancellor of Washington, D.C., summed up their
campaign like this: “The single most important factor determining whether
students succeed in school is not the color of their skin or their ZIP code or
even their parents’ income—it is the quality of their teacher.”
As proof, Klein—and others for him—cites
his life story in what has become a stump speech for his brand of school
reform. Again and again, Klein recounts his own deprived childhood and how it
was a public-school teacher who plucked him from a path to mediocrity or worse.
He offers his autobiography as evidence that poverty is no bar to success and
that today’s disadvantaged children fail only because they are not rescued by
inspiring teachers like those from whom Klein himself had benefitted.
This has become conventional wisdom
in national education policy. As Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has
declared, “Klein knows, as I do, that great teachers can transform a child’s
life chances—and that poverty is not destiny. It’s a belief deeply rooted in
his childhood, as a kid growing up in public housing. … Joel Klein never lost
that sense of urgency about education as the great equalizer. He understands
that education is the civil-rights issue of our generation, the force that
lifts children from public-housing projects to first-generation college
students. … In place of a culture of excuses, Klein sought [as chancellor] to
build a culture of performance and accountability.”
Here is Klein’s autobiographical
account in his own words, faithful to original context, culled from numerous
speeches and interviews that Klein has given and continues to give:
I grew up in public housing in
Queens and grew up in the streets of New York. I always like to think of myself
as a kid from the streets, and education changed my life. … I stood on the
shoulders of teachers to see a world that I couldn’t have seen growing up in
the family that I grew up in.
My father had dropped out of high
school in the tenth grade during the Great Depression. My mother graduated from
high school and never went to college. No one in my family had attended college
… or knew about college. I had no appreciation of reading or cultural
activities. …
By most people’s lights, we were
certainly working-class, poor. … I grew up in a pretty unhappy household. …
Teachers set expectations for me
that were not commensurate with my background or my family’s income. …
Nobody in [my] school said to me,
‘Well, you grew up in public housing, your parents don’t read, you’ve never
been to a museum, so we shouldn’t expect too much from you!’ … I wanted to play
ball, I had a girlfriend at the time. I thought school was OK, a little
overrated but I thought it was OK. … Mr. Harris, my physics teacher at William
Cullen Bryant High School, saw something that I hadn’t seen in myself. … I
realized, through him, that the potential of students in inner-city schools is
too often untapped. We can fix that. Demography need not be destiny.
From the day I took the job as
chancellor of the New York Public Schools, friends told me that I would never
fix education in America until you fix the poverty in our society. … I’m
convinced now more than ever that those people have it exactly
backwards—because you’ll never fix poverty in America until you fix education.
I reject categorically the
principle that poverty is an insurmountable impediment, because I see that we
have surmounted it time and again.
I never forget and never will
forget who I am, where I came from, and what public education did for me. I am
still the old kid from Queens.
The lesson Klein, Duncan, and
others draw from this autobiography is that poor children today fail because
their teachers, unlike the 1950s Mr. Harris, are overprotected by union
contracts, have low expectations for poor students, and so barely try to teach
them. To correct this, Klein and others who call themselves “school reformers”
hope to identify ineffective teachers and replace them with new ones who rest
their security not on union rules but on an ability to rescue children from
material and intellectual deprivation.
Unlike a politician’s biography,
which gets vetted by the press, Klein’s account has never been questioned.
That’s too bad, because in nearly every detail the story he tells is misleading
or untrue. The misrepresentations call into question the reforms he and his acolytes
promote.
As a policy analyst, I have often
criticized those who dismiss the powerful influence of poverty on academic
achievement and the belief that better teachers can systematically overcome
that influence. In making this critique, autobiography influences me as well,
because as it turns out, Klein and I grew up in similar
circumstances—third-generation, educationally ambitious, Queens, New York,
Jewish households, with parents who had nearly identical jobs and incomes. I’m
just a few years older than Klein. We attended neighboring schools; I even had
the same physics teacher, Mr. Sidney Harris, whom Klein credits with his
rescue. We both attended Ivy League colleges (he went to Columbia, I to
Harvard), but unlike Klein, I have always considered myself lucky to have come
from an academically motivated family and would never dare suggest that I had
material or intellectual hardships that were in any way comparable to those
faced by poor minority children from housing projects today. Some of my teachers
were superb, some not so, but with backgrounds like ours, Klein and I would
probably have succeeded no matter what shortcomings our schools might have had.
Klein is right that “demography
need not be destiny.” Human nature and environments are variable, children are
complex, and so although disadvantaged children on average perform more poorly
than typical middle-class children, some disadvantaged children do better and
some do even worse than their circumstances would seem to predict. A few
respond exceptionally well to teachers and schools. Some poor parents are
literate, take education unusually seriously, seek the best out-of-school
enrichment, and read to their children at home. These are the few low-income
minority children whom some high-profile charter schools serve. It’s when
poverty combines with chaos at home, adult illiteracy, neglect, unaddressed
health issues, constant dislocation, and a neighborhood pervaded by addiction
and crime that most children in these environments become, in sociologist
William Julius Wilson’s phrase, “truly disadvantaged.” It’s these children
whose academic performance we must help to improve and who are the target of
most self-described school reformers.
* * *
For Klein’s life story to serve his
argument, he can’t merely have grown up in a housing project but in a home that
failed to support middle-class values of academic ambition and striving. To
support his program, he’s had to suggest he had an “inner city” upbringing on
“the streets” and was raised in a dysfunctional home we typically associate
with the truly disadvantaged. This is where his misrepresentations and
distortions come in. The discrepancies matter because they go to the heart of
what’s wrong with his reform agenda.
Educational values were not absent
from Klein’s family. His father, Charles Klein, like many of his generation,
left high school during the Depression, but the notion that his parents
couldn’t read or didn’t know about college is misleading. His mother, Claire
Klein, was a bookkeeper. With fierce competition for scarce jobs, Charles did
well enough on a civil-service exam to land work at the post office, remaining
for 25 years in a secure job he hated to ensure he could send his children to
college. This was not the commitment of semi-literate parents with little
knowledge of higher education.
Indeed, while serving as assistant
attorney general in the Clinton Justice Department, and before becoming schools
chancellor, Klein recalled how he was inspired to become a lawyer: He sometimes
skipped school, he told an interviewer, so his father could “take me to the
federal courthouse in Manhattan, and we’d just watch cases.” This is not the
typical father-son activity of public-housing residents with “no appreciation
of reading or cultural activities.”
Klein graduated high school at 16,
because, like me, he was placed in a New York City program that compressed
three years of junior high school into two. These “special progress” classes,
at Klein’s Junior High School 10 and my nearby Junior High School 74, were not
for would-be truants and gang members but for academically advanced students
with ambitious parents who were impatient with the regular curricular pace.
Special-progress classes were even more racially and academically segregated
from other students than their contemporary version, “gifted and talented”
programs that retain middle-class parents in the public-school system by
separating their children from most low-income and minority-group peers. Klein
may recall that he was not academically engaged until inspired by his
high-school physics teacher. But in the 1950s, you weren’t assigned to
seventh-grade special-progress classes unless you were already performing well
above grade level.
Klein excelled academically in high
school before encountering Mr. Harris. The Bryant High School yearbook for the
class of 1963 tells a very different story from the one Klein recounts. It
describes him as a member of the National Honor Society in his junior as well
as senior year. He was also a member of the math team, served as an editor of
the school newspaper, and was elected student-government president. To top it
all, the “Senior Celebrities”page of the yearbook named him class scholar.
Klein’s family was also not poor by
any reasonable criteria. Charles Klein’s annual post-office salary in the 1950s
was about equal to the national median household income. The median national
salary for full-time female clerical workers was about three-fourths of the
national median household income. Thus, so long as Claire Klein worked, the
Klein family income would have been substantially in excess of the national
median. Indeed, Charles Klein was well-off enough to take his family on an
annual summer vacation to the Catskills. In 1971, Charles Klein saw his son Joel
graduate from law school and obtain a prestigious clerkship at a federal
appeals court. Charles then retired with a defined-benefit federal pension to a
Florida apartment near the beach—an option unlikely for public-housing
residents as we now know them.
The conventional definition of
disadvantaged students today is eligibility for free lunch, because their
household income (for a family of four) is about half the national median.
These are the children about whose achievement we worry and by this definition,
Klein was not poor. Even if his mother earned nothing, the family was not
economically oppressed. Klein didn’t overcome demographic odds; he fulfilled
them. He was a student who then, like now, enjoyed family resources and values
that predict academic success.
Klein’s most egregious
autobiographical distortion is that he grew up in public housing. That’s
because, as Klein must know, the words “public housing” evoke an image of
minority unemployment, welfare dependence, unwed motherhood, truancy, gangs,
drug dealing, addiction, and violence. Klein, though, grew up in racial
privilege, dramatically different from the segregated world of most youngsters
in public housing today. (Click here to read Richard Rothstein’s related piece
on the role of public housing in racially segregating communities.)
Klein did live in public housing
after his family moved to Queens in 1955 when he was nine years old. But he
fails to say—perhaps because he truly doesn’t realize—that some public housing
in New York in the 1940s and 1950s, including the Woodside Houses project where
his family resided, was built for white, middle-class families. The poor and
the problems poverty causes were unwelcome. This distinction is critical to
understanding Klein’s history and why it undermines his current policy
prescriptions.
Returning World War II veterans
like Klein’s father confronted a housing shortage. To address it, New York
erected projects like Woodside Houses, an attractive six-story development with
trees, grassy areas, and park benches. Residents were not on the dole but paid
rent that covered their housing costs; apartments were not subsidized and were
not part of the national low-income housing program.
Rather, for prospective tenants in
Woodside Houses and its sister projects, the New York City Housing Authority
enforced 21 disqualifying factors. Excluded were single-parent families and
those with irregular employment history, out-of-wedlock births, criminal
records, narcotics addiction, or mental illness—in other words, any family with
the qualities we now associate with public housing. Couples had to show
marriage licenses to apply. To filter out undesirables, inspectors visited
applicants’ previous homes to verify good housekeeping habits, sufficient
furniture, and well-behaved children. Neighborhood public schools serving
complexes like Woodside Houses thus didn’t have to contend with unruly
adolescents; they had already been weeded out by the Housing Authority.
New York City claimed it did not
segregate its projects, but Woodside and similar complexes in white
neighborhoods accepted only a token few black tenants because Housing Authority
policy was to respect “existing community patterns.” So when the Kleins moved
to Woodside Houses in its predominantly white neighborhood, 87 percent of their
fellow tenants were white. The few nonwhites were also middle-class, owing to
the rigorous screening they endured. By contrast, South Jamaica Houses in a
black Queens neighborhood was only 12 percent white, and its low-income tenants
were subsidized.
So Klein’s entire autobiography is
a sleight of hand.
He was not a child of the streets.
He was not an academically unmotivated student. He did not come from a deprived
family background. He did not grow up in public housing as we understand it
today.
I sent Klein a detailed set of
questions that focused on the discrepancies between the public record and the
life story he has told. He responded by e-mail: “I appreciate the time and
effort put into trying to reinterpret and recharacterize my family’s history
and to construe the conditions of public housing, public education, and
public-sector employment 50 years ago. I happened to be there, however, and it
was as I’ve described it over the years—a humble, challenging environment, positively
influenced by parents who set great examples through hard work and by many
teachers including one who truly inspired me and changed my life. I do not
compare my family’s situation to anyone or anything, nor do I view
socioeconomic need as a downward contest for credibility in addressing the
challenges in education today.”
* * *
In misrepresenting his childhood,
Klein has distorted the world of both our fathers. Mine, already out of high
school and at City College of New York when the Great Depression hit, was also
fortunate to land a job in the post office, working second jobs at night.
Permanently traumatized by the insecurity of the Depression, he remained
unhappily in the federal civil service so he, like Charles Klein, could see his
children through college, after which he was rewarded, also like the elder
Klein, with a secure federal pension. My mother, like Klein’s, was a
bookkeeper.
I never lived in public housing,
but my parents’ small single-family home in a white Queens neighborhood not far
from Woodside had monthly mortgage payments about the same as the rent Charles
and Claire Klein paid to the Housing Authority. Our family income was similar
to the Kleins’; both families were middle-class.
At Bayside High School, I also had
Sidney Harris for physics. (After I graduated, he transferred to Bryant.) I
don’t doubt that he was an excellent teacher and inspired Klein, but he did
nothing similar for me. I was instead motivated by my Latin and journalism
teachers. Like the 1963 yearbook at Bryant High School, my 1959 Bayside
yearbook has few black faces. Klein and I both attended almost entirely
segregated, white schools.
My family was not wealthy. But my
parents supplied me with plenty of picture books to play with in my crib. My
father didn’t take me to watch court cases, but one night we went to Brooklyn
to retrieve a set of encyclopedias from a second cousin who was about to
discard them. My mother and father took me to the Museum of Natural History and
the Planetarium, and at the dinner table, my father frequently posed a
counterfactual to explore the day’s events. “Let’s assume …” was his favorite
phrase. Such unintended exercises in reasoning and critical thinking, and other
similar activities, play an essential role in preparing students for success
when they get to school.
My public-school education in the
1950s was OK but not as good as that received by many of my college peers who
came from more affluent communities. What made my education complete was the
academic support I received at home—support that Klein now takes for granted,
discounting the enormous contribution his parents made to his cognitive
strengths. Parents who have similarly sacrificed, keeping jobs they hated to
ensure their children could attend college, might conclude that Klein’s parents
raised an ingrate. Certainly it seems absurd for him to claim that his parents
had less influence on his eventual academic success than Mr. Harris, who first
encountered him only late in high school. Yet this is the position of Klein, Rhee,
Duncan, and their allies: Teachers alone determine whether children succeed,
and home environment is merely an obstacle for teachers to overcome. Maybe
there’s a case for this approach, but Klein’s biography doesn’t prove it.
My high school initially refused to
process my application to Harvard. When my father took a day off to make a holy
fuss, the Bayside principal, Dr. Samuel Moskowitz, said that he wouldn’t waste
his staff’s time, because “boys from here don’t go to Harvard.” So much for the
high expectations of this supposedly golden, pre–teachers’ union era. Today,
tenacious parenting still predicts success for students from middle-class or,
less frequently, from impoverished households.
Children like Klein and me were
privileged, not perhaps in money but in what sociologists term “social
capital.” Nobody I know of from my special-progress class dropped out of
school; my fellow students typically went on to become college professors,
doctors, business executives, accountants, writers, and lawyers. Sure, we loved
to play street stickball, but we were not “kids from the streets,” as Klein
would have it. We were surrounded by peers with middle-class ambitions and
goals.
It would be obscene for me to claim
I overcame severe hardship and was rescued from deprivation by schoolteachers.
It is more obscene for Klein to do so, because his claim supports attacks on
contemporary teachers and a refusal to acknowledge impediments teachers face
because of their students’ social and economic deprivation. It’s a deprivation
that he never suffered but that many children from public housing do today.
A few superhuman teachers may lift
a handful of children who come to school from barely literate homes, hungry, in
poor health, and otherwise unprepared for academic instruction. But even the
best teachers face impossible tasks when confronted with classrooms filled with
truly disadvantaged students who are not in tracked special-progress classes
and don’t arrive each morning from families as academically supportive as mine.
Instead, they may come from segregated communities where concentrated and
entrenched poverty, unemployment, and social alienation over many generations
have been ravaging.
When Klein was appointed chancellor
he did seek advice, not only from his friends as he reports in his
autobiographical accounts but from analysts like me. I was one of those who
told him, as he puts it, that we “would never fix education in America until we
fix the poverty in our society.” I suggested that he might win more lasting
achievement gains by establishing school clinics to ensure that all children
had good health care and by directing resources to early-childhood literacy
programs and after-school enrichment. I urged him to use his influence to
protest government-created residential segregation that concentrates the most
disadvantaged children in schools without middle-class peers and where the
accumulation of impediments to learning is overwhelming.
In June, the Supreme Court ruled
that First Amendment free-speech rights protect a politician’s false claims to
have earned military medals. Klein, too, has a constitutional right to
fabricate a life story. But it is up to the rest of us to consider what light
the fact of his misrepresentation sheds on the merits of policies he advocates.
Klein is not the sole author of
current school-reform policies; many others share responsibility.
But his less-than-honest
autobiography has been accepted unquestioningly by allies like Arne Duncan who
use it, as he does, to support needless test obsession for millions of
schoolchildren, on the theory that more accountability for teachers will cure
our social ills. Klein’s story has contributed to the demoralization of tens of
thousands of teachers who are now blamed for their low-income students’ poor
test scores. Klein and Duncan’s conclusion that public schools must be failing
because they don’t perform the miracles they allegedly performed in the past
has helped justify a rapid expansion of charter schools. Most charter schools
have done no better for disadvantaged children than the schools from which they
came, while stripping regular schools of their most motivated students.
Contemporary reforms have produced much turmoil in public education but little
or no meaningful improvement. Meanwhile, social inequality has grown and with
it, challenges to educators hoping to narrow the achievement gap.
Klein and Rhee have recently
founded an organization called StudentsFirstNY to raise millions of dollars
from New York City’s wealthiest. It will support candidates in the city’s
upcoming mayoral race who adopt an agenda that puts “the interests of children”
over “special interests” (read: teacher unions) and commits to expanding
charter schools, eliminating teacher tenure, and using student test scores to
evaluate teachers. The group’s mission statement incorporates the fanciful
Klein autobiographical tale, saying that “while there are many factors that
influence a student’s opportunity to learn, a great teacher can help any
student overcome those barriers and realize their full potential.”
Klein’s actual biography tells an
important story, just not the one he imagines: It’s more evidence that student
achievement mostly reflects the social and economic environment in which
children are raised and that the best way to improve academic achievement is to
address these conditions directly.
My Comment:
I just love these people with their
fictitious, Mr. Me, "Horatio Alger" stories!
Here's a guy (among many others
such a Rhee and Ducncan) who is now an "education expert"?
Just who grants these titles and
where can I get one?
I wonder how much time any of these
"experts" have actually worked in a classroom filled with
unprivileged kids or any kids at all?
Not much I would bet!
Ross Perot said it best when he was
at Ford and I paraphrase.
"If a manager doesn't
regularly go down to the shop floor and put a wheel on a car now and then, he
can't be doing a good job as manager?"
Getting back to Mr. Klien and his
story portraying himself as a poor unprivileged child who succeeded. If he
wants to get into an "out pooring" contest he should call me up.
I too, in spite of an extremely
poor background (light years poorer than his) did OK.
I, of course never soared to his heights but did OK (I was a
chemistry and physics teacher for forty years - a job which I liked and think I
did fairly well).
My modest success arose from my
mother's continual support, urging and engagement which are things sorely
lacking in many homes of American children today (both rich and poor - though
mostly poor).
I would attribute a very small
portion of my "success" to me. It mostly came from my mother, my
teachers and my coaches. I was most fortunate to encounter these people during
my childhood. Had it not been for them I am sure things would have been much
different for me.
Maybe I feel this way because my
mother also taught me some humility. After reading your article, I'm not so
sure Mr. Klein's mother taught him any (or if she did he just failed to learn).
http://teachersdontsuck.blogspot.com/
PS
Based on this article, Klein appears to be another pompous ass looking to lavishly feather his own nest and aggrandize himself rather than to truly seek solutions to the educational problems of urban schools.
