Joel I. Klein: Educator (right!)

In an irony typical of the New York Times' tin ear for democracy, a recent article (May 22) on New York Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein carried the headline "Big Thinking and Radical Dreaming." In a puff piece passing as news, Susan Dominus gave us this choice in thinking about the diktat-obsessed, top-down lawyer-bureaucrat who helped impose Mayor Bloomberg's iron will on the New York school system: Klein must either be a "passionate reformer" or a "driven zealot".

How about an imperial ignoramus? A grandstanding bureaucrat? A union-busting bully? Klein advocates "reforms" like compelling kids before they finish fifth grade to visit colleges (you know, so they will understand the joys of higher ed and be motivated to succeed!); like preventing parents from sending their kids to neighborhood primary schools (there's a great way to keep the middle class in the public school system); like empowering principals at the expense of teachers; and like making "remote" education via the web a surrogate for live teachers in the classroom (hey, you can reduce the teacher corps by 30%, Klein boasts, and increase the size of classes at the same time).

In this last bureaucrat-speak idea he is aping the social science wisdom of Terry Moe and John Chubb (Chubb runs that wondrous for-profit outfit called Edison Learning). Moe envisions a world in which "kids can work it out on their own" while schools become a "place where they go and have clubs and sports activities and drama," doing all their course work online.

I've done remote teaching and it is a far cry (remote indeed) from real teaching. But coincidentally it is a whole lot cheaper since one virtual teacher can instruct hundreds while the rest of the real teachers can join the fast food service industry.

Susan Dominus acknowledges in her piece that Klein "can be hard on the people who educate the city's children," but thinks we should give him "credit for holding his tongue most of the time."

Truth is, Klein is a perfect clone of a Mayor who seized control of the schools and vowed to put his stamp on them (just as he overturned the two term limit standing in the way of his running again for Mayor later this year). His "big thinking" means bureaucrats and their business-inspired management schemes come first, principals with tough top down controls come second, while teachers and parents come last. Children, the pupils, they don't rate at all, except as the subjects for Klein's "radical dreaming" - which is inspired neither by reformist pedagogy nor democratic inclusion but by the corporate management nightmare of totally controlling the "customers" it pretends to serve.

(By the way, I am not sniping from the sanctuary of private school privilege: my daughter graduates next month from a New York public high school and has spent her entire K-12 education in public school).

Comments

[terrymoe]

Just a clarification to say that, in my comment on Barber, the phrases that are in quotes were originally not in quotes but simply set off by dashes. The Huffington Post translation software apparently substituted quotes for dashes when I submitted my comment.

[terrymoe]

I disagree with almost everything Benjamin Barber has said here, as well as with his incendiary tone. I won’t respond to all of his claims, but I do want to comment on two issues.
First, I think Klein and Bloomberg have been very good for public education in New York City. Unlike too many of their counterparts in other urban districts, they are not beholden to the city’s teachers union and have acted to put children first in their reforms. Reasonable people may disagree with the specifics. But the reforms are good-faith—and politically courageous—efforts to wrest control of education from vested interests, and to bring changes that are long overdue.
The second issue has to do with online learning. This innovation holds enormous benefits for kids, from customization to instant feedback to vastly increased course offerings. Anyone who believes that, in future years, kids will get all their academic training by sitting in classrooms listening to teachers talk is out of touch. Joel Klein is looking to the future in recognizing the potential of online learning, and he is thinking about kids, learning, and the productive expenditure of resources.
If Barber actually wants to know what John Chubb and I think about online learning, I would encourage him to read our new book, Liberating Learning: Technology, Politics, and the Future of American Education. If he wants to engage in a rational debate of some sort—no stereotypes, no demonizing—we’d be happy to oblige.

Terry M. Moe
Stanford University

[Raphi]

The so-called "market" model simply cannot be applied as if it fit all human organizations. The theory includes the assumption of equal access to all goods and services as well as what is called perfect information, meaning that everyone knows everything about what is available everywhere. Obviously rarely true. In addition, the concept of externalities. Anything outside of standard accounting parameters is considered irrelevant. Such as social disruption through unemployment or enviromental distruction. Since the model also is based on profit, then whatever detracts from that should be eliminated. So to actually apply these principles would mean denying health care to the chronically ill and education to one half of all students. By definition, 50% are below the median. Not saying that schools and other public institutions do not need to be efficient or accountable. It's just that there are issues of human decency, values not tallied in dollars. Greed is not good; a lesson in history from the age of the robber barons and the Depression we've had to repeat. The traditional model, going back to the days when my grandparents were in the NY schools, was to create citizens out of the immigrant masses. Paternalistic, sure, but out of this came working people who knew what was in their own best interests. Like voting and organizing unions. The questions about educational policies are always: how, for whom, and to what ends?