It's time to fire New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein. In eight years as chief executive of the city's school system, he has consistently embraced measures designed more to sell the idea of a system helping our students to attain critical achievement goals than to target those goals directly.

New York City's unemployment rate rocketed from 5.1 percent in May 2008 to 9 percent in May 2009. While this is less than unemployment in some other cities around the country, it still takes a human toll often not conveyed by the grim statistics emanating from the U.S. Department of...