Juan Gonzalez: Joel Klein Lost The Respect of Parents and Teachers

Schools chancellor Joel Klein won't be missed - he lost the respect of teachers and parents alike
Juan Gonzalez - News, November 10th 2010
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You could tell the Joel Klein era was ending long before Mayor Bloomberg made it official on Tuesday.

It became clear one cold January night in the cavernous auditorium of Brooklyn Technical High School, during an extraordinary all-night meeting of the Panel for Educational Policy.

The panel, Bloomberg's rubber-stamp replacement for the old Board of Education, was about to approve Klein's proposal to close down 19 low-performing public schools and install several new charter schools in their place.

State law required the panel to go through the motions of a democratic process by holding a public hearing.

More than 1,000 angry parents and teachers filled the auditorium that night. The list of speakers seemed endless. Many gave eloquent defenses of their programs. Several begged for assistance from school district headquarters.

I was dumbstruck to see teachers and even assistant principals take their turns at the microphone and publicly berate their boss, Klein, for refusing to support neighborhood schools.

The chancellor, who spent long stretches of the meeting on his BlackBerry, walked out of the room at one point.

Suddenly, the entire auditorium rose in unison. Everyone began chanting: "Where's Joel Klein? Where's Joel Klein? Where's Joel Klein?"

The longer Klein stayed away, the louder the crowd became. Not until he sheepishly returned and took his seat did things quiet down.

When the panel finally got around to voting, it was near dawn, yet hundreds of people were still in the room.

That's when you realized the disconnect between advocates of Klein's regime and the countless parents and teachers who long ago grew weary of his autocratic and disrespectful style.

Klein's legacy is truly a Tale of Two Cities.

To Manhattan's wealthy elite, the city's longest-serving chancellor was "one of the most important transformational ... education leaders of our time." That's what Bloomberg called him Tuesday.

The chancellor, they say, fought aggressively to reduce the racial achievement gap in education, brought in scores of innovative charter schools and brought corporate management methods to a "dysfunctional" system.

But most New Yorkers simply do not agree that he succeeded.

Only 30% of city residents believe our public schools have improved under Klein and Bloomberg. So says a poll conducted last month by The Wall Street Journal, a paper owned by Klein's new employer, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.

Many critics now realize all those trumpeted state test score results over the past few years were grossly inflated.

They see how Klein's headlong rush for more charter schools spawned bitter neighbor-versus-neighbor battles for scarce space.

His constant reorganizations of the school bureaucracy only demoralized and confused the system's veteran employees, teachers say. The racial achievement gap has not significantly diminished.

In short, progress was hardly stellar when you consider the unprecedented increases in state funding for public schools in the past decade.

That night of the marathon meeting at Brooklyn Tech, it was apparent Klein had lost the confidence and respect of too many teachers and parents.

A few months later, a Supreme Court justice overturned his decision to close the 19 schools. Then came the revelations of the inflated test scores.

We will soon see if our new chancellor actually listens to parents and teachers once in a while.

jgonzalez@nydailynews.com