DAVIS: NYC's Joel Klein putting children first

• Article
• Comments ()
• Click-2-Listen
• Videos

By Lanny Davis

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Let's start with full disclosure: I have known Joel Klein for nearly 30 years and consider him to be one of the smartest, most grounded, most public-spirited people I have ever known — right up there with the other two old friends I would include in that characterization, Bill and Hillary Clinton.

In 2002, New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg exhibited his well-known, impressive powers of persuasion and political boldness by convincing Mr. Klein, a former Clinton White House deputy counsel and assistant attorney general for antitrust, to leave a seven-figure job as chief executive of an international corporation and become chancellor of the New York City public school system, which pays less than one-tenth of that.

I hadn't seen Mr. Klein for several years and just recently caught him at a Rotary Club luncheon in downtown Manhattan. He was born in the Bronx, raised in a Queens, N.Y., public housing project, and attended public schools. When he approached the daunting job of trying to improve the New York City public school system, it came down to one concept and three basic principles.

The concept: Put children first. The three principles he relied on: developing public school leadership, incentives for teacher quality, and accountability. His approach has produced some demonstrable progress. For example:

• Between 2002, the year of Mr. Klein's arrival, and 2008, there has been a steady growth in the city schools' four-year graduation rate, increasing by 11 percentage points.

• Compare New York City's results to those of the state's other "big four" cities — Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse and Yonkers — which have comparable shares of low-income minorities in their populations. In 2002, New York City's fourth-grade math results were 27 percent lower than the average for the rest of New York state, with the "big four" suffering about the same gap, 31 percent behind. In 2008, after six years under Mr. Klein's leadership, New York City was just 8 percent behind the rest of the state, whereas the other "big four" were 25 percent behind.

• In 2002, the math gap between New York City eighth-graders and those in the rest of the state was 30 percent. By 2008, it had dropped to 18 percent. Meanwhile, the big four had a 40 percent gap in math results in both 2002 and 2008. There was also a modest closing of the gap in English and language arts between New York City and the rest of the state, when compared with the performance of the state's other major urban areas.

(To state the obvious, the data comparing New York City to the rest of the state is somewhat inapt, with the rest of the state being more affluent, whiter, and with far fewer immigrants who don't speak English — all of which, self-evidently, will tend to produce higher English and math scores on standard tests than the economic and ethnic mix of New York City.)

Mr. Klein's principles are being borne out. In his first three years as chancellor, he raised more than $70 million in private philanthropic money to finance world-class leadership training courses for public-school principals and other administrative leaders. The result was an impressive group of dedicated principals and leaders, who were inspirations and motivators for both students and faculty.