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Inside “The Founders”: Joel Klein (excerpt)
Date: Aug 26, 2016
Caption: Joel Klein was the first Chancellor of the Department of Education appointed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg under mayoral control. In this video, he describes his approach to making change in the city’s schools.
In 2002, the New York State Legislature gave the mayor’s office control of New York City’s public schools. Mayor Michael Bloomberg claimed that this system was more democratic than one in which voters elected local school board members, because voters elected the mayor, and could vote him out if they did not like his performance in leading the school system.
The Board of Education was renamed the Department of Education, and the mayor’s appointed chancellor Joel Klein took charge of the city’s school system pursuing an aggressive reform agenda.
Mayor Bloomberg and Klein believed that creating competition between schools for students would yield the best academic results, which they defined by student performance on standardized tests. This competition could happen between new small public schools, or between these schools and charter schools.1
This interview with Chancellor Joel Klein was published on The 74 Million, a news site founded by school choice and charter school advocates.
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Heather Lewis, New York City Public Schools from Brownsville to Bloomberg (New York: Teachers College Press, 2011), 139-142. ↩︎
Categories: K-12 organizing
Tags: school administration, charter schools, school choice, mayoral control
This item is part of "Mayoral Control" in "Who Governs Schools?"
Item Details
Date: Aug 26, 2016
Source: The 74 Million
Copyright: Under copyright. Used with permission
How to cite: “Inside ‘The Founders’: Joel Klein (excerpt),” in New York City Civil Rights History Project, Accessed: [Month Day, Year], https://nyccivilrightshistory.org/gallery/interview-with-joel-klein.
Questions to Consider
- What do you think were the most important issues to Joel Klein during the early years of mayoral control?
- In this video clip, Joel Klein talks about schools competing to “earn” their students. He thinks of children and parents as consumers of education and, therefore, schools (like businesses) compete for consumers. Based on this logic, some schools will succeed in attracting consumers (or students) and others will not. Those that do not succeed will be closed down. Thinking about your own experiences as a student, what are the strengths of this idea? What are the weaknesses?
- As part of New York’s system of mayoral control, Joel Klein was appointed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg to the job of Chancellor. Many other school system leaders are elected or selected by an elected school board. How do you think that mayoral control affected Klein’s approach to his job? How do you think it affected his approach to making changes in the school system?
References
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