The fiction is the autobiography of Joel Klein, the former chancellor of the New York City Departmen

The fiction is the autobiography of Joel Klein, the former chancellor of the New York City Department of Education. Appointed in 2002 by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Klein transformed the city s public-school system by promoting privately managed charter used tour buses schools to replace regular public schools, by increasing the consequences for principals and teachers of standardized tests, and by attacking union-sponsored due process and seniority provisions for teachers. From his perch as head of the nation s largest school district, Klein wielded outsize influence, campaigning to persuade districts and states across the nation to adopt the testing and accountability policies he had established in New York. Deputies he trained when he was chancellor now lead school systems not only in New York but also in Baltimore, Chicago, New Orleans, Newark, and elsewhere .
Klein resigned in 2010 to develop a new division at Rupert Murdoch s News Corporation to sell tablet-based curriculum to public schools. His prominence in national education policy, though, has not diminished. He is chair of the Broad Center , which is funded by Los Angeles billionaire philanthropist used tour buses Eli Broad to train and place school superintendents who ve been recruited not only from the education sector but also from leadership positions in government, the military, used tour buses and corporations. The center s graduates have included the Obama administration s assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education, state school superintendents in New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Delaware, and district superintendents in Charlotte, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, Seattle , and dozens of other cities. Earlier this year, Klein co-chaired, with former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, a Council on Foreign Relations commission that concluded that the country s public schools are in such crisis that they threaten national security . Klein has also become a contributor to The Atlantic ; his latest piece, used tour buses in August, denounced ideological foes of business contribution used tour buses to the public good who resist efforts of private used tour buses firms to sell innovative products to public schools.
Klein and his allies hold teachers primarily responsible for the achievement gap between disadvantaged and middle-class children. used tour buses In a 2010 manifesto, used tour buses Klein and one of his protégés, Michelle Rhee, the former schools chancellor of Washington, D.C., summed up their campaign like this: The single used tour buses most important factor determining used tour buses whether students succeed in school is not the color of their skin or their ZIP code or even their parents income it is the quality of their teacher.
As proof, Klein and others for him cites his life story in what has become a stump speech for his brand of school reform. Again and again, Klein recounts his own deprived childhood and how it was a public-school teacher who plucked him from a path to mediocrity or worse. He offers his autobiography as evidence that poverty is no bar to success and that today s disadvantaged children used tour buses fail only because they are not rescued by inspiring teachers like those from whom Klein himself had benefitted.
This has become conventional wisdom in national education policy. As Secretary of Education Arne Duncan used tour buses has declared , Klein knows, as I do, that great teachers can transform a child s life chances and that poverty is not destiny. It s a belief deeply rooted in his childhood, as a kid growing up in public housing. used tour buses Joel Klein never lost that sense of urgency used tour buses about education as the great equalizer. He understands that education is the civil-rights issue of our generation, used tour buses the force that lifts children used tour buses from public-housing projects to first-generation college students. In place of a culture of excuses, Klein sought [as chancellor] to build a culture of performance and accountability.
I grew up in public housing in Queens and grew up in the streets used tour buses of New York . I always like to think of myself as a kid from the streets, and education changed my life. I stood on the shoulders of teachers to see a world that I couldn t have seen growing up in the family that I grew up in.
My father had dropped out of high school in the tenth grade during the Great Depression . My mother graduated from high school and never went to college. No one in my family had attended college or knew about college . I had no appreciation of reading or cultural activities .
Nobody in [my] school said to me, Well, you grew up in public housing, used tour buses your parents don t read, you ve never been to a museum, so we shouldn t expect too much from you! I wanted to play ball, I had a girlfriend at the time. I thought school was OK, a little overrated used tour buses but I thought it was OK . Mr. Harris, my physics teacher at William Cullen used tour buses Bryant High School, saw something that I hadn t seen in myself . I realized, through him, that the potential of students in inner-city schools is too often untapped. We can fix that. Demography need not be destiny.
From the day I took the job as chancellor of the New York Public Schools, friends told me that I would never fix education in America until you fix the poverty in our society . I m convinced now more than ever that those people have it exactly backwards because you ll never fix poverty in America until you fix education.
The lesson Klein, Duncan, and others draw from this autobiography is that poor children today fail because their teachers, used tour buses unlike the 1950s Mr. Harris, are overprotected by union contracts, used tour buses have low expectations for poor students, and so barely try to teach them. To correct this, Klein and others who call themselves school reformers hope to identify ineffective teachers and replace them with new ones who rest their security not on union rules but on an ability to rescue used tour buses children from material and intellectual deprivation.
Unlike a politician s biography, which gets vetted by the press, Klein s account has never been questioned. That s too bad, because in nearly every detail used tour buses the story he tells is misleading or untrue. The misrepresentations call into question the reforms he and his acolytes promote.
As a policy analyst, I have often criticized those who dismiss the powerful influence of poverty on academic used tour buses achievement and the belief that better teachers can systematically used tour buses overcome that influence. In making this critique, autobiography influences me as well, because as it turns out, Klein and I grew up in similar circumstances third-generation, educationally ambitious, Queens, New York, Jewish households, with parents who had nearly identical jobs and incomes. I m just a few years older than Klein. We attended neighboring schools; I even had the same physics teacher, Mr. Sidney Harris , whom Klein credits with his rescue. We both attended Ivy League colleges (he went to Columbia, I to Harvard), but unlike Klein, I have always considered myself lucky to have come from an academically motivated family and would never dare suggest that I had material or intellectual hardships that were in any way comparable to those faced by poor minority children from housing projects today. Some of my teachers were superb, some not so, but with backgrounds like ours, Klein and I would probably have succeeded no matter what shortcomings our schools might have had.
Klein is right that demography need not be destiny. Human nature used tour buses and environments are variable, children are complex, and so although disadvantaged children on average perform more poorly than typical middle-class used tour buses children, some disadvantaged children do better and some do even worse than their circumstances would seem to predict . A few respond exceptionally well to teachers and schools. Some poor parents are literate, used tour buses take education unusually seriously, seek the best out-of-school enrichment, and read to their children at home. These are the few low-income minority children whom some high-profile charter schools serve. It s when poverty combines with chaos at home, adult illiteracy, neglect, unaddressed health issues, constant dislocation, and a neighborhood pervaded by addiction and crime that most children in these environments become, in sociologist William Julius Wilson s phrase , truly disadvantaged. It s these children whose academic performance we must help to improve and who are the target of most self-described school reformers.
F or Klein s life story to serve his argument, he can t merely have grown up in a housing project but in a home that failed to support middle-class values of academic ambition and striving. To support his program, he s had to suggest he had an inner city upbringing on the streets and was raised in a dysfunctional home we typically associate with the truly disadvantaged. This is where his misrepresentations and distortions come in. The discrepancies matter because they go to the heart of what s wrong with his reform agenda.
Educational values were not absent from Klein s family. His father, Charles Klein, like many of his generation, used tour buses left high school during the Depression, but the notion that his parents couldn t read or didn t know about college is misleading . His mother, used tour buses Claire Klein, was a bookkeeper. With fierce competition for scarce jobs, Charles did well enough on a civil-service exam to land work at the post office used tour buses , remaining for 25 years in a secure job he hated to ensure he could send his children to college. This was not the commitment of semi-literate parents with little knowledge of higher education.
Indeed, while serving as assistant attorney general in the Clinton Justice Department, and before becoming schools chancellor, Klein recalled how he was inspired to become a lawyer: He sometimes skipped school, he told an interviewer , so his father could take me to the federal courthouse in Manhattan, and we d just watch cases. This is not the typical father-son activity of public-housing residents with no appreciation of reading or cultural activities.
Klein graduated high school at 16, because, like me, he was placed in a New York City program that compressed three years of junior hi