(From The New York Sun, September 2, 2008)
By ELIZABETH GREEN
After six years of putting pressure on teachers and principals to show better results, Mayor Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein are entering their seventh, and possibly final, school year today with the pressure somewhere else — on them.
One reason is that this is the school year in which the law that granted the mayor control of the schools is set to expire. By June 30, lawmakers in Albany will have to decide whether to renew the law as is, scrap it, or revise it in some way.
Messrs. Bloomberg and Klein's preference is to preserve the law with no changes, and their goal is to make that case by proving that with the help of the law they have improved students' academic achievement.
Test scores and other measures of academic gains will be scrutinized for evidence of that improvement.
So will policy decisions due for this year, from a new capital plan to school budgets to charter schools housed inside traditional public school buildings.
"With mayoral control at stake at the end of this year, this year has to be at least as good as last year. That's the story," an aide to Mr. Klein who runs a network of about 500 schools, Eric Nadelstern, said. "It's all about execution and keeping people motivated and focused so the success keeps going."
Success would also be helpful to each man's political future. If Mr. Bloomberg does not find a way to extend term limits and seek re-election, not only he but also Mr. Klein could be in the market for a new job. Mr. Klein is indicating that he would like his name in the hat for offices ranging from chancellor to U.S. education secretary to even, some say, New York City mayor.
"I think Joel, like the mayor, wants to continue in public office," the president of the city teachers union, Randi Weingarten, said. "So I think he is looking; he hasn't told me, but a lot of other people have said that he's looking to continue to be chancellor or to be mayor or he's looking to be secretary of education. I've heard that from a lot of different people."
Asked in the past whether he is interested in the mayoral job, Mr. Klein has said his current job as chancellor is the one he wants.
Mr. Klein has long been persistent about proving his success, and the struggle seems only to have ramped up in the past week.
Over the weekend an Australian radio station aired an interview with Mr. Klein lasting more than 20 minutes in which he defended a proposed new "education revolution" in the country modeled on Mr. Klein's work.
Last week, Mr. Klein responded to a critical Web log post by the vice president of the Washington, D.C.-based Thomas B. Fordham Foundation think tank, Michael Petrilli, by personally telephoning Mr. Petrilli to express "his strong disagreement," Mr. Petrilli wrote in a follow-up blog post.
The vice chancellor of the New York State Board of Regents, Merryl Tisch, said that this school year will be about proving that the city schools truly are improving, though increases on national tests have been more elusive than on state tests.
"We've got to get the state and city results jiving with the national results," Ms. Tisch said. "That's really very, very key here. If we continue to have NAEP results and state results moving in divergent directions, I think people will start to question the credibility of our gains."
She said that the achievement gap between racial groups also must close. "African-American males and the Latino performance has been disappointing, and I think that if we cannot show significant improvement in terms of closing that gap, then I think people will become very frustrated," she said.
Other people said the specific results of this administration should not affect the debate on mayoral control.
"This should be a debate about governance, not about the personalities, or even the performance of Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein," the executive director of the lobbying group Democrats for Education Reform, Joseph Williams, said. "It's about the next mayor and the next chancellor, and whether they're going to be held accountable the same way."
Assemblyman Alan Maisel of Brooklyn, who supports revising mayoral control, said of his fellow legislators, "They have made up their mind that there have to be adjustments to mayoral control. Even a perfect school year is not going to change people's opinions on that."