By Sally Goldenberg and Yova Gonen
(From New York Post, November 10, 2010)
Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, a hard-charging innovator who brought unprecedented national attention to the city as a model for urban public-school reform, shocked the education world yesterday by announcing his resignation.
He will be replaced by Cathie Black, a publishing-world powerhouse who has headed Hearst Magazines for the past 15 years and who Mayor Bloomberg said was selected largely for her managerial skills.
Like Klein when he was appointed to run the country’s largest schools system back in 2002, Black will take the helm of an operation with a $23 billion budget, 1.1 million students and 135,000 employees having had almost no experience in education.
She will become the city’s first female schools chancellor when she takes over sometime around the new year.
Klein, who has been heralded as an educational reformer, said he is taking a position as an executive vice president at News Corp., the parent company of The Post.
“Thank you for giving me the best job I’ve ever had,” Klein told Bloomberg at a press conference at City Hall yesterday.
To the city’s public-school parents, Klein added, “Being responsible for educating your children has been both daunting and humbling. I want you to know, I gave it my all.”
Klein, 64, took over a schools system that was by all accounts dysfunctional and that had seen a revolving door of chancellors attempt, and for the most part fail, to make lasting improvements.
Hand-in-hand with Bloomberg — the first mayor to have direct control over the city’s public schools — Klein set about restructuring not just the chaotic organization of the system but also its defeatist culture.
Among the initiatives with which he targeted his so-called three pillars of school reform — leadership, empowerment and accountability — Klein:
* Assigned schools A through F letter grades and closed schools that had consistently received poor grades.
* Created a hospitable environment in which more than 125 charter schools could flourish, including by providing them with free public building space.
* Battled to eradicate longstanding teachers-union protections, such as tenure, seniority rights and lockstep pay, which he believed benefited educators, but not students.
* Handed much of the budget and educational decision-making power to schools, rather than ruling from a central bureaucracy.
During his tenure, Klein oversaw a 15-percentage-point increase in graduation rates, according to the city’s calculations. It now stands at 63 percent, according to a new methodology.
Klein also oversaw steady gains in elementary- and middle-school math and reading test scores.
“He really was and is a transformative leader,” said Sy Fliegel, a former educator and current director of the Center for Educational Innovation-Public Education Association.
“His reorganization and what he’s doing now is a major innovative change, because I always thought schools were the center of change — and that’s where he’s putting the power.”
But Klein also took his fair share of punches throughout his tenure — often after alienating parents and when butting heads with the leaders of the powerful teachers union.
Many parents and teachers have been fuming for years over what they see as Klein’s reliance on test scores — which are used to decide which students to hold back, which teachers to give tenure to, and which schools to close.
“Chancellor Klein’s tenure has been controversial, and even divisive, in part because he never figured out how to work effectively with parents,” said Zakiyah Ansari, a parent organizer for the Alliance for Quality Education.
But others say that Klein brought a tidal wave of positive change to the city — and that he was particularly effective at recruiting talented teachers and principals.
“Joel Klein built an incredible base in his term, and now it is up to the rest of us to build on that base and continue the push to save public education from itself,” said Joe Williams, director of Democrats for Education Reform.
sgoldenberg@nypost.com