Joel Klein, Survivor
This week marks the fifth-year anniversary of Joel Klein's becoming chancellor for the city's public schools, a job that's been a revolving door for most of his predecessors.
Asked in an interview about his level of satisfaction about what's been accomplished, he gave himself a mixed report card.
“If you mean satisfied in terms of where I think we need to get to, the answer is no,” he said. “There is a lot more that we need to do. If you mean satisfied looking back over five years, the answer is yes.”
Feel free to weigh in here with your own assessments.
Joel Klein is a turtle.
bloomberg has yet to hold any of his incompetent commissioners accountable for anything. Instead he focuses on clerks taking cigarette breaks and having solitaire on their computer screens, what a tough guy, what an clueless cowardly a**hole.
The high school dropout rate has gone up (see the June 2006 issue of Education Week, a kind of trade mag for educators) under klein and bloomberg. 3 re-organizations in 5 years? If this were the private sector they'd have been fired a long time ago. This brings me to the next point, whose idiotic idea was it to allow a lawyer without any background in education to get approval to run the nation's largest school system?Time to get a law passed to limit the terms of the State Regents to be allowed only term and to permit the governor and/or legislature to remove them for incompetence(like giving klein a waiver.) He's done a lousy job,(eg February bus route changes)and he and the mayor bring in people who fail at very high salaries and don't fire them when they screw up(see Arons and Srinivasan). Instead they are kept on so they can qualify for fat pensions and benefits at taxpayer expense and their replacements come with their own conflicting issues and lack of qualifications other than being lawyers.bloomberg has made a shambles of the public school system in his attempt to privatize public education and drive taxpayer money into Wall st. and the private sector.Joel Klein did a lousy job at Bertlesman and was just about to be thrown out from that organization until bloomberg got some crazy idea to hire this incompetent and the moronic Regents granted a waiver for someone without any background.The NYC public school system/plantation is a very racist organization as demonstrated by klein and bloomberg in the removal of an Arab American educator because of her religion and putting in her place a radical Jew.Wow! what a slap in the face to the growing Arab and Muslim community in NYC and the rest of the country.
ACS commissioner Mattingly, a failure, bloomberg /Weinschall at the helm of one of the biggest maritime disasters in NYC history, all have their jobs or have moved onto other high paying govt. positions.I could go on and on, but you get the idea.bloomberg is a failure as a mayor and can't hold accountable the failures he's brought into city govt. like klein,et al.