Joel Klein, lousy manager from the beginning to the end

See this article in Capital about what a bad manager Joel Klein was...with lots of stories of screaming fights at Tweed.

It might make good gossip, but anyone paying any attention to our schools has known for a long time that Klein was a terrible manager, though the mainstream media seems to have paid little attention before now. The theory floated in the article is that everything was better before Kristen Kane left in 2007.

When [Kane] she left in 2007, Klein filled her position of chief operating officer, but no one took over her managerial responsibilities and the department suffered for it, a former official said.

“There really never was any high-level management coming out of Joel’s office without her, and certainly, she was never replaced,” said a former DOE official.

(Photo Anagnostopoulos replaced Kane as COO, though strangely, her name is never mentioned in the article. Photo is also the only top level DOE official to have quit, at least so far, since Cathie Black's appointment was announced, and clearly, someone wants to make her the scapegoat.)

Yet the reality is that Klein made one management blunder after another, long before Kane left. As soon as he dissolved the school districts, supposedly to save money but really to grab more power for himself, the whole thing fell apart.

Those of us who were around in the early years still remember the huge budget overruns at DOE, the whole special education mess when kids went two years without referrals and services, the Diana Lam horror show, the reading curriculum fiasco, and don't forget the bus route reorganization that left kids having to cross highways and shivering in the street in the middle of winter. This very visible indication of Klein's heedless mismanagement took place in February 2007 -- nearly a full year before Kane resigned in December 2007.

In fact, Klein mismanaged the department consistently from the moment he stepped into the job till the moment he left. For those whose memory is short or weren't there at the time, they really should read our book, NYC Schools under Bloomberg and Klein.

The funniest moment of the more recent Cathie Black brouhaha was when Kathy Wylde, head of the NYC Partnership and inveterate Joel Klein booster, defended the appointment by saying,

“Many members of the school community have spent the last several years complaining about how badly managed the school system was,” Ms. Wylde said. “If anything else, this shows the mayor was listening, and he went after a manager.”

Of course, she had never admitted this publicly before.

Public Advocate’s Commission on School Governance Report Hugely Disappointing

Mayor Bloomberg’s reaction in the NY Daily News to Thursday’s much-anticipated Commission on School Governance Report from the NYC Public Advocate’s Office was, predictably, haughtily dismissive. “Just a political thing,” he commented, as if the steady stream of press releases and television ads emanating from the Tweed public relations machine was something far more noble and pure. Ever on the alert for the telling metaphor, Mayoral supporter Kathryn Wylde threatened the dangers of ANY legislative changes in the Mayoral control law by hearkening back in one fell swoop to Condoleeza Rice's smoking gun/mushroom cloud and Hillary Clinton's doomsday, 3:00 a.m. call on the dreaded red telephone: "Who knows what can happen in the middle of the night in Albany." Yes, that's right, NYC public school parents: Be afraid, be VERY afraid.

The Mayor and his mouthpieces have little reason to complain, however. Instead of a badly-needed call for action and meaningful change, the Commission offered up a timid program of tweaking around the edges that would leave governance of the public school system virtually unchanged: the Mayor and Chancellor in full and unfettered control, accountable and answerable to no one, with parents and children still on the outside, looking in.

Given Ms. Gotbaum’s past criticisms of the DOE under Mayoral control, her Commission’s 48-page School Governance Report is an astonishing disappointment. The document is larded with typographical errors, overly devoted to background material on its own workings and theories of school governance, and devoid of any genuine assessment of the last five years of Mayoral control. Far worse, however, the report offers up recommendations that run from the non-relevant-to-governance obvious (follow City Charter guidelines on procurement of services, a reference to the DOE’s 100 million dollar plethora of no-bid contracts) to the blandly ineffectual (please make the CDEC’s and SLT’s more effective and give parents more opportunities for meaningful input!) to the maintenance of a barely modified status quo in the actual governance structure.

In essence, the Commission recommended retention of Mayoral control under the theoretically watchful eye of the Panel for Education Policy (PEP). That oversight body would continue to have 13 members, with eight still named by the Mayor and one each named by the Borough Presidents. The “bold” changes would be to give members fixed four-year terms corresponding to the terms of their naming authorities -- thereby ostensibly increasing their independence by immunizing them from sudden removal – and removing Chancellor Klein from Panel Chair and voting member to non-voting, ex officio participant. Under such a scheme, the Mayor still retains 61.5% control (8 of 13) of those named to PEP and purse-string control over most of the rest.

As we have seen over the past few years, the Borough President’s representatives (with the sole exception of Manhattan BP Scott Stringer’s representation by Patrick Sullivan) have been no more independent in their behavior or voting records than have been the Mayor’s hand-picked representatives. PEP has consistently looked more like a dozen rubber stamps wearing business suits, or a Jesus and his twelve disciples following in lockstep (Mr. Sullivan the doubting and often denying 13th), than an independent oversight and decision-making body. The Commission’s report does nothing to change this situation and leaves the Mayor’s and Chancellor’s current dictatorial powers to manipulate the public school system according to their whims and political needs virtually untouched.

To its credit, the Commission recommends reinstating the 32 school district offices to bring the DOE back closer to the local community level. It also offers a vaguely worded and rather weak-kneed suggestion that the Independent Budget Office (IBO) be given “explicit responsibility to report on the performance of the Department of Education.” The IBO offers hope for at least occasional independent evaluation and reporting, but even this recommendation falls far short of honest data auditing and investigative analysis.

The bottom line here is simple but alarming. Public school parents who have looked to the Public Advocate as one of their critical voices on NYC educational policy and governance have been dealt a harsh body blow. The Commission on School Governance Report is a clarion call for the status quo, long on rose-colored vision and short on specifics or real change. Under the governance system proposed in the Commission’s report, parents remain standing powerless on the outside, their voices barely heard and, even when heard, inevitably ignored or condescendingly dismissed as just so much carping by a disgruntled few.

In the coming days, I will have much more to say about the assumptions underlying two key aspects of the Commission’s report: Mayoral accountability and public participation.

Diane Ravitch emerges victorious against the billionaire bully

Though at first it seemed shocking that the administration would try to stamp out dissent by taping Diane Ravitch at speaking events, developing the sort of research file on her that candidates create on their opponents, and then having Kathy Wylde of the NYC Partnership try to smear her in an oped in the NY Post. In retrospect perhaps it’s not surprising at all.

Bloomberg and Klein run their respective fiefdoms as though they're involved in a non-stop political campaign. Many of the top officials in the Mayor's cabinet are PR people rather than policy experts – including most of his deputy Mayors. And as we know, Klein has the most extensive -- and expensive --PR staff in city government, short of the Mayor.

And while both of them may pretend that they believe in competition, clearly they only allow this notion to prevail when it means leaving schools, and students, to succeed or fail on their own, without throwing them a lifeline. When it comes to their own turf, they refuse to allow the sort of free exchange and expression that real democracy depends upon.

As Leo Casey writes in Edwize: “It seems that for some, markets should rule all education — except for the free marketplace of ideas. There, their monopoly must go unquestioned and uncriticized.”

Remember how Bloomberg won office in the first place– not on his qualifications or political experience, which were nil, but because he was able to use his own personal fortune to ruthlessly dominate the airwaves? In 2001, he spent a record $71 million; even though early in the campaign, he himself said that spending more than $30 million would "look obscene." He went on to spend more than twice that amount.

Four years later, even though he was the heavy favorite in the race, he broke his own record --- spending $78 million, more than any other nonpresidential campaign –nearly ten times as much as his opponent, Freddy Ferrer. During the 10 days before the election, he spent $12 million, mostly for television, radio and newspaper advertising.

Remember how he fired three of his appointees on the Panel on Educational Policy, the day of the vote about third grade retention? The man uses brute force when he cannot persuade. Never does he stop to think that perhaps he might be wrong. The absolute power that he wields when it comes to our schools is not enough -- he also feels that he should own public opinion as well.

Now, whether its our taxpayer money going to develop dossiers against dissenters, or persuading charities that were originally set up to help the public schools (the Fund for Public Schools) to spend millions more to burnish his image by spreading disinformation, precious resources that should have been devoted towards improving education for our kids is being diverted – and perverted – into his narrow political ends.

Only in this case, the good guy won, and rather than besmirching Diane’s reputation, the administration has sullied their own . No one seems to have told these bullies that you don’t treat a national treasure like Diane as you would a political foe.

Commentators of every political stripe have come out in her defense. Not that she needed them. First, you must read Diane’s eloquent response in the NY Post.

Also, the Daily Kos, Steve Koss in our own blog; Sol Stern of the Manhattan Institute, the National Review, Eduwonkette, Education Notes, and Gotham Gazette : all of which decry Tweed's underhanded tactics to suppress dissent.

The only person not in his payroll of the Mayor who seems to support the administration is Whitney Tilson, former hedge fund manager and charter school proponent.

Last but not least, check out one of my favorites -- The Neighborhood Retail Alliance:

The real issue here, and its one that we've commented on before, is the way in which the DOE acts more like the DOD in its ruthless approach to dissent. …It is, as Ravitch, Sol Stern and Andrew Wolf have all pointed out, the way that an agency behaves when it has a good deal to hide. It is an agency that will go to great lengths to do bureaucratic sleight-of-hands, and when that doesn't work on seasoned educational experts, the agency will bring out corporate toadies to do ghost-written character assassination.

Thanks to David Bellel for the illustration. Yes, that’s Kathy Wylde down for the count.