One mother's letter to Obama

There have been many eloquent emails sent and petitions signed in the past few days, warning Barack Obama against hiring Joel Klein as Secretary of Education, ever since his name was first floated as a possible appointment.

See for example, this petition, which as of this morning had been signed by over 2500 parents and educators nationwide, and this petition, signed by over 2000 more, as well as the eloquent comments posted to our blog about this issue.

Even the national media has finally picked up on the fact that Joel Klein is not universally adored among NYC parents; see this excerpt from today’s US News and World report:

Teachers and parents, however, have complained about his management style, saying he is too brash and unresponsive to their concerns. Is the country ready for his reformist agenda or would he demand too much, too fast without enough support from key players?

We just received a copy of the following letter to Obama, from an Upper West side mom, and wanted to share it with you. You can send a letter to the President-Elect's website at http://www.change.gov/yourvision

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Dear President-Elect Obama,

I am a New York City public school parent. My son is a fourth-grader at a public school on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. I understand that New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein is rumored to be one of your choices for Secretary of Education. In my view, Chancellor Klein is a truly abominable choice for this position and I feel compelled to speak out. New York City public school children and their families have suffered under his authority and it would be a shame for the country’s children to similarly suffer.

By far, Chancellor Klein’s most egregious transgression relates to the serious overcrowding of New York City public schools.

During Chancellor Klein’s tenure, Manhattan has experienced a real estate boom. Numerous new residential buildings have been built but Chancellor Klein has not ensured that there is adequate public school space for the growth this has brought to many neighborhoods. The Office of the NYC Comptroller, William J. Thompson, Jr. issued a report in May, 2008 entitled, “Growing Pains: Reforming Department of Education Capital Planning to Keep Pace with New York City’s Residential Construction.” Tts opening sentence is this: “The capital planning process for public schools in New York City is broken.”

It goes on to detail numerous Department of Education failures in everything from flawed enrollment projections to the fact that capacity needs are understated and are “not sufficiently forward-thinking or responsive to changing neighborhoods”.

In April, 2008, Manhattan Borough President Scott M. Stringer released a report entitled, “Crowded Out”, a borough-wide analysis of residential development and its relationship to school capacity. In a press release dated September 5, 2008 discussing the report, Stringer says, “While the Department of Education continues to announce the opening of schools – either new or replacement facilities – it is not keeping up with the pace of new development, and with the commitment New York families are making to stay in the city and use their neighborhood public schools.”

What does this mean for New York City public school children on a daily basis? Let’s take my son’s school as an example. In the last few years, we lost our lower-grades art classroom. Lower-grade (K-2) children now have art in a cramped, windowless former teacher’s lounge. We have also lost both our lower-grades and upper-grades (3-5) music classrooms. Our music teachers carry equipment, instruments, music, etc. from classroom to classroom. We also lost our computer room. The computer teachers travel from classroom to classroom with 25 laptops in tow. Many times, half of the computer period is taken up just setting up the computers at the children’s desks and then putting them away.

I applaud our teachers for making the necessary sacrifices and for doing their best under the circumstances but teachers shouldn’t have to work in these conditions and children shouldn’t have to learn in these conditions. With the loss of these classrooms, outside of lunch and recess, our children now leave their classrooms only twice a week: once for gym and once for art. There is a natural benefit to some physical movement between classrooms during the day but our children don’t have that option. Besides classroom issues, there are numerous teachers who work out of closets. We also have some children with no choice but to have lunch at 10:30am because of the number of classes our cafeteria must accommodate.

Because of Chancellor Klein’s failure to make certain that adequate space exists to meet the demand for public school, the conditions under which many New York City children now attend school are unacceptable. As the highest-ranking education official in the city, Chancellor Klein ultimately must bear responsibility for the current and extremely serious overcrowding affecting thousands of public school students.

Additionally during Chancellor Klein’s tenure, an inordinate focus has been placed on standardized testing, test scores and test preparation. All children in grades three through eight are subjected to multiple standardized tests in a variety of subjects.

Test scores affect our school’s ‘report card’, compensation for our principals and teachers and our school’s funding. I recently learned that my son’s class would have no publishing parties (celebrations of the children’s writing pieces to which parents and other family members are invited typically held several times throughout the school year) and no field trips with the exception of an hour-long museum trip for the first five months of the school year because upcoming testing and the preparation for those tests requires too much time.

Chancellor Klein’s excessive emphasis on testing is at odds with essentially all other partners in a child’s education: parents, the children themselves, teachers, administrators. Yet the emphasis continues so that now we see the Department of Education instituting standardized testing for kindergartners! Please see a New York Times article discussing results of a survey in which 85% of New York City public school teachers disagree with the statement that the Chancellor’s emphasis on testing had improved education in their schools.

Can our country really afford to have 85% of its teachers dissatisfied with how the Secretary of Education leads?

Finally, Chancellor Klein has consistently conducted himself in an authoritarian fashion. Parents, in particular, have repeatedly been disenfranchised and diminished. While great show is made of soliciting input from parents, teachers and administrators, in fact, it is just that . . .show. Parents realize that their input means little in the eyes of the Department of Education, as run by Chancellor Klein.Chancellor Klein’s poor performance in his role as highest-ranking education official in New York City is likely due to the fact that he is not an educator. He is an attorney. Education needs a human touch. I believe that successfully educating our nation’s children requires a thoughtful and highly-functional partnership between administrators, teachers and parents. In New York City, Chancellor Klein has proven that he is incapable of being such a partner.

Sincerely,

Rochelle Hestnas

Klein Out of Running as Ed Sec; Accepts Overseas Post

November 11, 2008 (GBN News): There has been a great deal of speculation over the possibility that President-elect Barack Obama may be considering NY City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein for the post of Secretary of Education. However, GBN News has learned exclusively that Mr. Klein has instead opted to accept an equivalent position under President Emomali Rakhmon of Tajikistan.

According to sources close to the Chancellor, while the position of Education Secretary initially sounded appealing to him, Mr. Klein began to have reservations as he came to realize that the President-elect’s policies would constrain him from carrying out the sort of reforms that he has instituted in New York. The Chancellor was said to feel that his reforms could more likely be carried out on a national level under a leader such as Mr. Rakhmon, who is known for ruthlessly enforcing idiosyncratic decrees, and whose election was “widely dismissed as a farce”. Ironically, back in 2007 the Tajik strongman was tapped to swap positions with Chancellor Klein, but the move was derailed when riots swept Tajikistan in protest.

The Chancellor apparently began having second thoughts about the Cabinet position when he heard of Mr. Obama’s plan to close the US terrorist detention camp at Guantanamo Bay. Mr. Klein has maintained similar facilities, popularly known as “rubber rooms”, in NY City, where teachers are held each school day, sometimes for years, without knowing the charges against them. The Chancellor had reportedly anticipated that as Education Secretary, he would have use of Guantanamo Bay as a sort of national “rubber room” to intern recalcitrant teachers. Not only would the Guantanamo closing be a major blow to the Chancellor’s plans, but it made him wonder if perhaps Mr. Obama’s other education policies might also be impediments to Mr. Klein’s concept of national education reform.

Mr. Klein was then said to have looked at Mr. Obama’s campaign website to read his ideas about education. What he found were statements like, “Obama and Biden believe teachers should not be forced to spend the academic year preparing students to fill in bubbles on standardized tests,” and “Obama and Biden will also improve NCLB's accountability system so that we are supporting schools that need improvement, rather than punishing them.”

As the Chancellor read on, he became more and more convinced that Mr. Rakhmon’s policies, which like those of Chancellor Klein and Mayor Bloomberg include a ban on cell phones in schools, are far more compatible with his than Mr. Obama’s. And when Mr. Rakhmon assured him that, “We know how to deal with ‘entrenched interests’ like parents and teachers”; and “When we say ‘drill and kill’, they know we we really mean it”, Mr. Klein decided that Tajikistan was the place to truly make his mark on education reform.

Our letters to Obama about Joel Klein

Now that the New York Times blog has excerpted a few lines (and none of the substantive critique) from my letter about why President-elect Obama should not appoint Joel Klein as US Secretary of Education, I figure I ought to post the letter in full on our own blog.

On Friday, I was asked to elicit advice from NYC parents to Obama for The Nation magazine, which was supposedly working on an article about this issue. I thought this was a good opportunity to get some media attention to the disdain and horror that many NYC parents feel about the prospect of Joel Klein running the US Department of Education. Though I still haven't heard from the Nation, in the process I have received hundreds of passionate letters from parents and teachers who vehemently oppose this appointment, based upon Klein's sorry record here in NYC -- and one email from a parent who praised him.

I suppose I should also respond to the comments of David Cantor, the DOE spokesperson, who is quoted in the NY Times as follows:

The chancellor has spent the last six years building a school system focused on the needs of kids. Along the way he’s angered adults with entrenched interests in policies that have never worked. That’s a trade he’ll make every time.

I actually haven't noticed that this Chancellor has ever tried reducing class size or addressing the other needs of NYC children to receive a decent, well-rounded education but instead has lurched from one faddish theory to another in his attempt to make it look like he is improving our schools. When he's been unsuccessful at accomplishing this goal, he has tried to manipulate the statistics to prove otherwise. But it is true that he has angered adults -- teachers and parents alike-- who have a real interest in trying to ensure that our schools provide a real opportunity to learn.

Anyway, my letter follows -- please everyone, add your own recommendations to Obama in the comments section!
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The Department of Education under Joel Klein has been run like a ruthless dictatorship – with no input from parents or educators, and no thought of how the policies he has imposed on our schools have been destructive to our children and their futures.

He has consistently ignored the crisis of overcrowding in our schools, that in many neighborhoods has gotten worse because of rampant residential development, as well as a result of his insistence to insert hundreds of new charter schools and small schools into existing, overcrowded school buildings. In a recent survey, half of all principals say that the overcrowding creates unsafe conditions for students or staff, 29% said that lunch starts at 10:30 AM or earlier, 25% said that they have lost their art or music rooms in recent years, and 18% said they had classrooms with no windows. Thousands of children are being given special services in hallways or in closets.

He has put almost no effort in building new schools, and under this administration, twice as many new seats have been created in new stadiums than schools. The city’s investment in school construction as a percent of its total capital spending is at an historic low, and will drop even more precipitously in the future, if the DOE’s proposed school capital plan goes through.

Joel Klein has refused to reduce class size, despite repeated audits and reports from the State Comptroller’s office and the State Education Department showing how under his administration, hundreds of millions of state dollars meant to provide smaller classes to NYC students have been misused. As a result, 86% of NYC principals in a recent survey have said they are unable to provide a quality education because of excessive class sizes.

Similarly, he has argued that even under Mayoral control, the Department of Education is not subject to city law, and thus he continues to defy laws passed by the City Council over the Mayor’s veto, requiring him to take measures against bias crimes and bullying in schools, to allow students to bring cell phones to school, and to obey the recycling laws required of every household and business in NYC.

The Chancellor has moved to eliminate the authority of school leadership teams –made up of half parents, half staff – to have decision-making authority over school budgets, contrary to the state law that created these teams. He has continued to shut out parents from having any input whatsoever, at the school, district, or citywide level.

He has spent literally hundreds of millions of dollars on no-bid contracts, and rather than decreasing the bureaucracy, the number of highly paid bureaucrats at Tweed continues to grow --- most of whom have no background in education. To counter a recent article by a Daily News reporter pointing out the personal wealth of many of the top education officials, who are former business executives and corporate consultants, the DOE press office responded in defense that two out of twenty of Klein’s top advisers were long-term educators. (This article was killed in the middle of the night, and removed from the Daily News website after complaints from the DOE; but we posted a copy of it on our blog here.)

The only educational philosophy of those running the system is based on trying to improve standardized test results, no matter how much cheating and test prep that involves. Whatever the rise in state test scores that has resulted is not matched by improvements in the more reliable national assessments called the NAEPs. In fact, NYC was 11^th out of 12 urban school districts in terms of its gains in the NAEPs over the course of this administration, and there has been no closing of the achievement gap in any subject tested.

Indeed, Joel Klein’s insistence on basing all decisions on high-stakes tests has led to racial disparities growing in many areas – with far fewer children of color admitted to gifted programs and to our selective high schools, and a declining number of Black and Hispanic teachers in our teaching force.

In short, he has been a disaster for our schools, and Barack Obama should be forewarned not to name him to any position of authority in his administration – as much as we would like to get rid of him!

Mr. Klein goes to Washington? How would you feel?

In today’s Washington Post, there is an article that says Joel Klein is a possibility for Sec. of Education in an Obama administration:

“Among those under consideration who would mark a departure from the tradition of rewarding loyalists and party leaders include New York City Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein for education secretary and retired Marine Corps commandant Jim Jones for national security adviser. Both are viewed as non-ideological and have the potential to rankle liberal Democrats.”

There’s a much longer list of possible candidates for the job in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education, that includes at three sitting governors, Janet Napolitano, of Arizona, Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas, and Timothy Kaine of Virginia, as well as the former Gov. of North Carolina, James B. Hunt Jr. None of them would be as controversial – and (contrary to the above assertion) as rigidly ideological -- as Joel Klein.

What do you think – which would be worse? Having Joel Klein become the Secretary of Education, or being stuck with him remaining as the NYC Chancellor? And if he left, who would be likely to replace him? Chris Cerf?

(image thanks to Eduwonkette.)