Meet the new Boss?

Today's news of the departure of Joel Klein from his position as New York City Schools Chancellor has sparked a lot of discussion, much of it expressing the sentiment "good riddance."  News that the his replacement Cathleen Black is even more of a charter-school ideologue than Klein and even less of an educator is already stirring concern.  As a new parent in the system, I don't really have enough direct experience to judge Klein, but I do find the subject quite interesting.  Now that I have a substantial stake in Black's success, I plan on keeping a close eye on her.

Klein has been an odd mix of controversial and disliked among people with a lot of direct contact with the system (teachers, parents, students) and lionized by the movers and shakers around town.  I think it's very tough to say what his net impact was.

His obsession with testing has demoralized teachers, student's and parents alike, and has proven to be a fraud both in concept and execution.  School choice has created opportunities, and made many parents happy, but has also sucked energy and money away from the core mission of making plain old public schools better, and injected a very counterproductive level of complexity into the process of figuring out where to send your kid to school.  His relationship with teachers is basically completely poisoned, and he is as hated among teachers and principals as any of his predecessors.

At the same time, though, I think the system is actually better (even if not measurably so) than it was before in some important ways.  There's more middle class buy-in, a much stronger sense that this is our school system and we're going to do what it takes to make it work for our kids.  It's in better physical shape than in many many years.  The sense that public schools are dangerous places you wouldn't dare send your kids is pretty much gone.  It may be very complicated to navigate the system, but there is a general sense that you'll be able to find a place for your kid.  Despite the demoralizing nature of being forced to teach to the test, there seem to be a lot of dedicated, capable teachers and principals.  This is all quite different from a decade ago.

Trying to figure out how much credit to give Klein for this reminds me of the debates over how much of a difference Giuliani really made in the resurgence of New York.  To people who worked in government, Giuliani was an unqualified disaster -- incompetent, surrounded by sycophants, thieves, and psychos, the source of an endless stream of bad ideas that only failed to cripple New York because city workers did their best to ignore them.  Yet people believed he turned the city around in the same way that so many people believe Klein did.  This belief has a bit of the character of a self fulfilling prophecy.

People believe he's good and support him. This support leads to some good things happening (maybe even despite his incompetence and wrongheadedness).  Maybe as a matter of cause, or maybe by coincidence, the middle class trickles back into the system from the burbs and the private schools, and we reach a tipping point.  It's now OK to send your kid to the plain old public school, or there's a G&T program, or a "school of choice" that works for you.  Then schools are more widely perceived as being good because they now have more good kids in them.  After all, more than teachers, or facilities, or curricula, or even funding, what makes a school perform is having students who come from backgrounds that prepare them to perform.  

So while some people express pessimism (or optimism) about the fate of the system because a particular leader is coming/going/staying, I tend to view the system as more dependent on grass roots.  In the end, the schools have gotten "better" because we have decided to stick with them, in a way many or our parents didn't, in much the same way the  City as a whole got better.  Based on what I've read of Cathleen Black, I think it highly unlikely that she has any gifts that will make a real positive difference in managing the schools.  It then becomes a matter of whether she can do no harm, and hold onto the middle class loyalty that has been building over the last decade or so.