Back in July 2002, when Joel Klein was named New York’s new schools chan cellor, this page wrote: “Here’s hoping he performs magic. The city requires nothing less.”
Today, as Klein leaves office to assume a senior position at News Corp. (which publishes The Post), it can fairly be said that he has earned his wizard’s wand.
Did he totally turn the city’s dysfunctional school system around?
Of course not.
But as the academic dean at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education recently wrote, under Klein, New York’s schools have shown “the most dramatic and thoughtful set of large-scale reforms going on anywhere in the country.”
How did he accomplish this? First and foremost was the notion of personal accountability.
Klein took office as the personal choice of Mike Bloomberg, who had just wrested control of the schools from one of the most moss-backed and intransigent bureaucracies in New York history.
And that’s saying something.
From the outset, parents knew who should — and would — be held responsible for continuing failure.
Secondly, he refused to accept what was then the conventional wisdom of the education establishment. As he put it, the “deep belief that there’s only so much you can do, particularly for high-poverty kids. . . . [that] there’s only so much education you can do.”
“It’s a lot harder to say we graduated 45 percent of our kids because we blew it, we didn’t do the job that we needed to do,” he added. “That kind of ownership is a major kind of transformation.”
And he wasn’t shy, either about challenging convention or taking on the educracy’s sacred cows — the unions and the pols who do their bidding.
Or the communities that tried to resist his insistence on shutting down large, failing neighborhood schools and replacing them with smaller ones.
The result was a mushrooming of school choice, including scores of new charter schools, which he calls “a powerful stimulus to reform.”
Under Klein, graduation rates have significantly improved — as has the number of graduates going on to college. And social promotion is no longer accepted procedure.
Teachers and administrators also are facing new accountability, with student achievement being factored into tenure decisions.
Yet despite the controversy over dumbed-down tests, there is no question that student achievement has improved markedly.
Not enough, to be sure.
But far better than most people probably expected when Joel Klein first took office.
“My job was to change the school system,” he said in a recent interview. “I think we did that . . . at an unprecedented level in the country.”
Indeed he did.