Joel Klein on ‘The Failure of American Schools’ in The Atlantic

Joel Klein, the prosecutor who took on the software giant Microsoft, writes in The Atlantic about his lessons learned during his eight years as chancellor of New York City's school system, the nation's largest. His key pain points: "feckless politicians, recalcitrant unions, mediocre teachers, and other enduring obstacles to school reform."

For me, Klein's spot on when he explains the net effect: "The net effect is that we're rapidly moving toward two Americas—a wealthy elite, and an increasingly large underclass that lacks the skills to succeed." He also echoes others in the education realm: the Kafkaesque system is run for the adults. He even includes the well-known quote from UFT's late, iconic head Albert Shanker: "When schoolchildren start paying union dues, that's when I'll start representing the interests of schoolchildren." (In fairness to Mister Shanker, Klein also quotes him from 1993 as saying that "The key is that unless there is accountability, we will never get the right system. As long as there are no consequences if kids or adults don't perform, as long as the discussion is not about education and student outcomes, then we're playing a game as to who has the power." In his 1993 Pew Forum speech, Shanker also said "we are at the point that the auto industry was at a few years ago. They could see they were losing market share every year and still not believe that it really had anything to do with the quality of the product...."

Also, Klein mentions Michelle Rhee for making similar noises as he, and indeed their views are quite similar (and, no doubt, equally controversial and pretty much at odds with anything from Diane Ravitch). I actually think Klein is way wrong in saying "Collaboration is the elixir of the status-quo crowd." Instead, I think there needs to be way more collaboration. The education realm is way too insular for societal success. But I do think's on to something with the idea that we need to do three key things: rebuild the entire K–12 system, attract top teachers and reward them accordingly, and rethink the use of technology in instruction.

Interesting stats pulled straight from Klein's article:

• "Our high-school graduation rate continues to hover just shy of 70 percent, according to a 2010 report by the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center, and many of those students who do graduate aren't prepared for college.
  
  
• "ACT, the respected national organization that administers college-admissions tests, recently found that 76 percent of our high-school graduates 'were not adequately prepared academically for first-year college courses.'"
  
  
• "From 1960 to 1980, our supply of college graduates increased at almost 4 percent a year; since then, the increase has been about half as fast."
  
  
• "The two national unions—the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association—together have some 4.7 million members, who pay hundreds of millions of dollars in national, state, and local dues, much of which is funneled to political causes. Teachers unions consistently rank among the top spenders on politics."
  
  
• "Sure, money, a stable family, and strong values typically make educating a child easier. But we also now know that, keeping those things constant, we can get dramatically different outcomes with the same kid, based on his or her education. Texas and California, for example, have very similar demographics. Nevertheless, even though Texas spends slightly less per pupil than does California, it outperforms California on all four national tests, across demographic groups. The gap is around a year's worth of learning. That's big. And the gaps are even bigger when we compare similar demographic groups in large urban districts. Low-income black students in Boston or New York, for example, are several years ahead of those in Detroit or Los Angeles on the national exams."
  
  
• "McKinsey estimates that the benefits of bringing our educational levels up to those of the highest-performing countries would have raised our gross domestic product by about $2 trillion in 2008. By the same token, every year we fail to close that gap is like living with the equivalent of a permanent national recession."

Sources: The Atlantic, Wikipedia (Klein image)