Konfusing Klein
I have long been skeptical of Mr. Joel I. Klein’s qualifications for his leadership of the New York City school system, and certainly of his motives in doing so. In what seems to be a spreading epidemic, complete control of the school system was taken away from elected community school boards and usurped by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who delegated the responsibility to Klein, a few years. Since then, the schools have been run like a business that are concerned with improving the bottom line, and raising text scores, not with educating all students.
It seems Klein himself cannot even keep the goals straight as evidenced by his very confused, or confusing, statements in yesterday’s NY Times articles, “A’s or B’s Given to Most City Schools”. This article states that Klein was very pleased that so many of the schools received high marks while also claiming that the schools still have “a lot of improvement in front of them.” Klein supports the rather vague and “blunt” grading system of assigning letter grades to schools, but urges parents to “dig deeper” and actually pay attention to why schools were assigned such grades – which is about as likely as encouraging teachers to teach based on the interests of their students and not on what will be on the state exam.
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