The Legacy of Joel Klein: Part One
A Four-part Series Assessing His Accomplishments: PART ONE
by Norm Fruchter
“We played big and we got big results,” Joel Klein told the NYC Education Reform Retrospective conference on November 10th, in a talk summing up his administration’s accomplishments after 8 1/2 years as Schools Chancellor. During those years he radically transformed the city school system. The 40-year-old foundations of decentralization, the citywide school board and the 32 elected community school boards and their appointed superintendents, are gone. The privileges of teacher seniority are much reduced; teacher hiring decisions (when not restricted by a hiring freeze) are now primarily a free-market school-level function. The high school landscape has been radically altered.
Since 2002, some 20 large, poorly performing high schools have been closed, some 200 new small high schools have been created, and the high school admissions/assignment process has been revised to expand student choice. More than 100 charter schools are currently operating in the city, and 100 more are being planned. The teaching force has been bolstered by a significant percentage of new teachers from non-traditional sources, and
