Latest News and Comment from Education

Friday, December 7, 2012

Jersey Jazzman: Chris Christie: Divisive Hypocrite

Jersey Jazzman: Chris Christie: Divisive Hypocrite:


Chris Christie: Divisive Hypocrite



(9:37) When you're trying to narrow people into corner, Jon, and call them names, it makes it much harder to get them to the table and compromise. And that's what we're supposed to be doing. People elected us to get things done, not to bloviate. 

Pre-fleece Chris Christie:
"Scaring students in the classroom, scaring parents with the notes home in the bookbags, and the mandatory 'Project Democracy Homework' asking your parents about what they're going to do in the school board election, and reporting back to 


Joel Klein: Shameless

Joel Klein is the former Chancellor of New York City's public schools and the current CEO of Amplify, a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp focusing on education technology.

Joel Klein is also utterly shameless. 

Parent advocate Leonie Haimson called him "an educational Bernie Madoff" at the end of tenure in NYC. His greatest scheme was convincing New York's voters that he had worked miracles while leading the schools in NYC; it's clear he did not. Klein was happy to keep pointing at rising state test scores as proof of his success, but those scores turned out to be an illusion. On national test scores, Klein's NYC did no better - and, to be fair, really no worse - than other major US cities.

That, of course, never stopped Klein from tooting his own horn. He's now taken this unbridled enthusiasm for his own apparent genius into the private sector: this week, he made a big pitch to investors to get in on the ground floor of his new company by both touting his own successes and vilifying the rest of the education system:
Klein’s point is that U.S. K-12 education is a “broken model,” with shockingly low