School's Out

A knot of parents and teachers--some clutching children, others clutching protest fliers--huddled outside Hostos Community College one frosty evening last February. The forty or so Bronx residents had crisscrossed the borough for the rare chance to mix it up with the New York City schools chancellor in a public forum.

A guard met them at the door. No more room, he said, leaving the agitated parents, quite literally, out in the cold. They had hoped to hear Joel Klein explain why he was scrambling the school system's signals for the second time in five years. Inside the Grand Concourse annex, Klein was winding down his pitch to the hundred or so in the audience who had made the cut. "We are enacting these reforms so we can make sure whatever your skin color, wherever you live, your kid will get the education he needs and deserves," Klein shouted into the microphone.

Klein may have appeared an awkward headmaster in his Wall Street suit, but he was on familiar terrain, wrapping his arguments for corporate-style school overhaul in the ethos of civil rights. He is driven by the noble pledge to "finish the job that Brown v. Board of Education began." His path to racial equity, however, employs the efficient tools of business--top-down decisions, marketplace incentives and a belief in private sector solutions to public school problems. Instruction is "data driven." Academic results are "granular." It is a technocratic vision of education, in sync with big-moneyed foundations, at odds with most classroom teachers and many parents.

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