In Michael Bloomberg’s world, the debate about who should be in charge of the education of more than one million New York City school children would center less around the who and more around the education.

In our world, mayoral control of schools has always been about this mayor, the one who ran on it and rammed it through the Legislature, and the man he hired to manage it, Joel Klein.
Klein knows full well that people hate him, and that he is far from the most popular man among many parents and legislators.

But he wishes that they would just get over it.

“I would assume it not be about me at all,” shrugged Klein. “I would like it to be about the policies.”

Klein has become indistinguishable from the policies. The chancellor’s critics say he runs the city’s school system like a business, ignoring customer complaints (read: parents), shuttering franchises (schools) and openly defying the wishes of his shareholders (state legislators).

In other words, they say, Klein and his methods have become a liability for him and for the mayor.

That explains the rumor that surfaced in February that UFT President Randi Weingarten had worked out a deal with Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (D-Manhattan) to renew mayoral control, provided Klein was fired. Weingarten denies the rumor and Bloomberg has since reaffirmed his total confidence in the chancellor.

Polls show that while no one is giving Bloomberg straight A’s for handling the schools, a majority would like him (or his successor) to keep trying. And as the debate heats up, Bloomberg and Klein (or as one critical education blogger called them, “Kleinberg”) will come increasingly under the microscope.

At this point, though, everyone pretty much agrees that mayoral control should and will be renewed. But no one seems to know how to separate the policies from the personalities.
“It shouldn’t be a referendum on the mayor, it shouldn’t be a referendum on Joel Klein,” Weingarten said, though admitting, “in effect, it does become a referendum on them, and that has made the debate far more complicated, particularly in terms of the chancellor.”

Bloomberg’s decision to run for a third term did not help the effort to divorce the policy from him and his chancellor. With Bloomberg the heavy favorite in this year’s election, legislators must confront the reality that extending mayoral control may well mean extending Klein’s control. That has produced another rumor: that the Legislature will punt on reauthorization, passing a one-year extension and then taking up the issue after voters either re-elect Bloomberg or choose someone else.

Bloomberg has said there will be “rioting in the streets” if mayoral control is not renewed. Klein says he welcomes the debate as an opportunity to discuss how to improve.

“I mean, this is education, man!” Klein says with a knowing smirk. “This is controversial!”   


Mayoral control in New York is nothing new. During the city’s first experiment with centralized school governance between 1873 and 1969, the mayor appointed each member of the central Board of Education, then would step aside and allow the schools to operate independently from the municipal government. Angry protests about racial integration in the late ’60s, however, spurred the Legislature to decentralize the school system, eliminating most of the mayor’s role and putting policymaking power in the hands of the board.

Then, in response to the petty corruption, patronage and incompetence of the independent Board of Education—and Bloomberg’s intensive lobbying—the Legislature handed the power back to the mayor in 2003.

Now the dilemma is how to integrate elements of the old system, like responsive and engaged district superintendents, less boosterism and more transparency from the Department of Education, into the new system without diluting the mayor’s control of the schools.

That may include giving parents more of a voice. In late March, for example, the New York Civil Liberties Union and the teachers union sued the DOE for closing struggling schools in Harlem and Brooklyn without notifying the local Community Education Council. (In the past, the DOE has defended its right to open and close schools as a way to better serve families in those communities. There is arguably nothing that typifies mayoral control of schools more than the DOE’s power to unilaterally close schools.)

Ultimately, the DOE backed off, keeping the schools open, and the suit was dropped. Nonetheless, several key lawmakers have said they intend to change the law to increase responsiveness to parents. As with all the changes being proposed, Klein is nervous that they go too far. The more lawmakers tweak the structure of mayoral control, he says, the less power he will have to make the type of top-down reforms DOE has been bragging about in its push to reauthorize the law.

“We don’t have a vote on every policy and every issue,” Klein says. “If we did, we’d have stalemate.”

At stake are the types of “big changes” Klein regularly brings up in testimony and in meetings with legislators: an end to social promotion, the creation of a report card system for schools, an increase in teacher salaries, cash incentives to encourage better student performance, merit pay for teachers, the dismantling of community districts and an explosion of new charter schools.

“Even critics of mayoral control will argue that in New York it’s been more possible to institute changes,” said Jeffrey Henig, a professor of public policy and education at Columbia’s Teachers College. “There have been fewer veto points, fewer groups able to block ideas.”

There is no consensus on how effective many of these changes have been. Critics point to the school bus re-route fiasco of 2007 and the cell phone ban as examples of the kind of bad changes that result when there is no input from parents and the community. Some say social promotion still exists, given that a majority of eighth graders struggle to meet state standards in reading and math even though they usually move on to the next grade anyway.

The multiple reorganizations of DOE bureaucracy, changing everything from budget planning to monitoring medical vaccinations, have caused constant griping as well.

For all of Klein’s insistences that he is striving to work together, those who work with him say that is hardly the case.

“The people involved on a day-to-day basis, whether it’s parents or teachers, don’t feel soft and fuzzy about Joel,” said Weingarten. “They feel he doesn’t listen and that it’s his way or the highway.”


Klein has a mostly thankless job. Education stirs up passions more than any other subject, more than transportation, taxes, term limits or rent. No matter how well Klein performs, there will always be those who demand he be dismissed.

There is also his persona as an uncaring technocrat, accurate or not, that complicates things.

But he does not always use that persona. Speaking at a PTA breakfast in Coney Island, for example, Klein forgoes the microphone, walking between the tables of middle-aged women, taking every question (though evading some answers).

“If there are ways you think we can do things better,” he says above the big hairdos and clinking coffee cups. “I want to hear from you.”

This Klein is not the one who gets tagged for being indifferent to parental needs and concerns.

In front of an East New York middle school auditorium full of starry-eyed charter school teachers, Klein adopts another persona as he preaches his message to the faithful.

“There are political forces that will fight against a lot of what you do,” he says to the hundreds of young teachers, some with tattoos and brightly colored hair, that fill the room. “You have got to become soldiers in this battle.”

They cheer him. For a moment, he is less the bald, slightly nebbishy schools administrator and more Bruce Springsteen.

At an event in mid-March to promote charter schools, the persona shifts again: Enthusiastic and emboldened, Klein is also chastising to the mostly supportive 6,000 parents and children mobbing the Harlem Armory.

“I want to take a second, I know so far it’s been noisy, but let’s hold the noise for just a second,” he pleaded, sounding like a principal wearily attempting to quiet an assembly of noisy sixth graders.

“Every charter school student stand up!” he yelled, trying to rouse the crowd.

Most ignored the request.

Klein proceeded as if they had not.

“This is our future,” he said.

PTAs and other parent groups, which are some of Klein’s most vocal critics, are fearful of what they see as an attempt by charter schools to bulldoze their way into what would otherwise be public-school space. Charter proponents bristle at the suggestion that they are “creaming” the best students from public schools, countering that what they really offer is more choice.
Plus, they say, President Barack Obama himself has expressed support for charters, holding up their proliferation in New York as a model for other cities. Many are as skeptical of charter schools as they are of mayoral control.  

Klein often finds himself defending charter schools to those parents who are still wary of these new schools. At the same time, he tries to sell them on the successes of mayoral control.

“There is a shift and there’s no question about it,” Klein said, discussing parents’ changing attitudes to education. “And I think one group is much more into the politics.”

One-on-one, Klein loses a lot of his public bravado. When asked about the praise heaped on him by charter school advocates and others, he mumbles self-deprecatingly and tries to change the subject. 

“If you focus on the individuals,” he says, “you get distracted.”

Before being named chancellor, Klein served at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New York, where he spearheaded the antitrust case against Microsoft. His appointment in 2002 was hailed as an attempt to allow an outsider to reform the ailing school system.

Seven years later, Klein is candid about where he has gone wrong during his career.

“There are times when I have not effectively engaged communities, I haven’t given people the opportunity to be heard,” Klein says. “I’m mindful of that.”

Klein is also mindful of his dismal polls numbers, which have been dropping steadily since 2003. He is not Ray Kelly, the only other member of the Bloomberg administration to routinely be the subject of polls, and who has scored consistently high.

Klein’s numbers have dipped since February, from 44 percent to 37 percent approval, but are still slightly better than his lowest numbers in mid-2007.

But Klein insists that things have improved.

“In the last year, my approval ratings have gone up significantly. They could always be better,” he said. “One hundred percent would be good, 110 percent would be better.”

Of course, low poll numbers do not mean mayoral control is a failure, Klein says. And besides, the numbers that do matter—graduation rate, test scores and the achievement gap between whites and minority students—prove mayoral control to be a success.


Those numbers, however, can be more complicated than they appear.

After his pep talk to charter school teachers in East New York, Klein cued up a data-heavy slideshow to back his claims about improving test scores and a shrinking racial achievement gap. 

Laser-pointer tracing along the upward sloping lines, Klein walked the teachers through a short history of New York’s successes in improving many of the indicators by which he hopes mayoral control will be judged.

Test scores are up, Klein tells the teachers, in a similar pitch to the one he has been making to legislators. The achievement gap is narrowing, minority students are performing better than they were six years ago, class sizes are shrinking and the graduation rate—the “Holy Grail” of indicators—has improved significantly.

The public relations blitz began last summer. In June, the department announced across-the-board gains in reading and math for elementary and middle-school students. In July, the department released a survey showing that more than 90 percent of parents were satisfied with their children’s education. And in August, they announced that high school graduation rates had hit a new high: 55.8 percent in 2007. The rate had been below 50 percent for decades.

Also over the summer, a handful of charter school proponents, religious leaders and Bloomberg allies got together to form Learn NY, a pro-mayoral control non-profit. With $3 million in private donations, the group has been lobbying lawmakers in Albany to renew mayoral control without weakening the system.

Learn NY has proven to be an adept ally for the mayor, filling Assembly hearings and other education events around the city with parents and supporters of mayoral control. But despite what some suspect, the group says it has only received tacit approval from City Hall and zero donations from the mayor.

Peter Hatch, executive director of Learn NY, said the challenge has been to highlight the positive aspects of mayoral control, while acknowledging how the system should be changed.

“We’re seeing so much progress in the schools,” Hatch said. “If there are parents who don’t have confidence in that, we have to address that.” That is not the only number in doubt as the push to renew begins in force. Klein and Bloomberg say standardized test scores have improved, for example, but Assembly Member James Brennan (D-Brooklyn), a frequent critic of mayoral control, released a report saying test scores actually began rising four years before Bloomberg took office. Other indicators used by the DOE have also been questioned. Eighth graders, for instance, have made no significant progress when compared to national test scores since Bloomberg took over the schools. National scores also show little gains in narrowing the achievement gap between white and minority students.

But when Klein is deep in his educational champion persona, all that controversy fades away.

“People can always challenge the information,” he says. “They also pick and choose the numbers.”

Klein dismisses the comparison of city scores to national ones, saying that DOE does not factor national numbers into its “accountability metric.” Compared to the state average, he says, the city outperforms almost every other school district.

The graduation rate, which has hovered barely above 50 percent during Klein’s tenure, is also a source of controversy. Klein has stopped counting discharges—students removed from the rolls but not considered dropouts—but does count failing students who earn credit by turning in independent projects. According to the original parameters, critics say, the graduation rate has increased only 6 percent since Bloomberg took over the schools. That is about half the increase Klein regularly advertises.


A final vote on mayoral control, whatever is negotiated, is not expected until June, and perhaps not until the very end of June, when the Legislature embarks on its traditional end-of-session cram before the summer recess. But the early outlines of the deal are already beginning to come into focus.

To get to the bottom over the allegations that Klein gins up the numbers, an independent audit of DOE data may be in the works, perhaps by the Independent Budget Office or some other outside group. The Panel of Education Policy, a 13-member vestige of the old Board of Education that serves as an advisory board, also may be reworked under a revised law. (Several unions are divided on how to restructure the PEP. The UFT wants to take away the mayor’s power to appoint the majority of the panel’s members. But the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators argues that without a plurality of the appointments, as well as the power to appoint the chancellor, the mayor would not have the control over the schools he needs.)
Almost everyone wants more checks on the chancellor’s control, more transparency, more parental involvement—but few can seem to agree on what that would look like. Suggestions include an elevated role for the district superintendents, as well as new provisions to ensure Klein keeps in the loop the Community Education Councils, advisory panels made up of parents and teachers that represent each of the 32 school districts.

During a recent Assembly hearing, Comptroller William Thompson (D), a former president of the Board of Education and a current candidate for mayor, issued a series of recommendations intended to bring greater accountability to mayoral control. He proposed splitting the responsibility of appointing members to the Panel between the mayor and the borough presidents. Education Chair Cathy Nolan (D-Queens) bubbled over with praise, effusing that “no one has come up with recommendations this well thought-out.”

But several sources close to the negotiations see things differently, panning Thompson’s recommendations as “stupid” and little more than a political posture for his bid to unseat Bloomberg.

In the end, both sides of the debate need to save face. With all the grandstanding and anger surrounding mayoral control, a conclusion that satisfies every parent, teacher, union member, lawmaker and DOE employee, and that leaves Klein with enough authority to mold policy, is hard to imagine.

Two things need to happen for mayoral control to be renewed. The hardcore supporters of mayoral control—the editorial boards, Bloomberg and the various groups supporting him—have to accept that there will be significant changes, but the Legislature needs to make sure these do not eviscerate what Bloomberg and Klein have created.

“If either of these two things don’t happen,” said one source close to the negotiations, “if either the Legislature passes a bill that’s mayoral control in name only, or the folks on the other side can’t take a good deal, then we’re going to be screwed.”

Although Bloomberg has reaffirmed his total confidence in Klein, rumors continue to circulate about his inevitable dismissal. Whether he will be sacrificed by Albany in order for mayoral control to go on remains to be seen.

Klein, for one, would like to remain chancellor so he can continue his effort to improve education in New York.

“I don’t want to overstate where we are in the process,” he said, leaning back in the light-filled conference room with heavy oak doors and shutters that people in Tweed refer to as the Bat Cave. “I don’t want to sit here and say we’ve done everything perfectly or everything about the current situation is right.”

But mayoral control has stirred the pot. The experiment deserves a chance to continue. And he deserves a chance to continue as well, he said. There are bigger things at stake.

“The core principles about mayoral responsibility and authority, I think, has enabled the mayor to do some controversial things,” Klein said, “and controversy is necessary if we’re going to change public education.”

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ABOVE: photo by Daniel S. Burnstein