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Yep….I chopped off the border. Lucky for me most of you agreed that the border should go, since I had already chopped it off before I posted the top. :) Its a better wall hanging size without the border, except after seeing these pictures I think I need to iron it out before I really put it on the wall with more than double stick tape.
I turned Ben's quilt over yesterday and I don't think I ever showed you a picture of the back…so here it is (during nap time.... hallelujah). I love the back almost as much as the front, the stripes are just a sheet I bought from The Company Store. Its nice and soft and 3 year old proof. Is that even possible?

subset: commoncrawl


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Can't get to the DMV? The DMV is coming here!
The DMV mobile unit will be in parking lot 1 in front of the Natural Science Center on Thursday, June 20th, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.
The wireless office on wheels offers all DMV services:
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Here's how RW members rated this race (37 votes).
In short: Great scenery, atmosphere and trails with a pint at the finish make this race excellent value.Date of review: December 14, 2014
In short: Killer hills leaving fond memories. Date of review: December 9, 2014
In short: Watlington Skyline 2014 ratingIn full: This makes 3 great races in Watlington - Summer and Winter 10km and 10 mile Skyline.As with all the Watlington races v well organised, marshalled and marked, despite my fears about getting lost!A race organised by runners for runners, v friendly race and great to get a pint in the pub.Enter these races before they get too popular!Thanks.Date of review: October 13, 2014
In short: Great race, fantastic scenery, unpretentious organisers, intimate friendly atmosphereDate of review: October 6, 2014
In short: A real gem in glorious surroundingsIn full: Having reviewed the inaugural Earth Trust 10k, a near neighbour of this event, two weeks earlier I didn't think that x-country running in Oxfordshire could get better - the Skyline has proved me wrong. Amazing Autumnal sunshine helped however the relaxed but efficient organisation and stunning views make this one a cut above. Just as with the Earth Trust 10k the Skyline 10 miler introduced me to yet another Oxfordshire 'Munro' although thankfully the path up was relatively gentle. I should have taken my camel pack to make up for the lack of mid water station but using my finely tuned Ray Mears survival instinct managed a few handfuls of water from a pheasant drinker along the Getty Estate. The lack of water stops, which was made quite clear to all runners was more than made up for by the free pint in most convivial local pub for all competitors after the race. A terrific morning's undulating race with some most welcome touches. Congrats to the organisers and marshals. Date of review: October 5, 2014
In short: Great race, lovely viewsDate of review: July 1, 2014
In short: Another great Watlington 10km - keep up the good workIn full: I will keep coming back to run the Summer and Winter Watlington 10km.What's not to like? £4 for well marshalled, well marked, challenging route plus a free pint in the pub. Absolute bargain.Organised by runners for runners. Top notch.Great spirit amongst all the runners.Date of review: June 30, 2014
In short: Beautiful, friendly and great valueIn full: Entered this on a whim and loved it. Really welcoming marshals, a tough-ish course (helped by the fact everyone walked up the steepest hills) and stunning scenery as you sweep down through a flower-filled meadow. A great mix of conditions, including a lovely wooded section with a springy forest floor. Superb.Date of review: June 30, 2014
In short: Stupendous XC 10k - defines X CountryDate of review: June 29, 2014
In short: Another great Watlington 10kmIn full: The Watlington 10km races are simply must do races if you live in the area and like challenging runs.This year there was what seemed to be a record field, which is great news. There was a hold-up at the start, which was unfortunate.Bargain entry fee of £5 and includes bottle of water and a pint at the end. Good pint in the pub as well.Tough hills, and sometimes muddy and stumpy underfoot.Great race. I'll be back everytime.Date of review: December 1, 2013
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Telling the story behind a customized Corvette requires more than listing a pile of parts for the project. It's also about a relationship between man and machine-and sometimes a woman, too. Jeff Hess knows that all too well. He's owned a few Vettes and other collectible cars over the years, and also signed more than a few ladies' dance cards. But when it came time to build his Coupester, a really special '66 with an LS7 engine and other modern enhancements, there was one really special person involved as well.
"My partner and the love of my life, Sheila, is the only woman I've ever been involved with who truly loves cars. Many of the others faked it and god knows what else!" Hess admits. Sheila Williams has owned a Porsche 365, a Karmann Ghia, a BMW, and she now drives a Porsche Cayman, but the Vette takes this automotive passion to a whole new level.
Not only partners in life, "We are partners on Coupester, which she has affectionately named 'Chuck'," Hess explains. (There's no particular reason behind the sobriquet-Sheila just likes to name her cars.) "And she was instrumental in the decisions that went into the overall concept, especially the color schemes."
The fevered inspiration for this neo/retro ride came about during a hot August night-yet not in the way you might think. It was literally at the Hot August Nights event in Reno, Nevada, a world-class car show that's rated as America's number-one outdoor event. (To call it simply a "show" hardly does it justice, since the entire city becomes one humongous collection of cool vehicles of all years, makes, and models, with more than 5,000 cars and 800,000 spectators.) Pre-'72 models in general are the main attraction, but it was the second-generation Corvettes that became a shared attraction for Hess and Williams.
Hess relates how, after the show, he and Sheila got totally psyched to own a C2 coupe. They later found an original factory-air car with a 327 engine and an automatic tranny. Their acquaintance with the car was gradual at first, but it deepened quickly.
"Our initial plan was to find one in reasonably good shape-put wheels on it, maybe a new paint job, and get it running well, but not much beyond that," he says. But just as a relationship between man and woman can blossom, so, too, did the Coupester concept. "Well, one thing led to another and we went the whole frame-off, restomod deal."
But that description doesn't do full credit to the concept. The treatment is a distinctive mixture combining equal parts hot rod and gentleman cruiser, plus more than a smidgen of street fighter.
The basic black paint job is as formal as a wedding tuxedo, with subtle accents of metallic charcoal gray for the hood stinger and the rear deck. The effect is classy and ominous at the same time, like James Bond stepping into Casino Royale.
But like the latest incarnation of Bond, the swanky duds barely disguise the menacing thug beneath. The spun-aluminum Budnik smoothies are an obvious tip-off that this classic Corvette has a license to kill.
Look under the hood and you'll see what sort of heat it's packing. In this case, the weapon of choice is an '07 LS7, supplied and dressed by Street & Performance. Hess, a retired insurance agent who's very familiar with risk assessment, took no chances with the performance of the Coupester. But Williams, a history professor, wanted to preserve the Sting Ray's legacy and heritage. Hence, the intriguing combination of old and new elements, capably integrated by John Vestri of Vestri's Vettes. The effect is sufficiently stunning to have garnered the car a slew of awards at several prestigious events. (An anniversary celebration of sorts is planned at this year's Hot August Nights.)


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Wall Murals
most amazing transformation of my living space
from vintage drab to WOW was easy to install all by myself took under two hours
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I LOVE my mural everyone that see its loves it. delivery and quality was excellent.
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Joel Klein's Misleading Autobiography
This is a story about a story, of how a fiction about impoverished children and public schools corrupts our education policy.
The fiction is the autobiography of Joel Klein, the former chancellor of the New York City Department of Education. Appointed in 2002 by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Klein transformed the city's public-school system by promoting privately managed charter schools to replace regular public schools, by increasing the consequences for principals and teachers of standardized tests, and by attacking union-sponsored due process and seniority provisions for teachers. From his perch as head of the nation's largest school district, Klein wielded outsize influence, campaigning to persuade districts and states across the nation to adopt the testing and accountability policies he had established in New York. Deputies he trained when he was chancellor now lead school systems not only in New York but also in Baltimore, Chicago, New Orleans, Newark, and elsewhere.
Klein resigned in 2010 to develop a new division at Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation to sell tablet-based curriculum to public schools. His prominence in national education policy, though, has not diminished. He is chair of the Broad Center, which is funded by Los Angeles billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad to train and place school superintendents who've been recruited not only from the education sector but also from leadership positions in government, the military, and corporations. The center's graduates have included the Obama administration's assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education, state school superintendents in New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Delaware, and district superintendents in Charlotte, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, Seattle, and dozens of other cities. Earlier this year, Klein co-chaired, with former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, a Council on Foreign Relations commission that concluded that the country's public schools are in such crisis that they threaten national security. Klein has also become a contributor to The Atlantic; his latest piece, in August, denounced "ideological foes of business' contribution to the public good" who resist efforts of private firms to sell innovative products to public schools.
Klein and his allies hold teachers primarily responsible for the achievement gap between disadvantaged and middle-class children. In a 2010 "manifesto," Klein and one of his protégés, Michelle Rhee, the former schools chancellor of Washington, D.C., summed up their campaign like this: "The single most important factor determining whether students succeed in school is not the color of their skin or their ZIP code or even their parents' income—it is the quality of their teacher."
As proof, Klein—and others for him—cites his life story in what has become a stump speech for his brand of school reform. Again and again, Klein recounts his own deprived childhood and how it was a public-school teacher who plucked him from a path to mediocrity or worse. He offers his autobiography as evidence that poverty is no bar to success and that today's disadvantaged children fail only because they are not rescued by inspiring teachers like those from whom Klein himself had benefitted.
This has become conventional wisdom in national education policy. As Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has declared, "Klein knows, as I do, that great teachers can transform a child's life chances—and that poverty is not destiny. It's a belief deeply rooted in his childhood, as a kid growing up in public housing. … Joel Klein never lost that sense of urgency about education as the great equalizer. He understands that education is the civil-rights issue of our generation, the force that lifts children from public-housing projects to first-generation college students. … In place of a culture of excuses, Klein sought [as chancellor] to build a culture of performance and accountability."
Here is Klein's autobiographical account in his own words, faithful to original context, culled from numerous speeches and interviews that Klein has given and continues to give:
I grew up in public housing in Queens and grew up in the streets of New York. I always like to think of myself as a kid from the streets, and education changed my life. … I stood on the shoulders of teachers to see a world that I couldn't have seen growing up in the family that I grew up in.
My father had dropped out of high school in the tenth grade during the Great Depression. My mother graduated from high school and never went to college. No one in my family had attended college … or knew about college. I had no appreciation of reading or cultural activities. …
By most people's lights, we were certainly working-class, poor. … I grew up in a pretty unhappy household. …
Teachers set expectations for me that were not commensurate with my background or my family's income. …
Nobody in [my] school said to me, 'Well, you grew up in public housing, your parents don't read, you've never been to a museum, so we shouldn't expect too much from you!' … I wanted to play ball, I had a girlfriend at the time. I thought school was OK, a little overrated but I thought it was OK. … Mr. Harris, my physics teacher at William Cullen Bryant High School, saw something that I hadn't seen in myself. … I realized, through him, that the potential of students in inner-city schools is too often untapped. We can fix that. Demography need not be destiny.
From the day I took the job as chancellor of the New York Public Schools, friends told me that I would never fix education in America until you fix the poverty in our society. … I'm convinced now more than ever that those people have it exactly backwards—because you'll never fix poverty in America until you fix education.
I reject categorically the principle that poverty is an insurmountable impediment, because I see that we have surmounted it time and again.
I never forget and never will forget who I am, where I came from, and what public education did for me. I am still the old kid from Queens.
The lesson Klein, Duncan, and others draw from this autobiography is that poor children today fail because their teachers, unlike the 1950s Mr. Harris, are overprotected by union contracts, have low expectations for poor students, and so barely try to teach them. To correct this, Klein and others who call themselves "school reformers" hope to identify ineffective teachers and replace them with new ones who rest their security not on union rules but on an ability to rescue children from material and intellectual deprivation.
Unlike a politician's biography, which gets vetted by the press, Klein's account has never been questioned. That's too bad, because in nearly every detail the story he tells is misleading or untrue. The misrepresentations call into question the reforms he and his acolytes promote.
As a policy analyst, I have often criticized those who dismiss the powerful influence of poverty on academic achievement and the belief that better teachers can systematically overcome that influence. In making this critique, autobiography influences me as well, because as it turns out, Klein and I grew up in similar circumstances—third-generation, educationally ambitious, Queens, New York, Jewish households, with parents who had nearly identical jobs and incomes. I'm just a few years older than Klein. We attended neighboring schools; I even had the same physics teacher, Mr. Sidney Harris, whom Klein credits with his rescue. We both attended Ivy League colleges (he went to Columbia, I to Harvard), but unlike Klein, I have always considered myself lucky to have come from an academically motivated family and would never dare suggest that I had material or intellectual hardships that were in any way comparable to those faced by poor minority children from housing projects today. Some of my teachers were superb, some not so, but with backgrounds like ours, Klein and I would probably have succeeded no matter what shortcomings our schools might have had.
Klein is right that "demography need not be destiny." Human nature and environments are variable, children are complex, and so although disadvantaged children on average perform more poorly than typical middle-class children, some disadvantaged children do better and some do even worse than their circumstances would seem to predict. A few respond exceptionally well to teachers and schools. Some poor parents are literate, take education unusually seriously, seek the best out-of-school enrichment, and read to their children at home. These are the few low-income minority children whom some high-profile charter schools serve. It's when poverty combines with chaos at home, adult illiteracy, neglect, unaddressed health issues, constant dislocation, and a neighborhood pervaded by addiction and crime that most children in these environments become, in sociologist William Julius Wilson's phrase, "truly disadvantaged." It's these children whose academic performance we must help to improve and who are the target of most self-described school reformers.
For Klein's life story to serve his argument, he can't merely have grown up in a housing project but in a home that failed to support middle-class values of academic ambition and striving. To support his program, he's had to suggest he had an "inner city" upbringing on "the streets" and was raised in a dysfunctional home we typically associate with the truly disadvantaged. This is where his misrepresentations and distortions come in. The discrepancies matter because they go to the heart of what's wrong with his reform agenda.
Educational values were not absent from Klein's family. His father, Charles Klein, like many of his generation, left high school during the Depression, but the notion that his parents couldn't read or didn't know about college is misleading. His mother, Claire Klein, was a bookkeeper. With fierce competition for scarce jobs, Charles did well enough on a civil-service exam to land work at the post office, remaining for 25 years in a secure job he hated to ensure he could send his children to college. This was not the commitment of semi-literate parents with little knowledge of higher education.
Indeed, while serving as assistant attorney general in the Clinton Justice Department, and before becoming schools chancellor, Klein recalled how he was inspired to become a lawyer: He sometimes skipped school, he told an interviewer, so his father could "take me to the federal courthouse in Manhattan, and we'd just watch cases." This is not the typical father-son activity of public-housing residents with "no appreciation of reading or cultural activities."
Klein graduated high school at 16, because, like me, he was placed in a New York City program that compressed three years of junior high school into two. These "special progress" classes, at Klein's Junior High School 10 and my nearby Junior High School 74, were not for would-be truants and gang members but for academically advanced students with ambitious parents who were impatient with the regular curricular pace. Special-progress classes were even more racially and academically segregated from other students than their contemporary version, "gifted and talented" programs that retain middle-class parents in the public-school system by separating their children from most low-income and minority-group peers. Klein may recall that he was not academically engaged until inspired by his high-school physics teacher. But in the 1950s, you weren't assigned to seventh-grade special-progress classes unless you were already performing well above grade level.
Klein excelled academically in high school before encountering Mr. Harris. The Bryant High School yearbook for the class of 1963 tells a very different story from the one Klein recounts. It describes him as a member of the National Honor Society in his junior as well as senior year. He was also a member of the math team, served as an editor of the school newspaper, and was elected student-government president. To top it all, the "Senior Celebrities" page of the yearbook named him class scholar.
Klein's family was also not poor by any reasonable criteria. Charles Klein's annual post-office salary in the 1950s was about equal to the national median household income. The median national salary for full-time female clerical workers was about three-fourths of the national median household income. Thus, so long as Claire Klein worked, the Klein family income would have been substantially in excess of the national median. Indeed, Charles Klein was well-off enough to take his family on an annual summer vacation to the Catskills. In 1971, Charles Klein saw his son Joel graduate from law school and obtain a prestigious clerkship at a federal appeals court. Charles then retired with a defined-benefit federal pension to a Florida apartment near the beach—an option unlikely for public-housing residents as we now know them.
The conventional definition of disadvantaged students today is eligibility for free lunch, because their household income (for a family of four) is about half the national median. These are the children about whose achievement we worry and by this definition, Klein was not poor. Even if his mother earned nothing, the family was not economically oppressed. Klein didn't overcome demographic odds; he fulfilled them. He was a student who then, like now, enjoyed family resources and values that predict academic success.
Klein's most egregious autobiographical distortion is that he grew up in public housing. That's because, as Klein must know, the words "public housing" evoke an image of minority unemployment, welfare dependence, unwed motherhood, truancy, gangs, drug dealing, addiction, and violence. Klein, though, grew up in racial privilege, dramatically different from the segregated world of most youngsters in public housing today. (Click here to read Richard Rothstein's related piece on the role of public housing in racially segregating communities.)
Klein did live in public housing after his family moved to Queens in 1955 when he was nine years old. But he fails to say—perhaps because he truly doesn't realize—that some public housing in New York in the 1940s and 1950s, including the Woodside Houses project where his family resided, was built for white, middle-class families. The poor and the problems poverty causes were unwelcome. This distinction is critical to understanding Klein's history and why it undermines his current policy prescriptions.
Returning World War II veterans like Klein's father confronted a housing shortage. To address it, New York erected projects like Woodside Houses, an attractive six-story development with trees, grassy areas, and park benches. Residents were not on the dole but paid rent that covered their housing costs; apartments were not subsidized and were not part of the national low-income housing program.
Rather, for prospective tenants in Woodside Houses and its sister projects, the New York City Housing Authority enforced 21 disqualifying factors. Excluded were single-parent families and those with irregular employment history, out-of-wedlock births, criminal records, narcotics addiction, or mental illness—in other words, any family with the qualities we now associate with public housing. Couples had to show marriage licenses to apply. To filter out undesirables, inspectors visited applicants' previous homes to verify good housekeeping habits, sufficient furniture, and well-behaved children. Neighborhood public schools serving complexes like Woodside Houses thus didn't have to contend with unruly adolescents; they had already been weeded out by the Housing Authority.
New York City claimed it did not segregate its projects, but Woodside and similar complexes in white neighborhoods accepted only a token few black tenants because Housing Authority policy was to respect "existing community patterns." So when the Kleins moved to Woodside Houses in its predominantly white neighborhood, 87 percent of their fellow tenants were white. The few nonwhites were also middle-class, owing to the rigorous screening they endured. By contrast, South Jamaica Houses in a black Queens neighborhood was only 12 percent white, and its low-income tenants were subsidized.
So Klein's entire autobiography is a sleight of hand.
He was not a child of the streets. He was not an academically unmotivated student. He did not come from a deprived family background. He did not grow up in public housing as we understand it today.
I sent Klein a detailed set of questions that focused on the discrepancies between the public record and the life story he has told. He responded by e-mail: "I appreciate the time and effort put into trying to reinterpret and recharacterize my family's history and to construe the conditions of public housing, public education, and public-sector employment 50 years ago. I happened to be there, however, and it was as I've described it over the years—a humble, challenging environment, positively influenced by parents who set great examples through hard work and by many teachers including one who truly inspired me and changed my life. I do not compare my family's situation to anyone or anything, nor do I view socioeconomic need as a downward contest for credibility in addressing the challenges in education today."
In misrepresenting his childhood, Klein has distorted the world of both our fathers. Mine, already out of high school and at City College of New York when the Great Depression hit, was also fortunate to land a job in the post office, working second jobs at night. Permanently traumatized by the insecurity of the Depression, he remained unhappily in the federal civil service so he, like Charles Klein, could see his children through college, after which he was rewarded, also like the elder Klein, with a secure federal pension. My mother, like Klein's, was a bookkeeper.
I never lived in public housing, but my parents' small single-family home in a white Queens neighborhood not far from Woodside had monthly mortgage payments about the same as the rent Charles and Claire Klein paid to the Housing Authority. Our family income was similar to the Kleins'; both families were middle-class.
At Bayside High School, I also had Sidney Harris for physics. (After I graduated, he transferred to Bryant.) I don't doubt that he was an excellent teacher and inspired Klein, but he did nothing similar for me. I was instead motivated by my Latin and journalism teachers. Like the 1963 yearbook at Bryant High School, my 1959 Bayside yearbook has few black faces. Klein and I both attended almost entirely segregated, white schools.
My family was not wealthy. But my parents supplied me with plenty of picture books to play with in my crib. My father didn't take me to watch court cases, but one night we went to Brooklyn to retrieve a set of encyclopedias from a second cousin who was about to discard them. My mother and father took me to the Museum of Natural History and the Planetarium, and at the dinner table, my father frequently posed a counterfactual to explore the day's events. "Let's assume …" was his favorite phrase. Such unintended exercises in reasoning and critical thinking, and other similar activities, play an essential role in preparing students for success when they get to school.
My public-school education in the 1950s was OK but not as good as that received by many of my college peers who came from more affluent communities. What made my education complete was the academic support I received at home—support that Klein now takes for granted, discounting the enormous contribution his parents made to his cognitive strengths. Parents who have similarly sacrificed, keeping jobs they hated to ensure their children could attend college, might conclude that Klein's parents raised an ingrate. Certainly it seems absurd for him to claim that his parents had less influence on his eventual academic success than Mr. Harris, who first encountered him only late in high school. Yet this is the position of Klein, Rhee, Duncan, and their allies: Teachers alone determine whether children succeed, and home environment is merely an obstacle for teachers to overcome. Maybe there's a case for this approach, but Klein's biography doesn't prove it.
My high school initially refused to process my application to Harvard. When my father took a day off to make a holy fuss, the Bayside principal, Dr. Samuel Moskowitz, said that he wouldn't waste his staff's time, because "boys from here don't go to Harvard." So much for the high expectations of this supposedly golden, pre–teachers' union era. Today, tenacious parenting still predicts success for students from middle-class or, less frequently, from impoverished households.
Children like Klein and me were privileged, not perhaps in money but in what sociologists term "social capital." Nobody I know of from my special-progress class dropped out of school; my fellow students typically went on to become college professors, doctors, business executives, accountants, writers, and lawyers. Sure, we loved to play street stickball, but we were not "kids from the streets," as Klein would have it. We were surrounded by peers with middle-class ambitions and goals.
It would be obscene for me to claim I overcame severe hardship and was rescued from deprivation by schoolteachers. It is more obscene for Klein to do so, because his claim supports attacks on contemporary teachers and a refusal to acknowledge impediments teachers face because of their students' social and economic deprivation. It's a deprivation that he never suffered but that many children from public housing do today.
A few superhuman teachers may lift a handful of children who come to school from barely literate homes, hungry, in poor health, and otherwise unprepared for academic instruction. But even the best teachers face impossible tasks when confronted with classrooms filled with truly disadvantaged students who are not in tracked special-progress classes and don't arrive each morning from families as academically supportive as mine. Instead, they may come from segregated communities where concentrated and entrenched poverty, unemployment, and social alienation over many generations have been ravaging.
When Klein was appointed chancellor he did seek advice, not only from his friends as he reports in his autobiographical accounts but from analysts like me. I was one of those who told him, as he puts it, that we "would never fix education in America until we fix the poverty in our society." I suggested that he might win more lasting achievement gains by establishing school clinics to ensure that all children had good health care and by directing resources to early-childhood literacy programs and after-school enrichment. I urged him to use his influence to protest government-created residential segregation that concentrates the most disadvantaged children in schools without middle-class peers and where the accumulation of impediments to learning is overwhelming.
In June, the Supreme Court ruled that First Amendment free-speech rights protect a politician's false claims to have earned military medals. Klein, too, has a constitutional right to fabricate a life story. But it is up to the rest of us to consider what light the fact of his misrepresentation sheds on the merits of policies he advocates.
Klein is not the sole author of current school-reform policies; many others share responsibility.
But his less-than-honest autobiography has been accepted unquestioningly by allies like Arne Duncan who use it, as he does, to support needless test obsession for millions of schoolchildren, on the theory that more accountability for teachers will cure our social ills. Klein's story has contributed to the demoralization of tens of thousands of teachers who are now blamed for their low-income students' poor test scores. Klein and Duncan's conclusion that public schools must be failing because they don't perform the miracles they allegedly performed in the past has helped justify a rapid expansion of charter schools. Most charter schools have done no better for disadvantaged children than the schools from which they came, while stripping regular schools of their most motivated students. Contemporary reforms have produced much turmoil in public education but little or no meaningful improvement. Meanwhile, social inequality has grown and with it, challenges to educators hoping to narrow the achievement gap.
Klein and Rhee have recently founded an organization called StudentsFirstNY to raise millions of dollars from New York City's wealthiest. It will support candidates in the city's upcoming mayoral race who adopt an agenda that puts "the interests of children" over "special interests" (read: teacher unions) and commits to expanding charter schools, eliminating teacher tenure, and using student test scores to evaluate teachers. The group's mission statement incorporates the fanciful Klein autobiographical tale, saying that "while there are many factors that influence a student's opportunity to learn, a great teacher can help any student overcome those barriers and realize their full potential."
Klein's actual biography tells an important story, just not the one he imagines: It's more evidence that student achievement mostly reflects the social and economic environment in which children are raised and that the best way to improve academic achievement is to address these conditions directly.
The author thanks the following for invaluable assistance in preparing this article: housing scholars Vicki Been, Nicholas Bloom, and Peter Hales; Douglas DiCarlo, archivist at the New York City Housing Authority archives at LaGuardia Community College; various classmates of Joel Klein, identified through Classmates.com; Jim Sauber, chief of staff, National Association of Letter Carriers; Liz Ryan Murray, policy director, National People's Action; Jeffrey Guyton, Co-President, Community District Education Council 30 (Queens, NY); Keri Klein and Edna Lewis, research librarians at the University of California (Berkeley) School of Law; Zodet Negron, public information specialist at the New York City Housing Authority; American Prospect research editor Susan O'Brian; and undergraduate research assistant Candice Raynor. Errors of fact or interpretation are those of the author alone.
Respectively, Andres Alonzo, Jean-Claude Brizard, John White, Cami Anderson.
Respectively, Thelma Meléndez de Santa Ana, Christopher Cerf, Deborah Gist, Lillian Lowery, Peter C. Gorman, Mark Roosevelt, John E. Deasy, Maria Goodloe-Johnson.
See Christina A. Samuels. 2011. "Broad Academy's Growing Reach Draws Scrutiny." Education Week 30 (33), June 8.
Joel I. Klein and Condoleezza Rice, chairs. 2012. U.S. Education Reform and National Security. Council on Foreign Relations, Independent Task Force Report No. 68. http://www.cfr.org/united-states/us-education-reform-national-security/p27618
Joel Klein. 2012. "The Case for the Private Sector in School Reform." The Atlantic, August 16.
Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee, et al. 2010. "How to Fix Our Schools: A Manifesto by Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee and Other Education Leaders," The Washington Post, October 10, B01. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/07/AR2010100705078.html
Arne Duncan. 2010. "Joel Klein's Legacy, Cathie Black's Challenge: Secretary of Ed. Arne Duncan Grades N.Y. Schools Big." The New York Daily News, November 14. http://articles.nydailynews.com/2010-11-14/news/27081137_1_urban-schools-public-schools-arne-duncan
Big Think. 2008. "Interview of Joel Klein." bigthink.com. Recorded March 30. http://bigthink.com/ideas/1040
Big Think. 2008. "Interview of Joel Klein." bigthink.com. Recorded March 30. http://bigthink.com/ideas/1040
The New York Times. 2011."Glenn Beck, Joel Klein, Amar'e Stoudamire and Others Reflect on Their Education." The New York Times, September 19. http://6thfloor.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/19/glenn-beck-joel-klein-amare-stoudamire-and-others-reflect-on-their-education/
Jeffrey Brown. 2012. "Condoleezza Rice: Education Could Be 'Greatest National Security Challenge.'" PBS Newshour, March 20. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/education/jan-june12/education_03-20.html
The New York Times. 2011."Glenn Beck, Joel Klein, Amar'e Stoudamire and Others Reflect on Their Education." The New York Times, September 19. http://6thfloor.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/19/glenn-beck-joel-klein-amare-stoudamire-and-others-reflect-on-their-education/
John Merrow. 2012. "John Merrow and Joel Klein in Discussion." Learning Matters, May 2. http://learningmatters.tv/blog/live-events/watch-john-merrow-and-joel-klein-in-discussion/10048/
Joel Klein. 2010. "Address." St. John's University School of Education Honorary Degree Convocation, April 19. http://testdigest.stjohns.edu/about_us/pr_aca_100419.stj
John Merrow. 2012. "John Merrow and Joel Klein in Discussion." Learning Matters, May 2. http://learningmatters.tv/blog/live-events/watch-john-merrow-and-joel-klein-in-discussion/10048/
The New York Times. 2011."Glenn Beck, Joel Klein, Amar'e Stoudamire and Others Reflect on Their Education." The New York Times, September 19. http://6thfloor.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/19/glenn-beck-joel-klein-amare-stoudamire-and-others-reflect-on-their-education/
Joel Klein. 2010. "Address." St. John's University School of Education Honorary Degree Convocation, April 19. http://testdigest.stjohns.edu/about_us/pr_aca_100419.stj
John Merrow. 2002. "High Hopes. John Merrow Talks with Joel Klein." Newshour with Jim Lehrer, September 30. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/education/july-dec02/nyc_9-30.html
David M. Herszenhorn. 2003. "Behind Makeover of Schools, A Bookish 'Kid From Queens.'" The New York Times, September 27. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/27/nyregion/behind-makeover-of-schools-a-bookish-kid-from-queens.html
See, for example, Richard Rothstein. 2010. How to Fix Our Schools. It's More Complicated, and More Work, Than the Klein-Rhee 'Manifesto' Wants You to Believe. Economic Policy Institute Issue Brief 286, October 14. http://www.epi.org/page/-/pdf/ib286.pdf
In this page from the Bayside High School 1959 yearbook, Mr. Harris is third from left in the picture at the top, and he is shown demonstrating a science experiment in the bottom left photo. Triangle, Class of '59. Bayside High School, Queens, New York, 1959, p. 26.
For a more detailed explanation of how social class differences affect student achievement, see my 2004 book:
Richard Rothstein. 2004. Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic, and Educational Reform to Close the Black-White Achievement Gap. Economic Policy Institute and Teachers College Press. http://www.epi.org/publication/books_class_and_schools/
Wilson, William Julius, 1987. The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
A recent influential examination of reform in Chicago elementary schools that attempted to distinguish the characteristics of schools whose students made dramatic improvements from those of schools whose students stagnated. To their surprise, the investigators discovered that well-designed reform programs made little or no difference in schools serving neighborhoods of concentrated poverty where nearly all students were residentially mobile, African American, and had low-income parents with relatively little formal education and a high likelihood of unemployment. These communities had high crime rates and inadequate community supports, such as health care and social-service providers, and few adults exemplified the benefits of educational attainment. In communities of concentrated disadvantage, addressing these contextual factors was essential before school reform could take root. The investigators concluded, "Our findings about schooling in truly disadvantaged communities offer a sobering antidote to a heady political rhetoric arguing that all schools can be improved."
Anthony S. Bryk, Penny Bender Sebring, Elaine Allensworth, Stuart Luppescu, and John O. Easton. 2010. Organizing Schools for Improvement. Lessons from Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
David M. Herszenhorn. 2003. "Behind Makeover of Schools, A Bookish 'Kid From Queens." The New York Times, September 27. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/27/nyregion/behind-makeover-of-schools-a-bookish-kid-from-queens.html
John Merrow. 2012. "John Merrow and Joel Klein in Discussion." Learning Matters, May 2. http://learningmatters.tv/blog/live-events/watch-john-merrow-and-joel-klein-in-discussion/10048/
Amy Feldman and Richard Sisk. 1998. "Joel Klein: N.Y.'s Hometown Trust-buster." The New York Daily News, May 20. http://articles.nydailynews.com/1998-05-20/news/18061856_1_anti-trust-joel-klein-bill-gates
Joel Klein's placement in the "special progress" program that completed three years of junior high school in two was confirmed in an interview with a childhood friend, identified by use of classmates.com.
Entry for Joel Klein in Postscript, 1963 Yearbook. William C. Bryant High School, Long Island City, NY, 1963, p. 26. In New York City, chapters of the National Honor Society were called "Arista."
In this page from the Bryant High School 1963 yearbook showing the school's student government officers, Joel Klein is in the front row, second from left. Postscript, 1963 Yearbook. William C. Bryant High School, Long Island City, NY, 1963, p. 128.
This photo of Joel Klein is from the Bryant High School 1963 yearbook showing the graduating class's "Senior Celebrities." Postscript, 1963 Yearbook. William C. Bryant High School, Long Island City, NY, 1963, p. 115.
Like public-school teachers today, letter carriers in the federal civil service in 1955 were paid on a stepped progression schedule with increases based on years of service. In that year, a letter carrier with six years of seniority earned $3,678, and the national median household income was $3,948. Salary schedule from the National Association of Letter Carriers. In 1955, letter carriers moved up a step on the salary schedule every two years, so Charles Klein would probably have been at Step 2 at that time.
(Schedule interpreted by Jim Sauber, chief of staff, National Association of Letter Carriers.)
Median income from U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census. 1957. Current Population Reports, Consumer Income, Series P-60, No. 24, April, Table 11. http://www2.census.gov/prod2/popscan/p60-024.pdf
Median income for full-time female clerical worker: $3,065.
U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census. 1956. Current Population Reports, Consumer Income, Series P-60, No. 23, November, Table 12. http://www2.census.gov/prod2/popscan/p60-023.pdf
Joanne Wasserman. 2002. "For Klein, Mom's Lessons Paying Off. Now Bryant High Grad Will Try to Repair City's Troubled Schools." The New York Daily News, August 4, p. 8.
Retirement forwarding address provided by National Association of Letter Carriers.
In 2010, the most recent year for which data are available, national median income was $49,445.
Carmen DeNavas-Walt, Bernadette D. Proctor, and Jessica C. Smith. 2011. "Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2010." Current Population Reports, Consumer Income, P60-239, Table A-1. U.S. Department of Commerce, Economics and Statistics Administration, U.S. Census Bureau. September. http://www.census.gov/prod/2011pubs/p60-239.pdf.
In that year, the poverty level for a family of four was $22,050. U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, 2011. The HHS Poverty Guidelines for the Remainder of 2010 (August 2010). http://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty/10poverty.shtml. Children whose families have income of 130 percent of the poverty line or less are eligible for free lunches; children whose families have incomes of 185 percent of the poverty line or less are eligible for subsidized lunches.
Nicholas Dagen Bloom. 2008. Public Housing That Worked. New York in the Twentieth Century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, p. 161.
Nicholas Dagen Bloom. 2008. Public Housing That Worked. New York in the Twentieth Century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, passim, and p. 87.
Nicholas Dagen Bloom. 2008. Public Housing That Worked. New York in the Twentieth Century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, p. 41 and Appendix A.
Nicholas Dagen Bloom. 2008. Public Housing That Worked. New York in the Twentieth Century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, p. 8, 176.
Nicholas Dagen Bloom. 2008. Public Housing That Worked. New York in the Twentieth Century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 176-177.
See also minutes of a 1970 meeting of the Woodside Housing Tenant Council, in which middle-class tenants objected to the declining social class of new residents, and unsuccessfully beseeched the Housing Authority to reinstitute home visits to applicants. New York City Housing Authority. 1970. "
Minutes of Meeting with Woodside Tenant Council, November 23." Research and Reports Division, 9/1/54. New York City Housing Authority Archives (LaGuardia Community College), Box # 0067A2 Folder # 15; Folder Title: WOODSIDE HOUSES—MSGRS + SUPERINTENDENTS MEETINGS; PROJECT SURVEY RPTS; INCIDENTS RPTS. Date (Range): 1959–1975.
Nicholas Dagen Bloom. 2008. Public Housing That Worked. New York in the Twentieth Century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, p. 87.
New York City Housing Authority. 1954. "New York City Housing Authority, Number of Families at Projects Under Parts I and II of the City-Aided Program, Shown by Racial Composition at Initial Occupancy and on June 30, 1954." Research and Reports Division, 9/1/54. New York City Housing Authority Archives (LaGuardia Community College), Box # 0063C7 Folder # 11; Folder Title: R & D: RACE & COLOR OF TENANTS--STATISTICAL SHEETS OF NUMBER OF FAMILIES W/RE: TO RACIAL COMPOSITION-FEDERAL, CITY, STATE BOOKLET ON OBJECT LESSON IN RACE RELATION; APPLICATION. Date (Range): 1953–1954.
[43] The Housing Authority received many complaints about racial discrimination. In a 1954 letter from Philip J. Cruise, the Authority chairman, to New York Mayor Robert F. Wagner, Cruise attributes the fact that only 3 percent of South Jamaica tenants (as of that date) were white because the Authority respected applicants' choices of where to live. Few white families chose to apply to projects in black neighborhoods, and vice versa.
New York City Housing Authority. 1954. "Letter, Philip J. Cruise (Chairman, New York City Housing Authority) to Honorable Robert F. Wagner, 'Attached Official Communication of August 23rd and letter from Mrs. Barbara Bonhomme in which writer charges discrimination against negroes in Housing Authority Projects,'" September 7.
New York City Housing Authority. 1954. New York City Housing Authority. 1954. "Letter, Philip J. Cruise (Chairman, New York City Housing Authority) to Honorable Robert F. Wagner, 'Attached Official Communication of August 23rd and letter from Mrs. Barbara Bonhomme in which writer charges discrimination against negroes in Housing Authority Projects,'" September 7.
New York City Housing Authority Archives (LaGuardia Community College), Box # 071B5, Folder # 03; Folder Title: Folder Title: 590.17: MGMT POLICIES: RACIAL--NEGRO POPULATION STATISTICS; CORRESP. RE: RACIAL PROBLEMS; GENERAL CORRESP. Date (Range): 1936–1955. "New York City Housing Authority, Number of Families at Federal Projects, Shown by Racial Composition at Initial Occupancy and on June 30, 1954." Research and Reports Division, 9/1/54. New York City Housing Authority Archives (LaGuardia Community College), Box # 0063C7 Folder # 11; Folder Title: R & D: RACE & COLOR OF TENANTS--STATISTICAL SHEETS OF NUMBER OF FAMILIES W/RE: TO RACIAL COMPOSITION-FEDERAL, CITY, STATE BOOKLET ON OBJECT LESSON IN RACE RELATION; APPLICATION. Date (Range): 1953–1954.
These proposals were adopted by a group of education- and social-policy experts who issued a statement, "A Broader Bolder Approach to Education," in 2008. http://www.epi.org/files/2011/bold_approach_full_statement-3.pdf
StudentsFirstNY. 2012. Our Mission in New York. http://www.studentsfirst.org/pages/our-mission-in-new-york
Thu, 2012-10-11 15:03
Excellent read! Thanks for the time and effort and for exposing this man's hypocrisy. As a former NYC middle school science teacher I've witnessed first hand the degradation of the profession. I wish your article would be picked up by the mainstream media, but of course this is unlikely.
Thu, 2012-10-11 20:07
I agree! Klein has constructed a fairy tale about his tough beginnings. In his cohort, I know a Ph.D. Anthropology professor and a NYC radio host whose fathers (both African-American by the way) worked for the Post Office. It was a stable working -class unionized job. The idea that one inspiring teacher lights the spark for an unengaged student is pure Hollywood myth; we need a strong supportive home environment , and development of non cognitive skills (persistence, tolerance for failure, ability to concentrate , postpone gratification ) as well as exposure vocabulary ; these are keys to school success. I'm a working class kid (parents factory workers, HS grads) who used the public schools and colleges for their children . We've all got Ph.ds or MAs. But came from a stable working class environment , with health insurance and regular salaries--no tutoring or summer bungalows, but no hunger or homelessness either.
Thu, 2012-10-11 21:16
Great piece. Thanks for exposing Klein and others like him who (disingenuously) downplay the impact of poverty on educational performance. Just recently, one of my fourth grade ESL students asked to be excused to go to the nurse because she had a stomach ache. When I asked her what she'd eaten for breakfast, she replied, "Nothing." When I asked what she'd had for dinner the night before, she said, "We didn't have no dinner either. We got home late last night, so my parents gave me some coffee and sent me to my bed." For Klein to suggest that his own childhood was somehow akin to the struggles my students face daily is insulting in the extreme. Thanks again for exposing Klein for the charlatan he is.
Fri, 2012-10-12 12:07
Fri, 2012-10-12 12:27
The unions are using the "root causes" argument as a convenient excuse that always lets them off the hook. No matter how bad the educational results are it is never their fault.
All they want is to suck on the taxpayers teat and never be held accountable for anything.
Fri, 2012-10-12 13:21
Klein's biography is truly irrelevant to the issue of school reform.
In truth, excellent teachers and excellent principals make a big difference in the educational progress of poor and socially deprived children. Year after year some teachers advance their classes a year and half in one year while other teachers advance their class about half that. Yet both the excellent and under performing teachers get the same seniority based pay.
Teachers unions have fought tooth and nail against any kind of accountability.
The New York City "Rubber Room" where under performing teachers are paid for many months or years while there case is given "undue process" is clear proof of how nearly impossible it is to get rid of the minority of teachers that do so much to ruin the lives of at risk children.
Fri, 2012-10-12 13:50
Thank you for this. What annoys me is that Klein has gotten ridiculously wealthy off his so-called leadership. He may believe the myth that he's spun, but it's just that. Working Mayor Bloomberg and now for Rupert Murdoch has paid off handsomely, and now he's heading a start-up in Brooklyn that manufactures "evaluation" materials that they can sell to schools to further their mission.
Urban education has become big business, but let's be clear that it's far more expensive than "reformers" let on.
Fri, 2012-10-12 14:13
Rothstein has wasted a huge amount of time and hair-splitting on the wrong topic.
Common wisdom is that we should judge individuals by their actions, their imprint on society. In this light, the shades of grey in Klein's personal history are irrelevant. What is relevant? Klein stepped up to a challenge few of us would have undertaken. He served for eight years as the Chancellor of the NYC Public Schools (the largest school system in America, with more than one million students). He was, in fact, the longest serving Chancellor of the modern era. Day-in and day-out he faced the gargantuan task of turning around this behemoth school district. He did not have the luxury of time nor hypothetical arguments; he had the reality of running a failing school system. And how did he do? He had successes and failures, but overall he made a very REAL difference in the lives of NYC's public school students and – by example – in the lives of students across the country.
Concretely, Klein opened 470 new schools and raised graduation rates by 20 percent. To cite a rigorously researched-example: A key piece of the Bloomberg-Klein reform agenda was the closing of large, historically failing high schools (often called dropout factories) to be replaced by new, small, non-selective schools serving the same population. MDRC, the evaluation research firm, conducted an extensive analysis of 105 of these schools, concluding: "based on an unusually large and rigorous study that takes advantage of lottery-like features in New York City's high school admissions process and includes data on 21,000 students from four cohorts who entered ninth grade between fall 2005 and fall 2008. That report demonstrated that SSCs are markedly improving academic progress and graduation prospects, particularly for disadvantaged students." (Source: http://www.mdrc.org/publications/614/overview.html)
Rothstein is an accomplished scholar, author, and public intellectual. Bravo, we need all of these things and I place enormous personal value of them as the daughter of two academics and myself a trained policy analyst. But does Rothstein have the sheer grit and courage to actually do something? To run a school district? To come to a city and combat the impacts of poverty (that Klein, of course, acknowledges) on so many students? To move from theory to action? To work within the confines of the system to make change?
The answer is sadly, no.
Sat, 2012-10-13 06:10
I'm not sure we can reduce a massive, well funded and dishonest reform campaign to "hair splitting". At every opportunity, the lack of qualifications, experience, and connection of "reformers" to the people intimately involved with public education (the ACTUAL doers, not tellers, managers) is ignored. The duck taped mouths, the TFA pipeline to ed-royalty, the smut-media/GOP PR "news" connection to policy...are we really to believe that the path these "privatizers" are dragging us down is the right one? Is the PUBLIC better served if its institutions are dismantled and served up to privately held publishing/testing/data-mining industries who will then be instrumental in school management decisions that will then free up more of that public institution to include in their private accounts? Why are we not modeling our policies after more successful ed practices from more successful systems around the world? With the crafty insider-formula data style that served up our economy to 1% of the country and devastated the rest, why would we think our schools and children will be well served by the shrouded VAM data style for learning, with investors drooling on the sidelines for a piece of that action? When those who stand to continue profiting the most are allowed to falsely define the issue and themselves, that needs to be pointed out. It's not hair-splitting.
Fri, 2012-10-12 23:17
Having spent a bit of time last month supporting the Chicago Teachers Union (to which I belonged for a couple of years 40 year ago!) in its successful strike, I've become convinced the corporate "education reform" movement really IS "all about the money" and not even remotely "all about the kids"!
Thank you for explaining just how distorted Joel Klein's "autobiography" really is! I graduated from a Catholic high school the same year he graduated from an NYC school, and it constantly astonishes me how my contemporaries can ignore the HUGE differences between life in the U.S. in 1962 and life in the U.S. in 2012. It truly WAS a different world, and pretending that a predominantly middle-class and white housing project in 1962 is the same as a predominantly poor housing project full of people of color in 2012 is just an extreme example of the "reform" movement's blindness! Thanks for make THAT crystal clear!
Sat, 2012-10-13 12:20
This is a great article. You also forgot however, a big piece of Joel Klein's reform into the NYC Public School System. When Mr. Klein came in, he had Diana Lam in charge of curriculum, the two flushed out every reading program and math program that was in the public schools and replaced them with Teacher's College Reading and Writing Workshop and EveryDay Math, both curriculum's were doomed to fail from the start because they are based the constructivism (learn as you go), our students needed good solid curriculum especially those who come from poverty stricken homes where little to no academic preparation reigns. I teach in NYC and use Sing, Spell, Read & Write a proven method that ALWAYS gets my students reading, writing and spelling BUT I have gotten in trouble for using it more often than not, I have repeatedly questioned on it's use. SSRW has a 40 year track record of children scoring from poverty homes in the 90th percentile, good curriculum that is multi-sensory works with our slowest kids. I continue to fight to this day, but I only save a small few, sadly Teacher's MUST use the chosen curriculum or be punished severely sometimes even fired. Teacher's today are not the culprit's they are just trying to do what they are told, the CURRICULUM DIRECTORS and JOEL KLEIN who brought in this JUNK curriculum has caused SO much unnecessary failure that sometimes one wonders if they actually WANT this to happen so they can open charter schools.
Mon, 2012-10-15 14:05
Whether Joel grew up poor or very poor is completely irrelevant to his track record on education. It is very sad to me that with all the problems facing schools that American Prospect thought this was a worthy article to publish. We should be focusing our attention on the solutions needed to break the cycles of poverty and not bashing someone who has committed his life to helping underprivileged kids, regardless if you agree or disagree with his approach.
Mon, 2012-10-15 18:31
I also grew up in the Woodside projects. In fact, I believe the same Joel Klein lived in the same "court" as I did. We played together, went to scouts together, and both went to PS 151 and JHS 10 (where I was also in SP class and skipped 8th grade). He was a year ahead of me. My grandfather died while I was in 9th grade, and my mother came into a small inheritance. My parents used the extra money to move to Rego Park, where I graduated from Forest Hills HS, a much more highly ranked school than Bryant.
While much of your account of life in the projects is true, I think more of the difference with students from the "projects" today has to do with the times than particular privilege associated with middle-income projects.
My own father died in 1977 and had retired a few years earlier. Going through his papers, my mother reported he had held 55 different jobs during the 30 years they had been married. He graduated high school and a few years later was accepted to college, to study medicine at BU. But his parents wrote to him, asking him to send them money (during the Depression). The lack of funds, and being jilted by a girlfriend, caused him to drop out. He then went into the army, and after the war wanted to go back to school on the GI Bill. But my mother (who was full-time homemaker) and he started a family, so he supported us by working as clerk (not a pharmacist) in drugstores, where he was able to use his scant knowledge of medicine.
As far as I could tell, this was not atypical of life in the projects. Many other kids had fathers who worked two jobs and stay-at-home mothers. Some, but not most, had mothers who worked outside the home.
You're absolutely right about the hubris calling this, "growing up on the streets." True, we did occasionally walk down to the railroad yards in Long Island City and steal flares and "boom booms" (small packets of explosives used for signaling), but more serious crime and drugs were virtually unknown. The closest we ever came to gangs was massive snowball fights between "courts" or whole sections of the projects, and in the spring these would become fights with water balloons or carpet guns (rough-fashioned wood guns using rubberbands to fire small pieces of linoleum).
From sixth grade on, groups of kids would frequently go by ourselves and ride the subway to go to ballgames (the Yankees were the only team in town at that point), department stores (we'd hang out in the toy section of Macy's until we were thrown out), 42nd St. (Ripley's Believe It Or Not was a favorite), or, yes, museums (especially Natural History and the Planetarium).
The projects were mixed racially, and the neighborhood was mixed ethnically even more. I grew up playing with black and Puerto Rican kids, and the white kids in the neighborhood were mainly Irish, Italian, or Jewish, although most of my Irish friends went to Catholic school.
Like Joel, I was accepted at Columbia, but unlike him, I choose to go to Cornell. There, thanks to scholarships from New York State and my father's union (SEIU 1199), my tuition was covered for all four years. Try doing that today.
Joel's characterization of himself as having grown up "on the streets of New York" is true, as it must have been for most kids growing up in New York at that time. Who didn't play stickball on the street, roller hockey and soccer on large asphalt surfaces, or ride their bicycle on the sidewalk? For softball we'd walk down to Bryant and play there, and the projects had playgrounds with basketball hoops, and health centers. (Remember this was a New Deal program.) But the implication that Joel overcame insurmountable odds (or even seriously perverse odds) because of this is absurd.
For one thing, the 1950s were what C. Wright Mills called "The Great American Celebration" and Stephen Marglin and Juliet Schoor called "The Golden Age of Capitalism." This was an unprecedented period of stability and growth. Upward mobility was "in the air," and this culture certainly permeated the Woodside Projects. At least inter-generationally, the opportunities were there, and expectations adjusted to the reality.
The other point is that the Woodside Projects, and the larger Woodside-Astoria neighborhood, was segregated by class. It was a middle-income neighborhood inhabited by upwardly mobile, middle-income families. We hardly ever saw single-parent families, adults hanging around on the street, or any of the other manifestations of abject poverty that W.J. Wilson writes about.
Then came the 1970s and the end of the Golden Age. As a moderate, former Southern governor, Carter did not tackle the deep-seated structural problems. Reagan did, but he did so by attacking unions and instituting neoliberalism. These policies opened up "free trade" and globalization, but government's ability to address deep structural problems is limited anyway. Richard Freeman, for example, points to the "Great Doubling" -- an increase in the global supply of labor that roughly doubled the size of the global labor force.
The result is that while some unusual and anecdotal intergenerational mobility remains, intergenerational mobility has declined, while inequality has grown. Wages have stagnated for almost four decades.
The world has changed from the one Joel Klein and I grew up in. To use a romantic nostalgia of a past portrayed as though it was more bleak than it actually was, and the protagonists (whether teachers or students) more heroic than they actually were, is a dishonesty that reinforces the dominant neoliberal ideology and diverts us from the real problem. Even more pernicious than the fable that Joel Klein overcame severe adversity thanks to a heroic teacher unshackled by a union, is the fable that education-based technology will save us in a global economy marked by over-accumulation of capital, a gigantic reserve army of labor, severe environmental constraints, and an economic system out of control.
Fri, 2012-10-19 17:17
"It's more evidence that student achievement mostly reflects the social and economic environment in which children are raised and that the best way to improve academic achievement is to address these conditions directly." Great summary: you provided essentially no scientific evidence of your conclusion, and gave literally no evidence of any kind to support your contention that "addressing these conditions directly" would have the desired results.
Fred Smith
Mon, 2012-10-22 14:16
You have to give Joel Klein credit for creating a mythic account of his humble origins. It wasn't easy. Being found floating in a basket by Pharaoh's daughter was taken; the manger-in-Bethlehem birth was well-celebrated; and the log cabin story was just too corny.
So, the tale of a precarious upbringing in public housing was invented and shaded in every way possible to disguise an average white kid's middle class childhood. This enabled our hero to become a champion of minorities in education--the "civil rights" issue of this generation. Joel would turn out to be so cool, he made it a point to recite the words to the R&B classic. "The Glory of Love", when speaking of his negotiating prowess. At least he didn't do a comb-over.
You have to wonder about a guy so desperate to build a persona and career on such fundamental dishonesty. Once you lie about self, you lie about everything else.
Mon, 2013-08-26 02:46
Mon, 2014-03-03 14:17
Is it just disingenuous or an outright and malicious lie?
This is a person who created an entire persona with a coordinated back story, so that he could further an agenda. An agenda by the way, that has not or ever will work. Joel Klein did nothing innovative in his 'transformation' (NOTE: You could not say that it was an IMPROVEMENT, just a transformation.) of the NYC school district. His closing of under performing and under used schools, promotion of privately managed charter schools, and all out assault on teachers (Granted, including the principals was something of a new wrinkle.) should be identified, codified and filed as the 'reformers commandments' or the 'reformer's playbook'. Frankly speaking, I would have thought that given the vast number of times that these tactics have been employed, and the lack of any measurable improvement, would have the public at large on alert when making public education decisions.
Thu, 2014-10-30 15:25
I was raised in Woodside, in the house in which my father was born. My mother's parents lived on the next block. I, too, considered myself a "street kid" and most of the other kids in my immediate neighborhood did not go on to college, but both of my parents were college educated professionals. My sister is a Bryant High School grad who went on to graduate from the University of Wisconsin. She, like Klein and Rothstein, skipped a year in Junior High via the "two year SP" program. I commuted to a "special high school" in Manhattan, starting in the 7th grade, the first from PS 12 in ten years to be accepted at that school, from which my mother had graduated in 1929. Had I continued on to a neighborhood Junior High School, I would have skipped 8th grade via the "two year SP," as did several of my elementary school classmates.
My family moved from Woodside to Jackson Heights the summer after I graduated from elementary school at the end of 6th grade. At my new school, I had a classmate, who is now an M.D. in Massachusetts, whose mother taught at Bryant High School. Her father drove a taxi. They lived in Astoria, in an apartment that I had always thought was a "housing project," although a few years ago I learned that it was actually a coop, probably build as "public housing" after WW2. I graduated from one of the four State University of New York "university centers" and went on to law school.
My entire family (which includes several NYC public school teachers, two of whom became administrators at some point in their careers,) was appalled by Joel Klein's performance as Schools Chancellor, as were all the other NYC public school teachers and administrators I happen to know. None of us was fooled by either his package of policies or his ersatz "back story." Thank you for exposing him for what he was, and is.
Sat, 2014-11-15 22:08
Physics is not offered in many NYC small schools created by Bloomberg and Klein. Small schools means small choices. If I attended a small school I probably would not have had physics, chemistry, calculus, or AP classes. Guess Joel Klein is lucky to have attended a large school.
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For nearly two decades, the Chemical Brothers "mind-bending" audiovisual live show has played to packed houses and festivals across the globe. But it has never been documented on film, until now. In 2011, at the iconic Fuji Rock Festival in Japan, The Chemical Brothers played a headline set in front of 50,000 fans which was captured on 21 cameras. Immersing us in the thick of a frenetic crowd, 'Don't Think' captures the synaesthetic barrage of sound, film and light and the transforming effect it has on its audience. Directed by Adam Smith, one of the show's visual creators, we are taken on a magical realist psychedelic journey where we feel the show rather than merely watch it.
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Cast: Adam Smith, Ed Simons, Tim Rowlands
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Running time: 1hr 45min
Opens: Feb 01, 2012 Limited