Can One Smart Kid Teach a Million?
August 12, 2002

By Henry J. Stern

    Back when I was a kid, the first day of school always brought a certain excitement.  A new teacher, some new classmates, the nip of September in the air, and the end of hanging around the house and beating up your siblings.  Also, on opening day, you didn’t owe any homework assignments, book reports, or lab experiments.  Figuratively as well as literally, you start school with a clean slate.

    This year we have a brand-new Schools Chancellor, Joel Klein.  He has a 1940’s name, post-Joseph but pre-Jason.  He went to a neighborhood high school, William Cullen Bryant in Queens, not an elite school like Science, Stuyvesant or Brooklyn Tech.  Forty years ago, you could do that.  From there it was Columbia College, magna, Harvard Law School, magna and law review editor, a distinguished career in public service and private practice, including a clerkship for the wise and moderate Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell.  Everything Klein has done professionally has been top-drawer.  And now he is about to take a job which, with the exception of Frank Macchiarola, has diminished everyone who has held it; if not in their own eyes, then in the eyes of the public.

    He begins with certain advantages:  first, he is an ally and not an adversary of the Mayor.  Second, he is unhampered by obligations to unions, businesses, contractors, lobbyists, activists, pacifists, political clubs and jobseekers.  Third, he is clearly a man of intellect and character, who left the White House counsel’s office alive, and with his reputation intact.  He leaves Bertelsmann almost simultaneously with his dismissed employer.

    The job he undertakes here is enormously difficult.  He will be challenged by the interest groups who permeate the huge educational establishment.  They seek ever-greater nourishment from over twelve billion dollars that are spent annually on education.   Klein will also have to deal with his own Fresh Kills - a mountain of waste, often carefully shielded by procedures, regulations, standards and traditions, not to mention collective bargaining agreements and codicils, which, it will be alleged in political courtrooms, have ossified into laws so powerful they would bind Gulliver, possibly even Hercules.

    But assuming he defeats or contains these formidable obstacles, it is not all that apparent what he can or should do to teach children reading, writing and arithmetic, which once were the goals of public education.  Scholars, including deconstructionists, have different views on how, and in what languages or dialects, children should be taught.   They complain, and if they don’t like the result, they litigate, on and on and on.

    Education has been an individual process, coming from the teacher-student relationship.  Assuming that Klein is brilliant enough to figure out what to do, and to get rid of the land mines in his way, he will have to find, or retrain, the thousands of qualified teachers who will be necessary to carry out this vision.  The task is daunting.

    In the interest of scholarship, an article on education should have references, and suggestions for further reading.  For a brief look at chancellorship politics, see For Whom the School Bell Tolls, an article I wrote April 25, at the start of Harold Levy’s exit dance. On the issue of what should be taught, I recommend a lively column by Heather MacDonald, which appeared in Monday’s Daily News.  I am not certain that every word in it should be taken ex cathedra, but she makes a great deal more sense to me, and to most New Yorkers than anything that emerges from 110 Livingston Street, an address that symbolized futility as Boss Tweed’s Courthouse betokened extravagance.

Henry J. Stern is the director of NYCivic.