Diana Lam's Swift Departure
Can Give Schools New Hope
If Mayor Becomes Involved.

Henry J. Stern
March 10, 2004

Monday afternoon, our column summarized the controversy over Deputy Schools Chancellor Diana Lam's efforts to get her husband hired by the Department of Education. We concluded, to be polite, that her usefulness had been impaired. Our last paragraph read:

Ms. Lam's fate is now in the hands of Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein. I am hopeful they will exercise appropriate judgment in a matter of this importance. It will be a test of the administration's standards of ethical conduct.

Monday evening, the mayor and chancellor did the right thing. It is not easy to reverse a prior inclination (through Friday, Chancellor Klein was standing behind his deputy), but it was a correct decision for many reasons.

The next two sections summarize the extensive press coverage of l'affaire Lam. All items are hyperlinked, so you can see the original stories and editorials. If you prefer, or if you have already read enough of the story, you can skip the texts and proceed to our commentary. We collect this as a service to researchers, education buffs, New York City historians, and readers who may already have consigned their newspapers to the catbox.


As one might surmise, the story was covered extensively in the March 9 dailies. The Times' detailed account, "Top Deputy Resigns Schools Post Over Effort to Get Husband a Job," by David M. Herszenhorn and Elissa Gootman, began on page A1. The Post story on page 12, written by David Seifman and Carl Campanile, was headlined "Lam Chopped," and their lead editorial on the subject, "Out Like a Lamb, Cont'd." ran on page 30.

The News, on page three, used "She's Out Like a Lam" as a headline for its story by Michael Saul and Joe Williams. Over a four-column picture of Ms. Lam showing plans for the Tweed Academy, which had quickly been renamed City Hall Academy, the News sacrificed an animal pun for a literary reference: "School Bell Tolls for Scandal-Scarred Deputy." Newsday ran an Associated Press story on page A4, titled "Deputy Schools Chancellor Diana Lam Announces Resignation." The Sun put the story on page one, with the head "Chancellor Forces Lam to Resign in Nepotism Flap," by Kathleen Lucadamo.


A Times editorial, "A Resignation at Tweed," is sympathetic to Ms. Lam and implies criticism of those at Tweed who knew of her job search for her husband and advised her on how to proceed. In today's News, the story is "Joel Backs Ed Att'y in Lam Flap." This, of course, is what Klein did for Ms. Lam on Friday. The mayor will have to decide, in time, whether Counsel Chad Vignola will be retained. The News editorial today, "Chancellor Klein gets taken to school," explores the poor advice and press spinning that took place. Lawyers are the gatekeepers for ethical conduct, and if their boss is doing something wrong, they have a public responsibility not to be helpful to him/her.

The Post has three separate items on the affair: on page two, "Klein accepts Lam excuses" (note the pun). On page 26, the lead editorial, "Mike's Next Move," deals with the alleged cover-up by her colleagues, and demands that the mayor take the lead in fighting school corruption. On page 27, the nationallly-known author and educational historian Diane Ravitch writes a powerful column that is highly critical of "Lam's Legacy." "Will Mike, Joel undo the damage?" the subtitle asks. Her column goes far beyond the indiscretion that cost Ms. Lam her job; Ms. Ravitch believes that most of what the deputy chancellor did was wrong. She calls on the mayor and chancellor to change course while there is still time.

Newsday makes "School Scramble" its banner headline, with a picture of the mayor on page one, and carries no fewer than five stories on the crisis on pages A6 and A7: "Surviving Scandal" by Ellen Yan and Glenn Thrush, "Lawyer Left Unscathed" by Dan Janison, "Parents Hoping for New Attitude" by Wil Cruz, an analysis piece, "Bloomberg, Klein Head Top of the Accountability List," also by Janison, and "Boss Tweed's Ghost Cackling Once Again" by Dennis Duggan. An editorial, "Step Up, Parents," deals with parent participation but touches on Klein and Lam: "She had to go, despite her plausible defense that officials knew of her efforts," Newday opined. The Sun, which has been aggressively negative in its coverage of Ms. Lam for a year, ran "Damage Control at Center Stage After Lam Sacked," by Ms. Temple-Raston, on page one, and an editorial, "After Diana Lam," on page six.
 

The underlying reasons that Ms. Lam should move on deal with educational questions. Her situation was not helped by her difficulties in her previous positions, her public statements, her advocacy of 'whole language' and distaste for phonics, her support of an unproven curriculum which the federal government was unwilling to fund, her extremely specific instructions to teachers, her remarks on finding a new definition for gifted (implicitly degrading literacy) which could affect Bronx Science, Stuyvesant and many other schools for gifted children, which left the Chancellor scurrying to deny that any change was indented. She said other things, some reasonable, but here in New York, words are amplified by the media, which can make them sound more provocative than they actually are. On the other hand, sometimes the media know what you really mean, but are too discreet to say.
There is a vague resemblance here to a chapter in the history of the former Soviet Union. Josef Stalin sought to change the system in 1934, when he named Yagoda to head of the NKVD (the Soviet secret police, formerly the Cheka, then OGPU, later KGB and now FSB, or Federal Security Service). The FSB is believed to be considerably more civilized than its predecessors, and was headed in the 1990's by Vladimir Putin. Young Putin joined the KGB in 1975 when he graduated from law school, and left in 1991 to go into St. Petersburg city government, where he advanced rapidly. Putin returned to lead the FSB from 1998 until 1999, when President Yeltsin appointed him as prime minister, and eventually as his successor. Putin is expected to be re-elected easily on March 14. His opponents have no media access, and one was kidnapped a few weeks ago.
 
Under Yagoda, using the pretext of the Kirov assassination, as Hitler used the Reichstag fire, thousands of people were purged and executed whom Stalin (the Saddam Hussein of his day, except that he was better at warfare) imagined to be disloyal. When Yagoda completed the task, he was himself purged and later executed. He was replaced by Yezhov, five feet tall and known as the Bloody Dwarf. After Yezhov had shot millions more, he was replaced by Lavrenti Beria, who purged the NKVD itself and had Yezhov executed. Beria lasted until 1953, when, after Stalin died and he became one of the ruling triumvirs, the other two, Malenkov and Molotov, had him shot. Beria's name was removed from the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, and the pages replaced by an extended article on the Bering Sea.
 
I tell this story because history is not taught that much anymore, and Americans should know what government was like in other countries, and how fortunate we are to live in the U.S., where politicians simply denounce their rivals.

 
The problem last year was that the mayor relied entirely on Joel Klein, a brilliant lawyer but no educator, and Klein relied on Ms. Lam, a devotee of the Teachers College cult of ultra-progressive education. I know that sounds lowbrow and it certainly is not politically correct, but the educational complex that rules today and the foundations that fund them sadly failed to solve the problems of urban education. In some cases, they actually impeded solutions developed by reformers, such as charter schools and vouchers in extreme cases, because they defended the prerogatives of people who are currently paid to do the job, but have not succeeded in doing it.
 
For his goal of educational advancement to be reached, the mayor should become more deeply and personally involved with education. He doesn't have to worry about crime; he has a fine commissioner in Ray Kelly. Education is a more difficult problem to deal with, in part because the solutions are in dispute. But we know that the school system can be more effective than it is today, even though New York City is better than many other school systems around the country, a fact we usually fail to recognize.
 
If Mayor Bloomberg will apply to education the same insight and aptitude that made him an enormous success in business, and if he is not beguiled by the sirens whose footnoted claptrap represents current thought in this backwater of social and scientific knowledge, the mayor can provide the leadership and resources to take the best of what has already been done, discard the worst, and turn New York City's schools into a national model for urban education.