Lessons of Hope

How to Fix Our Schools

Joel Klein

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780062268655
• eBook ISBN:
  9780062268662
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildungsbiographien

New York Times Bestseller (Education)

The Economist Best Books of the Year Selection

In this revealing and provocative memoir, the former chancellor of the New York City schools offers the behind-the-scenes story of the city's dramatic campaign to improve public education and an inspiring blueprint for national reform.

In 2002 New York City's newly elected mayor, Michael Bloomberg, made a historic announcement: his administration had won control of the city's school system in a first step toward reversing its precipitous decline. In a controversial move, he appointed Joel Klein, an accomplished lawyer from outside the education establishment, to lead this ambitious campaign.

Lessons of Hope is Klein's inside account of his eight-year mission of improvement: demanding accountability, eliminating political favoritism, and battling a powerful teachers union that seemed determined to protect a status quo that didn't work for kids. Klein's initiatives resulted in more school choice, higher graduation rates, and improved test scores. The New York City model is now seen as a national standard for meaningful school reform. But the journey was not easy. Klein faced resistance and conflict at every turn.

Lessons of Hope lays bare the problems plaguing public education and shows how they can be solved. At its core lies Klein's personal story: his humble upbringing in Brooklyn and Queens, and the key role that outstanding public school teachers played in nurturing his success. Engaging and illuminating, Lessons of Hope is essential reading for anyone concerned about the future of American public education.

1

1 Before

I was a city kid, born in the Bronx but raised first in Brooklyn then in Queens. The home I shared with my parents and sister in Bensonhurst was an apartment across the street from the home of my grandfather Abe and my grandmother Rose. In 1953, after I turned seven, my father announced that he could no longer live near his in-laws, and our family moved to a sprawling public-housing complex in Woodside, Queens, where more than a thousand families crowded into twenty large apartment buildings.

My childhood was turbulent. My father, a postman, was unhappy with his job and frustrated by his circumstances. At unpredictable moments, but with alarming frequency, he would begin to complain; his voice would fill with anger and suddenly he was shouting about his miserable job, lack of money, our terrible apartment, his awful marriage, and how he should just leave and never come back. My parents had few friends, and my father fought with those they had, always feeling slighted by what they said or did. My mother tried to be a peacemaker, but she was afraid of my father’s temper.

2

The tension was constant. Our family discussions were perfunctory: “How was school?” “Fine.” We never read together or talked about books, and we hardly spoke about my parents’ lives. I knew virtually nothing about my ancestors in Hungary and Russia, my parents’ childhoods, or my father’s service in World War II, where he was wounded and was awarded the Bronze Star. I had started college before learning that my mother had been married briefly before meeting my father.

In my father’s eyes, I was the vehicle for my family’s progress. He was loving with me, but constantly reminded me to think big when imagining my future. We spent lots of time together, just the two of us. Since his only real interest was sports—mostly the Yankees—that became the glue that bound us. In the first seven years of my life, the team of DiMaggio, Rizzuto, Ford, Berra, and Mantle won six World Series. In the next seven years, they would capture four more. On the days when my father took me to the stadium, or during the countless hours we played ball together, I forgot about how he pressured me and treated my mom.

His expectations for me felt heavy and ever present. I knew that I was expected to achieve in ways that would redeem a life he regretted as he struggled to provide for us. Sometimes he took his frustrations out on me. The beatings, while rare, were severe and left an indelible mark. Scoldings were more frequent; though I was basically a well-behaved kid, I felt as though I was always doing something wrong. It’s not easy for a child to understand how someone who gives so much love can also inflict so much pain. School—orderly and predictable—became a haven for me.

3

My first school, P.S. 205, occupied half a block on Twentieth Avenue in Bensonhurst and educated mainly working-class Jewish, Italian American, and Irish American kids. The groups warred against each other and often the others teamed up against the Jews. After the move to Woodside, I went to P.S. 151 in Astoria and then to neighboring Junior High School 10. During these years, I was busy looking for, and finding, adult support away from the turmoil at home. One pillar was my grandfather Abe. I spent lots of time with him, especially during summer vacations, talking about the world beyond my corner of Queens. A patient, wise man, he was a marvelous storyteller. I also found refuge at a little storefront synagogue in Astoria, where Rabbi Aryeh Jacobs taught me in Hebrew school and frequently invited me to dinners with his family. The rabbi showed me how a man could be smart, generous, and loving—and the way a family could be a place of mutual support rather than constant discord.

Just before high school, my family moved again, this time to a second-floor apartment on a busy shopping street called Sutphin Boulevard in a gritty part of Queens known as Jamaica. Buses ran up and down the boulevard on the way to a sprawling Long Island Railroad station where eight tracks converged. The LIRR is the busiest commuter railroad in the country, and more than a hundred trains passed through the Jamaica station every day. In the 1950s and ’60s, most were powered by diesel and spewed a greasy smoke that coated the neighborhood with a black film. My bedroom faced the boulevard, where the buses ran all night. I can still hear them.

Because I wanted to be with the kids I knew from elementary and junior high school, I got a variance that allowed me to attend Bryant High School in Astoria, Queens. I commuted by subway, joining a community of four thousand students and teachers housed in a massive four-story block of brick and concrete. My life at Bryant was truly joyful. I earned mostly A’s and joined the math and chemistry clubs, played sports, wrote for the student newspaper, and was elected president of the student union. It was there that I fell in love for the first time.

4

Bryant’s teachers were generally good, and I remember most to this day. They inspired me to love learning, saw that I thrived on new and increasingly difficult challenges, and gave me lots of personalized attention. My physics class was taught by an extraordinary man named Sydney Harris, who couldn’t stand wasted potential. “You have so much more ability than you think you do,” he told me. “I’d like to make a deal. Spend a couple afternoons a week after school with me, and I’ll teach you Einstein’s theory of relativity. I think you can handle it, and more.”

I took the deal, and Harris turned out to be right. Einstein was followed by a National Science Foundation scholarship to a summer program at Mount Hermon, a private boarding school in rural Massachusetts. There, I entered an entirely new universe, inhabited mostly by kids from prep schools who were more worldly than people I’d previously known. I managed the academic work, doing well in a physics course and reading everything by Hemingway on my own. But I was socially uncomfortable and missed my chance at romance because I felt too intimidated by classical music to join the others on Saturday nights at nearby Tanglewood, where they socialized while listening to the Boston Symphony. I had never been to a concert; my only real cultural outings had involved a couple of school visits to museums. Even so, the summer changed me: I gained some confidence from knowing I could compete with the best academically, and I made some new friends.

5

In my senior year at Bryant, Sydney Harris advised me to look beyond Queens College, which my father had chosen for me because there was no tuition and I could commute from home. With Mr. Harris’s encouragement, I applied to Columbia. When the thick acceptance letter arrived in April 1963, it informed me that I had won the Joseph Pulitzer scholarship, which would cover four years of tuition and require me to live on campus. The scholarship answered a prayer so precious it had never been spoken aloud. My father immediately tried to nix the idea, saying that Columbia would still be too expensive because the scholarship didn’t fully cover the cost of room and board. I was nevertheless determined to go—because it was Columbia and because I had to get away from home. I would work part-time to cover any shortfall. Starting as a newspaper-delivery boy in my freshman year, I wound up a bank teller by senior year and always earned enough to get by.

MY EXPERIENCE AT COLUMBIA WAS MIXED, THOUGH IT IMPROVED as time passed. In my first year, I took a physics course with the Nobel Prize–winning professor Polykarp Kusch, who announced that any student who got all thirty-five final exam questions right could have dinner with him. Noting the lukewarm response to his challenge, he added, “You don’t know what two hours of a Nobel Prize winner’s time is worth.” He then said that no one had aced his exam since he started teaching at Columbia in 1937. I studied as hard as I could and came one answer shy of winning dinner. This near miss reinforced my feeling that, whatever my background, I could achieve academically.

But I remained socially uncomfortable. Most of my classmates came from greater wealth and privilege and had grown up frequenting museums, attending theater and concerts, traveling, and reading the great books. Many had gone to private schools like Andover, Exeter, Choate, and St. Paul’s. I had read some of the classics, but didn’t know a Picasso from a Renoir. My classmates dressed in classic preppie clothes. I dressed like a kid from Queens, with gold pants and purple sweaters. They spoke with tight-jawed, patrician accents and laughed as they said, “Dere goes Klein. He’s goin’ ta da moobies.”

6

After I was rejected by two leadership clubs—Blue Key and Van Am—I thought maybe my father was right: I should have gone to Queens College. I considered transferring but, fortunately, pulled myself together. I decided to apply to a fraternity—Alpha Epsilon Pi—and when I was accepted, several of the older members befriended me. Still, I never felt fully at home. Between working hard in my courses and earning money in part-time jobs, I didn’t have much time for social events, and I found that I didn’t make many friends in college—though a handful became close and remain so to this day. Unlike most of my classmates, I was too intimidated to date girls from Barnard, thinking we wouldn’t have much in common.

Despite my success in Professor Kusch’s class, physics couldn’t compete with the promise of the law. In television programs like Perry Mason, movies like Anatomy of a Murder, and great books like To Kill a Mockingbird, I saw inspiring advocates at work. I wanted to have an impact, to help make society fairer and better, and the law seemed to provide a way to do that. I also suspect that the invisible hand of my father, who wanted me to be a lawyer and had occasionally taken me to see trials in lower Manhattan, played a role in my decision to apply to law school.

I was accepted by several law schools and chose Harvard because it was Harvard. Harvard would also give my father something to brag about at the post office, even though, as it later turned out, his coworkers thought I had been admitted to “Harper Law School” (Harper was a part of the state university in New York, and it didn’t have a law school).

7

Harvard educated me in countless ways. I studied with legendary teachers like Paul Bator, who taught me to think harder than I had imagined possible, and found most classes exciting and challenging. I became good friends with professors like Alan Stone, a psychoanalyst who taught interdisciplinary courses, and Alan Dershowitz, the great criminal lawyer, both of whom would have a profound impact on my values and life.

Harvard in the late 1960s and early ’70s was a place focused on urgent national events, especially the war in Vietnam and the growing disconnect between the government and its young citizens. This was a turbulent time, one when many students became radicalized and occupied or even shut down university buildings and programs. My alma mater, Columbia, was probably most heavily affected, while Harvard followed close behind.

Although I was not involved in radical groups, I went through my own time of turmoil. I took time off and decided to try my hand at teaching. I enrolled in education courses at New York University and then taught mathematics to sixth graders in Astoria, Queens, not far from where I had grown up. I loved teaching, but after being called into the army reserves, I decided to return to law school after my service. Still, those memories of teaching remain: the kids were smart and funny, the parents were engaged, and I felt challenged by preparing for class every day. Many of the kids were from immigrant families. It was the era of so-called new math. Several parents unable to help their children asked me for advice, and I suggested we meet as a group one night each week. When I asked for permission to hold these meetings, my principal told me not to do it—even though I expected no extra salary and the school was already open for evening events. The principal explained, “If you do it, the parents will expect the other teachers to do it, and they won’t want to, so they will resent you.” So it didn’t happen. This was my first real experience with low expectations in a school and the damage they can do.

After completing my army reserve training at Fort Dix, I returned to Harvard and finished my studies. Upon graduation in June 1971, I spent a year with an extraordinary group of scholars at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Before graduation, I had worked for my law professor, Alan Dershowitz, who had been selected for the Stanford program and didn’t know he wasn’t permitted to bring along a research assistant. Luckily, I was welcomed to stay.

8

Among the scholars in attendance that year was the famous Bruno Bettelheim, a Holocaust survivor, who was one of America’s most prominent psychologists and a popular writer whose work ranged from a concentration camp memoir, The Informed Heart, to a book about kids in an Israeli kibbutz, The Children of the Dream. Some of Bettelheim’s ideas, especially those about autism, would eventually be discredited, but he was a profound thinker and writer whose works on the nature of childhood, the meaning of love, and other aspects of the human condition were insightful and accessible. We hit it off surprisingly well and often discussed intellectual matters—psychology, politics, history, law—as well as personal concerns. Bettelheim made two observations that affected me deeply and stayed with me forever. One was, “Most people want security—they want to make sure tomorrow is just like yesterday. You’re not like that. You only want to look ahead.” He said this approvingly, and it made me feel good. But he also said, “You do so well with other people, but you have to learn to do well with yourself.”

Bettelheim’s second statement described my tendency to look outside myself for inspiration, direction, and reassurance. Although I didn’t know it at the time, the insecurity of my childhood had led me to focus my attention on others and had taught me how to meet and even exceed their expectations. Years—and a lengthy psychoanalysis—would pass before I truly understood what this meant, but Bettelheim had detected something very real. In my pursuit of success, I was almost always focused on experiences and achievements that would satisfy my father, whose demands had become internalized as my own, without my really knowing it. Had Bettelheim not helped me find my inner anchor, I wouldn’t have been able to do many of the things I subsequently did in life.

9

After my year at Stanford, I spent the next eight months traveling throughout most of Europe and Africa funded by a fellowship awarded by Harvard. I returned to the United States in May 1973 to start my legal career, beginning with a clerkship for Chief Judge David Bazelon of the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. Highly respected, Bazelon was intensely focused on the rights of individuals, and he issued many important rulings in favor of the mentally ill and criminal defendants. It was Bazelon who greatly broadened the “insanity defense” and also first ruled that people placed in the care of state mental institutions had a right to treatment for their illnesses, not just custodial care.

After my clerkship with Judge Bazelon, I worked over the summer at the Mental Health Law Project, a public interest law firm advocating on behalf of the mentally disabled. Next I clerked for Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, a genteel and thoughtful jurist. Powell, appointed by President Nixon, was a conservative. At the time, my own politics were quite liberal. But despite our differences, I was thoroughly won over by his humility, intelligence, love of country, and sense of public service. I learned how a jurist could begin consideration of a case with his core principles, listen to arguments on all sides, think through what he believed to be right, and then work with colleagues to reach a just conclusion. Powell was a truly rare individual; as I would later say at his memorial service, “Unlike most people in Washington, D.C., when Lewis Powell danced with you, he looked in your eye, not over your shoulder to see if there was someone more important to dance with.”

10

My only brush with conflict came as the court considered O’Connor v. Donaldson, a case in which a Florida man, Kenneth Donaldson, claimed the state had improperly deprived him of the right to liberty by confining him to a mental hospital without treatment, even though he was not a danger to himself or others. Having clerked for Judge Bazelon and worked at the Mental Health Law Project, I knew this kind of case well and understood that tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people were, like Donaldson, then being unnecessarily confined in similarly harsh conditions.

Mr. Donaldson was a sympathetic figure, and the legal issues seemed clear to me. I compiled a stack of previous court rulings, medical research, and relevant academic papers, and made sure they circulated among my co-clerks. I knew, of course, that Chief Justice Warren Burger—previously Bazelon’s nemesis on the court of appeals—disagreed with the lower court rulings favoring Donaldson and the right to treatment initially declared by Bazelon. Burger was eager to reverse them.

As has previously been reported, the chief justice chose to write the opinion himself and circulated a draft that would have scuttled any notion of a right to treatment. Quietly, I gathered support for Donaldson among the clerks and watched as the justices slowly lined up against the chief. Donaldson ultimately prevailed, and Bazelon’s earlier right-to-treatment ruling remained as a precedent for future cases. Chief Justice Burger wrote a blistering opinion, attacking the notion of a right to treatment, but none of the other justices joined him.

The Brethren, a major book on the Supreme Court written by Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong, dissected the Donaldson case. Knowing I was involved, Woodward interrogated me, revealing in the course of our interview that he had been misinformed on some details. Faced with allowing him to publish incorrect information, I became a source, a decision that I suspected would not please my boss, Justice Powell. I fessed up over a pleasant lunch after which Powell—a patrician, soft-spoken man—said he appreciated my cand...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1: Before
• 2: Everybody Deserves a Good Education
• 3: No One Knows Anything
• 4: A System of Great Schools
• 5: Children First
• 6: Dollars and Sense
• 7: The Zombie Bureaucracy
• 8: A Deal Worth Fighting For
• 9: Making Leaders
• 10: Overcoming the Fear Factor
• 11: Relentless
• 12: Change That Endures
• 13: Choosing Hope
• Postscript
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher