I just got back from Joel Klein's address at the American Enterprise Institute (carried live on C-SPAN). The New York City Schools Chancellor gave a sober (read: boring) presentation of his tenure in New York, which left the audience a bit wanting in terms of engagement (read: he lectured from a text-packed PowerPoint for forty minutes and talked to the screen instead of the 200-person crowd).
Regardless, there's plenty to like about his story of New York City school reform. As one of the most prominent spokesmen of the "do whatever works" crowd (or, if you prefer, the incentivists), he talked at length about the structural reforms he and his team have enacted, including a freer and fairer market for hiring teachers; greater autonomy for principals; an expansion of charter schools and other forms of choice; and a version of weighted-student funding.
Still, seven years into his tenure it's clear that he's not particularly passionate about the "stuff" of schools, specifically curriculum. But maybe that's changing. Asked by a certain intrepid blogger about any regrets he might harbor, particularly considering New York City's lack of progress in 4th grade reading since 2003 (while the rest of the country is finally showing gains), he admitted a few. First, that he mandated "Month by Month Phonics" in his early years (read: we only put phonics in our program's name as a marketing ploy, but we're really all about whole language). And second, that his reading curriculum hasn't focused enough on non-fiction, a la Core Knowledge. (Joel and Randi agree about something!)
That's surely not enough to appease his detractors-for example, he still took credit for gains from 2002-2003, even though his reform plans were announced just months before his students took the 2003 NAEP test. (More on that controversy here.) And he still doesn't embrace scientifically-based reading research, pointing to this flawed study to buttress his argument that nobody really knows for sure which reading method is best. But perhaps, just perhaps, you could say that he's starting to move in the right direction.
