New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein announced today that he was leaving his post to work on an education project for News Corp., and Mayor Michael Bloomberg named Klein's replacement, Cathie Black, who now works as the chair of Hearst Magazines.
That led the website The Awl to snark, in its post headline about the change: "Media Industry Perfect Training For Running School System, Apparently." Black is the second non-educator, after Klein, to lead the system, and it just evidences Bloomberg's governing philosophy -- that the public sector should be run like the private one. (The mayor, after all, wasn't a public servant but a billionaire-entrepreneur when he took office.)
It's not clear what that approach has done for the city's schoolchildren, though. While the administration has trumpeted what seem like successes in score improvements and the few gains its made with the city's teachers' union, the outcome for children in the school system remains bleak: Black men do especially poorly in New York. And already, Black is making a few private-sector-sounding proposals, like increasing the number of charter schools. One small consolation, though, is that Black has only a few years guaranteed to do the job: After this term, Bloomberg is certainly out.
-- Monica Potts
