Schoolhouse Doors & Executive Washrooms

This week in New York City our third-term mayor, Mike “Mother” Bloomberg, finally announced what he’d known for three months – the schools Chancellor Joel Klein would be stepping down and going back to private life. Since I don’t have any children in the public schools, it might be your first question: why do you care? For the same reason people of sound reasoning opposed the installation of Mr. Klein in the first place, opposed the usurpation of parental involvement by the creation of mayoral control of the schools; mainly that none of these autocratically decreed measures took into account some of the basic tenets of democracy we hold dear. The prime example is the mayor’s third term. After publicly supporting term limits, Bloomberg decided he wasn't finished remaking the city in his own image (or maybe there are some of his corporate real-estate magnate pals that haven’t gotten their piece of the pie yet) and overturned the law that limited elected officials to two terms. That way, Mayor Mike could buy himself another term. Regular citizens asked, “What tha’?” But what do regular citizens know anyway?

When Mr. Klein was elevated to Chancellor, he was given a waiver by the state department of education that took his experience as an attorney and administrative manager as, “good enough” for running the nation’s largest school system, even though he had never once developed a lesson plan, taught a chemistry class or even served government cheesy mac n’ cheese to any of the “customers” – Mayor Bloomberg’s phrasing on his radio show recently in reference to students and parents. So to run the New York City schools you don’t have to have any teaching experience and that precedent is very likely to continue with the mayor’s latest appointee, Cathie Black, who was a Hearst publishing executive until jumping into the public education fray at Bloomberg’s summons. Ms. Black is from Chicago, which again isn’t a disqualifier for heading New York’s schools, but fits with the mayor’s Bostonian tendency to look for his best and brightest from either outside the city rather than from within the five boroughs or the ranks of the agency he’s looking to reform. To be fair, for all the looking down his aquiline nose Joel Klein performed on parents, teachers and students during his tenure as chancellor, at least he was a product of those same New York City schools. According to published reports (ABC News and WNYC radio) Ms. Black herself attended parochial school and sent her own children to private boarding schools in Connecticut.

While she may be as the mayor put it, a “world-class” executive, and an obviously talented and somewhat privileged part of the ruling class, I can’t for the life of me see how running Good Housekeeping and Popular Mechanics magazines really qualifies anyone to manage a school system. Then again, there is an antecedent for this, and it runs deep in a certain strata of American plutocracy – the idea that public service through politics is best performed by people of such immense wealth and social standing that they are not beholden to special interests (heck, they are the special interests) and more likely to throw the full weight and thrust of their innovative, entrepreneurial and managerial powers into simply getting things done, unions, teachers, parents and their lousy knot-headed children be damned.

The Kennedy Administration was filled with the best and brightest. That gave us Mr. McNamara’s war, and there are many other examples I could cite of situations where our government or some function thereof was hijacked by a cabal of those who know better than all the rest of us by virtue of their having made more money than they’ll ever spend in the private sector. There is some good to be gleaned for this kind of call to service, if it can be called that. We do know that Ms. Black might be a short-timer in the chancellor’s office because there are only three years left in the mayor’s term and she may want to fly off to some other challenge or call to serve in another profit-making enterprise.

Any argument of this type would be stupidly one-sided if I didn’t point out that without such philanthropists as Carnegie and Rockefeller, all across the country we wouldn’t have many of the public institutions that are the bulwarks of American democracy such as libraries and children’s hospitals. No one of good faith with an interest in vibrant, active public education would say that involvement from people with financial savvy, managerial prowess and proven corporate leadership ability is a bad thing, but it’s certainly not the only thing. That’s where the selection of Cathie Black for schools chancellor seems out of balance. New Yorkers will get a chance to see who our dear leader has chosen for us in action and we’ll like it because what do regular citizens know anyway?

End. Rev2. 13 November 2010, 11.03 a.m., Brooklyn
© David Mark Speer