Former NYC School Chancellor Joel Klein Is Not Telling the Whole Truth About His Personal History
http://www.alternet.org/education/expose-former-nyc-school-chancellor-joel-klein-not-telling-whole-truth-about-his-personal
“Sleight of Hand,” an article in the November-December issue of The American Prospect, describes how federal, state, and local housing policies, including the public housing program, were designed a half-century ago to segregate our major metropolitan areas, and how the residential patterns created by public policy at that time persist to this day.
The article does so by way of describing the childhood of Joel Klein, former New York City schools chancellor and now C.E.O. of a Rupert Murdoch company selling technology and software to public schools. Klein has often used his life story to prove an educational theory – that poor quality teachers are the cause of disadvantaged children’s failures. The life story is that he grew up poor, in public housing, “a kid from the streets” with little interest in education until a high school teacher “saw something that I hadn’t seen in myself.” And this life story, Klein and his allies imply, proves that if only disadvantaged students today had the kind of teacher from whom he had benefited, they too would excel and succeed.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan says, “Klein knows, as I do, that great teachers can transform a child’s life chances—and that poverty is not destiny. It’s a belief deeply rooted in his childhood, as a kid growing up in public housing. … He understands that education is … the force that lifts children from public-housing projects to first-generation college students.”
As an education policy analyst, I had heard Joel Klein tell this story about his deprived childhood many times during the last decade. But I never really paid attention. Then, a few years ago, I started to research the history of residential racial segregation, attempting to understand how it came to be that many low-income African-American children are concentrated in urban ghettos where their disadvantage is so overwhelming that even the best teachers and schools cannot overcome it. I learned that 60 years ago when Joel Klein was growing up, public housing projects like his had been constructed not for low-income people but for two-parent middle class families with stable employment histories and solid credit. Unlike the public housing projects we know today, rents in these projects were not government-subsidized; residents paid market-rate rents, sometimes more. After World War II, with returning veterans like Joel Klein’s father flooding an already tight housing market, public housing was often the most desirable residence available for stable employed men and their families. These middle class public housing projects were located in white neighborhoods and intended for whites only (a token number of middle class blacks were admitted in northern city projects), while public housing projects for low income blacks were sited in distant inner-city ghettos in those same northern cities.
= new reply since forum marked as read
was built on the site of an urban dairy farm (in the then-northern suburb of Bond Hill) by the elder Mr. Trump; young Donald worked for his dad here, doing ??
family moving into woodside houses, may 23, 1949.
Returning World War II veterans like Klein’s father confronted a housing shortage. To address it, New York erected projects like Woodside Houses, an attractive six-story development with trees, grassy areas, and park benches. Residents were not on the dole but paid rent that covered their housing costs; apartments were not subsidized and were not part of the national low-income housing program.
Rather, for prospective tenants in Woodside Houses and its sister projects, the New York City Housing Authority enforced 21 disqualifying factors. Excluded were single-parent families and those with irregular employment history, out-of-wedlock births, criminal records, narcotics addiction, or mental illness—in other words, any family with the qualities we now associate with public housing. Couples had to show marriage licenses to apply. To filter out undesirables, inspectors visited applicants’ previous homes to verify good housekeeping habits, sufficient furniture, and well-behaved children. Neighborhood public schools serving complexes like Woodside Houses thus didn’t have to contend with unruly adolescents; they had already been weeded out by the Housing Authority.
http://prospect.org/article/joel-kleins-misleading-autobiography
by saying they 'couldn't read' and that it wasn't until his high school physics teacher inspired him that he began to do well in school, when he was an honors student before he met said teacher.
all to advance a false narrative of miracle-working 'good teachers' and concomittantly, a union-busting narrative of 'bad teachers'.
what a slimeball.
do these people (celebrating arbor day, for god's sake) look like they live in 'the projects'?)
Last edited Tue Oct 16, 2012, 11:04 PM - Edit history (4)
"I grew up in public housing in Queens and grew up in the streets of New York. I always like to think of myself as a kid from the streets, and education changed my life. … I stood on the shoulders of teachers to see a world that I couldn’t have seen growing up in the family that I grew up in.My father had dropped out of high school in the tenth grade during the Great Depression. My mother graduated from high school and never went to college. No one in my family had attended college … or knew about college. I had no appreciation of reading or cultural activities. …
By most people’s lights, we were certainly working-class, poor. … I grew up in a pretty unhappy household. …Teachers set expectations for me that were not commensurate with my background or my family’s income. …
Nobody in [my] school said to me, ‘Well, you grew up in public housing, your parents don’t read, you’ve never been to a museum, so we shouldn’t expect too much from you!’ … I wanted to play ball, I had a girlfriend at the time. I thought school was OK, a little overrated but I thought it was OK. … Mr. Harris, my physics teacher at William Cullen Bryant High School, saw something that I hadn’t seen in myself. … I realized, through him, that the potential of students in inner-city schools is too often untapped. We can fix that. Demography need not be destiny."
http://prospect.org/article/joel-kleins-misleading-autobiography
1. His family made above median income.
2. The public housing he lived in was for middle-class families. The Housing Authority specifically excluded below-poverty tenants, single-mothers, anyone who'd had trouble with the law, etc. Tenants paid market rates, and rents weren't subsidized. It was about 88% white.
3. His parents obviously could read. His father passed a civil-service exam to work for the post office. His mother was an accountant.
4. His parents obviously valued education. His father took him to court to watch the cases, for example.
5. He was an honor student & student leader throughout his junior-high & high-school years. He graduated from high school at 16 because he'd been admitted to a special accelerated program (the article is written by someone in the same program who went to school with him).
He impugns the memory of his dead parents when he implies they raised him in a tenement, they couldn't read, they didn't value education, they didn't know what college was, he was raised 'on the streets', and his success in life is due to a random physics teacher who 'saw something in him he hadn't seen."
He's a big fat liar. He was a middle-class jewish boy living in a middle-class jewish/italian neighborhood going to a middle-class high-school school.
Among his classmates at WC Bryant HS:
Suze Rotolo (1943–2011), an American artist, book artist, author, but best known as Bob Dylan's girlfriend between 1961 and 1964. She is the woman walking with him on the cover of his album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan.
Richard Kline (1944– ), played "Larry Dallas" on classic ABC-TV sitcom "Three's Company". He also performed on Broadway in "City of Angels" and is a member of the Lincoln Center Repertory Company.
Joel Klein (1946– ), New York City Department of Education Chancellor from 2002-2011
The person who wrote the article is also jewish and grew up in astoria in the same social milieu klein did:
In misrepresenting his childhood, Klein has distorted the world of both our fathers. Mine, already out of high school and at City College of New York when the Great Depression hit, was also fortunate to land a job in the post office, working second jobs at night. Permanently traumatized by the insecurity of the Depression, he remained unhappily in the federal civil service so he, like Charles Klein, could see his children through college, after which he was rewarded, also like the elder Klein, with a secure federal pension. My mother, like Klein’s, was a bookkeeper.
I never lived in public housing, but my parents’ small single-family home in a white Queens neighborhood not far from Woodside had monthly mortgage payments about the same as the rent Charles and Claire Klein paid to the Housing Authority. Our family income was similar to the Kleins’; both families were middle-class.
At Bayside High School, I also had Sidney Harris for physics. (After I graduated, he transferred to Bryant.) I don’t doubt that he was an excellent teacher and inspired Klein, but he did nothing similar for me. I was instead motivated by my Latin and journalism teachers. Like the 1963 yearbook at Bryant High School, my 1959 Bayside yearbook has few black faces. Klein and I both attended almost entirely segregated, white schools.
Children like Klein and me were privileged, not perhaps in money but in what sociologists term “social capital.” Nobody I know of from my special-progress class dropped out of school; my fellow students typically went on to become college professors, doctors, business executives, accountants, writers, and lawyers. Sure, we loved to play street stickball, but we were not “kids from the streets,” as Klein would have it. We were surrounded by peers with middle-class ambitions and goals.
It would be obscene for me to claim I overcame severe hardship and was rescued from deprivation by schoolteachers. It is more obscene for Klein to do so, because his claim supports attacks on contemporary teachers and a refusal to acknowledge impediments teachers face because of their students’ social and economic deprivation.
It’s a deprivation that he never suffered but that many children from public housing do today.
http://prospect.org/article/joel-kleins-misleading-autobiography
another wc bryant graduate of roughly the same period:
Susan Anspach (born November 23, 1942) is an American stage and film actress.
Anspach was born in New York City and was raised in Queens, New York. She graduated from William Cullen Bryant High School in Long Island City in 1960. Paul Simon was a neighbor. She enrolled in the music department at the Catholic University of America....
students in library at william cullen bryant high school, 1955
http://livelovelaughcreate.com/ebay/JM-1015B-THUR_(125).JPG
wc bryant HS commencement program, 1958
sidney harris, the teacher who supposedly turned klein from the 'street life'
subsidized housing (e.g. the gov't didn't pay part of the rent to keep it cheap for renters). klein's family's income was *above* the median. He didn't grow up poor in any way, shape or form.
and far from being diverted from some impoverished life of crime by a *special* teacher, he was a top student all through his entire school career, because he came from an upper middle class, educated jewish family that valued & pushed education.
klein is a big fat liar.
try reading the article before posting irrelevant comments.
Klein’s family was also not poor by any reasonable criteria. Charles Klein’s annual post-office salary in the 1950s was about equal to the national median household income. The median national salary for full-time female clerical workers was about three-fourths of the national median household income. Thus, so long as Claire Klein worked, the Klein family income would have been substantially in excess of the national median. Indeed, Charles Klein was well-off enough to take his family on an annual summer vacation to the Catskills...Charles then retired with a defined-benefit federal pension to a Florida apartment near the beach—an option unlikely for public-housing residents as we now know them...
Klein did live in public housing after his family moved to Queens in 1955 when he was nine years old. But he fails to say—perhaps because he truly doesn’t realize—that some public housing in New York in the 1940s and 1950s, including the Woodside Houses project where his family resided, was built for white, middle-class families. The poor and the problems poverty causes were unwelcome. This distinction is critical to understanding Klein’s history and why it undermines his current policy prescriptions.
Returning World War II veterans like Klein’s father confronted a housing shortage. To address it, New York erected projects like Woodside Houses, an attractive six-story development with trees, grassy areas, and park benches. Residents were not on the dole but paid rent that covered their housing costs; apartments were not subsidized and were not part of the national low-income housing program.
Rather, for prospective tenants in Woodside Houses and its sister projects, the New York City Housing Authority enforced 21 disqualifying factors. Excluded were single-parent families and those with irregular employment history, out-of-wedlock births, criminal records, narcotics addiction, or mental illness—in other words, any family with the qualities we now associate with public housing. Couples had to show marriage licenses to apply. To filter out undesirables, inspectors visited applicants’ previous homes to verify good housekeeping habits, sufficient furniture, and well-behaved children. Neighborhood public schools serving complexes like Woodside Houses thus didn’t have to contend with unruly adolescents; they had already been weeded out by the Housing Authority.
arbor day celebration at woodside houses, 1953
http://prospect.org/article/joel-kleins-misleading-autobiography
