9486 in the collection
Oppose the appointment of Joel Klein as Secretary of Education
You are invited to sign the
online petition opposing the appointment of
Joel Klein as U. S. Secretary of Education.
Go to the URL below.
To: President elect Barack Obama
We, the undersigned, devoted thousands of hours
of volunteer time to the election of Barack
Obama as President. As Professional educators
we were encouraged by the promise to have an
open and respectful dialogue within the
educational community about NCLB, its limits,
and its failures.
Now, a trial balloon has been advanced in the
media for Joel Klein, Chancellor of NYC schools
to serve as U.S. Secretary of Education in an
Obama Administration. ( It is quite possible
that Klein himself promoted the trial balloon.)
Trial balloons are trials. They are floated to
see how people will react.
This petition is a reaction.
The administration of Joel Klein as Chancellor
of New York City Schools is representative of a
particular rigid approach to school change
promoted by NCLB which we oppose. Rather than
take the advice of educators, Chancellor Klein
repeatedly championed and implemented policies
that support corporate interests as opposed to
children. The NY City Department of Education
under Joel Klein has been run like a ruthless
dictatorship – with no input from parents or
educators. Teachers have not been respected,
consulted, nor listened to. And little thought
has been devoted to how the policies he has
imposed on our schools have been destructive to
the children and their futures.
To lay at the door of schools the many problems
the of society—and particularly those that
afflict people of color and low income—as does
Joel Klein, is a transparent media manipulation
of complex issues. While focusing on test
scores, he has consistently ignored the crisis
of overcrowding in New York schools. Thousands
of children are being given special services in
hallways or in closets.
Rather than face the complex nature of student
achievement and to work for substantive school
improvement, Chancellor Joel Klein has joined
with others to blame teachers unions and to
bash teachers.
He has, at the same time, refused to reduce
class size, despite repeated audits and reports
from the New York State Comptroller’s office
and the State Education Department.
Joel Klein has repeatedly demonstrated that his
primary goal is improving test scores even when
these policies produce cheating and a focus on
test preparation. The rise in state test scores
that has resulted is not matched by
improvements in the more reliable national
assessments called the NAEPs. In fact, NYC was
11th out of 12 urban school districts in New
York in terms of its gains in the NAEPs over
the course of his administration, and there has
been no closing of the achievement gap in any
subject tested. The available data New York
City does not support the claims of improved
school achievement under this administration.
This singular focus on test scores contradicts
the educational platform of the Democratic
Party and the Obama campaign.
We were encouraged by the Obama campaign’s call
to reform NCLB and for adequate school funding
rather than to continue with the narrow blame-
the –teacher –focus of the Bush administration
and candidate McCain. The Joel Klein
administration in NYC has modeled school change
efforts of the mode of the Bush/McCain efforts
and in stark opposition to the promises of the
Obama campaign.
For these reasons, and after noting the cries
of opposition from parents groups, we the
undersigned oppose the nomination of Joel Klein
and we call upon the Obama Administration to
seek broad public input into important
decisions.
Sincerely,
The Undersigned
— educators
petition
2008-11-10
http://www.petitiononline.com/campd227/petition.html
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