16. Exit Interview: Schools Chancellor, NYC

Having already amassed an eventful resume -- the Clinton White House, the Department of Justice, and Bertelsmann -- Joel I. Klein spent the past eight years at chancellor of the biggest school system in the country. So what'd he learn?

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 0:48Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 1:20Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 1:53Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 2:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  I have been told that really, this whole leaving the job is just really all about spending more time with the dog.

• 2:38Speaker 01

  From American Public Media and WNYC, this is the Freakonomics Radio Exit Interview. Have a seat. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 2:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  Joel Klein spent the last eight-plus years running the New York City Public School System. It's the largest system in the country, 1.1 million students, 1,600 schools, a $23 billion budget. He spent much of his career as a high-voltage Washington lawyer, arguing cases before the Supreme Court, fighting antitrust battles for the Department of Justice, and serving as deputy counsel to President Bill Clinton. He also had a brief stint in the media business, heading up U.S. operations for Bertlesman. And now, he's heading back to the media business as executive vice president in charge of Educational Ventures for News Corp. Klein's tenure as schools chancellor was very eventful. So what did he learn?

• 3:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  Chancellor Klein, welcome to our exit interview. As you surely know, many firms conduct an exit interview when an employee is leaving to find out their experiences. So I just want to stress that you hear of your own accord. This is not mandatory. You should feel free to be candid. Nothing you say here will be used against you, will be forwarded to future employers, unless, of course, they're listening to this program. So you're okay with that? You ready to proceed then? I'm ready. All right. So after eight years as chancellor of the New York City School System, you are resigning. You're leaving us. Why?

• 4:13Speaker 02

  You know, I think I had planned to do it for eight years when I started. That's sort of what I talked to the mayor about. I faced the decision really before the mayor's reelection whether I want to stick around for the full term or not. He asked me to stay through the election. We kind of agreed on that. But I'm ready. And you know, it's hard to say exactly what that means. I feel like I've done the things I should. I think the city would benefit from bringing in a new chancellor who will have three years working with the mayor on this. And far as I'm concerned, I've always wanted to have a career after this, and I've found a job I'm very excited about.

• 4:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, you came to the job as chancellor of education in New York City schools with a great interest in education, K-12 education, with a great, with a robust set of beliefs in what was right and what was wrong, but not as a veteran educator. So what was that like for you, coming in to take a professional job, running schools, 1.1 million kids, a massive, massive job in something that you had not worked in before? How did that experience unfurl?

• 5:18Speaker 02

  I think it had its complications as well as its benefits, and I think that's inevitable, what's going to happen. I was able to see this in a way that I think people who grew up inside the system were unlikely to see it. You know, I mean, before there was Freakonomics, I actually believed in incentives and thought that they affect the way organizations work. And it just seemed to me, everything in K-12 education was misaligned. We incentivized all the wrong things. And so that was something, I think, coming from the outside, you could see. On the other hand, I didn't pretend to be some great expert on learning theory, or development of the brain, or certainly what it was like day to day in the trenches. I had taught for a short period of time.

• 6:01Speaker 02

  I taught a lot, actually, law school, but I had taught sixth grade math way, way back when, but didn't pretend to be a veteran teacher in any way. It seemed to me the greatest disadvantage was it enabled critics to say he's not an educator. That, I think, is a mistake. I think because somebody's taught for a few years, or five years, or 10 years, I don't think qualifies them to run a huge, complex organization. In fact, I always used to say, I didn't think that the managing partner of a law firm necessarily should be a lawyer. Lawyers are not steeped in management, in human capital, in creating incentives, in creating an organization that's a problem-solving organization. Those are not the things that

• 6:43Speaker 02

  people are trained to do. You can be a great teacher and actually a poor principal. I mean, one of the things that always struck me is we thought people had to be a teacher first before you become a principal. It seemed to me to make no sense. Why shouldn't there be people who can come in, who have the management skills, appoint a strong deputy, put together a team, and get the work done?

• 7:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  A couple people who've worked for you discussed the fact that a lot of management positions at the Department of Ed were filled by people from a corporate or consulting background, as opposed to typically typical schools and typical in New York City, education veterans. Why? Why'd you do that? How'd it work?

• 7:17Speaker 02

  So, I did it because I wanted a mix of skills. I mean, I hired a lot of people from business schools. I mean, it's a $23 billion organization. Why would we think that a social studies teacher would be the primary person to do budgets? Why would we think the social studies teacher would be the primary person to do human resources? You need human resource policies, recruitment policies. So, I wanted people who came from different backgrounds. Second of all, I wanted people who really were part of a performance culture, who really thought that excellence and driving themselves and pushing forward. And I wanted them to come from whatever background. I've got more, in my current cabinet now,

• 7:57Speaker 02

  I've got more senior educators than anybody else ever had. I've got probably four people that have got, oh, maybe 150, 180 years among them in the system. But I've also got some people who come from a very different background. That's the way you assemble a team. But where I could find talent, whether it was from the business schools, or the law schools, or the Kennedy School, or even occasionally a school of economics, you know, I would go for these people and bring them in.

• 8:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  You sound as if you feel that you've accomplished an awful lot. There are a lot of people who would second that, that you've accomplished an awful lot. Tried a lot of things, failed at some, but kept trying others and so on. But how does your feeling now about your accomplishment compare with your expectation of that accomplishment?

• 8:43Speaker 02

  I feel good about it, but you know, I think if you ask me, there's still some of these arcane rules that make no sense. We're looking throughout America at layoffs. State municipal government, they're in trouble economically. They're looking at layoffs. It's hard to look you in the eye and say, "We're going to do layoffs last in, first out." I mean, that is by definition not going to get us the right teachers. Nobody thinks that, and I'm not saying, we've got some veteran teachers who are terrific and we should keep them around. They might be our first priority to mentor others. But only group think says all veteran teachers are better than all the new teachers, the recent teachers that you've recruited. So, that kind of rule drives me nuts. I spend over a hundred million dollars

• 9:26Speaker 02

  right now, as we're talking, on a group of people who can't get hired as full-time teachers in the system. And they do basically substitute teaching. But I don't need substitute teachers that I pay for full-time teachers. So there are rules like that. Rules in terms of some of the technology and the other things you talked about with the School of One, where they got all these arcane regulations that I wish didn't exist. And I still wish every single family in this city had at least one choice, that nobody had to take whatever the school system served up. Middle-class people, friends of yours, would never agree to a school system in which they automatically went to the neighborhood school, whether it was good, bad, or indifferent. And you have poor people who don't have the options,

• 10:10Speaker 02

  can't move, can't afford private school. Poor people, we say to them, "Just take one and you're done." Whether it's good or bad. And it seems to me, competition, even in a incomplete fashion, will help drive forward the system. We made a lot of progress in that regard, but I think there's more we could have made.

• 10:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, let's dial it back then. Pretend you're walking in, it's eight years ago, eight and a half years ago, and you know then what you know now, and you're driven by this desire to be bolder. Tell me a couple of things you'd do off the bat if you were starting over.

• 10:38Speaker 02

  Well, one of the things now I would do off the bat, I'd be much more heavily invested in these technology and learning platforms. You know, a simple little thing, I've now seen a whole bunch of students working with a tutor online, right, and they're texting away, and it's working. I mean, I talk to the kids, I see the results, so that's something we should have done more.

• 10:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  Were you reluctant to believe in that kind of use of technology coming out of the gate?

• 11:03Speaker 02

  I wasn't, but there were, you know, rules when you started. Basically, you had one teacher, you know, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, you could make the argument that using those tutors is violation of the contract or something like that. But I would have pushed those things a lot harder. I would have spoken out even more than I did on some of these arcane rules that make no sense.

• 11:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  If there's been a bete noire in your administration, in your term, probably most people would say it's the teachers' union. There's all kinds of competing issues. How'd you do then, in your view, with the teachers' union? How did you do?

• 11:39Speaker 02

  I think we did OK. We got some important things done. We eliminated forced placements so that schools could hire people. We didn't dramatically change the tenure rules, which I think needs dramatically being changed, both in terms of who gets tenure and what tenure means in this system. I think we've got to professionalize teaching, and it's still too much of a trade union, assembly line, Detroit model, and we've got to move that. And I always like to say about the teachers' union and my relationship, it's like that old song, you know, the glory of love. You give a little, you take a little, and you let your poor heart break a little. That's the story of, that's the glory of love. That's the story of and glory of labor management relations in the public sector.

• 12:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  Coming up, we ask the chancellor to grade himself on how he ran New York City schools.

• 12:43Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 13:27Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 13:48Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 14:21Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 14:53Speaker 01

  We're back with the Freakonomics Radio exit interview. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 14:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  We're talking to Joel Klein, who last week ended his eight-year run as New York City Schools Chancellor. You oversaw or undertook directly a lot of change. There was eliminating community districts, there was putting your weight behind charter schools and all kinds of programs, pilot programs like School of One that we've talked to you about before, closing low-performing schools, opening up a lot of new schools, and especially changing really the shape of the relationship between the Department of Ed with teachers and the relationship with parents and the relationship with students. So I'd like you to give yourself a couple of grades for me. I'll let you break it down how you want. There are administrative tasks, there are public relations, there are in-the-classroom tasks, there are financial tasks.

• 15:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  So tell me how you think you did in the different major departments that you were responsible for.

• 15:47Speaker 02

  So I think administratively, we ran the department well, made some errors in that, but some serious administrative errors. But I think overall, I'd give ourselves a good grade on that.

• 15:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  A good grade being what, a B+?

• 15:57Speaker 02

  A B+, A-, well, I think on leadership, which is really the overall realm, there I think we get an A. I mean, I think it's the most comprehensive, most integrated education reform in the country. I don't think there's any doubt about that. You know, there are pieces throughout the country, some of them going on right now, others, but in terms of an eight-year run at restructuring the culture, restructuring the components, that's what I thought the most important piece, we did that. And the public relations, I would have to mark us down some. It's not about public relations. I mean, people say, "You don't listen," but that's not true. I listened. I disagreed with a lot of people. I didn't do as good enough a job explaining to people why I thought, for example, closing

• 16:41Speaker 02

  a school that was persistently failing children was something we needed to do.

• 16:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  You've had some interesting jobs in the past. You've worked in the White House, the Department of Justice, Bertelsmann. How'd this compare?

• 16:54Speaker 02

  This is best. This is, you know, this was my passion. I really, it was my thing, and I wanted to do it. I've had great jobs. I mean, I loved the Clinton White House. Running the Antitrust Division was terrific. I practiced law before the United States Supreme Court as an appellate advocate. I tried a lot of cases in my time. This thing was my thing, and, you know, I believed I trained all my life for it, and I believe it was as rewarding as anything I could have done.

• 17:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, very good. And final question. I understand that you have a dog that you love very much, a Shih Tzu, yes?

• 17:28Speaker 02

  Yes, I do.

• 17:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  What is this Shih Tzu's name?

• 17:30Speaker 02

  The Shih Tzu's name is Roger.

• 17:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  Roger. It's a male?

• 17:33Speaker 02

  It's a male.

• 17:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  And I have been told by people with whom you work quite closely that really, this whole thing, this whole leaving the job as chancellor of New York City Public Schools is just really all about spending more time with the dog.

• 17:47Speaker 02

  Well, the truth is, it's really about spending more time with the dog's mother, my wife, who is the person that I really want to spend more time. So, basically, and the two of us will spend more time with Roger. But, you know, Roger's moving into his adolescence now, and as you probably know, dogs in their adolescence need a lot of time. So, we're going to give him the appropriate focus he needs.

• 18:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  I wish you the best of luck, and thanks for stopping by.

• 18:14Speaker 02

  Thank you. It's a pleasure, Steve.

• 19:32Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 20:04Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 20:35Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 21:13Speaker 03

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