Stumbling Through: How Joel Klein Reinvented the New York City Schools

In this essay, the author reviews "Education Reform in New York City: Ambitious Change in the Nation's Most Complex School System," by Jennifer A. O'Day, Catherine S. Bitter, and Louis Gomez. The book under review explores a larger set of issues, and some time has passed. But many of the issues studied remain relevant and the consistent responses received from a broad cross section of people make the work informative in considering the merits of this volume. According to its editors, the book contains evidence-based papers of Chancellor Joel Klein's Children First initiative, implemented from 2003 to 2010. Klein, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney in charge of the Antitrust Division, served as Chancellor from 2002 to 2011, when he left to work for the News Corporation where he was enlisted to help Rupert Murdoch navigate his way through the hacking scandal that had engulfed his media conglomerate. The book refers to the Klein education reforms as the "most ambitious of any large urban school system in the country" dedicated towards "instituting evidence-based practices to produce higher and more equitable outcomes for all students."