A skillful account of how Klein maneuvered between parent and teacher concerns and city politics to transform the city's...
News Corp. executive vice president Klein gives an accounting of the remaking of New York City's school system during his eight-year term as chancellor.
Trained as a lawyer and serving in President Bill Clinton's Justice Department, the author was appointed as the head of the nation's largest school system by newly elected Mayor Michael Bloomberg in 2002, after the state legislature voted to give the mayor full authority over city schools. Using a national network of collaborators, Klein became one of the most influential figures in American education. He was also among the most controversial figures, but he makes it clear that the mayor was in charge. On Martin Luther King Day in 2003, Bloomberg announced the reform program called “Children First,” which Klein calls “the most carefully crafted public address of his time in office.” Part of the plan included the elimination of New York City’s elected school boards, along with the district superintendents’ offices. From then on, the schools were to be run centrally. “I wanted control [of the schools],” said Bloomberg, “and I got control. And I am going to do something about it.” Klein was tasked with the restructuring of three separate but related problem areas—political, bureaucratic and educational—to benefit the children. First on his agenda was empowering school principals by freeing them from political patronage and bureaucratic obstructionism. To that end, he set up a principals' training institute and program. Over a four-year time frame, the 1,000-page teachers' contract was renegotiated, and curriculum changes were introduced. The author also sought to lower the dropout rate, and he notes that relations with the teachers' union were vital to his efforts to improve the quality of education for New York City students.
A skillful account of how Klein maneuvered between parent and teacher concerns and city politics to transform the city's education system.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0062268648
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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