The Education Business:
Teachers Missing At The Top

Harlem — When Mayor Michael Bloomberg was elected, he vowed to improve the city’s schools, initiating far-reaching overhauls that began with mayoral control: The demolition of the independent and often mayor-opposing Board of Education, the creation of a Department of Education, and the formation of the mayor-vetted Panel for Educational Policy. Critical to Bloomberg's vision was his appointment of Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein, the former head of publishing giant Bertelsmann and U.S. Department of Justice antitrust attorney who sued Microsoft – and won.

Historically, educators lead departments of education. But of the 16 individuals on Klein’s leadership team, only two are educators. In the Bloomberg era, lawyers and MBAs dominate: not only did Klein have a career in law, James Liebman, the Chief Accountability Officer who developed the school progress reports that now drive school survival and principals' job security, is a law professor at Columbia. Stephanie Dua, who heads the Office of Strategic Partnerships – and is CEO of the DOE-linked Fund for Public Schools – worked as a management consultant at the global business consultancy McKinsey & Company. Garth Harries, former Chief Executive of Portfolio now charged with reviewing special education services, came to the department via Stanford Law and McKinsey. Deputy Chancellor Christopher D. Cerf trained as a lawyer and worked with the Edison Learning Company, in 2006 the world’s largest for-profit schools network.

Others come from the political sphere: Micah Lasher, the department’s chief lobbyist, founded the KnickerbockerSKD political communications firm, with clients including Caroline Kennedy, Andrew Cuomo and the Fund for Public Schools. Brian Ellner was a Bloomberg campaign staffer and one-time Manhattan Borough President hopeful who now serves as Klein’s director of Public and Community Affairs.

“I was elected largely on the basis of my business background. I think New Yorkers expect me to run city government in much the same way I ran my company," said Bloomberg in his 2003 State of the City speech, with “the incentive and desire to do more, do it better, and do it with less.”

Under his leadership, the art and practice of education has shifted perceptibly to the business of education – market-driven, "incentivized" and data-steeped.

Enter the Microsoft slayer

“It’s not an accident that the mayor selected the country’s leading antitrust litigator and not a teacher” to lead the DOE, says Eric Nadelstern, who holds the title of Chief Schools Officer. “What the mayor understood [is that] when you have a system with so much vested interest, somehow, you have to break through that.”

Klein’s nomination as chancellor required special state waivers, to permit him to assume the post without advanced academic credentials in education or experience in education leadership. “You can make the argument that the head of the schools should be an experienced pedagogue,” Klein said at an education journalists' roundtable last fall. But fixing the schools posed “a massive management challenge," he said, and the mayor needed “to try outside strategies.”

So Bloomberg “hired the Microsoft guy,” is how a former member of the DOE cabinet under Klein summed it up. “He’s a guy who breaks up monopolies. The problem was the problem of monopolies – the lack of competition, market failure. The whole thing had to be blown up.”