Klein’s Name Is Floated, and Bloggers Object by Elissa Gootman - City Room Blog - NYTimes.com

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The blogosphere may have given Barack Obama’s presidential campaign a lift, but it could have the opposite effect on the candidacy of a contender to be his education secretary: Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein.

Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein has been mentioned as a possible secretary of education. (Photo: Annie Tritt for The New York Times)

No sooner was Mr. Klein’s name floated as a candidate for the federal post than parents, educators and others who have criticized his handling of the city school system took to the Internet to try to scuttle the nomination.

On Proudparenting.com, the blogger HalWLanse wrote:

Chancellor Klein’s leadership is questionable, to say the least. I’ve never heard a teacher speak well of him. President-elect Obama won the election because he is an inspirational leader. Joel Klein has drawn the ire of teachers and parents alike. Choosing him as secretary of education would be a provocative move.

On SmallTalk, Michael Klonsky wrote, in a posting titled “Worst possible choice for Sec. of Ed.? Joel Klein,” that he had been “bombarded” with emails from educators and teacher groups in New York, “panic stricken over the possibility” that Mr. Klein could be appointed to the federal post.

On a blog attached to the Obama campaign’s official Web site, a poster with the handle Woodlass from New York, N.Y., pleaded with President-elect Obama to pass over Mr. Klein, writing:

He hasn’t made schools in this city any better than they had been, because it’s obvious students aren’t doing so well and neither are the teachers. He excluded parents and the rank-and-file from the decision-making process, poured millions into machines to crunch data for no practical purpose, and he neither respects or defends truth.

And since last week, Leonie Haimson, the executive director of Class Size Matters, has urged parents to address their concerns about Mr. Klein to The Nation, which she said was planning to post the observations of parents and other stakeholders on its website.

“The Department of Education under Joel Klein has been run like a ruthless dictatorship,” Ms. Haimson wrote. “In short, he has been a disaster for our schools, and Barack Obama should be forewarned not to name him to any position of authority in his administration — as much as we would like to get rid of him!”

Asked about the criticisms, David Cantor, the chancellor’s press secretary, said in an e-mail message:

The chancellor has spent the last six years building a school system focused on the needs of kids. Along the way he’s angered adults with entrenched interests in policies that have never worked. That’s a trade he’ll make every time.

The Nation: Travails of the Super-Rich By Barbara Ehrenreich

Travails of the Super-Rich

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Travails of the Super-Rich
By Barbara Ehrenreich
The Nation

Friday 31 August 2007

On Labor Day we customarily give a nod to America's underpaid and overworked blue- and pink-collar workers - janitors, flight attendants, forklift operators and the like. But this year let's go a step further and salute the most reviled and despised of the people who make our economy happen, the mere mention of whom causes the average forklift operator to spit on the floor. You are thinking, perhaps, of telemarketers, human traffickers and the fiends who answer the phone when you to try to make a claim on your health insurance. But I'm talking about our CEOs.

Just in time for the holiday, two liberal groups - United for a Fair Economy and the Institute for Policy Studies - have issued a gleefully malicious new attack on our CEO class. They point out that the CEOs of large companies earn an average of $10.8 million a year, which is 362 times as much as the average American worker, and retire with $10.1 million in their exclusive pension funds. The groups further point out that the compensation of US CEOs wildly exceeds that of their European counterparts, who, we are invited to believe, work equally hard.

And, in what they must think is their cleverest point of all, the UFE/IPS folks state: "The 20 highest-paid individuals at publicly traded corporations last year took home, on average, $36.4 million. That's...204 times more than the 20 highest-paid generals in the U.S. military." You know what we're supposed to think here: Wow, but generals have all that responsibility! They're responsible for national security, or at least for conducting the wars that increase the threats to our national security and thus help justify ever greater increases in our national security apparatus!

But someone has to speak up for our beleaguered CEO class, and let me begin with that spurious comparison to the top military brass. Could we put patriotic emotion aside for a moment and look at this in a hardheaded, bottom-line sort of way?

Suppose you are the general responsible for all the service people in Iraq, about 130,000, and suppose you manage to lose every single one of them in some ghastly miscalculation. With the death benefit for the family of one dead soldier running at $100,000, your mistake will cost a total of $13 billion. Sounds like a lot, I know, until you consider that a hedge fund manager or financial company CEO can lose that much in a single afternoon, without anyone even noticing. There is simply no comparison between a general and a CEO.

That's a side issue, though. The real point, which the CEOs and their usual defenders are strangely reticent to make, is that it's damn expensive to be rich, and extravagantly expensive to be super-rich. Before you start playing your air violins, consider the costs of maintaining as many as five different homes, some of them as large as 45,000 square feet, most with swimming pools, tennis courts, guest houses and wine cellars requiring constant supervision.

The poor whine about having no home at all, or maybe a two-bedroom apartment for a family of six. They should just think for one moment of the tribulations involved in running four or more mansions, each with its own full-time staff. There's the problem of getting between them, for example. A friend of mine, of very modest means himself, consults for a billionaire couple who commute between London and Los Angeles by private jet, with their dogs following in a second private jet.

But much of what we know about the extreme costs of wealth comes from Wall Street Journal columnist Robert Frank's recent book Richistan. The ultra-rich, drawn largely from the CEO class, require staffs of about forty to fifty people, including not only cooks, maids and nannies but "lifestyle managers" (to set up the entertainment schedule) and - in a throwback to the original Gilded Age - butlers. It's the butler's job, among other things, to deal with any issues that may arise from the proliferation of homes. For example, if the boss is in Palm Beach, Frank reports, "and wants to send his jet to New York to pick up a Chateau LaTour from his South Hampton cellar, the butler makes it happen, no questions asked."

Nor are the ultra-rich in a position to cut back on their expenses - by, say, running down to the supermarket for a $12 bottle of Chardonnay. If they were to do so, their friends would despise them. As Frank explains, the Richistani word "affluent," meaning someone with less than $10 million in assets, translates into English roughly as "scum."

A mean-spirited critic of the ultra-rich CEO class might grumble that the rich should simply find a new circle of friends. But who exactly might these new friends be? If you were in the $100 million-in-assets set, you could hardly consort with the class of people for whom a pittance like $10,000 might be a transformative sum, possibly allowing Granny to get her insulin and the children to have warm winter clothes. People of that class could not be trusted not to pocket the silverware or rip out the gold fixtures in your powder room. They might even make a lunge for your throat.

The Nation: This Land is My Land by Barbara Ehrenreich...

I took a micro-vacation last week–nine hours in Sun Valley before an evening speaking engagement. The sky was deep blue, the air crystalline, the hills green and not yet on fire. Strolling out of the Sun Valley Lodge, I found a tiny tourist village, complete with Swiss-style bakery, multi-star restaurant, and “opera house.” What luck–the boutiques were displaying outdoor racks of summer clothing on sale!

But things started to get a little sinister–maybe I had wandered into a movie set or Paris Hilton’s closet–because even at a 60 percent discount, I couldn’t find a sleeveless cotton shirt for less than $100. These items shouldn’t have been outdoors; they should have been in locked glass cases.

Then I remembered the general rule, which has been in place since sometime in the 90s: If a place is truly beautiful, you can’t afford to be there. All right, I’m sure there are still exceptions–a few scenic spots not yet eaten up by mansions. But they’re going fast.

About ten years ago, for example, a friend and I rented a snug, inexpensive, one-bedroom house in Driggs, Idaho, just over the Tetons from wealthy Jackson Hole. At that time, Driggs was where the workers lived, driving over the Teton Pass every day to wait tables and make beds on the stylish side of the mountains. The point is, we low-rent folks got to wake up to the same scenery the rich people enjoyed, and hike along the same pine-scented trails.

But the money was already starting to pour into Driggs–Paul Allen of Microsoft, August Busch III of Anheuser-Busch, Harrison Ford–transforming family potato farms into vast dynastic estates. I haven’t been back, but I understand Driggs has become another unaffordable Jackson Hole. Where the waitstaff and bed-makers live today I do not know.

I take this personally. I need to see vast expanses of water, 360-degree horizons, and mountains piercing the sky–at least for a week or two of the year. According to evolutionary psychologist Nancy Etcoff, we all do, and the need is hard-wired into us. “People like to be on a hill, where they can see a landscape. And they like somewhere to go where they cannot be seen themselves,” told Harvard Magazine earlier this year. “That’s a place desirable to a predator who wants to avoid becoming prey.” We also like to be able to see water (for drinking), low-canopy trees (for shade), and animals (whose presence signals that the place is habitable.)

But the gentrification of rural American has a downside for the wealthy too. The more expensive a resort town gets, the further its workers have to commute to keep it functioning. And if your heart doesn’t bleed for the dishwasher or landscaper who commutes two to four hours a day, at least shed a tear for the wealthy vacationer who gets stuck in the ensuing traffic. It’s bumper-to-bumper westbound out of Telluride every day at five, or eastbound on Route 1 out of Key West, for the Lexuses as well as the beat-up old pick-up trucks.

Then there’s the elusive element of charm, which quickly drains away in a uniform population of multi-millionaires. The Hamptons had their fishermen. Key West still advertises its “characters”–sun-bleached, weather-beaten misfits who drifted down for the weather or to escape some difficult situation on the mainland. But the fishermen are long gone from the Hamptons and disappearing from Cape Cod. As for Key West’s “characters”: With the traditional little “conch houses” once favored by shrimpers going for a million and up, these human sources of local color have to be prepared to sleep with the scorpions under the highway overpass.

In Telluride, even a local developer is complaining about the lack of affordable housing. “To have a real town,” he told the Financial Times, “Telluride needs some locals hanging out”–in old-fashioned diners, for example, where you don’t have to speak Italian to order a cup of coffee.

When I was a child, I sang “America the Beautiful” and meant it. I was born in the Rocky Mountains and raised, at various times, on the coasts. The Big Sky, the rolling surf, the jagged, snow-capped, mountains: All this seemed to be my birthright. But now I flinch when I hear Woody Guthrie’s line, “This land belongs to you and me.” Somehow, I don’t think it was meant to be sung by a chorus of hedge fund operators.

Barbara Ehrenreich, the author of Nickel and Dimed (Owl), is the winner of the 2004 Puffin/Nation Prize.

The Nation: Katrina vs. Colbert...

Watch Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel's repeat appearance on the April 10 edition of Comedy Central's Colbert Report in which she debates the host on the question of truthiness and much more.

The Nation: Evaluating 'No Child Left Behind' by Linda Darling-Hammond...

As Congress begins to consider reauthorization of the Bush Administration's 2002 No Child Left Behind Act, The Nation asked Linda Darling-Hammond, a leading education expert, to examine the law, its consequences and prospects for improving the legislation. Those responding in this forum include sociologist and author Pedro Noguera, longtime educator and National Urban League vice president Velma L. Cobb and senior NYU scholar and veteran school principal Deborah Meier. --The Editors

When Congress passed George W. Bush's signature education initiative, No Child Left Behind, it was widely hailed as a bipartisan breakthrough--a victory for American children, particularly those traditionally underserved by public schools. Now, five years later, the debate over the law's reauthorization has a decidedly different tone. As the House and Senate consider whether the law should be preserved--and if so, how it should be changed--high-profile Republicans are expressing their disenchantment with NCLB, while many newly elected Democrats are seeking a major overhaul as well.

What happened? Most discussions focus on the details of the more than 1,000-page law, which has provoked widespread criticism for the myriad issues it has raised. All of its flaws deserve scrutiny in the reauthorization debate, but it's also worth taking a step back to ask what the nation actually needs educationally. Lagging far behind our international peers in educational outcomes--and with one of the most unequal educational systems in the industrialized world--we need, I believe, something much more than and much different from what NCLB offers. We badly need a national policy that enables schools to meet the intellectual demands of the twenty-first century. More fundamentally, we need to pay off the educational debt to disadvantaged students that has accrued over centuries of unequal access to quality education.

NCLB's Promise--and Problems

In 2002 civil rights advocates praised NCLB for its emphasis on improving education for students of color, those living in poverty, new English learners and students with disabilities. NCLB aims to raise achievement and close the achievement gap by setting annual test-score targets for subgroups of students, based on a goal of "100 percent proficiency" by 2014. These targets are tied to school sanctions that can lead to school reconstitutions or closures, as well as requirements for student transfers. In addition, NCLB requires schools to hire "highly qualified teachers" and states to develop plans to provide such teachers.

NCLB contains some major breakthroughs. First, by flagging differences in student performance by race and class, it shines a spotlight on longstanding inequalities and could trigger attention to the needs of students neglected in many schools. Second, by insisting that all students are entitled to qualified teachers, the law has stimulated recruitment efforts in states where low-income and "minority" students have experienced a revolving door of inexperienced, untrained teachers. While recent studies have found that teacher quality is a critical influence on student achievement, teachers are the most inequitably distributed school resource. This first-time-ever recognition of students' right to qualified teachers is historically significant.

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Help Stamp Out the Postal Rate Hike for America's Independent Media...

From The Nation:

America's founders understood the First Amendment would be worth little without a postal system that encouraged broad public participation in America's "marketplace of ideas." Thomas Jefferson called for a postal service that allowed ideas to "penetrate the whole mass of the people." Along with James Madison, he paved the way for a system that gave low-cost mailing incentives to small publications.

The postal policies that resulted have helped spur a vibrant political culture in the United States by easing the entry of diverse political viewpoints into a national discourse often dominated by the largest media organizations.

Now, this is all about to change, putting the future of The Nation, along with many other publications, at risk.

Postal regulators have decided to extend special favors to the nation's largest publishers, like Time Warner and Hearst, while unfairly burdening smaller and independent magazines with much higher postal rates--The Nation is being saddled with an unexpected increase of $500,000 in annual postal costs and many smaller publications could be forced to the brink of bankruptcy.

The only way to reverse the decision is if you - and many others - take a minute to sign a letter demanding that the rules are changed. This is not a right/left issue, which is why The Nation and William Buckley's National Review are teaming up in this instance to demand that the Postal Board of Governors reverse its decision.

Please join us in urging postal regulators and Congress to convene public hearings, determine how these rate increases were decided, and reverse the ruling. We only have until April 23--the end of the public comment period--to respond, so please take action today:

Write the Postal Rate Commission and Congress.

Learn more about the issue.

Help promote the campaign.

The Post Office should not use its monopoly power to favor the largest publishers and undermine the ability of smaller publishers to compete. With your help we can reverse this decision and salvage the postal system that has served free speech in America so well for so long.

Thanks for your help.

Best Regards,
Peter Rothberg,
The Nation