Board of Education Chancellor Joel Klein spoke last night at the Citizens Union annual meeting. It was a great speech. Unfortunately, his actions over the past six years have been diametrically opposed to last night’s words.

I’ll list three examples:

He started by talking about the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education. Later, he returned to that decision. His words seemed to indicate that he felt it was a great decision. But recently, his new zoning and variance regulations and have led to more segregation in our schools, not less.

That’s right – this past year’s kindergarten classes were more segregated, thanks to Joel Klein. One prime example is P.S. 199 in Manhattan, a school where the older grades have a mix of minority students. The five kindergarten classes, however, contained not one African-American child among them, and few, if any, hispanics.

Then Klein said that teachers are the most important part of the educational system. He claimed that treating teachers as “fungible” (yes, he used that word) is the wrong approach. But his entire approach to classroom activity, by creating a preset schedule for every class, denies teachers the ability to use their individual talents and abilities, his insane fascination with ever-increasing numbers of standardized tests forces teachers to spend more time taking practice tests and less time working on what they believe their children need – in short, he has treated teachers as “fungible” all along.

The third example is his claim that school choice is good. That may be true; it is at least debatable. But he has moved away from school choice, making it more difficult for parents to choose their kids’ elementary school, and making the process of “choosing” a middle school complex and chancy. Clearly, he either doesn’t believe in school choice, or he’s too stupid to know that he is giving parents and children less choice, not more. (Note: I choose to believe the former.)

The point is that while Joel Klein talks a good game, he doesn’t deliver. His speech probably had a good ring of insight when it came out of his mouth, but it landed on our ears with the hollow toll of hypocrisy.

What’s the result? He crows over “test scores” that seem to be rising, but are rising only for those tests he controls. The national tests show no improvement at all. His reaction when questioned about this discrepancy was an outright lie – he claimed that the national tests use too small a sample to be valid.

It would be nice if we had a schools chancellor who understood how education works (when it does), and also understood what he was actually doing. It's a shame that for the past six years we have not had that.

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