Mr. Klein is not taking questions

apparently

NewsCorp: education edition

You didn't know there was an education connection?
The state of New York has multiple millions of dollars out in no-bid contracts to Wireless Generation, a subsidiary of News Corp., where, not-so-coincidentally, past New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein now works.
It appears that some are now thinking this might not be so wise:

The New York Daily News, in a story about how the media scandal could affect News Corp.’s new education division, quoted Patrick Sullivan, a parent leader on the city’s Panel for Educational Policy, as saying that it was “really disturbing” that education officials had “hired a Murdoch company to work on our children's data.”
And now, School Size Matters, a New York-based education advocacy nonprofit organization, has organized a petition drive asking the state and the New York City comptroller to reject no-bid contracts with Wireless Generation.

Rupert Murdoch recently appointed Klein to serve as his advisor on the growing News Corp. scandal (that's him sitting next to Murdoch's wife, Wendi Deng, and behind his son James, as Murdoch testifies before a Parliamentary subcommittee today).

And speaking of Race to the Top

It turns out that maybe that much-vaunted evaluation system doesn't hold up under scrutiny:

Tennessee and Delaware, the first two states to win education funding through President Obama's $3 billion Race To the Top competition, were chosen through “arbitrary criteria” rather than through a scientific process, according to a new report by a non-partisan research institute.

The report called, “Let’s Do the Numbers,” by William Peterson and Richard of the nonprofit, independent Washington D.C.-based Economic Policy Institute, says that the 500-point system created to decide the “best” proposals for education reform is based on false precision.

Those changes that Race to the Top requires, much supported by Joel Klein, who runs NYC public schools?

...it seems important for Klein to remember that under his tenure and his business approach to public schools, the percentage of African American and Hispanic children accepted into gifted and talented programs -- based entirely on a standardized test score-- dropped from 46 percent to 22 percent, according to education historian Diane Ravitch’s “The Death and Life of the Great American School System."

And, she said, under Klein, the number of black students admitted to selective high schools plummeted. Of 900 freshmen, in 2004 there were 83 black students; by 2009, only 7 black students qualified; Hispanic students dropped from 96 to 17.

Meanwhile, in 2009, when Klein announced the expansion of charter schools, he didn’t mention that of 51,316 public school students in the city who were homeless, only 11 were enrolled in charter schools.

Let's hope Patrick--and not only Patrick--is backing off from this disaster.

Predictions for 2010

...from NYC, but we should pay attention:

Just last week, Mr. Klein had announced the closing of the last remaining public high school in the city. The DOE had been closing more and more "underperforming" schools, with students from each one flooding the few non-charter schools that were left. It is unclear just where the 253,763 students from Alfred E .Neuman High School in Queens will go next year, but the chancellor had a reassuring message for concerned parents. "The good news," said Mr.Klein, "is that with virtually no schools left, the high school application process has been considerably simplified."

(and yes, these are in jest. We think.)