When It Comes to New Inspiration, Chancellor Klein Goes by the Books

A professor of management at UCLA, William Ouchi, was exiting the Guggenheim during a visit to New York six years ago when his cell phone rang. It was his office in Los Angeles, reporting that a man named Joel Klein had just called requesting a meeting.Mr. Klein had been named schools chancellor about two weeks earlier, and he had read Mr. Ouchi’s most recent book, “Making Schools Work.” Would Mr. Ouchi be available to meet with him in his new office at Tweed Courthouse?The meeting they had the next morning — Mr. Ouchi took the no. 6 train from his hotel — struck off a six-year working relationship in which Mr. Ouchi’s book became a kind of playbook for Mr. Klein’s attempts to “empower” principals and slash central bureaucracy.It would be incorrect to say, though, that the UCLA professor is the brains behind the set of initiatives Mr. Klein labeled Children First. In fact, the schools chancellor has made a habit of using books as inspiration, combing them in much the same way new mothers scour parenting books.After reading a memoir by a top aide to Prime Minister Blair, Sir Michael Barber, Mr. Klein distributed the book to all of his senior staff, as well as to at least one newspaper editor.Mr. Klein had previously hired Mr. Barber as a consultant, and the book, “Instruction to Deliver,” injected a new favorite adage into Mr. Klein’s repertoire: the idea that government should think of its mission as “service delivery,” getting the best services to the people.The service delivery concept cropped up in Mr. Klein’s Class Day address at Columbia University last year; at countless press conference, and in a video interview he did with the Web site Big Think.Asked for other examples of books that have inspired him, Mr. Klein yesterday named “Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns,” by a Harvard Business School professor, Clayton Christensen, and the new book “Sweating the Small Stuff,” by the education writer David Whitman, which argues that an attitude of “paternalism” toward students is what distinguishes the country’s best inner-city schools.A recurring theme in the books is rapid, aggressive change. Mr. Ouchi’s book is subtitled “A Revolutionary Plan to Get Your Children the Education They Need.”When he met with Mr. Klein in 2002, Mr. Ouchi said the book was not yet finished; he had released it just to a few colleagues, in manuscript form, seeking review.Yet when Mr. Ouchi walked into Mr. Klein’s office at Tweed Courthouse, he saw a dog-eared, worn-down copy littered with highlights and underlines.“He held it up and said, ‘I read it. I’m there. This is what I want to do in New York City,'” Mr. Ouchi recalled.Soon, Mr. Ouchi had signed on as a consultant to the Department of Education, advising Mr. Klein on how to implement his ideas. He was in that position for about six months and has stayed in touch with Mr. Klein since, helping him map out what he called the “big ideas” of his reform plan.Mr. Ouchi said that he and the chancellor talked through the creation of the Leadership Academy, which trains new principals and offers on-the-job support to current ones; the formulation of Mr. Klein’s Fair Student Funding formula, which sought to standardize school funding and give priority to children with special needs, and finally about the Autonomy Zone of schools saddled with less bureaucracy. The latter were created by a Klein aide, Eric Nadelstern.Mr. Ouchi has since studied the effects of Mr. Nadelstern’s efforts as part of a new book looking at eight decentralization projects at school districts around the country.Presenting the preliminary conclusions at a lunch yesterday at the Harvard Club, Mr. Ouchi declared that the Autonomy Zone, now known as the network of Empowerment Schools, has helped principals raise their students’ test scores and decrease teachers’ student loads, or the number of students they are responsible for teaching.Mr. Ouchi said he is pleased and impressed that Mr. Klein translated the ideas in his book into action.“Nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine people out of 1,000 people who read that book are going to say, ‘Well, it sounds intriguing, but nobody else is doing it, so I’m not going to do it,'” Mr. Ouchi said. Mr. Klein, he said, went further.“That takes a lot of guts,” he said.At yesterday’s lunch, there were several principals who said their autonomy has increased under Mr. Klein.One, John Murphy of I.S. 8, said he has more freedom at his school in Queens than he had running a school for years in Westchester County.There were also some dissenting voices.A former chairman of the board at the City University of New York, Herman Badillo, asked Mr. Ouchi whether any of the school districts he studied had closed the achievement gap between black and Hispanic students and white and Asian students.Not yet, Mr. Ouchi said, though some individual schools have made great strides in closing the gap.Mr. Badillo later said he supports decentralization, but that stressing “top-down management” could be problematic.“It’s so top-managed that teachers are leaving in large numbers,” Mr. Badillo said, standing beside his wife, who said she is retiring as a city schoolteacher after more than 20 years.

When It Comes to New Inspiration, Chancellor Klein Goes by the Books

When It Comes to New Inspiration, Chancellor Klein Goes by the Books

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