Chancellor Tells Students, and Media, Not to Worry About Critics

On his annual five borough tour for the opening of the city's public schools, Chancellor Joel Klein picked Queens Gateway for Health Sciences as his second stop. The secondary school serving grades 7-12 had just moved to a brand new building in Hillcrest.

While touring the school with a few well-groomed seniors, Klein stopped to watch an 8th grade social studies class. A couple of students gave a presentation on the life of President Theodore Roosevelt they had prepared during summer school. The students had a poster full of biographical information and mentioned that the phrase "Teddy Bear" came from a story about Roosevelt not shooting a bear.

When they were done, Klein dug his wallet out of his pants pocket and opened a piece of paper with a quote from Roosevelt. "I didn't do this just for today," he said, before going on to tell them, "I always carry some lines from a speech that Theodore Roosevelt gave at the Sorbonne in France. He was one of my favorite presidents."

Klein -- who worked for President Clinton's Justice Department as the lead trust-buster in the case against Microsoft -- noted that Roosevelt enforced laws against monopolies and was also a defender of the environment. Then he explained the quote.

"Theodore Roosevelt gave a speech at the Sorbonne in which he said 'It's not the critic who counts, not the man or woman who points out how the strong man stumbles or whether the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust, sweat and blood. Who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again because there is no effort without error or shortcoming. Who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions. Who spends himself or herself on a worthy cause.'

"What do you think that means?" Klein asked the students.

The reporters had some idea. Klein has come under scrutiny lately following the double digit decline in student proficiency on this year's state's math and reading tests. The decline happened everywhere in New York after the state made it harder to pass the tests as part of its push toward higher standards.

The students, of course, didn't know about the background politics. So Klein told them "It's one of the most powerful speeches and I read it whenever I do a high school or college graduation. I read it 'cause the real message is that leadership -- getting into the arena, which is tough, you have a lot of critics, really matters. The kind of society we have depends on real leadership on people willing to stand up and fight for the things they care about. And it's never going to be easy, is what Roosevelt is saying. And you'll always have lots of people who criticize you. But it's really important because in terms of the life you live and the preparation you have here, which is such a great school, we need your engagement, your leadership."

Afterwards, Klein told reporters it was a coincidence that the students had been studying Roosevelt and said he really does carry around the quote. He said he also carries one from The New York Times about whether you need to fix poverty before fixing education or the other way around.

Which brings us to Klein's other message on opening day, for students and for the rest of the city. In a year when schools have cut another four percent from their budgets, on average, he said money alone wasn't the answer to improving public education. Speaking with reporters in a press van between Queens and his next stop, at a charter school in the Bronx, the chancellor conceded he would love to have more money. But he pointed to his earlier visit at PS 172 in Sunset Park as an example of a school with high academics despite not getting much extra aid from the state. The school gets federal poverty money because of its low-income students, but it doesn't get the additonal funds awarded to low-performing schools.

When asked if the city would devote any extra resources to the 19 failing schools he had wanted to begin closing this fall before he was blocked by a lawsuit, Klein said the solution for schools like that is to replace them with better schools because they've already gotten additional funds and made no improvements. "If I can get additonal monies I'm always happy," he said. "But schools like that have gotten plenty of (state) SURR money (for schools under registration review), and other SINI money (for schools in need of improvement), stuff like that. So it's not about the money."

Later, Klein gave a similar message at the Bronx Charter School for Excellence, where 280 elementary students are squeezed into a small former police precinct. The school has an average class size of 28 students and very high scores. Speaking to a fourth grade class he said "We'd like to have smaller classes, we'd like to have more additional resources. But in the meantime when I see a school like yours get really good results it makes me so proud. I keep telling other people to learn from the things that you're doing."