Former NYC School Chancellor Joel Klein Is Not Telling the Whole Truth About His Personal History

[HiPointDem]

43. of course people lie by implying.

Last edited Tue Oct 16, 2012, 10:04 PM - Edit history (4)

"I grew up in public housing in Queens and grew up in the streets of New York. I always like to think of myself as a kid from the streets, and education changed my life. … I stood on the shoulders of teachers to see a world that I couldn’t have seen growing up in the family that I grew up in.

My father had dropped out of high school in the tenth grade during the Great Depression. My mother graduated from high school and never went to college. No one in my family had attended college … or knew about college. I had no appreciation of reading or cultural activities. …

By most people’s lights, we were certainly working-class, poor. … I grew up in a pretty unhappy household. …Teachers set expectations for me that were not commensurate with my background or my family’s income. …

Nobody in [my] school said to me, ‘Well, you grew up in public housing, your parents don’t read, you’ve never been to a museum, so we shouldn’t expect too much from you!’ … I wanted to play ball, I had a girlfriend at the time. I thought school was OK, a little overrated but I thought it was OK. … Mr. Harris, my physics teacher at William Cullen Bryant High School, saw something that I hadn’t seen in myself. … I realized, through him, that the potential of students in inner-city schools is too often untapped. We can fix that. Demography need not be destiny."

http://prospect.org/article/joel-kleins-misleading-autobiography


1. His family made above median income.

2. The public housing he lived in was for middle-class families. The Housing Authority specifically excluded below-poverty tenants, single-mothers, anyone who'd had trouble with the law, etc. Tenants paid market rates, and rents weren't subsidized. It was about 88% white.

3. His parents obviously could read. His father passed a civil-service exam to work for the post office. His mother was an accountant.

4. His parents obviously valued education. His father took him to court to watch the cases, for example.

5. He was an honor student & student leader throughout his junior-high & high-school years. He graduated from high school at 16 because he'd been admitted to a special accelerated program (the article is written by someone in the same program who went to school with him).

He impugns the memory of his dead parents when he implies they raised him in a tenement, they couldn't read, they didn't value education, they didn't know what college was, he was raised 'on the streets', and his success in life is due to a random physics teacher who 'saw something in him he hadn't seen."

He's a big fat liar. He was a middle-class jewish boy living in a middle-class jewish/italian neighborhood going to a middle-class high-school school.



Among his classmates at WC Bryant HS:

Suze Rotolo (1943–2011), an American artist, book artist, author, but best known as Bob Dylan's girlfriend between 1961 and 1964. She is the woman walking with him on the cover of his album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan.

Richard Kline (1944– ), played "Larry Dallas" on classic ABC-TV sitcom "Three's Company". He also performed on Broadway in "City of Angels" and is a member of the Lincoln Center Repertory Company.

Joel Klein (1946– ), New York City Department of Education Chancellor from 2002-2011

The person who wrote the article is also jewish and grew up in astoria in the same social milieu klein did:

In misrepresenting his childhood, Klein has distorted the world of both our fathers. Mine, already out of high school and at City College of New York when the Great Depression hit, was also fortunate to land a job in the post office, working second jobs at night. Permanently traumatized by the insecurity of the Depression, he remained unhappily in the federal civil service so he, like Charles Klein, could see his children through college, after which he was rewarded, also like the elder Klein, with a secure federal pension. My mother, like Klein’s, was a bookkeeper.

I never lived in public housing, but my parents’ small single-family home in a white Queens neighborhood not far from Woodside had monthly mortgage payments about the same as the rent Charles and Claire Klein paid to the Housing Authority. Our family income was similar to the Kleins’; both families were middle-class.

At Bayside High School, I also had Sidney Harris for physics. (After I graduated, he transferred to Bryant.) I don’t doubt that he was an excellent teacher and inspired Klein, but he did nothing similar for me. I was instead motivated by my Latin and journalism teachers. Like the 1963 yearbook at Bryant High School, my 1959 Bayside yearbook has few black faces. Klein and I both attended almost entirely segregated, white schools.

Children like Klein and me were privileged, not perhaps in money but in what sociologists term “social capital.” Nobody I know of from my special-progress class dropped out of school; my fellow students typically went on to become college professors, doctors, business executives, accountants, writers, and lawyers. Sure, we loved to play street stickball, but we were not “kids from the streets,” as Klein would have it. We were surrounded by peers with middle-class ambitions and goals.

It would be obscene for me to claim I overcame severe hardship and was rescued from deprivation by schoolteachers. It is more obscene for Klein to do so, because his claim supports attacks on contemporary teachers and a refusal to acknowledge impediments teachers face because of their students’ social and economic deprivation.

It’s a deprivation that he never suffered but that many children from public housing do today.

http://prospect.org/article/joel-kleins-misleading-autobiography

another wc bryant graduate of roughly the same period:



Susan Anspach (born November 23, 1942) is an American stage and film actress.

Anspach was born in New York City and was raised in Queens, New York. She graduated from William Cullen Bryant High School in Long Island City in 1960. Paul Simon was a neighbor. She enrolled in the music department at the Catholic University of America....



students in library at william cullen bryant high school, 1955

http://livelovelaughcreate.com/ebay/JM-1015B-THUR_(125).JPG

wc bryant HS commencement program, 1958



sidney harris, the teacher who supposedly turned klein from the 'street life'