In 1998, before Klein became Chancellor, the New York City Board of Education transferred responsibility for school safety to the
New York City Police Department. Klein has been criticized for not seeking to alter this arrangement or to curb the conduct of the Police Department's school safety agents in the face of allegations of abuse. Klein has praised the work of the school-safety agents in contributing to a decrease in crime in the public schools. Despite their opposing positions in the
Justice Department antitrust case against
Microsoft, Klein was able to work with the Gates Foundation to fund the creation of smaller schools in New York City. At the 43 small high schools funded by the
Gates Foundation graduation rates are 73% compared to 53% at the schools they replaced. The researchers only examined schools selectively; for example, 33 small schools were omitted from the analysis. According to Bob Herbert, Bill Gates, speaking about the national movement for smaller schools, stated in 2008, that “Simply breaking up existing schools into smaller units often did not generate the gains we were hoping for.”. A series of analyses by the research institute MDRC found that the "Small Schools of Choice" (SSC) had "marked increases in progress toward graduation and in graduation rates" for three successive cohorts of students analyzed (students who entered the SSCs in 2005, 2006, and 2007) compared with other schools, including students of color, compared with students of color at similar schools. A report by Schools Investigator Richard Condon found Lam helped her husband get two jobs improperly, and criticized Vignola for falsely claiming that the husband was a volunteer rather than a hired employee. In 2005, Klein fired
Columbia University professor
Rashid Khalidi from the teacher training program, reportedly because of Khalidi's political views. After the controversial decision, Columbia University president Lee Bollinger spoke out on Khalidi's behalf, writing: "The department's decision to dismiss Professor Khalidi from the program was wrong and violates
First Amendment principles.... The decision was based solely on his purported political views and was made without any consultation and apparently without any review of the facts." The program's creator Mark Willner stated that (Khalidi) "spoke on geography and demography," and that "There was nothing controversial, nothing political." In 2007, the Klein launched a major redesign of the formula used to fund schools. Previously, funding for teachers had been based on the salaries of the teachers in the building, leading to more funding for schools in schools with students from more affluent backgrounds, as teachers tended to stay at those schools longer (and be relatively better paid than teachers with less experience). Under Klein's "Fair Student Funding" program, schools were given amounts of money based on the enrollment and demographics of students, such as special education and low-income. This eventually accounted for 66% of all funding to schools. During the Bloomberg Administration, whose educational legacy was largely determined by Klein's chancellorship, graduation rates in New York City went up for all ethnic groups, although the gap between graduation rates between ethnic groups remained stubbornly persistent. From 2005 to 2012, the graduation rate for white students rose from 64% to 78%, for Asian-American students from 63% to 82%, and for Black students from 40% to 60%.
Balanced literacy Klein played an important role in changing the way that literacy was taught in New York schools. In 2003, he introduced a "balanced literacy" approach that was controversial among education experts who said the approach was unsupported by research. The approach de-emphasized direct instruction, in particular phonics instruction. No curricula existed at the time for this approach, leading
Lucy Calkins to write a textbook on the subject in three weeks ahead of the 2003–2004 school year. In 2022, the
New Yorker reported that New York was shifting away from this approach to literacy amid controversies over low literacy rates. == News Corporation ==