Classroom Technology

Klein Touts Tech as He Leaves NYC Schools

By Katie Ash — November 12, 2010 1 min read
  • Save to favorites
  • Print

A guest post from Education Week reporter Sarah Sparks:

Outgoing New York City Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein hopes to leverage his experience with new school and technology models in the city at his next job as an executive vice president at News Corp., the media company founded by Rupert Murdoch.

“I believed and I believe now that in essence, while education is not a business, it is a service delivery challenge and that people didn’t understand that and not surprisingly, most educators didn’t understand that,” Mr. Klein told researchers and other stakeholders at the release of evaluations of the Children First initiatives he led with Mayor Michael Bloomberg. He claimed New York City’s focus on experimenting with new online and other instructional platforms as one of the best parts of the initiative. “No place else has tackled what I call the core instructional delivery mission by both changing the model, as we do in School of One and New American Academy, and by changing the methods, and that seems to me to be one of the great hopes of the future,” Mr. Klein said.

At News Corp., he told reporters after the conference, “I’ll be looking at how to stimulate private investment in what I think are instructional platforms and other technologies I think will change the way K-12 education is delivered. I’ve got a lot to do before I tell you the details, but that’s the basic concept. I think it’s going to take substantial private capital to be able to generate the kind of technological advancement I think is absolutely essential. New York City is so far ahead in this discussion, but we’re still in the earliest phases of that discussion.”

Photo credit: Christopher Powers/Education Week

A version of this news article first appeared in the Digital Education blog.