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DOE Deputy Chancellor for Finance and Technology Photeine Anagnostopoulos submitted her resignation Wednesday. Photo via Harvard College Libraries

The city’s top finance and budget official is following Chancellor Joel Klein out of the Department of Education, officials confirmed Wednesday evening.

Photeine “Photo” Anagnostopoulos, Deputy Chancellor for Finance and Technology, submitted her resignation Wednesday, effective immediately.

“She has served the DOE well through tough and challenging budget times and I wish her the very best in her next endeavor,” Klein wrote in an email.

“Given the transition we are about to undertake, she felt it was the right time to move on,” said DOE spokeswoman Natalie Ravitz. “We wish her well in her future endeavors, and are already beginning the process of identifying qualified candidates for her position.”

Anagnostopoulos’ departure signals that Klein’s resignation and the arrival of Hearst Magazines executive Cathie Black as chancellor will also bring a shift in power in the top circle of the DOE.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s announcement on Tuesday afternoon that he was replacing Klein with Black came as a surprise to many DOE officials, including some of Klein’s senior aides.

And while Black has indicated that she plans to rely heavily on the team of top officials that Klein brought together — especially Klein’s team of eight deputy chancellors — the willingness of some of those officials to stay on without Klein is far from certain. (more…)

Did you know we have a new schools chancellor?

• Tom McGeveran analyzes the tabloids’ two very different takes on the new chancellor. (Capital)
• Eight different takes on why Cathie Black should or should be the next chancellor. (The Atlantic)
• In an interview with the Times, Klein says he doesn’t feel misunderstood by the public. (NYT)
• Black’s book says a lot about her leadership style, but nothing about education. (NYT)
• By appointing Black, Bloomberg is showing that he doesn’t trust teachers to lead. (New Yorker)
• Callers to the Brian Lehrer Show had mixed feelings on Cathie Black’s credentials. (WNYC)
• A former DOE insider says Klein could have avoided much of the early anger from parents. (Noodle Ed)
• Klein changed the way a lot of influential people thought about education. (Eduwonk)
• Klein’s legacy can’t be fully judged, as the kids who’ve lived his policies are still very young. (City Limits)
• Merryl Tisch said she didn’t know about Bloomberg’s pick, but trusts his judgment. (City Hall News)

In other news:

• Most reporters, columnists, and pundits did not question “Waiting for Superman” enough. (CJR)
• Ruben Brosbe: the city isn’t changing its ESL materials, even though the students are. (GothamSchools)
• Rumor has it that an Ast. Sect. in the US DOE will be LA’s new schools chief. (Politics K-12)
• If American students are bad at math, as a new study says, how is the U.S. still a superpower? (Flypaper)
• Jay Mathews says middle schools are holding back U.S. kids in math. (Washington Post)
• Nearly one in four Chicago elementary schools have lost their libraries to cuts. (NPR)

What do we know about Cathie Black?

Most of the profiles of her published so far focus on her management style, her similarities to her new boss, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and her lack of substantive experience in education.

But other details are beginning to surface. Here are some things we’ve learned so far:

This is not the first time she has walked into a management situation as an almost complete outsider.

Seven pages into her memoir-like business advice book, newly-appointed city schools chancellor Cathie Black recounts an episode that suggests yesterday’s events may have felt like deja-vu.

In the book, Black describes the first time she walked into the offices of USA Today to meet the staff. She had just been named president following the newspaper’s tumultuous first year:

I was also a female, non-newspaper person and an absolute unknown quantity to these people — many of whom had just learned about my hiring moments beforehand. As I looked around the room, I could feel the questions in the air: Was I a savior, a marketing genius who could turn the paper around? Or would I be a flop? (more…)

As the dust settles around his abrupt resignation and replacement, Chancellor Joel Klein is beginning to fight speculation that he was pushed out of his job.

In an interview with New York Magazine today, Klein refuted the suggestion that tension had developed between him and Mayor Bloomberg after the mayor placed Chief Operating Officer Sharon Greenberger in the Department of Education. Sources told the Times — and I heard the same thing — that Greenberger was “imposed over Joel’s objection.”

Klein told NY Mag:

That’s absolutely preposterous. Part of my thinking, in terms of both the issues I was facing and long-term for the department, was that I needed to bring in a great long-term operating officer. I took the mayor to lunch at Nam, in Tribeca, and I said to him that I thought Sharon, who I had worked closely with at the school construction authority, was the right person. He agreed and thinks she’s terrific. Both of us went ahead and recruited her aggressively. Anybody who says she was imposed on me is simply fabricating.

Asked if he had been forced to resign, Klein responded: “Totally my decision.” He told the Times: “I really did think it was the right time for me.” (more…)

Amid speculation that he might have been forced to resign, Chancellor Joel Klein walked into the rotunda of Tweed Courthouse today to say goodbye to his staff and assure them that his decision to leave was own.

Klein said that when he agreed to be schools chancellor more than eight years ago, he assumed he would have the job for two terms at the most. But when the City Council ended term limits and Mayor Bloomberg won re-election, the chancellor began to plan his exit.

“I told the mayor that soon in the third term I would move on. That’s been in my head and my heart,” he said.

He acknowledged that the transition to a new chancellor would be rough for the department, and for him.

“I said to the mayor, this is the best job I ever had,” he said. “Ask my wife how long I cried last night.”

Yesterday’s news that Klein will resign and be replaced by Heart Magazines chairwoman Cathleen Black caught most DOE officials, even the highest-ranking ones, by surprise. And at 9 a.m. this morning, employees filed into the building’s rotunda to hear Klein say goodbye. Clutching Blackberrys and briefcases, some peered down over the railing of the second floor, while others packed the ground floor. When Klein appeared, they broke into applause. (more…)

Schools Chancellor Joel Klein plotted big ideas throughout his tenure — and sometimes revised them.

When NBC New York broke the story that Joel Klein was about to resign yesterday, the news organization’s report summarized his tenure this way:

He is credited with ending the practice of social promotion but had a somewhat controversial reputation throughout his tenure.

The rest of the description closely mirrored Klein’s curiously incomplete Wikipedia entry, which highlights a 2005 First Amendment spat over a teacher training lecturer as a main feature of his chancellorship.

Wikipedia, use this instead: Klein brought a penchant for radical transformation to the New York City public schools, redrawing the basics of how schools are run, opening hundreds of new schools and closing dozens of others, and reeling in millions of new dollars in new funding.

His constant rallying cry — that improving public schools required erasing much of the existing cultures and structures, and that this project was the next frontier of the civil rights movement — inspired dozens of young, bright-eyed bureaucrats and teachers. But the same stance alienated many more educators and parents, who found his dismissal of past efforts at change disrespectful and a sign of his limited experience with the business of instruction.

The chancellor oversaw real improvements in the schools — at least of the sort by which he judged himself: concrete numbers. Handpicked by Mayor Michael Bloomberg in 2002, Klein took the reins of a school system that, by any measure, was not serving its students. Test scores were low. School crime was seen as a major problem. Just 44 percent of students graduated from high school in four years.

Now, as he moves into a new position at Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, Klein leaves behind a system where more than half — and as many as 60 percent — of students graduate on time, and where state test scores are inching upward. But he also leaves behind questions about how much true learning is reflected by those metrics — and about whether his organizational changes left more collateral damage than benefits.

Here is a short(-ish) history of Klein’s eight-year tenure. (more…)

School officials are battening down the hatches as they prepare for an onslaught of public hearings about school closures.

Just hours after the city released the latest round of high school rankings, Sharon Greenberger, the Department of Education’s chief operating officer, sent an email recruiting top-level deputies for an “all hands on deck” effort for the hearings, which could start as soon as this month and last through March.

“Be prepared to maintain a very flexible evening schedule in January,” Greenberger wrote to a small group of high-level deputies in Chancellor Joel Klein’s cabinet. She also asked each of them to designate several staff members to help at the hearings, which are required by state law when the city seeks to close a school.

Last year, the city held hearings for 19 schools that it tried to close. Many went late into the night, and the January meeting of the Panel for Educational Policy, which had to approve the closures, finished at 4 a.m.

This year, the city has signalled that it wants to close even more schools. The high school progress reports released last week added nine more schools to the already record-high list of 47 schools that the city has said it might try to close. (more…)

I teach in a school filled with English language learners. Most of their families are originally from Dominican Republic, followed by Mexico, then various Central and South American countries. To meet the needs of these students and their families my school and most schools like it send out letters and report cards in both English and Spanish. Pretty good effort to help our ELLs, no? There’s only one problem: not all our ELLs speak Spanish.

While the majority of the students in my class and school speak Spanish at home, a growing number do not. Over the past few years (and longer in many places) the demographics of my school’s community and the Bronx in general have been shifting to include a growing number of families from West Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. In spite of the changing ELL population, it doesn’t seem like the school or the city is keeping up pace.

A lot of ESL providers still equate ESL with speaking to the students in Spanish. And tonight I handed out English report cards to several families who don’t read or speak English fluently. If the city isn’t making report cards readily available in Arabic, Fulani, Vietnamese, Hindi and the numerous other languages spoken by our students, it needs to start. If translation into those languages is available (I imagine it is) then schools need to step up to have these materials on hand to meet the multilingual needs of their population. We all know English Language Learner doesn’t just mean Spanish Speaker. It’s time for our practice to reflect this understanding.

• Did you hear? Chancellor Klein resigned. (GothamSchools, Times, WSJ, Post, Daily News, NY1, WNYC)
• Few saw Klein’s departure coming. (GothamSchools, NY1)
• Independent researchers are presenting new findings about the city schools’ performance today. (Post)
• Klein’s replacement, Cathie Black, is a media exec just like Mayor Bloomberg. (GothamSchools, Times)
• Black says she’s always tried to be different, ever since she tweaked her name at age 12. (Post)
• The Daily News says Black faces an uphill climb because of her corporate background.
• And both the Daily News and the Post say Joel Klein leaves big shoes for Black to fill.
• Juan Gonzalez says Klein doomed himself by alienating teachers and parents. (Daily News)
• Bronx parents protested Monday against the slimming down of free tutoring services. (Daily News)
• Goldman Sachs is lending $25 million to help build charter schools in New York. (Bloomberg)
• The Catholic Church is shutting 32 more schools, about half in New York City. (Times, Post)
• New Haven will pay public school graduates’ tuition at Connecticut colleges. (Times)
• And blame for a Los Angeles teacher’s suicide continues to land on his value-added ranking. (Times)

Klein’s resignation, Black’s arrival:

• Chancellor Joel Klein is stepping down, Hearst’s Cathleen Black is stepping up. (GS, NYT, DN, WNYC)
• Black is the first woman to head the city’s Department of Education. (NY Post)
• An LA teacher’s suicide has fueled debate over the release of teachers’ effectiveness scores. (NYT)
• By hiring someone more corporate than Klein, the mayor is declaring war on unions. (DN)
• Insider: Picking Black is “a charm offensive” to loop in those Klein alienated. (NYMag)
• Ben Smith: What does Klein’s “small tectonic shift” mean for Bloomberg 2012? (Politico)
• Klein might be headed for for-profit, online education efforts at News Corp. (Reason)
• TFA’er is sad to see Klein go, calls Class Size Matters “the flat earth society.” (Huffman)
• Checker Finn: Klein’s policy changes were “promising modern-day school reforms.” (Flypaper)
• Buy a ticket to the GothamSchools benefit next week before they run out! Cathie, you too.

Other news:

• Cuomo said he will cut education and health spending rather than raise taxes. (AP)
• A video lampoons narrow views of student assessment, unproductive teacher support. (You Tube)
• Lesson study is maybe a better, more professional way to help teachers. (Peter Pappas)
• Panel concludes that classrooms should be “more permeable … metaphorically.” (Justin Cohen)
• A novel study finds that the TAP program for teacher pay and support helps children. (Teacher Beat)
• Some Chicago charter schools have very high student attrition rates. (Hechinger/WBEZ/Catalyst)
• An NYC rookie charter school teacher is observed with positive results. (Goldstein)