Joel Klein will rake in the dough

Joel Klein will reportedly make over $4 million a year at NewsCorp.

Let’s hope that Murdoch takes a total bath on this one, and he and Klein aren't able to make a penny off of poor kids – either here in NYC or in Africa – by selling bogus “educational” video games supposed to lead to real learning.

Kids, parents and teachers have suffered enough as a result of Klein's delusional and damaging fantasies about what constitutes a quality educator; see what principals said were their hopes for an entirely new direction for our schools now that he is gone.

Klein was reportedly a poor manager at his last private job –Bertelsmann — and was a terrible manager at DOE. The only reason he lasted as long as he did with all the expensive blunders, no-bid contracts, consultants , reorganizations, and wasted millions was because he had a boss, himself wrongly purported to be a good manager, who either wasn’t paying attention or didn’t give a damn.

NY Mets Were Set to Choose Black as General Manager

Ed Notes has learned that the NY Mets were set to appoint Cathie Black as their new general manager instead of Sandy Alderson a few weeks ago but Mike Bloomberg, having already decided to kick Joel Klein to the Rupert Murdoch curb (where Klein is predicted to last about a year before claiming he wants to go back into education destruction), intervened.

A spokesperson for the Wilpon family would not speak on the record but endorsed Bloomberg's vision of corporate manager not needing to know anything about the area they are managing.

"Look at our results over the past few years," he said. "Worse than the results of the school system. And with people supposedly having baseball knowledge. So we decided to hire Cathie Black to reverse the fortunes of the Mets but Bloomberg said she knew even less about public schools and education than baseball and he needed someone to chop the school system down into little morsels and that could best be accomplished by someone who knew nothing about what she was chopping. Too bad. We could really use a 50% cut in the Mets payroll."

In other news, Rupert Murdoch has announced that for the brief time Joel Klein will spend at the News Corp, he expects Klein to reorganize whatever division he heads at least once a month with the goal of breaking the Guiness Book of World Records for reorganizations, a record currently held by Klein himself.

The Post and the Daily News editorial boards: designated hit men for Joel Klein

On Friday morning, the NY Post published a picture of Judge Lobis, assigned the case of the lawsuit filed against Klein's arbitrary closing of 19 schools; and wrote an editorial implicitly threatening her if she ruled the wrong way.

After she decided in favor of the plaintiffs later that same day, finding that Klein had clearly violated the mandated procedures established in the governance law, the Post vicioiusly attacked her in another editorial on Saturday morning, accusing of basing her judgment solely to benefit the UFT.

This, by the way, is the Post’s standard attack one anyone who dares to oppose the administration’s flawed and increasingly lawless policies.

On Sunday, the Daily News piled on, in an editorial that sounds like it was written by Klein himself.

Let’s hope that Judge Lobis is not intimidated by these thugs, bought and sold by Rupert Murdoch and Mort Zuckerman, close allies of the Mayor and Klein and members of the Billionaire’s Boys Club.

All of these men, of course, send their kids to elite private schools, and would never stand for arrogant abuse perpetrated by Bloomberg and Klein on students who attend the city's public schools.

Arne Duncan has become an embarrassment

Check out my latest column on the Huffington Post.

Check out how Duncan's latest intrusion into local politics and slavish flattery of Mayor Bloomberg and Rupert Murdoch's NY Post has provoked outrage from parents and teachers alike.

It would all be somewhat comical if this politicization of education reform weren't so inherently dangerous. It's time for Obama to rein his appointee in - before he causes yet further embarrassment to his administration.