A well-connected city education honcho suddenly turned on then-Schools Chancellor Joel Klein because he passed over her girlfriend for a top job, Klein suggests in his new book.
The now-infamous rift that developed between Klein and education powerhouse Diane Ravitch — the former wife of ex-Lt. Gov. Richard Ravitch — occurred after he declined to hire her longtime partner, Mary Butz, to head the new Leadership Academy to train principals, Klein notes in his memoir.
“What caused this complete turnaround? Only Ravitch can know for sure. But, at least as I see it, one possible source might have been a personnel decision we made,” Klein says in his new book “Lessons of Hope: How to Fix Our Schools” (HarperCollins).
Klein, who served as chancellor under then-Mayor Mike Bloomberg, met with Ravitch in August 2002, shortly after his appointment, to discuss the school system.
Klein said Ravitch — an influential professor and education researcher — “urged me to talk with Mary Butz, who, she told me, was her longtime partner.” Butz ran an existing principal-training program for the city school system at the time.
But after consulting with his top advisers, Klein concluded that Butz wasn’t the right fit for the job. Klein considered the decision so sensitive that he ran it by Bloomberg, who backed him.
“We concluded that her approach didn’t emphasize the kind of transformative leadership that we thought was necessary,” said Klein, now a News Corp executive and CEO of its educational technology firm, Amplify. News Corp also owns The Post.
Klein said Ravitch reacted angrily. “I was shocked to learn that Mary Butz was told to leave,’’ Ravitch, 76, told Klein in an e-mail. “If you don’t have room on your team for a person as knowledgeable, as committed, as experienced and as energetic as she, I despair for your initiatives.’’
Klein says soon after, Ravitch became a critic of the Bloomberg-Klein education policies — including the authorization of more charter schools, replacing failing schools and imposing stricter accountability — issues Ravitch had championed.
Ravitch Sunday night rebutted Klein’s account.
“What he writes is untrue. I did not ask him to hire her, promote her or give her money,” Ravitch said, adding that her conversion from supporter to opponent had nothing to with Butz’s employment.
“I became persuaded by the evidence that the things I had advocated for and believed in were not working and would never work,” she said.
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