Education

around astoria queens in the same era, in the same middle-class jewish milieu, had the same teacher, etc.

Klein graduated high school at 16, because, like me, he was placed in a New York City program that compressed three years of junior high school into two. These “special progress” classes, at Klein’s Junior High School 10 and my nearby Junior High School 74, were not for would-be truants and gang members but for academically advanced students with ambitious parents who were impatient with the regular curricular pace.

http://prospect.org/article/joel-kleins-misleading-autobiography

but you know better, yeah, right.

klein is a freaking liar. anyone who's ever seen him speak knows he never grew up 'on the streets.'

Klein did live in public housing after his family moved to Queens in 1955 when he was nine years old. But he fails to say...that some public housing in New York in the 1940s and 1950s, including the Woodside Houses project where his family resided, was built for white, middle-class families. The poor and the problems poverty causes were unwelcome....

New York City Housing Authority enforced 21 disqualifying factors.

Excluded were single-parent families and those with irregular employment history, out-of-wedlock births, criminal records, narcotics addiction, or mental illness—in other words, any family with the qualities we now associate with public housing. Couples had to show marriage licenses to apply.

To filter out undesirables, inspectors visited applicants’ previous homes to verify good housekeeping habits, sufficient furniture, and well-behaved children. Neighborhood public schools serving complexes like Woodside Houses thus didn’t have to contend with unruly adolescents; they had already been weeded out by the Housing Authority.

http://prospect.org/article/joel-kleins-misleading-autobiography

"He was not a child of the streets. He was not an academically unmotivated student. He did not come from a deprived family background. He did not grow up in public housing as we understand it today."

And his peers were people like susan anspach & paul simon.