Here is a brief excerpt from an article by Frank Bruni to The New York Times. To read the complete article, check out others, and obtain subscription information, please click here.

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More than halfway through Joel Klein’s forthcoming book on his time as the chancellor of New York City’s public schools, he zeros in on what he calls “the biggest factor in the education equation.”

It’s not classroom size, school choice or the Common Core.

It’s “teacher quality,” he writes, adding that “a great teacher can rescue a child from a life of struggle.”

We keep coming back to this. As we wrestle with the urgent, dire need to improve education — for the sake of social mobility, for the sake of our economic standing in the world — the performance of teachers inevitably draws increased scrutiny. But it remains one of the trickiest subjects to broach, a minefield of hurt feelings and vested interests.

Klein knows the minefield better than most. As chancellor from the summer of 2002 through the end of 2010, he oversaw the largest public school system in the country, and did so for longer than any other New York schools chief in half a century.

That gives him a vantage point on public education that would be foolish to ignore, and in Lessons of Hope: How to Fix Our Schools, which will be published next week, he reflects on what he learned and what he believes, including that poor parents, like rich ones, deserve options for their kids; that smaller schools work better than larger ones in poor communities; and that an impulse to make kids feel good sometimes gets in the way of giving them the knowledge and tools necessary for success.

I was most struck, though, by what he observes about teachers and teaching.

Because of union contracts and tenure protections in place when he began the job, it was “virtually impossible to remove a teacher charged with incompetence,” he writes. Firing a teacher “took an average of almost two and a half years and cost the city over $300,000.”

And the city, like the rest of the country, wasn’t (and still isn’t) managing to lure enough of the best and brightest college graduates into classrooms. “In the 1990s, college graduates who became elementary-school teachers in America averaged below 1,000 points, out of a total of 1,600, on the math and verbal Scholastic Aptitude Tests,” he writes. In New York, he notes, “the citywide average for all teachers was about 970.”

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

Frank Bruni, an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times since June 2011, joined the newspaper in 1995. Over his years at The Times he has worn a wide variety of hats, including chief restaurant critic (from June 2004 through August 2009) and Rome bureau chief (2002 to 2004). He has also written two New York Times best sellers: a memoir, Born Round, that was published by Penguin Press in 2009, and Ambling Into History, a chronicle of George W. Bush’s campaign for the presidency, published by HarperCollins in 2002. That same year HarperPerennial reissued, in paperback, A Gospel of Shame: Children, Sexual Abuse and the Catholic Church, of which he was a co-author. (It was initially published by Viking in 1993.)