Joel Klein is the bald-pated nebbish who served as the chancellor of the city's schools system from 2002-2011 and has since buddied up with Rupert Murdoch as an executive as News Corporation.

When Queens native Klein took over the New York public school system in 2002, his only experience in education was a stint teaching sixth-grade math in Queens during a leave of absence from Harvard Law back in 1969. After law school he spent 20 years as one of Washington's most powerful lawyers, both as an attorney in private practice and as assistant attorney general at the Justice Department, where he headed up the team of 700 lawyers in Justice's anti-trust division and, most famously, did battle with the likes of Microsoft.

In 2000, Klein left Washington behind and returned to New York, joining the German media giant Bertelsmann to head up its U.S. operations. His stay in the private sector, however, was short-lived: Following Michael Bloomberg's successful campaign for mayor, he tapped Klein as the city's schools chancellor as part of a corporate-style reshaping of city government. Wresting control of the nation's largest school system from the teacher's union, Klein instituted a city-wide math and reading curriculum and standardized testing system. He also pushed to break up larger high schools, championed small, charter schools, and advocated giving more autonomy to local schools, eliminating the bureaucratic tangle that has existed in recent years. And his heavy-handed approach (he was an anti-trust litigator, after all) repeatedly inflamed relations with teachers and parents, particularly his early efforts to micro-manage with dictums on everything from the placement of chalkboards to the size of the in-class "reading rugs." Since he resigned at the end of 2010, he made the questionable choice to become an executive at News Corp., with the hope that he would provide "guidance" during the phone hacking scandal. [Image via Getty]