The Education of Eva Moskowitz Read online

  If I ran a charter school, I’d have real control that would enable me to strive for true excellence. I also liked the idea of working with Joel and John; they were razor-sharp and really wanted to help kids. Moreover, their longer-term vision was bold: figuring out how to run a school that cost no more than the district schools but got far better results, and then replicating that model over and over dozens of times. Cracking that nut could revolutionize American education.

  I also liked the idea of getting back into education. I’d always loved the thrill of exposing students to new ideas, and visiting hundreds of schools as chair of the Education Committee had sparked my interest in returning to the classroom. I’d spent years thinking, writing, and talking about K–12 education; now I’d have a chance to apply what I’d learned.

  I’d also become increasingly comfortable with the charter school concept. Charter schools were just another kind of public school: they were paid for with government funds, were approved and overseen by government entities, and in some respects were actually more egalitarian than district schools, which had zoning and admissions policies that made them highly stratified by race and socioeconomic status. By contrast, charter schools admitted students by random lottery.

  So, I accepted Joel and John’s offer to lead what would be called the Harlem Success Charter School and they asked me to draft a proposed contract. I realized this was an opportunity to determine the contractual terms under which the school would hire its first employee—me. While executive contracts often contain provisions for severance or guaranteed periods of employment, I felt strongly that the school’s employees should be fully accountable for their performance and that this should start with me. Thus, I turned down Joel and John’s suggestion that I draft a proposed contract and informed them that I would instead “serve at the pleasure of the board as an at-will employee.”

  Now I had to figure out how to open a school in just eight months even though we had no staff, no teachers, no principal, no facility, and only a partially fleshed-out curriculum. Moreover, I was going to be doing this under a very bright spotlight as the Times soon observed:

  Opening a school is a risky thing for an aspiring politician; in doing so, Ms. Moskowitz is laying her mayoral ambitions at the tiny feet of 5-year-olds. Even the best-run schools are full of potential surprises—the troublemaking student, the errant teacher, the irate parent—and Ms. Moskowitz, a mother of three who has visited hundreds of schools throughout the five boroughs, knows as well as anyone how hard it is to get it right.

  George Arzt, a prominent political consultant, commented, “Your political career is in the hands of the students and the faculty, and that would make me an insomniac.”8 Randi Weingarten, who was still gloating about ending my political career, was apparently looking forward to another helping of schadenfreude. If my charter school failed, she asked, “Will she do what she does now, which is blame others, vilify everybody else? Or will she take responsibility for what goes wrong?”9 In her eyes, I’d decided to build a house of glass after four years of throwing stones.

  To raise the stakes even higher, the UFT had just opened its own charter school, which Weingarten had promised would “dispel the misguided and simplistic notion that the union contract is an impediment to success” with “real, quantifiable student achievement.” The UFT and its archenemy were opening schools virtually simultaneously with starkly different philosophies; it was the ultimate charter school bake-off.

  I set about assembling a team by asking the battle-hardened idealists who had worked with me on my campaign and on the council to join me in this new adventure. Most agreed, including Jenny Sedlis, a veteran of both my district office and several of my campaigns, Sheila Lopez, my Education Committee policy analyst, and Thomas Melvin and Sarah Szurpicki, who’d both worked on my borough president campaign. In addition, Joel Greenblatt had recruited PS 65’s principal, Iris Nelson, as an advisor.

  There was one person, however, whom I had to let go:

  Dear Eric:

  As you know, I recently assumed responsibility as Executive Director of Harlem Success. I know I speak for the Board when I say I am enormously grateful for your advice and assistance. Unfortunately, I must terminate our business relationship.

  Love,

  Your Wife

  Eva Moskowitz

  Eric had actually told me I had to fire him because, even though he’d been hired by Joel and John, he knew I’d be accused of nepotism if I kept him on. So I took Eric’s advice, but I also wrote:

  It is my hope that you will consider being our pro bono legal counsel. Though not financially rewarding, we are a hell of a lot of fun.

  Happily, he agreed.

  While the plan was for our schools to eventually break even on public funding, we needed money for start-up costs such as furniture, books, and our salaries prior to the school opening. Moreover, our school would initially run a deficit since our funding would be based on enrollment, but some of our costs, such as the salaries of the principal and the office manager, would be fixed. I remembered that when I’d held my labor contract hearings, I’d gotten a congratulatory call from the founder of the Gap, Don Fisher, so I arranged to meet with him. He warned me in advance that he ordinarily only gave money to charters with proven results, but he warmed up to the project when we met. He liked that we were starting with kindergarten because, after years of funding charter schools that started in middle school, he’d concluded that it made more sense to begin earlier. In the end, he agreed to make a tremendously generous $1 million contribution to help us get started. This, in addition to the $1 million that John and Joel were giving annually, put us on sound financial footing.

  Now I turned to planning the school. Many charter school founders focus on closing the racial achievement gap but I was also worried about another gap: that between American students and those in countries such as Japan, Singapore, and Finland. Closing that gap would require a very high level of rigor, particularly in math and science. In addition, while many of our students would come from poor families, I didn’t want to design a school that served one class of students, but rather one to which any parent would be proud to send their children.

  Being older than most charter school founders, I already had three children, so I thought about what type of education I’d want for them, which made my approach less ideological. Many educators debate what’s most important—conceptual understanding or precision, the rules of grammar or the ability to express one’s own views—but kids need all of these things.

  The Success for All reading curriculum was the cornerstone of our program. To fill out the rest of it, I drew from my work on the Education Committee. I’d noticed that science wasn’t taught until middle school in the district schools and, even then, they failed to teach the scientific method of formulating hypotheses and testing them. This was a lost opportunity. Not only do young children develop their critical thinking by studying science, they also love hands-on activities. I therefore decided to have dedicated science teachers provide instruction five days a week, beginning in kindergarten. Finding a curriculum was the next challenge. Many science textbooks were rudimentary and had boring activities such as having students sort fabrics by color and texture. We hired a teacher from Brearley, a renowned private school, to help develop our science curriculum. She concocted more interesting experiments, like determining which fabrics were hardest to clean after being stained with ketchup and mustard!

  Remembering how much my own mother had read to me and believing it had played a critical role in my education, I decided to require that parents read to their children and keep a log of what they’d read.

  Like most charter schools, we planned to have a longer school day, but rather than devote all the extra time to academics, we intended to use it for sports, music, art, and especially chess—a game Eric had taught our eldest son to play in order to develop his ability to concentrate and think strategically, and which I felt had also boosted his self-conf
idence. In addition, we decided to have a school uniform to send the message that we expected our students to take school seriously and also so they wouldn’t have to compete to wear the coolest clothes.

  Perhaps most important, we needed a school building. Thankfully, New York City had a policy called “co-location” that allowed charter schools to use space in underutilized district school buildings. The city agreed to put us in PS 154, a school operating at 50 percent capacity, but when the UFT got wind of this, they began whipping up opposition. Jenny Sedlis and an assistant attended a meeting regarding our co-location. An aide to a local politician claimed that co-locating us would cause class size at PS 154 to triple. Racial epithets were hurled at Jenny; her assistant, who was African American, was told “to go back to the suburbs.” A motion was then made to eject them, which was accompanied by shouts of “throw ’em out.”

  Two weeks later, the UFT followed up with a rally outside PS 154. The UFT had just succeeded in ending my last career. Maybe they’d derail this one too.

  Then I suddenly found myself at war on a second front. I’d decided to add the word “Academy” to our name to convey that our school would be academically rigorous. Technically, this required approval from the State Education Department (SED), but since they were responsible for regulating thousands of schools, many of which had very serious academic problems, they hardly had time to worry about something like this. Or so I thought. SED claimed that since one of our board members had observed that we might sometimes call ourselves Harlem Success Academy for short, thus leaving out the words “charter school,” our name change was a nefarious plot to hide the fact that we were a charter school. I protested to SED:

  Most schools have a nickname. Girls Preparatory Charter School calls itself Girls Prep. My alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, calls itself Penn. Harvard University frequently refers to itself simply as Harvard. [N]o one has to my knowledge accused them of trying to hide the fact that they were universities.

  SED eventually caved and agreed to our name change. Now maybe you’re saying, “Okay, Eva, they were wrong, but why did you get your knickers in a twist? After all, a name change is pretty trivial.” That, however, was precisely the point: if I’d allowed SED to get involved in something as trivial as a name change, who knew what they’d try to meddle with next.

  In Thomas Hardy’s novel Far from the Madding Crowd, a shepherd has a young dog who one night chases the sheep so zealously he runs them right off a cliff. The dog’s error, wrote Hardy, was thinking that “since he was kept for running after sheep, the more he ran after them the better.” Unfortunately, SED’s regulators had fallen prey to the same error of logic. They believed that the more heavily they regulated the better they were doing their job. In fact, regulation is necessary but should be undertaken judiciously, particularly in the case of charter schools since they are supposed to be freed from micromanagement. SED, however, apparently hadn’t gotten the memo.

  Meanwhile, I sought to recruit students for our school by visiting day care centers. At one, a woman named Natasha Shannon said to me: “So let me get this straight. You have no building, no principal, no teachers, but you want me to enroll my child in your school?” But despite her understandable skepticism, she did enroll her child, who is now a junior at our high school.

  Another challenge was recruiting teachers. Since our founding faculty would set the tone for the school, they had to be strong, so we did everything we could to find them: advertising, going to job fairs, reaching out to our personal networks. Once we found candidates we liked, I tried to make up for the fact that we didn’t have a school by inspiring them with the excitement of starting something new and with our bold vision. It wasn’t easy, but we did manage to hire twelve strong teachers, and while not having a school made hiring harder, those who did sign on were unusually adventurous and idealistic. We also recruited Paul Fucaloro, a veteran teacher at PS 65, the district school Joel had funded.

  Meanwhile, I tried to overcome the opposition to our co-location. One local politician suggested it would help if I hired a well-connected insider as an assistant principal. I politely declined. I wasn’t going to turn Success into a patronage mill. A few weeks later, DOE deputy chancellor Garth Harries asked us to accept fewer rooms at PS 154 than we’d previously been offered, but I couldn’t agree to that. The original offer had split the space fairly between Success and PS 154 based on enrollment; I wasn’t going to let the UFT bully us into taking less. Harries pushed back. He claimed that if my child was in a public school where DOE was trying to co-locate a charter school, I’d be opposing it too. I replied that it just so happened that my oldest child was in such a school and I’d refused the entreaties of the other parents to oppose the co-location.

  DOE then offered us an alternative site: PS 149 at 118th Street and Lenox Avenue. Fortunately, the UFT chose not to raise a ruckus at this placement, perhaps realizing that if they prevented me from opening a school, they’d deprive themselves of the satisfaction of seeing me fail. Conveniently, Eric and I had just moved to a building in Harlem that was just two blocks south of PS 149.

  We had decided to renovate the space we were given because a school’s appearance sets the tone for a school, particularly a new one. It was a frantic rush to get this done by August 21, the day we were set to open, so contractors were practically tripping over one another. Then one day we found men with guns hanging out in our hallway. It turned out they were plainclothes police officers who were conducting surveillance on a drug kingpin across the street. Since the presence of armed men didn’t really mesh with the safe atmosphere we were seeking to convey to our families, we asked the officers to conceal their weapons.

  On August 18, the mother of one of our children informed us her son wouldn’t be coming. She lived in the Bronx and her sister, whom she’d been counting on to take her son to school each day, had been murdered. I’d figured our school would be touched by violence, but not before it even opened.

  As the first day of school approached, I became increasingly conscious of the difference between debating educational policy in the abstract and running an actual school. It reminded me of the sense of responsibility I’d felt when I’d given birth to my first child and realized that for the next eighteen years I’d be waking up knowing that he was my responsibility. Now I’d be responsible for 165 children.

  But while I was nervous, I was also excited and optimistic. We’d planned carefully, created a great curriculum, and hired wonderful teachers. We had a shot, I believed, at accomplishing something truly extraordinary. Filled with this heady froth of hope and terror, I rose early on the morning of August 21, walked the two blocks from my home to our school, and waited for the students to arrive.

  5

  WEEVILS!

  2006

  At 7:15 a.m. sharp, we opened the doors and in streamed 165 children dressed in our orange and blue uniforms looking happy, energetic, and full of potential. I felt a sudden urge to confess to their parents that while I was going to try my best, I’d never run a school before and didn’t really know what I was doing. Instead, I put on a confident friendly smile, introduced myself, and shook the hand of each child who entered.

  Our first task was to match the students with their teachers and, for all of our planning, we’d given this little thought and chaos ensued. Hours later, we discovered we’d mixed up two identical twins.

  The days that followed were like some Alice in Wonderland dream. Periodically, loud bells would ring throughout the school, their origin and purpose a mystery. We soon learned it was PS 149’s system for calling the custodian, as if cell phones, beepers, and walkie-talkies hadn’t been invented. In addition, our bathrooms lacked toilet paper, most of our families didn’t turn in logs of the books they were supposed to have read to their children over the summer, and our payments from the city were late, so we had to get an emergency loan from Joel so our teachers’ paychecks didn’t bounce.

  On the second day, Paul and
I had to serve lunch because most of the cafeteria workers didn’t show; we had to cancel recess because the play yard was strewn with glass from broken bottles; the school nurse called in sick; our office’s vintage air conditioner broke down when temperatures were in the nineties; the mother of one of our students was checked into a psychiatric hospital; and while the toilets now had toilet paper, most had gotten clogged up from actual use.

  On the third day, families told us the nearby public libraries were refusing to lend them books because they were borrowing too many. Librarians against excessive reading—who knew?

  Wonderful things were happening too, but the pace of events was overwhelming. Here was a report I gave to Joel and John about the next two days:

  Good news:

  Chess started on Monday. The kids love Mr. Sanchez.

  Kids love science!!! They ate herbs today. Only problem was that they reported to parents that they were eating leaves at school and we had to field some concerned parent calls.

  Our kids have read 4,626 books!!!!!! 79 percent of our families completed the reading assignments up from 37 percent.

  We call when children are not in school by 9 a.m. and we have reduced latenesses from 20 to 2.

  Bad news:

  We have 2 weak 1st grade teachers. One is extremely emotional (cries every day) and they are inefficient instructors. They don’t know how to use every moment.

  [A student] threatened our learning specialist today. [He] made motions to hit her and then jumped from a desk and pulled her hair.

  We had another teacher cry today. She lost it. The kids were disobeying. She has 7 special ed boys who misbehave on a regular basis. I am finding a way for more recess. Boys have trouble w academic culture: too much sitting still.