The Education of Eva Moskowitz Read online

  Milk was frozen. Kindergartners cried. Mayhem resulted. Spoke to Miss John. Milk has to be liquid!!!!!

  Electricity went down again. Wireless doesn’t work all the time. Rugs were dirty. Had to have a heart to heart with custodian which was: if my rugs aren’t vacuumed, you’re a dead man.

  Soccer games: Reserving fields is challenging but we have 3 games scheduled.

  Got to bottom of mystery [of] harassing phone calls: a parent. Brought in police. Good God.

  And the hits kept on coming. When water started pouring into our office out of an adjacent bathroom, we had to disconnect our newly purchased computer equipment and move it to higher ground. After flooding came pestilence: the snacks DOE had given us for our kids were infested with weevils.

  Many of our students still hadn’t received their uniforms, so we fired our uniform provider. Eleven families told us they couldn’t read even a simple picture book to their children because they were illiterate or didn’t speak English. Other parents were belligerent, including a woman who used a string of profanities to tell me what a terrible school I was running since we’d let her grandson lose his gym uniform, a reprimand I took personally since things were going so poorly.

  By the end of the second week, I was exhausted. We’d had a parent with a nervous breakdown, broken glass on our play yard, parents not reading to their children, an incompetent uniform company, failing electricity and Internet, a librarian work slowdown, a broken air conditioner, belligerent parents, nonworking toilets, a police stakeout, a cash crisis, a sick nurse, frozen milk, and weevils. Weevils!!!

  If this was just two weeks, what would a year be like? And what would it be like when we had not 165 students, but 500 or, God forbid, dozens of schools with thousands of kids as Joel and John wanted? Maybe I wasn’t cut out for this work. Maybe I’d been naïve to think I could run a school with so little experience.

  But I couldn’t just fold up my tent, so we went about solving our problems one by one. To get rid of the bell system, we bought walkie-talkies for the custodian and both schools. To end the New York Public Library’s policy of discouraging excessive reading in Harlem, I called its president, Paul LeClerc, who sent down word that this wasn’t in fact official library policy. To help a family whose parents weren’t reading to their child because they’d recently become homeless, I called up the commissioner of housing and got them a housing voucher. To address our nurse’s habitual lateness and inability to identify common childhood ailments like ringworm, I got a new nurse assigned. These successes boosted my spirits. While I was inexperienced, at least I could use my knowledge of city government and the problem-solving skills I’d learned as a council member to support our teachers and help our families.

  Next, I spoke to the grandmother of the boy who’d lost his uniform. Her anger, I came to understand, stemmed from anxiety that she’d have to buy a new uniform every week, which she couldn’t afford. I said we’d pay for a replacement uniform and do a better job of helping her grandson keep track of it in the future. Given how she’d treated me, however, I feared she might act belligerently toward our teachers. I explained to her that we really did have her grandson’s best interests at heart, that we were all on the same team, and that in the future, she needed to give us the benefit of the doubt. It’s very important that a school protect its teachers from being mistreated by parents or they become jaded and dispirited, which ultimately hurts kids.

  I also worked hard to improve our school’s appearance. A poorly maintained facility suggests that teachers and students aren’t valued and contributes to low expectations. If only half of a school’s light bulbs work, teachers figure it’s okay to prepare for half their classes and parents figure it’s okay for their children to do half their homework. I wanted our facility to communicate that our school was both rigorous and joyful, and to instantly dispel any preconceptions anyone had about urban public schools. This meant having classrooms that were spotless and well lit, hallways that were festooned with student work and colorful banners, and bathrooms that both looked and smelled clean.

  Success eluded me at first: I’d complain to the custodian; he’d promise improvements; none would come. Finally, I asked him whether there was anything I could do to help. Yes, he said, I could buy him a better vacuum cleaner, which he probably thought was impossible since district school principals didn’t have the authority to do something like this. I did. Done, I told him. Second, he wanted us to put students’ chairs on the desks at the end of the day to facilitate cleaning. Done, I said. Third, kids had to stop messing up the bathrooms by throwing paper towels all over and failing to “aim.” He was 100 percent right: why should his staff put any effort into keeping our school clean if our students’ conduct suggested they didn’t care if it was clean? We began monitoring our students’ conduct in the bathrooms more closely and instituted a bathroom cleanliness competition between the boys and the girls with the winning gender receiving a golden plunger award. The cleaning gradually improved and we helped the custodian hold his staff accountable by regularly reporting on the quality of their work. We also thanked them for their efforts and this helped them understand that their work really mattered to us.

  Another problem we had was getting access to our building’s library, one of dozens the Robin Hood Foundation had built for about $1 million a pop. These libraries were so wonderful that rather than waste them on students, many schools turned them into de facto teachers’ lounges. I got access for our students by threatening to contact Robin Hood, but PS 149’s students had no such luck. This illustrates the danger of indiscriminately providing additional resources to schools; while they may benefit a competently managed school, a dysfunctional school will merely squander them.

  My highest priority was creating a school culture that had a low tolerance for laziness and dysfunction and high expectations for student achievement and teacher performance. To accomplish this, I drew on lessons from other pioneers in the charter movement including KIPP, Achievement First, and Uncommon. I learned from them that focusing students on the goal of attending college would help them understand that doing well in school wasn’t just about pleasing one’s teachers but about having a bright future. We took our kids to college campuses starting in kindergarten, referred to grades by the year they would graduate from college (e.g., our kindergartners were the class of 2023), named our classrooms after our teachers’ alma maters, and encouraged our teachers to talk about their college experience and to decorate their classrooms with swag from their alma mater.

  We also preached what we dubbed our “ACTION” values—Agency, Curiosity, Try and try, Integrity, and No shortcuts. These may sound hokey but they really strengthened our school culture. Agency reflects the idea that students need to take responsibility for their own fate rather than simply rely on others; curiosity, our belief that learning should be joyful and driven by natural intellectual drive. To teach these values, we used games, stories, and songs. We taught agency with a song called “I’m in Charge of Me.” We taught try and try with a Dr. Seuss book in which a boy creates letters beyond Z to capture the idea of going beyond what is ordinarily considered sufficient. While it can be frustrating to teach young children because they don’t know how to behave, the upside is that they are virtually a blank slate, and if you take advantage of that fact to teach them to become good learners, that investment will pay dividends for years to come.

  Our ACTION values also applied to our adults and, to express our dismay when adults failed to exemplify these values, we came up with their antithesis which we called, tongue in cheek, LAGDEC: Learned helplessness, Apathy, Giving up, Dishonesty, Ego, and Corner cutters.

  By a couple of months into the school year, I felt reasonably good about the culture we’d created and our school no longer seemed out of control. But it became increasingly clear that I’d made one critical mistake. The principal I’d hired wasn’t stepping up to the plate despite my best efforts to help him, so in October, I let him go. This
meant I’d have to hire a principal midyear, and given that I hadn’t managed to succeed in finding a strong candidate in the normal hiring cycle when candidates were plentiful, it seemed unlikely I’d do so now when candidates were scarce.

  6

  THE FUCALORO METHOD

  2006–2007

  Given the difficulty of hiring a principal midyear, I considered promoting one of my teachers but, as talented as they were at instruction, none were ready to take on the responsibility of leading a school. I had no choice, I concluded, but to do the job myself. I knew I wasn’t an ideal candidate since my only experience teaching children was a history class I’d taught one summer to fourth-graders, but I’d learned a great deal about K–12 education by holding innumerable hearings and visiting hundreds of schools as chair of the Education Committee. It was like getting a graduate degree in education.

  But given my lack of actual classroom experience, I decided to focus my energies at first on supporting our teachers: providing them with a clean and well-maintained facility, adequate supplies, counseling for students who needed it, and, perhaps most important, helping with the discipline issues that often confounded and demoralized teachers. While a competent teacher can handle most behavioral problems, some students misbehave incessantly and fail to respond to ordinary classroom management techniques, which can have a domino effect; when other students see it’s possible to get away with misbehaving, they decide to get in on the fun and soon the teacher is playing whack-a-mole rather than teaching.

  A school often needs parental support to improve a child’s behavior. If the school tells the child he must behave better but the parents say he needn’t, the child will invariably choose the latter course. It’s often hard, however, to get parents on board. As a parent myself, I know how easy it is to be defensive when you’re told your child is misbehaving. It feels like your child is being attacked so your instinct is to defend him, to say 1) he didn’t do it; 2) if he did, the other kid started it; 3) he never misbehaves at home; 4) the teacher is playing favorites; and 5) the teacher doesn’t know how to manage her class. And of course, sometimes these things are at least partially true: some teachers do have weak disciplinary skills and some kids do find it harder to behave in school than at home since there are different behavioral expectations in a classroom with thirty students.

  There’s also an issue of trust. Since district schools are often quick to send children with behavioral issues to programs for emotionally disturbed children, some parents fear that admitting their child has a behavioral problem will merely grease the skids. It’s critical to help parents understand that addressing a student’s behavioral issues is important not only so that the school can be more orderly, but also so that the student can succeed academically. You must make clear to a parent that you don’t see their child as just some two-dimensional “bad kid” but rather you see his potential. I could do this, I discovered, by finding out something positive about a student, such as a talent for science or art, and talking about that first. This is quite effective, but it’s hard to do when a child is being challenging. Sometimes you want to grab a parent firmly by the lapels and scream, “Your child is making my job impossible!” But unless you acknowledge a child’s virtues, a parent will rarely admit his faults.

  Occasionally, parents would object to our imposing our cultural expectations on their children and some of our white teachers were hesitant to push back because they feared doing so would be insensitive. I found, however, that if I told parents we had the same high expectations for all students and I was confident their children could meet them, they were actually pleased. This may be counterintuitive, but ironically, just because a parent felt we might be willing to set a different standard for a student’s conduct based on his race or class, that didn’t mean they actually wanted us to have that view.

  Once we got parents on board, their job was to work with us to address the behavioral issues. We’d give them a daily report on their child’s behavior; if it was good, they’d say something positive to their child such as, “I heard you behaved very well in school today. I’m so proud of you.” If the report was bad, they might say, “I heard you pushed another student. If you get frustrated, you need to talk to the teacher so she can help you calm down.” We weren’t looking for parents to take extreme measures; indeed, we sometimes had to discourage them from doling out physical punishments.

  Rather than overwhelm parents by trying to solve every problem at once, we aimed for small victories to build momentum. When one student who liked to jump down a flight of stairs in a single bound managed to walk down the steps one by one, I took a picture and emailed it to his parents.

  To reward good behavior, we’d call up a child’s mother in the middle of the day so he could speak to her by phone. We’d also call families on Sunday nights to tell them what would be happening in class that week, such as what stories would be read, as we found that knowing what to expect had a calming effect on children.

  We weren’t seeking to foist behavioral problems off on parents. Rather, we were asking them to work with us as a team so we could present a united front. We wanted the child to understand that he would incur the opprobrium of all of the critical authority figures in his life if he misbehaved, and, if he didn’t, their praise. This team effort, combined with incentives we provided for good conduct, usually worked quite well.

  With these efforts, our classrooms gradually but surely became calmer and more productive, which helped the morale of our teachers. So did being attentive to their needs. When some of our teachers mentioned they were having trouble staying on top of their work, we hired an assistant to correct homework, take attendance, and help out with other administrative tasks. We also made sure our teachers got any supplies they asked for immediately, which surprised them since they’d often had to pay for such supplies out of their own pockets in the district schools where they’d previously taught. Spending a few hundred dollars for supplies that made our $60,000-a-year teachers more effective and enthusiastic was a no-brainer.

  I next turned my attention to instruction. Since people viewed me as a politician, many assumed I’d be a figurehead who wouldn’t get my hands dirty with actual schooling, but I was first and foremost an educator. To learn more about instruction, I decided to teach an eight-week session of the Success for All (SFA) reading program. I attended the planning sessions led by Paul Fucaloro, whom our teachers tended to underestimate because he bore a superficial resemblance to the movie stereotype of a stern and joyless teacher. In reality, Paul was nothing of the sort. He was an avid gardener, a great cook, and a manager of professional boxers—something I didn’t quite believe until Paul had half a dozen of his protégés show up one day to help us move boxes. Paul always had some business scheme going on. Once, he announced he was heading off to Dubai to buy crude oil from a sheikh he’d befriended through boxing; he returned with the news that the crude oil deal had fallen through but he’d been able to buy a vast quantity of olive oil instead. His energy was limitless. I’d show up at 6:30 a.m. to find not only that Paul had already been preparing for an hour but that he’d also planted his annuals that morning before coming in.

  As for teaching, Paul could play every position on the field. Since we didn’t have a music teacher our first year, he led sing-alongs of popular ’60s and ’70s tunes like “Under the Boardwalk.” When we needed materials to help students with reading comprehension, Paul wrote marvelous poems designed to teach children skills such as identifying a passage’s main idea.

  I was struck by how thoroughly Paul prepared and how much he enjoyed doing so. Some teachers complained that SFA wasn’t sufficiently challenging, but Paul showed me this was because they were focusing only on phonics rather than on comprehension. For example, if a character who hadn’t been invited to a birthday party said he didn’t want to go anyway, the students would take this at face value, not realizing that authors often expect their readers to deduce a character’s true feelings. Paul
would ask the class whether the story contained any clues that the boy might feel differently than he claimed.

  Of the many things I learned from Paul, the most important concerned effort. Many teachers assume that students are generally trying their best. Alas, that’s rarely true. Imagine how carefully you would add up ten numbers if you knew you’d get $1 million for doing so correctly. You’d focus ferociously and check your work ten times to make sure you got it right. Now let’s define that as your best effort. By that standard, how often do you truly give your “best effort” when you do things? Most adults rarely give anything even close to their best effort and kids are even worse. Paul knew this and he believed that it was his responsibility to get kids as close as humanly possible to their theoretical million-dollars-on-the-line level of effort every minute he taught.

  Here is how this would play out. Suppose the boy in the above-mentioned story had slammed the door on hearing he hadn’t been invited to the birthday party. Paul asks, “How do we know that Kevin is angry?” and Elijah answers, “Because Kevin wasn’t invited to the birthday party.” Many teachers would follow up with “Very good, Elijah, that’s why Kevin’s angry. Now, how do we know he’s angry?” This may seem very pedagogically astute because the teacher compliments the student for what he did right while still pointing out the error. However, Paul would start from the premise that the student probably hadn’t given his best effort and would press the student to try harder. He might say, “Elijah, you didn’t listen carefully to my question. Aisha, repeat my question so Elijah can try again.” This may be tough medicine but Elijah will now try harder. Moreover, Paul gives Elijah a chance to redeem himself by trying to answer the question after Aisha restates it rather than just asking Aisha to answer the question.

  Children are less fragile than many educators think. They can handle being pushed hard intellectually. Moreover, since children saw that Paul was tough on all of his students, they understood that if he was displeased with them, it didn’t mean they were stupid but that Paul had high expectations. In fact, Paul’s implicit message to his students was that he thought so highly of their abilities that when they failed to answer his question correctly, the only explanation could be lack of effort. Students invariably rose to the challenge in the end and this led to real self-esteem, which comes from hard work, not false praise. That’s why students who play sports are often more confident than their peers: their coaches push them so they become accustomed to the idea that they can surmount challenges with hard work.