The Education of Eva Moskowitz Read online

  Because Paul was demanding, some teachers thought he was mean, but students adored him and worked particularly hard in his class. Kids like predictability, and Paul, while strict, was utterly transparent: kids knew exactly what conduct would garner censure and what conduct would earn them praise.

  Students also enjoyed Paul’s class because he’d perfected techniques to keep them constantly engaged. When Paul asked a question, he’d pause briefly so that every student could prepare an answer and then call randomly on a student, who was expected to have his answer ready. Thus, every student had to prepare to answer every question. When the student gave his answer, Paul would sometimes ask another student to repeat it to make sure they were listening to one another. Paul never repeated a student’s answer, as many teachers do, because that just encourages students to stop listening to one another. Here is a typical sequence of Paul’s questions (with the students’ responses omitted):

  “Was Kevin telling the truth when he said he didn’t want to go to the birthday party?”

  [Pause to allow every student to prepare an answer.]

  “Elijah?”

  “Elijah, what evidence is there in the story for your opinion?”

  “Aisha, repeat what Elijah said.”

  “Raise your hands if you think that Aisha correctly stated Elijah’s opinion. Now, raise your hands if you think she didn’t.”

  “Taj, how was what Aisha said different from what Elijah said?”

  “Rashid, do you agree with what Elijah said? What is your opinion? What evidence is there for your opinion?”

  “Raise your hand if you agree with Rashid.”

  “Mark, you didn’t raise your hand. Why do you disagree with Rashid? What’s your evidence?”

  Students knew they could be called upon at any moment to answer Paul’s rapid-fire questions and were expected to have their answer ready. As a result, they continually engaged in “active listening”: developing their views on everything that was being said. The moment a child made a mistake, a dozen students would start squirming in the hope they’d be called upon for a correction. What Paul realized was that students get nearly as much intellectual benefit from preparing a potential contribution as from actually making it, so children could learn a lot even if they rarely got a chance to participate. This epiphany was the foundation of what I’ve dubbed the Fucaloro method, Paul’s riff on the Socratic method.

  Paul made sure students were engaged in active listening by closely monitoring their behavior. He didn’t let them stare off into space, play with objects, rest their head on their hands in boredom, or act like what Paul called “sourpusses” by bringing an attitude of negativity or indifference to the classroom. Rather, they had to sit up and “track” (meaning look at) the speaker so Paul could be sure they were paying attention. If a child’s eyes strayed for a moment, Paul would point to the child, snapping his fingers if necessary to get the child’s attention. Students who were short or were strategically slouching to avoid eye contact were moved to the first row. If Paul had thirty students in his class, he wanted to see sixty eyeballs staring back at him.

  To improve my own teaching, I hung on Paul’s every word, followed his advice religiously, and went to him for extra help. At the end of eight weeks, my students were assessed and they’d made excellent progress. This proved to me that even an inexperienced teacher like me could be fairly effective using this curriculum and applying the techniques Paul had taught us.

  I found it invigorating to be back in education and was totally consumed with running Success. It felt like ages since I’d been in politics. It was quite jarring, therefore, when I got a message one day that someone from my old life had called: Randi Weingarten.

  7

  THE CATCH

  2007

  Randi Weingarten had lambasted me for my union contract hearings, boasted of helping Scott Stringer defeat me, and predicted I’d fail at schooling. Why on earth would she be calling me? When I returned her call, she explained that she wanted Success to adopt the “thin contract” that Bloomberg and Klein had sought. While she’d refused to accept such a contract for the district schools, getting Success to adopt one would be a victory for the UFT since our teachers weren’t unionized.

  While a thin contract was certainly preferable to a fat one, it would still severely constrain our ability to manage our teachers and create a negative management/union oppositional dynamic. Weingarten asked me, however, whether there was anything she could offer to induce me to change my mind, so I told her I’d give that some thought and get back to her. I did so the following day. I’d agree to a thin contract, I said, if she’d agree to one for the district schools as well. After all, if this thin contract was so great, why limit it to Success?

  I never heard from her again.

  While my teaching abilities were improving, I was still a relative beginner, so I tried to help our teachers improve by learning from one another. We compared our results and tried to figure out what the teachers with the strongest results were doing differently. Some didn’t like their results being made public but I explained that improving their teaching was more important. Imagine if one heart surgeon at a hospital had a dramatically lower mortality rate than the others. Wouldn’t you want to tell this to the surgeons so they could figure out what the one with the better results was doing differently? And while it’s true that the lives of our children weren’t at risk, their futures were.

  Some teachers also felt that since they were all doing pretty well, there was no point in obsessing over slight differences. Aiming for pretty good, however, is a recipe for mediocrity, as explained in the wonderful Charles Osgood poem “Pretty Good,” which I posted in the teachers’ work room. Every teacher, even the best ones, should strive to become better. One reason Michael Jordan had such an impact on the Chicago Bulls was that his teammates saw how hard he practiced and they figured that if the best basketball player in the world was still striving to improve, so should they.

  Many people who find themselves in demanding jobs think they’d be happier in a more relaxed environments but I find that once people adjust to a demanding fast-paced environment, they find it exciting and fulfilling. Conversely, many people who get undemanding jobs are initially very happy because they are comfortable and relaxed but quickly become bored. Hard work is like swimming in the ocean; the cold is unpleasant at first but once your body adjusts to the temperature, it’s fun. The trick is having the courage to wade in.

  So we all worked together to improve. We regularly observed one another’s classrooms and then discussed what we’d seen: the great moves we’d witnessed, the mistakes we’d observed, our suggestions for improvement. We even videotaped ourselves and watched key parts of the lesson. Once my teachers got past their initial discomfort, they found that they enjoyed learning from one another since teaching can be an isolating profession when each teacher is siloed away in her own classroom.

  As the year progressed, I thought about which teachers we would rehire for the following year. I’d already let two go and there were four others I felt were weak. I asked Joel Greenblatt and John Petry for advice. John responded by citing Jack Welch’s principle that employees generally fall into three categories: 20 percent who are superstars; 70 percent who can be successful with sufficient guidance and training; and 10 percent who aren’t right for the company and must be let go. Since we’d already let a few teachers go, John reasoned, the four I was worried about probably fell into the 70 percent category so we should keep them and try to help them improve.

  This is just one of the many times that John and Joel gave me wise advice that reflected their considerable business experience. I nonetheless worried about how to square that advice with establishing a culture of excellence at Success. Once you’ve established such a culture, you can keep on a few weak employees you’re trying to improve without others concluding that mediocrity is considered acceptable. These four weak teachers, however, were a third of our staff so I soug
ht to steer a middle course. I told these teachers that while we’d help them to improve, they’d only be rehired if they demonstrated they were truly committed to improving and had made sufficient progress by year’s end. All but one did.

  However, since we were expanding, we still needed to hire several new teachers and nobody had time to do this as we were all focusing on running the school. Fortunately, Kristina Exline, who’d been on my city council staff and was now working for a women’s rights organization, called me to tell me that she was finding her new job boring and wanted to work for me again. I was delighted to have her back and put her in charge of recruiting. With her addition, every one of the five former employees I’d asked to join me at Success had agreed to do so. While I am a notoriously demanding boss, many people find the stress and long hours are outweighed by the excitement and feeling of satisfaction that comes from tackling important projects with terrific intensity. I’m very grateful for their sacrifices.

  In addition to teachers, we also needed to hire a dean to help us with the many challenges our students were facing. One student’s father had been murdered and his mother had serious psychiatric issues, so we had to get his uncle to take him in. Another student went around saying that he wanted to kill people. We needed a dean who could ensure these problems were handled properly so our teachers could focus on the needs of all of our students. Running an urban school sometimes requires you to balance your obligations to students who are in crisis with those who aren’t but whose futures nonetheless depend on getting a strong education.

  Finding a strong dean wasn’t easy because we needed someone who cared deeply about kids and understood the challenges they were facing but also shared our belief in setting high standards for student behavior. None of the candidates impressed me until I met Khari Shabazz, a former police officer who, tired of arresting young men whose problems arose from societal ills, had quit the force and begun working for an after-school program. Impressed by the financial sacrifice he’d made to help kids and also by his intellect and strong but loving demeanor, I decided to hire him.

  While we were making progress in many areas, dealing with DOE proved challenging. It kept losing our requests to provide services to students with learning disabilities. When we protested, DOE then managed to “find” them but said it was now too late to approve the services before the year’s end. I was apoplectic and vowed to prevent this from happening the following year.

  Another problem was our fluorescent lights, which were constantly going out. It turned out that DOE was purchasing bulbs that lasted only 5,000 hours, so we replaced them with 30,000-hour bulbs. This led to bitter complaints from the handymen who’d been earning copious amounts of overtime pay by constantly replacing DOE’s short-lived bulbs. Welcome to public education.

  But apart from such frustrations, I felt the year had gone reasonably well. There was a good sense of esprit de corps, the students seemed to be learning, and we were making progress with our challenging students and their parents. Losing our principal turned out to be a blessing in disguise because it forced me to learn more about instruction and while I certainly wasn’t the most experienced educator, the teachers saw that I was there when they arrived and when they left and got emails from me at all hours of the night and on weekends. This hard work showed them how important I considered our mission and gave me the moral authority to ask them to take on the herculean task of getting our disadvantaged children to match the achievements of privileged, suburban children who attended schools with twice our resources.

  But there was a catch. John, Joel, and I had gotten it into our heads that we were going to have a material impact upon public education in New York City during our lifetimes by opening forty schools within a decade. While other charter schools had “replicated” before, they usually didn’t seek permission to do so until they could demonstrate success of their first school with standardized test scores, which our students wouldn’t take until third grade, and even then, most only sought to open one more school. If we took that approach, it would take decades to open forty schools. I therefore decided to apply immediately and to ask for three schools rather than one. People told me I was nuts, that it would be a miracle if I got permission to open even one additional school. Moreover, they didn’t know about my run-in with SED over our name change. What were the odds that regulators who didn’t even want to let me add a word to the name of our first school would allow me to open three new ones?

  8

  SONGS OF A REFUGEE

  1882–1964

  My great-grandmother Annie Einhorn was born in 1882 in a portion of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that is now Poland. Having already lost her father, she was orphaned when her mother died from a rabid dog bite. At the age of fourteen, she was sent by her brother to America to become an indentured servant. Upon the completion of her servitude, she married Samuel Ehrenreich, a Polish immigrant, who on May 7, 1898, had arrived at Ellis Island where clerks had dutifully recorded, in accordance with the law of the time, that he was not deformed, crippled, or a polygamist.

  Samuel pressed clothes twelve hours a day in a factory while Annie opened up a small grocery store. She was illiterate and innumerate but one of her customers taught her how to add, multiply, and subtract so she could make change. In 1905, she gave birth to a girl, my grandmother Frances.

  Frances became a public school teacher and, in 1931, married Emil Moskowitz, a child of emigrants from Budapest and, like his father, a tailor. In 1935, Frances gave birth to a boy, my father, Martin. My father would help out at his father’s store on weekends. During a period when suppliers were insisting that Emil pay cash due to his financial difficulties, my father once had to deliver $3,000 in cash to a supplier. Understanding full well the disaster that would befall his family if he lost this enormous sum, my father breathed a sigh of relief when he arrived at his destination.

  One day, a boy named Clement Finn called my father a “dirty Jew,” so my father slugged him as hard as he could and was sent to the principal’s office to explain himself, which he happily did: Clement had it coming. Alas, that view did not prevail so my father was promptly shipped off to the Pleasantville Cottage School for troubled children.

  My father discovered he had a natural affinity for mathematics that others didn’t seem to share. One day, during a lesson on how to tell time, my father raised his hand and observed that in theory, you didn’t need the minute hand to tell time if you looked closely at the hour hand. His teacher told him to shut up.

  In third grade, my father noticed a pattern in the multiplication tables. If you took a square (e.g., 8 × 8), and then you made one number lower and one higher (e.g., 7 × 9), the result (63) was one less than the square (64). He saw this was true for all the squares up through 10 x 10, which was where the multiplication table ended, so he asked his teacher whether that would continue on forever. Again, he was told to shut up.

  Later, my father figured out that the paper cone in which the egg cream sodas he liked were served would hold one third as much as a cylinder of the same dimensions. He tried to explain this to the store’s proprietor but, to my father’s surprise, the proprietor couldn’t grasp this concept.

  Sensing my father’s gift, my grandmother had him take the admissions test for Stuyvesant, the city’s best public high school, and he passed. There, he was pleased to find others who shared his enthusiasm for math, although he was upset to learn in his senior year that he wouldn’t be allowed to take calculus. He was told that only students on the math team could take calculus, and when he offered to join the team, that he couldn’t join the math team just because he wanted to take calculus. He resorted to taking it at night school instead.

  After graduating, my father enrolled in an engineering program at Cooper Union but decided after two years to transfer to Brooklyn College to study pure math. My grandmother opposed this plan as impractical and wouldn’t speak with my father for six months when he went ahead with it anyway. At first, my father
struggled, but in the end, he did well enough to gain admission to a graduate program at the University of California, Berkeley. There, he studied with Gerhard Paul Hochschild, one of the many Jewish refugees from Germany who became leading lights in the fields of mathematics and physics. Spurred on by the same fascination that had led him to discover the relationship between the volume of a cone and a cylinder, my father came to study Lie groups, a field that lies at the intersection of geometry and algebra.

  After a year of studies, my father returned to New York City for the summer. When it ended, he drove back to Berkeley with my mother, whom he’d met at an Israeli folk dance. While my father didn’t exactly conform to my mother’s romantic ideals, their cross-country journey allowed her ample time to discover virtues in him not apparent at first sight. They began dating and, in 1959, got married. As the ceremony took place in California, their families couldn’t attend. The only guests were two witnesses, the spread for the reception was half a wedding cake, and the honeymoon was a day trip to Sausalito.