The Education of Eva Moskowitz Read online

  My parents decided to move to Israel where my father got a position at Hebrew University. While sad to see his daughter move so far away, my grandfather Chaim nonetheless “bless[ed] the hour when [she’d] set foot in the promised land.” My parents ultimately decided, however, that the promised land wasn’t their cup of tea and returned to the United States, but first, they took a boat to Naples and hitchhiked their way throughout Italy and France. By spending just $2.50 per day four years after publication of the budget travel guide Europe on $5 a Day, they managed to make $600 they’d saved last four months. My mother was so inspired by the sites she saw that she later decided to study art history.

  In 1961, my grandfather Chaim learned he had cancer, the same illness that had felled his beloved Sascha. It was now time, he realized, to fulfill the vow he’d made to publish the Yiddish poems he’d written. Fittingly enough, he funded the publication of his book, Songs of a Refugee, with reparations payments he’d received from Germany. He explained in the book’s preface that he wished to depict “the deep sorrow of the Jewish refugees who were persecuted along the rocky, thorn-strewn road as they were chased from border to border” and “the joy of those who finally found refuge . . . in the free America.”

  His poems were filled with gratitude for the country that had welcomed him:

  Now, after wandering so long,

  over many lands and oceans wide,

  I sing a song of praise to you,

  the land that gave me a new home.

  Now, no one is excluded,

  that is what makes you truly great.

  All the children of God’s world

  are welcomed at your gates.

  So accept the gratitude

  of a simple immigrant.

  You provided us with a safe haven.

  Be blessed, you precious land!

  His poems also expressed his love for his adoptive city:

  I’m enchanted by your long, broad streets,

  your towering palaces of stone and steel,

  the multicolored din of your Times Square

  which calls to joy and life both night and day.

  Your Greenwich Village artists, bearded poets,

  oft laughed at, mocked, yet so creative;

  by day, they paint out in the sunshine

  by night, sip wine in local pubs.

  But while grateful that he’d managed to find refuge in America, he lamented that doing so had opened up an unbridgeable cultural divide with his children, who couldn’t understand the Yiddish language he so loved:

  I have two daughters, beauteous as roses,

  Magically charming as all can see.

  But my ancestry is foreign to them.

  Who can share my deep sorrow with me?

  I have a cupboard full of books

  But nobody to leave those tomes.

  The attic and the cellar will read them

  when my final hour comes.

  And he was still haunted by the horror the Nazis had inflicted on his family and his people:

  The bloody wounds have not yet healed;

  the killings, the torture, fresh in my memory.

  I can still hear the moans of the martyrs—

  their lives cut short by the German hordes.

  Not even one generation has passed,

  yet so much of what happened is being forgotten.

  Remember! Remember to the ends of time

  how we were herded into the fire and gas.

  Chaim’s life had not been easy. His wife had died of cancer, his mother had been murdered in a gas chamber at Treblinka, and he’d struggled financially in New York. But his final poem suggests that, notwithstanding the losses he’d suffered and the anger he felt, he’d found a measure of comfort in his adoptive home and the knowledge that his descendants would enjoy a happier life in the land to which he’d delivered them. This poem, titled “Sunset” and written by Chaim at a Jewish country retreat after his cancer diagnosis, suggests he was at peace with his own imminent mortality:

  The fragrance of flowers

  spreads through the air

  engulfing all

  as sunset approaches.

  A narrow cloud, now flaming red,

  shimmers in the sky;

  reflected in all its beauty

  in the waters of the lake.

  Rowboats glide quietly toward the shore.

  Couples disembark and bring along

  the blessing of the cool waters

  in their song of praise to the sunset.

  Six months after Chaim wrote this poem, my mother gave birth to a boy she named Andre and traveled back to New York so my grandfather could meet the first of his descendants to be born in America. By December 1962, it was clear the end was near so she returned again. Despite the terrible pain he was enduring, Chaim smiled to see his grandson one more time. Days later, he died.

  A little more than a year later, on March 4, 1964, my mother gave birth to the second of Chaim’s descendents to be born in America, a girl to whom she gave the name Eva Sarah Moskowitz.

  9

  GET US THE DAMN SPACE!

  2007–2008

  Normally a charter school seeking to replicate sought permission from its authorizer, which in our case was the State Education Department (SED), but given our history with them, we instead applied to the State University of New York (SUNY), which also had the power to grant charters. I knew the head of its charter school committee, Ed Cox, a prominent lawyer who liked the work I’d done on the city council, so I arranged for Joel, John, and me to meet with him and he encouraged us to apply.

  In the summer of 2007, we submitted our applications which, due to SUNY’s onerous requirements, consisted of 45,000 pages contained in ninety binders. SUNY got back to us on August 16. They had one big concern: if we couldn’t open because the city didn’t give us space for our schools, SUNY would have wasted three charters, so they asked us to promise we’d rent space if necessary. I refused. To open enough schools to make a serious dent in the city’s educational crisis, our schools had to operate, aside from start-up costs, on public funding. Renting space would make that impossible since it would add around $2 million in costs annually per school. If we reached our goal of opening forty schools, we’d have to raise $80 million annually. Making ourselves dependent on such a huge stream of philanthropy would be fiscally irresponsible; one bad year and we’d be thrown into a financial crisis, forced to choose between eviction and laying off teachers. Besides, paying rent would be a waste of money since plenty of district schools in Harlem were half empty. Parents there preferred to send their children to parochial schools, charter schools, or district schools in other neighborhoods. At one nearby school, PS 241, enrollment had fallen from 918 students to 347 in just three years.

  But SUNY was adamant. If we wouldn’t promise to rent space, said SUNY, then we had to get DOE to commit to giving us space and while I was confident DOE would do so once we ran our lottery, they were too lethargic and cautious to make that commitment up front. It was a classic catch-22: DOE wouldn’t give us space until SUNY gave us charters and SUNY wouldn’t give us charters until DOE gave us space.

  While this was playing out, our first school reopened on August 20. This time we actually had a plan for making sure our students ended up with the right teacher, but we had to refight some battles. The piercing custodial bell had returned because, as we soon learned, the custodian wouldn’t answer his walkie-talkie due to a feud with PS 149’s principal over a romance gone bad between their respective staff members. Another issue was syrup, as I wrote Joel and John:

  Last year I outlawed syrup for breakfast. Five-, six-, and seven-year-olds can manage to get the entire school sticky. First day of school syrup was served. Food service managers told me that I did not have the authority to outlaw syrup and that only the US Secretary of Agriculture could make that decision.

  Who knew?

  In addition, our special education teachers were being paid
late by DOE, so we had to lend them money. DOE also took forever to hang a curtain in our auditorium because curtain hangers were unionized and in short supply. Despite having held more than one hundred hearings as chair of the Education Committee, I’d never heard of this union.

  But some things were going more smoothly. Khari, our new dean, was a big hit with the kids since he had a kind but authoritative manner and an orange BMW motorcycle he’d let them sit on if they were well behaved. He was also deeply compassionate. When Khari learned that one of our students was angry and defiant because he missed his father, who was imprisoned many hours away from the city, Khari offered to bring this child to visit his father. The boy’s attitude immediately changed; he started smiling and talked about showing his father his writing and teaching him how to play chess. It was heartwarming and yet at the same time heartbreaking to see how this boy longed for something most children could take for granted. After the visit, the boy’s mother thanked Khari profusely, saying that she “didn’t know people could care that much.”

  Khari was also more comfortable than many of our teachers with speaking frankly to our parents. He wasn’t afraid that telling them they had a moral obligation to check their children’s homework would be perceived as a cultural judgment. He also nimbly handled the disputes that sometimes arose between parents. One day at dismissal, several mothers of our students began assaulting a student’s father with bags chock-full of library books because they believed he was two-timing his wife. Unfortunately, when we’d instituted our policy requiring our parents to read their children books, we hadn’t anticipated the risk that they’d be weaponized. I tried to intercede but, at five foot two, was ill suited to the task. Fortunately, Khari stepped in and calmed everyone down.

  We also systematized certain practices like regularly checking the cleanliness of our school. Every time we found a deficiency, we took a picture of it that we forwarded to the custodian. Another innovation was requiring teachers to call parents regularly. Imagine this. You’re making dinner and the phone rings. It’s your son’s first-grade teacher. “Oh no,” you think, “what has he done now?” The teacher says, “I wanted to let you know that Taj wrote a wonderful story today about our trip to the circus. You should ask him to show it to you.” Buttering you up for the bad news, you think, but the bad news never comes. The sole purpose of these calls was to build a positive and productive parent-teacher relationship, something that’s much harder to do if a teacher’s first interaction with a parent is negative.

  We also encouraged our teachers to talk less. In math, teachers were supposed to provide only eight to ten minutes per day of “direct instruction,” meaning leading discussion from the front of the room. Children learn better by doing: reading books, solving math problems, writing, having conversations. In theory, our teachers already believed this: ask them about progressive education, and they’d happily talk your ears off about its virtues; but put them in front of children and many would drone on endlessly. We therefore made them set kitchen timers so they’d know when to stop.

  Meanwhile, I finally managed to break the DOE/SUNY logjam. DOE gave us a letter regarding their intention to give us space that was firm enough to satisfy SUNY but vague enough that DOE felt it could back out if necessary. Thus, on October 26, 2007, with everyone’s bureaucratic posterior now covered, SUNY approved our applications to open three new schools, and we soon received two grants to help open them: another $1 million from Don and Doris Fisher and $660,000 from the Walton Family Foundation.

  But SED, which had the power to veto SUNY’s approval, wasn’t satisfied with the 45,000 pages of applications we’d submitted. It made seventy-three requests for more information on such educationally critical matters as “the process for completing bank reconciliations” and putting column headings on the second page of a chart that spanned two pages. We responded to these requests but SED rejected our applications anyway, citing, among other things, our lack of standardized test scores. In this regard, SED was oblivious to the practical reality facing families in Harlem. Sure, they would have loved to send their children to a school with a proven track record of success, but there weren’t any in Harlem. Rather, they had to choose between schools that had proven themselves to be lousy and our schools, which, while unproven, at least might be good. Many families believed we were a better bet and they were in a far better position to make that judgment than bureaucrats hundreds of miles away in Albany.

  Fortunately, however, SUNY had the power to override SED’s veto and did. Now I needed to get co-location sites from DOE. Although I’d identified six buildings that each had more than 450 empty seats available, DOE hadn’t yet committed to specific sites, so I asked Joel Greenblatt to call Chancellor Klein and be firm with him:

  His lieutenants treat us as if we’re asking for special favors. We’re taking kids off his hands in a neighborhood that has been an education disaster. He needs to tell his lieutenants to be thankful and get us the damn space!

  In late February, DOE announced a site for one of our schools, PS 123, but opposition soon emerged. Council Member Inez Dickens claimed there was “a noticeable shortage of space at PS 123,” although she failed to explain how that assertion could be squared with the fact that PS 123 had only 540 students in a facility built for 1,082 students. Six days later, one of her aides boasted at a community board meeting that Dickens had “successfully fought twice to make sure charters don’t go into public school space” and would “fight again.”

  Interestingly, a teacher at PS 123 who attended this meeting conceded that there actually was space at PS 123, but complained that this was because charter schools were “robbing the school system of children,” as if these children were chattel who belonged to the schools rather than human beings entitled to receive a good education. Another teacher claimed Success wasn’t needed because “We have school choices. Public schools. You can go to any one in the city.” Obviously, that just wasn’t true. The good schools were generally located in affluent neighborhoods and had few spots available for students who lived elsewhere. Yet another teacher claimed that charter schools only admitted students who’d scored high on state tests and “leave us with the 1s and 2s.” In fact, the law requires charters to admit students by lottery, and students weren’t tested until years after we admitted them. Finally, the head of the community board said to a white DOE representative, “You are creating opportunities for your cousins coming in. This stuff is not for us.”

  A hearing on our co-location was scheduled for April 1 and I feared the UFT would gin up opposition by using scare tactics with PS 123’s parents. While Bloomberg supported co-location, there was a limit to how much political capital he could afford to spend on us. We needed to make a strong showing at the hearing so that both the Bloomberg administration and the press would understand the broad support for charter schools in Harlem. The problem was that, while we’d received three thousand applications, we hadn’t run our lottery yet, and parents who didn’t know if they’d be able to send their children to our school even if it opened didn’t have enough motivation to come out and support us. So we had to rely upon the families of our existing students. Anticipating this day, I’d told them at the outset that if they sent their children to our schools, they should be willing to fight to give other families that opportunity. Most agreed, as one parent, Kyesha Bennett, explained in an op-ed piece:

  My mom gave me an early lesson in school choice. She got me into PS 87 on the Upper West Side. I was 9, and I had to get myself and my 6-year-old sister to a school 2 miles away by public bus. Maybe it sounds crazy for kids to travel alone in New York City, but my mom believed that going to my “zoned school” was more dangerous for my future.

  Flash forward 22 years. I needed to find a school for my son. I was shocked to find my options in Harlem were almost identical to my mother’s. I heard about a charter school in the neighborhood. I prayed for him to get in and he did.

  All parents should have good schoo
l choices. That’s why I’ve joined with other mothers and fathers to found a group called Harlem Parents United.

  The day before the hearing at PS 123, I was explaining to a Daily News reporter why co-location was controversial and I said that the endless conflicts in the Middle East showed that “dividing land ain’t pretty.” I thought I’d made my comment off the record, but the reporter apparently understood otherwise because she published an article stating that I was “gearing up for . . . a ‘Middle East war’ over classroom space.” This was bad. It sounded like I was bringing Zionism to Harlem with African Americans as stand-ins for the Palestinians. I’d played right into our opponents’ hands. I apologized publicly and also privately to John and Joel.

  On the day of the hearing, the auditorium was packed with parents from both Success and PS 123 and it quickly became apparent that, just as I’d feared, the UFT had given parents false information. One parent claimed that if our co-location was approved, PS 123’s class size would increase to thirty-five students. This wasn’t true. Space wasn’t what determined class size at PS 123. If it did, then PS 123 would have had nine students per class since it had fifty-eight full-size classrooms for its 538 students. What determined PS 123’s class size was the number of teachers it could afford to hire, which wouldn’t change.

  Our parents sought to counter the UFT’s efforts to portray us as outsiders:

  “I have four children. Two in public school, one in charter, and one on her way to charter . . . We’re no better than anybody else sitting here. We all bleed the same. We all shop at the same supermarkets, we all go to the same hospitals when we’re ill. [W]hy can’t we cohabitate here . . . ?”

  “I am a teacher at public schools with the Department of Ed . . . [T]here [is] space available. We’re just trying to share.”