The Education of Eva Moskowitz Read online

  “People keep trying to [make race] an issue—if you’re black, if you’re white, if you’re purple. I wouldn’t care if the teacher was green! My baby can read!”

  Perhaps our efforts to show support for co-location were successful since DOE soon announced two additional co-location sites for us: PS 7 (which had 425 students in a building that could hold 867) and PS 101 (which had 612 students in a building that could hold 1,190).

  On April 16, we held our lottery at the Mount Olivet Baptist Church. Thirty-six hundred applications were submitted for six hundred seats including more than 40 percent of the District 5 children eligible for kindergarten. Among them was my son Dillon. Like many other families in Harlem, Eric and I didn’t really have any good alternatives and were just praying he’d get in.

  We encouraged the press to attend the lottery, which some people felt was cruel since it would make a public spectacle of an event that would be very painful for those families who walked away empty-handed. I was sympathetic, particularly since I too had a child in the lottery, but I felt it was important for the public to understand the desperation of families in poor communities for better educational opportunities since it would help build pressure for change. Thankfully, Dillon got in, so Eric and I breathed a sigh of relief, but for most families, the lottery was incredibly painful.

  As I’d predicted, now that we’d identified the six hundred children who would be deprived of the opportunity to attend our schools if our co-locations were nixed, opposition to our co-locations quickly died down. Now we just needed to open our three new schools simultaneously by August.

  10

  I HOPE MY BOARD FIRES ME

  2008

  There are two tragedies in life, said Oscar Wilde: not getting what you want and getting what you want. I was experiencing the latter. Having received permission to open three new schools, I now had to find three new principals, hire and train eighty new teachers, renovate three new facilities, and prepare to educate six hundred new students, all in a few months’ time and while I was still figuring out how to run my first school. I was now even more grateful that Kristina Exline had returned since she possessed the naive optimism of the character Rose shooting the rapids in The African Queen. Impossible tasks that might cause others to crumble were just another exciting adventure for her. Fortunately, her fearlessness also meant she made quick decisions. When we got a good résumé, we’d call the candidate that day to schedule an interview and, if it went well, make an offer almost immediately.

  Given that most of the teachers we were hiring were inexperienced, we implemented techniques and systems they could learn quickly. We taught them that when they read to students, they should periodically suggest questions students should be thinking about, such as whether a character is being truthful or why a character is angry. Like Paul’s techniques, these questions encouraged children to engage in “active listening”—thinking about the text rather than just passively taking in its literal meaning. Another technique was “turn and talk”: a teacher asks a question, each student discusses it with the student next to him, then the teacher picks one student to repeat what his partner said. This gives students more opportunities to actively participate.

  We also developed hand signals to keep class running smoothly. Instead of asking students to raise their hands if they agreed with a classmate and then if they disagreed, we’d ask all of our students to simultaneously give a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. We also had signals for needing a drink of water, a tissue, or permission to use the bathroom, which enabled a teacher to simply point to a child to grant permission. Without these signals, teachers would call on students expecting them to participate and would end up with bathroom requests, which would disrupt the short attention span of young children. Techniques like these may seem unimportant, but if they save 5 percent of your class time, that’s the equivalent to adding two weeks to the school year.

  But to be effective, the entire school has to adopt these techniques. While college students can quickly accommodate themselves to different teaching styles, young children find it hard to learn even one set of rules and expectations, much less several. Occasionally I’ll read about a teacher at some school who refuses to teach contrary to her deeply held pedagogical beliefs, which are different from those of the school’s principal. That just doesn’t work. If a teacher doesn’t agree with her school’s pedagogical philosophy, she should find a school whose philosophy she does agree with, not create chaos by marching to the beat of her own drum. It’s not that the school’s principal is necessarily right, it’s that a team can’t have multiple quarterbacks calling different plays.

  Of course, our rookies didn’t become master teachers overnight. Because they lacked confidence in their students to get the right answer, they’d often steer students to it in a rather ham-handed fashion. It takes time before teachers have the confidence to let students think for themselves. Nonetheless, an inexperienced teacher could get pretty good, pretty quickly by using the techniques we taught them.

  By July 28, the first day of training, we’d managed to hire all but two of the eighty staff members we needed, and Teach for America (TFA) asked us to hire a teacher who’d gotten into trouble at a district school. He and his fourth-grade class had come up with an idea for a silly little film in which the students would briefly pretend they’d turned into animals—cows, monkeys, whatever they wanted. The kids enjoyed it but one parent complained that it fed into a racist stereotype of urban kids acting like animals, which prompted the school’s principal to bring the teacher up on disciplinary charges for failing to get her permission for this project.

  Rather than fight the charges, the teacher asked TFA to reassign him. We interviewed him and found him to be bright, idealistic, and well intentioned. Problem solved, right? Not quite. The teacher found out that DOE still wanted to proceed with disciplinary charges. Fortunately, I was able to get DOE to back off but I still found it incredible that DOE would have bothered with this teacher once he’d resigned.

  Just weeks earlier, an article had appeared in the Daily News about DOE’s efforts to dismiss a teacher who’d bombarded a fifteen-year-old student with lovesick emails but whom an arbitrator had declared fit for duty. Fortunately, DOE had gotten a judge to reverse the arbitrator’s decision, but the cost of proceedings like these was huge, as the journalist Steve Brill would soon reveal in a New Yorker exposé. Teachers whom DOE was seeking to terminate were consigned to what was known as the Rubber Room, a sort of purgatory for teachers. One termination proceeding on which Brill reported was expected to last forty days, eight times as long as the average criminal trial. Moreover, it made little sense to have an arbitrator second-guess a principal’s determination regarding a teacher’s competence since the arbitrator couldn’t directly observe instruction. This was underscored in one hearing by the UFT’s use of a photograph showing the teacher at issue in a well-organized classroom with a model lesson plan written on the blackboard: the picture, it turned out, had been staged with the help of the UFT chapter leader.

  Moreover, since the UFT could object to the appointment of an arbitrator whom it believed had been too harsh in a prior case, arbitrators would often “split the baby” by fining teachers and throwing them back into the classroom. The process typically cost hundreds of thousands of dollars when you took into account not only the cost of the lawyers and the arbitrator but also the salary of the teacher, who was paid for sitting in the Rubber Room while this charade played out.

  Yet while DOE seemed to have its hands full with teachers who were incompetent or romantically obsessed with their students, they’d somehow found the time to persecute a promising young teacher with a 3.9 average from an Ivy League university who’d made at worst a rookie mistake and had already resigned. This episode illustrates how a system of charter schools can actually be fairer to teachers than a government educational monopoly. With charters, a teacher fired at one school can usually get a second chance at another. Where distri
ct schools are the only game in town, however, termination can end a teacher’s career and, because this is such a severe consequence, it leads to demands for “due process” protections that end up being expensive, time consuming, and ineffective.

  Happily, with the addition of this young man, we now had a complete set of teachers and all we had to do now was teach them to teach. DOE trained its teachers for one day before they started; we did so for nearly a month before school began as well as a dozen additional days throughout the year and every Wednesday afternoon. Unlike teachers’ colleges, at which professors with little classroom experience give lectures on pedagogical theory, our principals, deans, and strongest teachers delivered our training and focused on concrete skills: how to prepare for class, handle discipline issues, teach children with special needs, talk to difficult parents, use the classroom techniques Paul had taught us, and implement components of THINK literacy, the curriculum we’d built.

  We also trained our teachers in a new mathematics curriculum we were rolling out called TERC, which was “constructivist,” meaning that it focused on conceptual learning and nurturing students’ own intuitive understanding of math. The comedian/mathematician Tom Lehrer once said that the point of what was then called “new math” is “to understand what you are doing rather than get the right answer.” There’s an element of truth to this. In the age of the smartphone, facility with long division is less important than understanding mathematical principles and developing problem-solving skills.

  But there was one problem: SED told us its Board of Regents had to vote on any “physical change to the charter documents,” meaning any change to a single word of these documents although they were hundreds of pages long and included such minute details as the exact length of every class. Moreover, since the regents weren’t going to meet for several months, we’d have to delay adopting this curriculum for a year. SED’s attitude was: not our problem. They cared about regulatory processes, not a silly little thing like making sure kids had a good math curriculum. SED even threatened to put us on probation if we went forward with TERC, which worried John Petry. “I could see the story of ‘Moskowitz School on Probation,’” he wrote Joel and me. I responded, “Yes, but I can’t run a school where [every single change] requires a charter revision.” So we went full speed ahead, damn the torpedoes, and just as with our school name, SED blinked.

  Another challenge was renovating our facilities in just a few weeks. As with so many things, half the work was fighting people trying to stop us. On August 15, the head of the local painters’ union showed up to harass our painters. For decades, the painters’ union had been controlled by the Lucchese crime family, and more recently, one of its top officials was prosecuted for kickbacks and thefts totaling nearly $750,000. Our painters were quite intimidated so they decided to do the remainder of their work on nights and weekends to avoid further confrontations.

  Our final challenge was arranging the schedule for sharing common space such as the gym, cafeteria, and play yard. PS 123’s principal refused to discuss this with us until her school opened, which was two weeks after ours did. This meant we’d have to start with one schedule and then change it two weeks later. I begged Deputy Chancellor Garth Harries to intervene because changing our schedule two weeks into the school year would be quite disruptive. He replied: “Adjusting schedules midstream happens all the time.” I responded, “If the day ever comes when I think something is okay simply because district schools do it, I hope my board fires me.” Excellence is the accumulation of hundreds of minute decisions; it is execution at the most granular level. Once you accept the idea that you should give in to things that make no sense because other people do those things and you want to appear reasonable, you are on a path towards mediocrity. To achieve excellence, one must fight such compromises with every fiber of one’s being.

  But despite my fervent protests, I lost this battle. Thus, after school started, we had to rip up our schedule, tell our part-time art and gym teachers they now had different schedules, and change routines on our kindergartners and first-graders. It galls me to this day.

  As opening day approached, problems seemed to multiply: the kindergarten tables we’d bought were delivered without legs; our telephone service was knocked out by a car accident; a first-grade teacher quit the day before school started; we inadvertently overenrolled kindergartners; one of our play yards was littered with bullets. But somehow it all came together and on August 25, we opened the doors at our four schools to a total of nine hundred kids.

  11

  CATNIP JELLY

  1966–1976

  In 1966, my father accepted a position at Columbia University. New York City had changed considerably in the decade my parents had been away. The manufacturing jobs in which the city’s immigrants had long toiled were rapidly being replaced by positions in finance, entertainment, and tourism. Wall Street generated enormous employment both directly and by feeding the city’s law and accounting firms. So too did the television networks, which had their headquarters and produced much of their programming in New York. These industries thrived in large measure because of the city’s unparalleled ability to attract talent. Those with ambition and ability flocked to the city to work with, and compete against, the very best, and success begat success, as exemplified by the Yankees’s sixteen World Series championships over a twenty-six-year stretch.

  For my parents, however, New York was simply home: the city where they’d grown up, still had family, and felt most comfortable. They rented an apartment near Columbia’s campus and formed a babysitting cooperative with some young professors and graduate students in the neighborhood. When my father took his turn, he’d have us run races around our block while he sat on the stoop of our apartment building working on math problems. My mother often read to us; I fondly recall The Secret Garden; Heidi; The Call of the Wild; and especially The Wise Men of Chelm and Their Merry Tales, a book of Jewish folktales that never failed to send Andre and me into hysterics. My great-aunt Minna also helped out, sometimes by taking me to the movies. I loved The Sound of Music so much that I prevailed upon her to sit through three showings with me.

  My mother enrolled in a graduate degree program in art history at New York University and, as the program’s rigorous qualifying exams approached, she had less time for Andre and me. “Once you get the PhD,” I asked her one day, “then will you be a real mommy?” Naturally, she was quite hurt, which I feel bad about. She was very much a “real mommy,” who ate dinner with us and read us bedtime stories every night, but I was so terribly fond of her that I craved even more attention.

  In the summer, my father would drive us to California so he could collaborate with Professor Hochschild. As we were still quite poor, we traveled frugally. For breakfast, we’d bring our own cereal to thruway malls and surreptitiously grab fistfuls of coffee creamers that we’d use as milk. We often slept outside in sleeping bags, on one occasion on a nest of biting ants that soon let us know we weren’t welcome. We owned a Plymouth Valiant, a car model that lasted forever, so that’s how long my dad decided to keep it. When we ran into hot weather, my parents would buy bags of ice to put on our laps, which they told us was “air-conditioning.” One day, a doorman of a building in front of which we’d stopped futilely attempted to open a door on our Valiant that had long ago ceased working, and was bewildered when Andre and I proceeded to roll down the window and clamber out.

  In the fall of 1968, I began attending a wonderful integrated nursery school in the middle of Morningside Park. During art class, we’d wear smocks and berets and pretend we were French painters. The following year, I went to my District 5–zoned school, PS 36, where my brother and I were virtually the only white children.

  As I look back, I am struck by how early I developed the interests that would occupy me for the rest of my life. I loved pretending to teach. I’d set my stuffed animals in front of an easel blackboard and instruct them in addition and subtraction, which my father had taught me,
or read from picture books whose words I’d memorized. I eventually managed to convince a few children in our apartment building to join my class but they weren’t very well behaved, so I had to reprimand them for their lack of effort. They complained that I was too strict and, sadly, soon abandoned their studies for jacks and jump rope. My stuffed animals, however, stoically persisted in their studies.

  Trips to historic sites such as Colonial Williamsburg, Mystic Seaport, the Paul Revere house in Boston, and Independence Hall in Philadelphia spurred my interest in history. So too did a trip to Italy one summer on which we saw ancient churches, medieval castles, and villages which led me to imagine what life was like back then.

  I found it fascinating to listen to my great-grandmother Annie, who lived until the age of ninety-six and seemed impossibly old to me: her skin was as wrinkled as a prune; her hands were bony and gripped me strongly; and her ears, which faced forward like those of a monkey, became comically large with age. She delighted in telling me how different things had been in her time: how the subway had cost just a nickel and doctors made house calls in horse-drawn carriages. It seemed incredible to me that someone who had lived in an age that was so different could still be alive.

  I also developed a strong interest in politics since my family was involved in the political activism of the age. My parents were at Berkeley at the birth of the free speech movement, an early manifestation of student activism, and were at Columbia when students occupied numerous university buildings including the math building, which my father got permission to enter so he could retrieve a manuscript on which he’d been working. My family was caught up in the issues of the day. We attended Vietnam War protests, painted a peace sign on the roof of our apartment building for the planes flying overhead, and regularly discussed politics at dinner.