The Education of Eva Moskowitz Read online

  One summer, I attended Camp Hurley, which had been founded by a social worker with strong leftist political views. Instead of traditional campfire songs, we sang union songs such as “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize,” civil rights songs such as “We Are Soldiers in the Army,” gospel songs such as “Go Down Moses,” and folk songs with political overtones such as “This Land Is Your Land.” Sometimes the folk singer Pete Seeger would lead our sing-alongs and every Friday night we’d link arms and sing “We Shall Overcome.” The camp’s head, Morris Eisenstein, told me I was “bourgeois” but liked my enthusiasm for the antiwar and civil rights protests he encouraged the campers to stage, and I endeared myself to him by engaging in an act of civil disobedience: refusing to obey the camp’s curfew the night before a protest so I could finish painting the protest signs.

  As a result of these influences, I became quite political. I wrote a letter to President Nixon expressing my opposition to the secret bombing of Cambodia. He responded with a cheery portrait of his family which made me feel he hadn’t taken my letter to heart, so I called the White House and let his staff know his response had been wholly unsatisfactory. While my interests in politics, teaching, and history naturally manifested themselves in childish ways at first, they persisted and in time became the focus of my life’s work.

  Unfortunately, my formal education made little contribution to my intellectual development. I attended PS 36 and every year, we’d spend months relearning math we’d been taught the year before. I was so bored that when I saw that some of my classmates were leaving class to get counseling, I asked to do so as well and talking with the counselor soon became the highlight of my day. As for learning, that happened primarily at home when my parents tutored me. I knew, however, that my classmates were totally dependent on the patently inadequate education they were getting at PS 36, and even at that age, I understood this would put them at a terrible disadvantage later in life, which seemed horribly unfair.

  After a couple of years, my parents managed to get Andre and me into PS 6, a school on the Upper East Side, which was a big improvement. I remember one of my teachers, Ms. Goldberg, quite fondly, and am in touch with her to this day. One of my classmates was the musician Lenny Kravitz, whose mother was on a TV show called The Jeffersons. Another boy in my class wouldn’t stop teasing me, and one day I reached the breaking point so I slugged him as hard as I could and gave him a bloody nose. Fortunately, unlike my father, I wasn’t sent away to a school for troubled children.

  Since PS 6’s lunchroom was noisy and smelly, many students went home for lunch, but Andre and I lived too far from school to do this, so we took the lunches our mother made for us to various places in the neighborhood including Gimbels, a nearby department store where we’d sneak under a table draped with a tablecloth, and the cafeteria at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I’d fish coins out of the museum’s fountain so I could buy a cookie. One day, a guard reprimanded me for this, which surprised me as I didn’t see how it was any different from picking up a coin in the street, but I stopped anyway.

  My parents thought our family should spend more time in the countryside—think Walden Pond—so they bought a fixer-upper in an agricultural area of upstate New York. When my father installed heating, he asked me to crawl inside a heating duct, as I was the only one who fit. When I later wrote about this in a school essay, my teacher accused me of lying. I’d already complained to my father about this teacher on several occasions for doing things like eating milk and cookies at her desk each day right before lunch as my classmates and I looked on hungrily. When I told my father about this latest episode, he wrote on a sheet of paper in my notebook “Ms. ____, screw you. Martin Moskowitz.” He did it as a gesture, to show me he was on my side. I knew I wasn’t actually supposed to give the note to my teacher but one day I got so angry that I did. Yet again, my father was summoned to the principal’s office!

  Our family would spend the entire summer at our home in upstate New York, but not to engage in leisure activities like swimming or tennis. Instead, we worked. We fixed up the house, picked berries, made jam, baked pies, grew vegetables, and, one year, planted eight thousand saplings. Andre and I also herded a local farmer’s cows when they needed to return for milking, earning a quarter each.

  My parents were models of industry. Although my mother didn’t become a professor until relatively late in life, she ended up publishing seven scholarly books on art history, continuing to do so even after she retired from teaching. When my dad wasn’t tutoring us in math or doing his own work, he fixed up the house and, when he finished that, turned the barns on our property into a larger home. Andre and I learned from our parents’ example, so they never had to nag us to do our homework.

  Our family had found a good balance by splitting our time between the city and the country, but by the early seventies, New York was becoming increasingly dangerous and unlivable. The subways were covered with graffiti, racial tensions were high, the schools were chaotic, and the city’s murder rate had doubled since my family’s arrival six years earlier. Just blocks from our home, a teenager was shot to death just for laughing at another kid. Andre and I were repeatedly mugged, and our apartment was burglarized so often that our parents told us to knock on the door when we came home to give any burglars who might be inside a chance to flee via the fire escape before we entered. My father eventually embedded glass in concrete on our windowsills and, after a burglar broke down a neighbor’s door, reinforced ours with plywood and stuck a chair underneath the doorknob at night.

  In 1973, my parents finally threw in the towel and moved our family to our home in upstate New York. Monday through Wednesday, they stayed at a small apartment in Manhattan to do their work, leaving Andre and me in the care of a local woman. At first, I dreaded their weekly departures and felt lonely since the nearest children were miles away. Over time, however, Andre and I adapted. We read, became even more studious, and managed to find ways to amuse ourselves.

  In the summer, my mother and I canned vegetables and made jam and I learned how to bake, winning some prizes in local fairs for my efforts. We also kept busy with chores such as fetching unpasteurized milk from a local farmer. Walking back up the dirt road, each of us holding one handle of the heavy milk jug and sporting bright red hair and freckles, we reminded my mother of a Norman Rockwell painting. We often skimmed the milk to make butter or ice cream. At times, however, our enthusiasm outstripped our knowledge. When we told our neighbor that our cat had taken a curious interest in the jelly we’d made from freshly picked mint, she gently let us know that we city folk might not be familiar with the difference between mint and catnip. News of the Moskowitzs’s catnip jelly quickly spread among our amused neighbors.

  The local school was pretty good and, at our parents’ insistence, allowed Andre and me to double up on our science classes because the science teacher was particularly strong. On Saturdays, our parents drove us to Saratoga Springs so Andre could study cello and I could study pottery, which I enjoyed, and ballet, in which I floundered as I apparently lacked both arches and rhythm.

  In 1975, my parents decided that we should take a sabbatical to which my father was entitled in Paris. We lived in the Latin Quarter and I attended a neighborhood public school whose students were quite friendly. Every morning, they’d greet me and one another with four alternating kisses on the check. Every new student’s arrival provoked another round of kissing, which I found hilarious, and my resulting giggling proved contagious. When the school doors opened, we all streamed in. The door shut behind the last student, so if you were late you had to ring the bell to get in and would receive a severe scolding. Once inside, the clogs that all the girls wore, including me, made a thundering noise on the wooden stairs.

  The teachers were very strict and were obsessed with form. There were very precise rules for taking dictation: you had to write on graph paper with a fountain pen, put two lines between your name and the title, put one line between the title and the text, unde
rline certain things once and others twice, etc. . . . When my papers came back covered with red marks because I hadn’t followed the rules, my classmates would try to help me understand them, but I’d always get mixed up, which often led to another bout of giggling.

  Lunch was a long multicourse affair served on a properly set table with real tablecloths, plates, utensils, and cloth napkins. They even put out pitchers of wine for the children as I learned one day when I accidentally drank some thinking it was juice. At recess, to the consternation of the school’s headmistress, I taught my classmates American dances such as the “bump.” After school, I’d sometimes go to the nearby Jardin du Luxembourg, a magnificent park that had gardens, playgrounds, fountains, and a merry-go-round. Other days, I went to the home of my friend Genevieve whose mother would give us some baguette with a few pieces of milk chocolate inside.

  My family found the fervent attachment of the French to their customs to be an endless source of amusement. When my dad asked for chocolate sauce on cassis ice cream, the waiter responded, “Impossible!” “Impossible?” my dad repeated, bemused and slightly irritated. “Non!” replied the waiter firmly, refusing to become a party to such a culinary travesty despite my father’s entreaties.

  On weekends, we’d visit churches and other sites throughout France. Over winter break, Andre and I went to a skiing camp in the Alps, to which we traveled along with the other campers in an overnight train filled with bunk beds. The ski runs in the Alps lasted forever and lacked clear markings, so you had to follow the skier in front of you. One day when the visibility was poor, I was following Andre, who suddenly disappeared. Moments later, I found myself tumbling down into a large crevice at the bottom of which I found Andre. We feared nobody would find us, but eventually we saw one of our ski instructors peering down at us and he helped us out.

  When the school year ended, Andre and I went back to the Alps to learn mountain climbing. It was just like The Sound of Music: jagged mountains, verdant fields, edelweiss flowers. We learned to scale up rock faces with ropes tied around our waists. Andre was brilliant at it; I wasn’t. One day, I fainted, developed a fever, and was taken to a hospital. Fearing I might have meningitis, the doctors performed a spinal tap on me, which was quite painful and traumatizing as my parents hadn’t yet arrived. Fortunately, I didn’t have meningitis and soon recovered.

  In the fall of 1976, we returned to our home in upstate New York. I soon learned that an old town clock in Granville that hadn’t worked in years was going to be torn down. It seemed a shame, so I decided to save it. I got the school to set aside the profits from the sale of food at athletic games for the repair of the clock. They were skeptical of my plan because food sales hadn’t previously generated much money, but I made various changes to the operation, including selling food in the stands instead of just at the booth. Profits skyrocketed and we soon had enough money to repair the clock.

  As I look back on my childhood, I feel that I greatly benefited from the variety of environments to which I was exposed. By the age of twelve, I’d attended schools in Harlem, the Upper East Side, upstate New York, and Paris. In addition, I’d spent summers in the city, upstate New York, and California, and had attended a lefty summer camp and a climbing camp in the Alps. Children benefit from change, from being forced to adapt to new situations. Our instincts are to protect them, to worry about their adjusting and making new friends. Life, however, involves curveballs and challenges, so one must learn how to adapt. Exposing kids to that early on helps them develop the skills and emotional fortitude they’ll need later. That was certainly true for me.

  12

  CULTURE DATA

  2008–2009

  On August 25, 2008, six hundred new students joined Success including Dillon, whom I feared might not like it. Up to that point, he’d whiled away his days at an idyllic Jewish nursery school by dancing, doing arts and crafts, and singing Jewish songs. Not only would Success be more rigorous, he’d be the school’s sole white student. After his first day, I nervously asked him how it had gone. “Good,” he said. He added, however, that they hadn’t sung any songs, which clearly puzzled him. “I don’t think there are many Jewish kids,” he said.

  At Dillon’s school and the two others we opened, we sought to recreate our first school’s culture. This was made more difficult by our teachers’ tendency to draw upon their experiences at other schools. For example, they didn’t tell anyone that they were often waiting outside because the custodian at one of our schools was chronically late. When I got wind of this, I fixed it immediately, but the teachers had tolerated this state of affairs for several weeks because they’d assumed from their prior experiences that this was just one of those things they had to put up with because schools are dysfunctional. Their own low expectations had created a self-fulfilling prophecy, and such low expectations can spread like cancer. A teacher doesn’t report that the lights in her classroom are out, another teacher sees the lights are out and assumes that’s normal, so when her lights go out, she doesn’t report it either, and so on.

  We also had to fight some instincts that were deeply rooted in the psychology of our staff. When I visited a student named Sydney McLeod who’d been hospitalized due to a stroke resulting from sickle cell anemia, I found that she was cheerful and optimistic despite the seriousness of her condition. Her mother, however, was worried Sydney would fall behind in her studies because we hadn’t given her any schoolwork or homework, only get-well cards. I emailed Khari about this and he explained that when he’d heard of Sydney’s hospitalization, “I immediately thought about giving her as much space from school as possible so she could recuperate and rest.” The problem with this was that many of our students came from families that were lurching from one crisis to another: homelessness, illness, domestic violence, the death or incarceration of parents or siblings. If every crisis became a hiatus from schoolwork, these students would inevitably fall behind. Khari picked up on this quickly, acknowledging that rather than “setting the bar high,” the school had let “lowered expectations get in the way of learning.”

  Unfortunately, some educators use poor children’s circumstances as an excuse for failing to teach them. The American Federation of Teachers contends that since “a student’s motivation and ability to learn are directly related to his or her health” students can only learn in “community schools” that serve children’s medical needs as well as their academic ones.10 That’s nonsense. The health care that poor people receive today is far superior than the health care that the richest person in the world received over a hundred years ago when not even antibiotics were available. Thus, while health care should undoubtedly be improved for poor children, inadequate health care isn’t a substantial factor in the failures of urban district schools. Even Sydney, who was hospitalized with a stroke, was able to do her homework.

  Similarly, while it’s often hard for poor parents to find time to help their children given the challenges they face, they can support their kids in school, if it is demanded of them. We required parents to check their children’s homework and get their kids to school on time and in uniform. If they didn’t, we’d call them; if that didn’t work, we’d bring them in for a conference; and if they didn’t show up, we’d give their child an “upstairs dismissal” at which they’d have to speak to the teacher or principal. If children were habitually late, we’d make wake-up calls. When one of our parents simply wouldn’t read to her son even after she’d promised me she would, I invited her to a meeting at which there was a surprise guest: her mother, whom I’d met one day when she was picking her grandson up from school and seemed to me more responsible than the mom. When I explained the problem, Grandma was furious with her daughter and said, “This will not happen again, I’m taking charge.” While I keep my “Grandma method” in a glass case labeled “Use Only in Case of Emergencies,” it reflects our philosophy of not giving up. It’s easy to develop a mind-set in which you say, “Well, the manual says do A, B, and C, and I’ve don
e those things so I’ve done my job.” Our view was that you’ve done your job when you’ve succeeded. Moreover, while some parents resented the pressure at first, they felt proud when they saw the dramatic progress their children made.

  One way to tell whether a leader was demanding high levels of parental investment was to stand outside right before school began: if kids were running down the block to make it on time, the message had gotten through; if they were sauntering, it hadn’t. However, I needed a more systematic method of monitoring our schools, so I began tracking what I called “culture data”—latenesses, absences, uniform infractions, missing homework, incomplete reading logs, and whether our teachers were calling parents about these problems. This data helped us to manage our principals and helped them to manage their teachers. If a teacher’s culture data was weak, it meant the teacher wasn’t doing enough to get her students’ parents on board. If an entire school’s culture data was weak, the principal wasn’t properly managing school culture.

  Many people who talk about using data to manage schools focus on standardized tests, but they are given far too infrequently to be of much use. Monitoring a school with standardized test scores is like monitoring an airline’s maintenance of its planes by seeing how often they crash.

  Of course, assessing the health of our schools also meant looking at more subjective factors such as the quality of a principal’s feedback to teachers on instructional practices, but culture data was like a canary in a coal mine: it was a simple, quick, objective measure of how well a principal was managing her staff. If a principal isn’t getting her teachers to do simple things like call parents, she probably isn’t getting her teachers to do harder things like improve their instructional practices. Thus, I watched this data like a hawk and wasn’t shy about telling our leaders if they were coming up short. I was particularly troubled, for example, when I saw that third-grade attendance was slipping at Harlem 1, so I emailed the school’s principal: “You need to be on them like nobody’s business. Our founding families should know better.”