The Education of Eva Moskowitz Read online

  The biggest change in our schools for the 2008–2009 school year was our new math curriculum. We did “Number Stories,” our version of something called “Cognitively Guided Instruction.” Take this question: “Aida had 19 apples, then she got 13 more. How many does she have now?” The old approach would be to show the kids the mechanics of how you put one number under the other, add the numbers in the first column, carry the 1, etc. . . . The new approach was to give the kids plastic “unifix cubes” and ask them to figure it out themelves. The first time, a child might just literally count the cubes. After a few times with similar problems, however, the child may notice that she can take the nineteen and turn it into twenty by taking one cube from the pile of thirteen cubes; so now the problem is just twenty plus twelve, which is easy. In this manner, children come to discover how addition in base 10 works and that is a very durable understanding they won’t forget. This “constructivist” approach makes an even greater difference when students get to more complicated math such as adding fractions with different denominators.

  Paul Fucaloro was again a great guide for us. If you told him that a student understood concept A but not concept B, he could tell you exactly how you could get a child to make the intellectual leap from one to the other. If he wanted them to subtract 82 from 143 in their head, he’d first have them count together by tens starting at 2 (i.e., 2, 12, 22, etc.). Next, he’d give them the problem and they could now see that by counting six 10s from 82 to 142 and adding one more, they could get to 143, so the answer was 61. Then he might ask them to subtract 82 from 141 and they would realize they could count six tens to get from 82 to 142 and then subtract 1 so the answer was 59.

  So things were going well at the schools, but a threat was looming on the horizon. We needed new facilities for two of our schools and it soon became clear that our opponents weren’t going to make getting them easy.

  13

  TARZAN AND JANE ARE BACK AGAIN

  2008–2009

  By 2008, there were more charter schools in Harlem than in any other part of the city. To give families the opportunity to learn about all of their educational alternatives—charter, district, parochial, and independent—we decided to invite all of the schools in Harlem to participate in a school choice fair and nearly one hundred agreed to do so. It took place at City College’s gymnasium and what I saw when I arrived that morning moved me to tears: more than one thousand parents had come early and were waiting in line, not for a Black Friday sale or a concert or a basketball game, but for a chance to learn about educational opportunities available for their children. Ultimately, over five thousand parents came. It showed that parents in poor communities didn’t send their kids to bad schools because they didn’t care but because they lacked better options; and finally, we were changing that.

  The unions, however, didn’t like the competition and they’d identified our Achilles’ heel: facilities. Not only would we need co-locations for future schools, but for our current ones as well since Harlem 2 was being kicked out of its current location to make way for a new middle school and Harlem 4 was running out of room. DOE offered to move these schools into the buildings of two schools it was closing, PS 194 and PS 241. Since many people don’t like the idea of closing a public school no matter how badly it’s failing its students, I feared this move would be controversial, but since we needed the space, I accepted the administration’s offer.

  DOE set the first hearing on its plan for March 11. Figuring that the unions would stir up opposition, I called on our parents to attend the hearing. Anticipating battles like this, I’d made it a practice to have orientation meetings for parents at which I warned them I’d need their help. While I’d fight for their children, I explained, I couldn’t do it alone. “If you don’t come and speak up for your kids,” I said, “we will lose.”

  When we arrived at the hearing, we were greeted by hundreds of parents of PS 123 students wearing UFT hats. DOE was represented by Deputy Chancellor John White. One opponent commented:

  Tarzan and Jane are back again, swinging through Harlem, not with vines, but through charter schools. Tarzan is John White and Jane is Miss Moskowitz. . . . Like Tarzan and Jane, coming right through the black community . . . making everything better because the natives couldn’t do it themselves.

  Here’s what some of our parents said:

  MICHELE CHRISTIAN: I have a son that goes to [Success]. [At the] school he was going to before he wasn’t learning nothing. I thought something was really wrong with my child. So he came to [Success]. They told me he was reading. I thought he couldn’t read, I thought he couldn’t write, I thought he couldn’t do nothin’. They taught him.

  PAMELA WATSON: When we get there at 7:20 in the morning, our principal is there waiting to greet our children, shake their hands. Harlem Success is the first school that I knew of [where the] principal [knows] every one of the students’ names. I communicate with her teachers every day. I didn’t have that kind of communication with my other children’s teachers.

  [UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER]: I’m a Harlemite, born and raised. How many of us have struggled to find the right school within our community? We don’t want to have to go down to the Upper West Side and the Upper East Side for our kids.

  [UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER]: My thirteen-year-old just got put in eighth grade and my five-year-old [at Success] is teaching her to read.

  SEAN JAMES: I got a child in the third grade in the regular public school and my five-year-old also teaches her how to say the words out. I don’t understand what’s the big difference about [Success], but I know it’s helping her and it’s helping me too because I didn’t get a chance to finish school.

  BELINDA DAVIS: I’m not putting down public schools. I have a number of family members that teach at public schools. However, if your child is in a failing school, somebody should be mad about that. We don’t have a problem with Harlem Success, we have a problem with the teachers, the principals, and the bureaucracy that failed your children.

  For me, it was poignant that these parents’ wonder and joy at their children’s accomplishments was often mixed with sadness upon realizing what they might have achieved with a similar education, and with pangs of guilt if they had an older child for whom they’d been unable to find a good school.

  Due to a procedural snafu, DOE held another hearing and it was more of the same. “Here is Eve Markowitz,” said one opponent, “dividing black parents.” Another claimed Harlem’s district schools were fine because they’d “produced Charlie Rangel, David Paterson, and Senator [Keith] Wright,” all Harlem politicians. In fact, Wright had graduated from Fieldston, a fancy private school, Paterson from a school in the suburbs where his family had moved precisely so he didn’t have to attend a district school in Harlem, and Rangel owed his success to having been turned around by the army after dropping out of high school (although he later went back to get his degree). Harlem parents weren’t fooled. By March, we had many more applications from students zoned for PS 194 and PS 241 than zoned students who attended these schools.

  To gin up opposition to our schools, the UFT used the community organizing group ACORN, which shamelessly exploited the fears of African American families. Here’s an interview with one of ACORN’s organizers about what they were telling parents about charters:

  ACORN ORGANIZER: [Charter schools] are doing it . . . for gentrification.

  INTERVIEWER: But the lottery—isn’t that random?

  ACORN ORGANIZER: Well, you’re saying how you think a lottery should go. But they say, “No, this is our lottery system and this is how it goes. . . .” They can get white families coming into that neighborhood quicker if the Department of Education can give them schools.

  INTERVIEWER: I didn’t realize that charter schools had more white kids.

  ACORN ORGANIZER: Well, but see, they’re new, and of course they can’t just come in like, you know, slam-dunk with the real intention. [O]nce they get established, then you’ll see the change.


  As I write this, nearly ten years later, virtually no white children attend Success’s Harlem schools, but these types of scare tactics were nonetheless quite effective.

  The UFT then brought a lawsuit, along with the New York Civil Liberties Union, claiming that zoned school closures required approval from the Community Education Council. The city decided it was on thin ice legally and abandoned its plans. This was a tragic result for the children who ended up attending these schools. In 2015, the passage rate for students at these schools for both math and English was just 5 percent.

  As for Success, it turned out that even though PS 241 wasn’t closing, it had so few children that there was still enough room for us. This wasn’t true at PS 194, however, so Harlem 2 was forced to remain at PS 123, which only had enough space for us for one more year.

  Charter schools soon suffered another defeat. The law that increased our funding automatically to match the growth in district school spending was amended to deprive us of half of the increase to which we were entitled. This cost us millions of dollars and set a terrible precedent since our opponents would undoubtedly try to do the same in future years.

  Not only was the UFT gaining political traction in its war on charters, the level of vitriol being directed against me personally seemed to be increasing daily. Indeed, the education blog Chalkbeat published a piece entitled “What Is It About Eva Moskowitz That Attracts So Many Enemies?”:

  Why’s there so much hate for a woman who has decided to spend her days starting schools for poor and mostly black children in Harlem? There are now many charter school operators in this city. Why focus on Moskowitz?

  Now this was news I could use! The answer, the article suggested, was that I had a “style problem.” “Rather than approaching the district public schools with respect,” Chalkbeat said, I “dismiss[ed] their work as unacceptable.” This frustrated me. The old adage “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all” is certainly sage advice when one is contemplating the merits of one’s mother-in-law’s tuna casserole, but in the public sphere, it’s important to be frank about problems so you can fix them. For doing so, however, I was increasingly called “divisive.”

  Then I learned the city council had scheduled hearings on a resolution to halt charter school co-locations. Klein urged me to testify: “U have to go after big,” he wrote. I was afraid I’d be in for some rough treatment since the committee would be completely aligned with the UFT, but I felt it was important to make the case for co-location. On April 7, I showed up in the city hall chambers where I’d once served and waited to be called, feeling like a Christian about to be fed to the lions.

  14

  TAKE OFFENSE, IT’S OKAY

  2009

  As I waited for the city council’s charter school hearings to begin, I recognized a UFT operative who was giving committee members cards that I suspected held proposed questions. This wasn’t surprising. Robert Jackson, who’d succeeded me as chair of the Education Committee, had gotten the position in part by reassuring the UFT that he wasn’t “in a position to evaluate” their contract. Translation: “I’m no Eva Moskowitz.”

  In his introductory remarks, Jackson claimed that “parents from nearby charter schools were brought in and deliberately pitted against parents of children attending . . . traditional public schools.” This was obviously a reference to the PS 194 and 241 hearings. Plainly, we’d touched a raw nerve; the unions had previously held a monopoly on parent organizing.

  Normally a former council member would be extended the courtesy of testifying first, but I waited in the audience for hours, using the time to gather my thoughts and steel my resolve. The committee’s hostility toward charters was palpable, but I was determined to speak frankly. While I’d long been aware of the district schools’ shortcomings, the daily contact I’d been having with Harlem parents had made me more aware of the human cost of these shortcomings. I’d seen firsthand the despair of parents whose children hadn’t won our lottery and heard their stories about their terrible experiences in district schools. I owed it to them, I believed, to tell the truth about the failings of the district schools and about the efforts being made to prevent charter schools from offering families better choices. I testified in part as follows:

  There are currently twenty-three public charter schools in Harlem. For the first time, parents have meaningful choices. Now, however, a backlash is taking place. The system is fighting against innovation and parent choice. There is a union-political-educational complex trying to halt progress and putting the interests of adults above the interests of children.

  At PS 241, only 10 percent of eighth-graders passed the reading test in 2008. Council Member Jackson, you and I both live in Harlem, and we don’t send our children to schools like this. No one on this committee would send their child to a school where only 10 percent of the students read on grade level. It is wrong to keep open failing schools to which we wouldn’t send our own children.

  In the last two weeks, we’ve seen a new demonstration of the union-political-educational complex’s power and influence. First, Albany recently raised zoned school funding while cutting charter school funding. Second, the council is considering a resolution that would make it harder to place charter schools in public school buildings. We all know where this is coming from. The union doesn’t want parents having a choice between the education that its members are offering and the education offered at charter schools.

  From our local government, we are hearing slow down change, slow down parent choice. That is wrong, because every year we wait to offer parents the choices they deserve, is a year in which children’s futures are destroyed.

  After concluding my testimony, the questioning began:

  CARMEN ARROYO: Thank you, Mr. Chair. Eva, you and I didn’t serve in the council together very long, I don’t really have a relationship with you, so I am going to feel very free to have this conversation with you here.

  Arroyo appeared to be justifying in advance her intention to rake me over the coals. She continued:

  ARROYO: You in your testimony said, “Council Member Jackson, we both live in Harlem.” For the record, do you live in Harlem?

  MOSKOWITZ: I do.

  ARROYO: Would you share with us a street?

  MOSKOWITZ: I have three young children, so I would prefer not to. Are you questioning that I am telling the truth?

  ARROYO: Yeah, I am.

  MOSKOWITZ: That is a little offensive. I am happy to take the oath.

  ARROYO: Take offense, it’s okay.

  Arroyo spoke with unbridled contempt. I couldn’t decide whether it was more offensive that she was accusing me of being dishonest or suggesting I’d be so stupid as to lie about something so easily disprovable.

  ARROYO: [Y]our arrogance about what the system should do and that charter schools are the answer is exactly what drives the conflict in a community. . . . You need to be mindful of that and hopefully come around to a different way of presenting how we should engage in this dialogue . . .

  Being lectured on civility by a woman who’d just falsely accused me of lying was a strange experience but I knew it was important to stay calm, so I answered in measured tones:

  MOSKOWITZ: If I have come off as arrogant then I apologize . . .

  ARROYO: You have.

  MOSKOWITZ: . . . but I would like an opportunity to explain, because I don’t think it is arrogance, it is my own personal experience with District 5 schools. I went to them as a child, I had to figure out what to do as a mother, and it is my experience of the pain of wanting your kids to get a phenomenal education and being told it is that zoned school or nothing. It is the experience of holding a hundred and twenty-five hearings and then meeting with thousands of parents who want a good school.

  ARROYO: But, Eva, what I am referring to here is the approach that comes into a community . . . and setting up the dynamics for there to be conflict.

  MOSKOWITZ: But how did I come in? I was raised the
re.

  Next up at bat was Council Member Inez Dickens from Harlem, who began by asking, “Do your children attend public school in District 5?” Here we go again, I thought. Just like Arroyo, Dickens was going to start with a personal attack. After I revealed that I sent one of my children to a district school and another to a charter school, Dickens gave up on this approach.

  DICKENS: I witnessed the adversarial situation between the parents of your charter school and the parents of PS 194 at a meeting . . .

  MOSKOWITZ: It was emotional both for PS 194 parents [and] our parents because we are [told] we’re from the outside. They’re saying to themselves, since when did I get to be an outsider? I come from the Drew Hamilton Houses. I shop here. I work here.

  DICKENS: I disagree about . . . shutting down [schools]. I think that this administration has been totally remiss in not . . . putting in the necessary resources.

  MOSKOWITZ: At PS 194, it’s $22,000 a child. PS 194 was failing when I was a kid. Parents deserve in real time something better. If you’ve got a kindergartner, you can’t wait five years. Your kid will already have not learned to read.

  The piñata bat was then handed to Council Member Lewis Fidler:

  FIDLER: I know that you’ve always expressed and spoken your mind pretty clearly and forcefully and I think that you know that I do too and in not the most touchy-feely way.

  MOSKOWITZ: I’m ready. Take off the gloves, go ahead.

  FIDLER: I disagree with you in general. But I found particularly objectionable your demonization of the teachers in the city and their union. . . . I don’t think . . . it’s an issue of being afraid of competition. [Y]ou’re comparing apples to bananas . . . I didn’t ask why your class sizes were smaller. I just aspire to having my class sizes smaller too.