Scholars do not have to know what you are going to do in the heat of the moment, and sticking it to them in front of their classmates will almost always lead to a battle you can’t win.
The key to using emotions is for the teacher to express ones that show she cares for her students, wants them to do well, and believes they can succeed. As long as that happens, teachers can and should express both positive emotions such as joy and love, and negative ones such as disapproval, sternness, and disappointment. This can be particularly effective with students from troubled homes because they often need an adult in their lives who acts like one: who is patient, who doesn’t let his emotions get the better of him, who sets clear rules and expectations, and who metes out love and disapprobation in a reasonable and predictable manner. Paul was masterful at this. He didn’t shout or get angry but was nonetheless very direct. When students didn’t do well, Paul let them know in a way that made them feel they’d let him down.
About a month or so before the state tests, Paul told every teacher at Harlem 1 to send him their most challenging students, the ones who were misbehaving or making little progress academically, so he could teach them. The teachers thought Paul was nuts, that it would be chaos if you put all of these students together in a single class, but he soon had them eating out of his hand and they made dramatic academic progress.
As the testing date came closer, we started having test prep on Saturdays. I made sure every student attended and personally intervened when necessary. I wrote an email to my staff about my conversation with one parent: “Spoke to mom. She apologized. Disorganized, etc. She says he is in school now. Told her he must come both Saturdays and I will personally come to her apartment and drag her and him out of bed if he’s not there.”
On May 7, we got our results. Ninety-five percent of our students had passed the English Language Arts (ELA) test and 100 percent of our students had passed the math test, compared to 76 percent and 93 percent statewide and 56 percent and 82 percent in District 5, Central Harlem. On the math test, 71 percent of our students had gotten 4s, the highest score, compared to 27 percent statewide and 15 percent in District 5. Miraculously, even Sydney, who had missed more than a month of school and continued to suffer from serious health issues, had not only passed both the ELA and math tests but had gotten a 4 in ELA.
I was very proud of both the teachers and the students and was enormously relieved. First, and most important, it meant that, at least on some level, we were succeeding in teaching children. Standardized tests don’t measure everything, but they measure something. You can’t pass a reading test if you can’t read. In addition, I believed that doing well on these tests would strengthen our students emotionally. Many of them suffered from things over which they had no control: homelessness, absent fathers, abused mothers, troubled siblings. They had now learned that they could succeed at something to which they put their minds, that they did have some ability to control their lives. Lastly, strong test scores meant we could get approval to open more schools so we could serve more students.
To do that, however, we’d also need more space, and in the course of looking for that space, we’d noticed something curious: while district school enrollment in Harlem was declining, it was doing so much more slowly than charter school enrollment was increasing, which made no sense given that we were pulling from the same pool of students. It wasn’t until we pored over the data that we got to the bottom of this mystery.
17
FROEBEL’S GIFT
2009
District schools, we figured out, were propping up their declining enrollment by admitting more students to pre-K. As a result, the worse a school was, the more pre-K spots it added. I complained to DOE that they were allowing these failing schools “to harm younger and younger kids” but the head of DOE’s pre-K responded that, au contraire, these programs must be great because “enrollment is high.” In fact, enrollment was high because charters weren’t allowed to offer pre-K, something that pained me deeply since I could see how little our students had learned in the district pre-K programs they’d attended before enrolling at Success. In pre-K, children should learn basic social skills such as sharing, taking turns, cleaning up after themselves, and expressing their needs with words; to count and to recognize shapes, colors, and sizes; artistic skills such as painting, cutting with scissors, and building with blocks; musical skills such as singing and playing a rhythmic instrument; and movement skills such as dancing, jumping, and hopping. Our kids were learning very little of this in the district pre-K programs they were attending. Most of these programs were instead just wildly expensive babysitting.
But one day, Eric told me he might have a solution to this problem. He’d noticed that state law said schools could educate children “between the ages of four and six” in kindergarten although they could also “fix a higher minimum age.” Why, Eric wondered, would the law contemplate that such a broad age range be taught in a single grade? He found the answer in the history of kindergarten.
By 1837, Friedrich Froebel had taught in a boarding school, written books and pamphlets on education, run an orphanage, and fought in the Prussian army that had defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, but his most important work was still ahead of him. That year he founded a “Play and Activity Institute” in which young children sang, danced, gardened, and played with educational toys Froebel had invented, which came to be called “Fröbel-Gaben” or Froebel Gifts. In time, Froebel dubbed his invention “kindergarten”—a garden for children—and, with the help of a devoted proponent and patron, the Baroness Bertha Marie von Marenholtz-Bülow, his ideas spread far and wide, eventually reaching America where, in 1856, Margarethe Meyer Schurz, one of Froebel’s disciples, opened a kindergarten in Waterton, Wisconsin, that was conducted in German.
Fascinating, I said to Eric, but what does this have to do with the price of tea in China? He explained that the 1947 New York law authorizing kindergarten gave school districts flexibility to “fix a . . . minimum age” for kindergarten because educators then didn’t think of it as just an additional grade tacked on before “first” grade, but rather, like Froebel, as a multiyear program akin to what we today call nursery school. Indeed, New York’s education commissioner had ruled in 1974 that school districts could run two levels of kindergarten: a regular kindergarten to prepare kids for first grade and a “developmental kindergarten” program for kids who weren’t yet ready for the regular kindergarten.
Since the law allowed charter schools to offer “kindergarten,” this meant we too could offer “developmental kindergarten” (or “DK” as we dubbed it). I loved this idea not only because it would allow us to start educating children as soon as they turned four, but it would also allow us the flexibility to assign kids, regardless of age, to either developmental or regular kindergarten, which would be helpful since children mature at different rates. This discovery had the potential of being a huge deal for the charter sector.
We asked both of our authorizers to amend our charter so we could offer DK, including in our submissions a supporting letter from Professor David Steiner, who was the dean of the Hunter School of Education and sat on Success’s board. Ed Cox, chair of SUNY’s charter schools subcommittee, liked our idea but wanted to be sure we were on firm ground legally, so he consulted the head of the New York City Charter School Center, James Merriman, a leading authority on charter school law, who concluded we were right about DK. So too did Carl Hayden, a distinguished attorney who was the head of the SUNY Board of Regents and had previously served as commissioner of the State Education Department (SED). On January 16, 2009, SUNY approved our request to offer DK at our three SUNY-authorized schools.
But strangely, we didn’t hear a peep from SED for months on end. They simply refused to act. In April 2009, I asked SED’s newly appointed chancellor, Merryl Tisch, for help. She responded, “Eva, your work speaks for itself. The only thing we should be doing is encouraging you[,] not getting in your way.” Music to my ears! Moreov
er, we soon learned SED’s new commissioner would be David Steiner—yes, the very same David Steiner who’d written a letter of support for DK!—and that the regents were going to officially appoint him on July 27, the very same date on which our application would be considered.
However, I soon began hearing rumors that opposition to DK was building. The teachers’ unions didn’t want charters to be able to compete with the district schools by offering pre-K and they had a lot of influence with SED. On July 24, Associate Commissioner Shelia Evans-Tranumn told me SED wasn’t going to approve DK because it was illegal. I began calling SED’s regents to ask for their support, but while they liked the DK concept, they felt their hands were tied since they were being told it was illegal. I complained to Merryl Tisch that while SED was telling its regents that DK was illegal, it had “never given me a legal opinion nor has any person from SED ever pointed to a single specific provision of the law that supports this position.” It was Kafkaesque: SED claimed that by offering DK I’d be breaking the law but wouldn’t tell me which one.
Then I heard from Carl Hayden, head of SUNY’s board, that SED was threatening to revoke our charters if SUNY let us run DK, and from James Merriman that other charter schools were told that votes on their requests were going to be delayed unless they got me to withdraw my DK application. Why go to all this trouble to pressure me to withdraw my application when SED could just vote it down? Because they were afraid that if I went public, it would be obvious that politics was at work since SED would be voting down a program that SED’s brand-new commissioner had previously supported.
Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have hesitated to take on SED but I didn’t want to undermine David or Merryl, who were both education reformers who could do a lot of good for us in the long run even if they weren’t willing to fight for our DK program. Moreover, even if SED wouldn’t approve our DK program, SUNY had, so we’d at least be able to offer it at our three SUNY-authorized schools. I wrote Tisch that I wouldn’t mount a public fight if the regents rejected our DK program: “It deeply pains me because it is truly wrong for our kids but I will sit quietly and leave.” While I could justify my decision on strategic grounds, I knew I was selling out the kids who’d been selected for Harlem 1’s DK program, and for the commission of this sin, I sentenced myself to witnessing in person SED’s execution of our DK program at their meeting in Bufaflo.
After the meeting, SED finally put its objections to DK in writing. DK, it claimed, was illegal because it would “prepare students for . . . regular kindergarten[,] not . . . first grade.” This position was flatly contrary to New York law and SED’s 1974 decision under that law that schools could offer “developmental kindergarten” for students who needed an additional year of kindergarten before first grade.
While SED vetoed SUNY’s approval of this program at our SUNY-authorized schools, SUNY had the power to override SED. To make sure SUNY did, I sought the opinion of yet another lawyer, Joseph Wayland, who was a demigod among educators because he’d brought a famous lawsuit establishing that the funding for New York’s public schools was constitutionally inadequate. Wayland concluded that SED had “fail[ed] to provide any legal authority supporting SED’s position” and had “ignored the applicable law described above, as well as the Charter School Act’s policy favoring innovation.” And mind you, he gave us this opinion pro bono, not as a hired gun.
At this point, a virtual who’s who of lawyers had determined that DK was legal: Wayland, James Merriman (head of the Charter School Center), Ralph Rossi (counsel to SUNY’s charter schools institute), Ed Cox (head of SUNY’s authorizing committee), Carl Hayden (head of SUNY’s board and a former SED chancellor), Joel Klein (New York City’s chancellor and the former head of the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice), and of course, my favorite lawyer of all, Eric, who’d come up with the idea in the first place.
With Wayland’s memo in hand, SUNY hung tough and overrode SED’s veto, but SED had one more card to play. It sent a letter to Joel Klein warning him that “no State Aid should be allocated to . . . developmental kindergarten.” This meant the city would have to pay for our entire program out of its own pocket. I prevailed on Klein to do so for the upcoming school year but I doubted the city would do so forever.
We opened up DK at Harlem 2 and it was quite successful but, just as I’d feared, Klein soon emailed me that he couldn’t keep on paying for it “unless I know I can get reimbursement” from the state. I asked Wayland if he could bring a lawsuit to make the state pay for DK. “It has involved so much risk and angst and political capital,” I explained, that I’d “have scuttled [it] long ago” if it weren’t “so great for our kids and such a compelling innovation.” Wayland replied, however, that a lawsuit could take years and it was always possible we’d lose, which meant we’d be stuck with the costs of the program. I reluctantly decided the risk was too great and we’d need to end the program. “Breaks my heart,” I wrote Harlem 2’s principal, “because you have done such a great job.” It was one of the most painful things I’ve had to do. The result was wrong in every way: educationally, legally, and morally.
Coincidentally, around this time Shelia Evans-Tranumn, one of DK’s assassins, retired from SED to become executive director of the UFT Charter School. I was curious to see how she’d do now that she was actually responsible for educating children herself and not just telling others how to do so.
18
I’M SUCH A LUCKY SO AND SO
1982–1994
After college began, Eric broke up with me. Since his own parents had gotten divorced, he explained, he wanted to decide carefully whom to marry. He felt he was too young and inexperienced to make that decision now, and that if he wasn’t willing to make that commitment, it wouldn’t make sense to let our relationship go on indefinitely.
I was heartbroken. Eric was everything to me and it hurt me deeply that I wasn’t everything to him. I felt bereft and alone. I also found it difficult to relate to my classmates who seemed to have a lot of money and to view college primarily as a means of getting more of it. I was probably being unfair, but I had romantic ideas about college and the pursuit of knowledge. Yet, adding insult to injury, I found myself struggling in my coursework. My papers, I was told, were verbose, poorly structured, and replete with rookie mistakes like the use of the passive voice. My teachers at Stuyvesant had never warned me my writing skills were weak. To the contrary, I’d always gotten excellent grades. This seemed terribly unfair. I was quite a diligent student and would have worked to improve my writing if I’d been warned it was lacking. Instead, they’d sent me off to college unprepared. Luckily, Penn had a writing clinic and I visited it religiously.
A bright spot for me was Penn’s great faculty, particularly those who taught history, my favorite subject, including Professors Lee Benson, Bruce Kuklick, Michael Katz, and Drew Faust, now president of Harvard. They were engaging, brilliant, and passionate about their work. I loved studying and did so incessantly. At the library, I’d lose track of time and had to scurry out when they started turning off the lights. I particularly loved reading primary sources and piecing together history from archival materials. For a paper on leftist student politics in the 1930s, I reviewed a huge trove of student Communist newspapers in the New York Public Library archives. One day an old man asked me why I was reading them. It turned out he’d been a Communist student in the 1930s, so I interviewed him and he then introduced me to some other former Communists who were also happy to be interviewed. I was in historian heaven!
I was disappointed by the political apathy of my fellow students at Penn, so I created an organization called the Political Participation Project to encourage students to become involved in politics. I also became active in campus groups protesting the issues of the day: apartheid, the CIA’s involvement in Nicaragua, and excessive sentences for drug crimes.
I’d stayed in touch with Eric both because I valued him as a friend and thought we might eventually get back together. Ra
ther than date other women, Eric had spent all of his time studying, becoming almost obsessively intellectual. Then, during our sophomore year, Eric suggested we get back together. The distance may have helped him. I think Eric had become so worried about hurting me that it had overwhelmed his positive feelings about our relationship. Maybe the fact that I’d managed to move on had reassured him that I wasn’t as fragile as he feared. Whatever the reason, I still loved Eric, so I let him undump me and we hatched a plan to spend our junior year together at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. I enjoyed the university, at which we studied English and history, but the best part was traveling on the Continent, which we did every chance we got. Over winter break, we spent three weeks visiting northern Europe, seeing van Eyck’s astonishing altarpiece at Ghent, Amsterdam’s incredible Van Gogh Museum, and the beautiful medieval town of Bruges where, walking the empty streets on Christmas morning after a light snow had fallen, it felt like we’d traveled back in time.
During our spring break, we spent a month biking in Portugal, Spain, and France, and then another two months bicycling through Greece and Italy that summer. We slept most nights in a tent and Eric would use a camp stove to cook a simple but delicious meal, often pasta with garlic, olive oil, and Parmesan or perhaps a tomato sauce, and I’d make a salad. This, along with a bottle of local wine and an appetite spurred by miles of biking, made for a feast. We’d often ask people if we could camp on their property, which frequently prompted an invitation to join them for dinner or drinks. This gave us the opportunity to meet people that most tourists wouldn’t encounter, such as farmers. One old man in the south of Italy showed us a textbook he’d used in elementary school that, to my amazement, had sections on every subject: math, history, geography, art, literature, science. It was all in one book because that was all they could afford.
The Education of Eva Moskowitz Page 12
