The Education of Eva Moskowitz

by Eva Moskowitz

  This incident made us realize, however, that we needed to give our teachers clearer guidelines about physical interactions with students. Sure, everybody knows you can’t hit students, but there are more gray areas than you may think. Suppose, for example, that a boy in kindergarten is taking all of the books off the shelves and throwing them on the floor. It’s natural to want to grab his arm to stop him but if the child resists, he may get hurt. If that happens, the parents will probably blame you. Here’s an email I got from one of my principals about one incident:

  [A student] bit me in the hand hard enough to break the skin and draw blood. Unfortunately, my reflex was to slap the young man on the forehead to get him off my hand. I informed the parent and apologized but said there wasn’t much I could do as he was biting my hand at the time. The mother contacted the police and they sent a team of officers over to question me. When I showed them the bite mark on my hand, they informed me that they were throwing out the complaint.

  Given the dangers in this area, we developed strict policies. Our teachers are never allowed to use force with a child—even grabbing a child’s arm—unless he’s acting dangerously.

  These types of issues multiplied, but one advantage of having a larger organization was that we could now afford to hire more people to help me manage our schools. We had created a separate not-for-profit organization called the Network that was responsible for hiring principals, recruiting teachers, renovating facilities, fund-raising, financial management, and professional development. These were all things that could be done better and more efficiently through centralization. After a lengthy search, I hired Keri Hoyt, who’d been with The Princeton Review for seventeen years, to help me run the Network. She turned out to be a godsend. As she was both decisive and hardworking, she could plow through enormous amounts of work at an astonishing clip. She also helped us move to a new space. We’d been managing all of our schools out of a couple of rooms in PS 149, where I didn’t have an office or even a desk, just a stool I’d sit on while I wrote emails and made phone calls. Eventually even my stool disappeared and I became nomadic sitting on the main office’s couch or the desk of someone who happened to be out. We managed to find offices at 125th Street and Lenox Avenue, Harlem’s epicenter, and I actually had my own office, which seemed like an incredible luxury.

  Another advantage of running several schools is that my principals could learn from one another. For example, one of them, Jim Manly, found that his kindergarten teachers were getting frustrated because their classrooms were chaotic. The problem, he realized, was that the teachers hadn’t invested enough time in helping their students learn the routines that make a classroom work. The following year, he had his teachers spend much of the first week practicing routines. After recess, for example, students practiced going into the classroom, putting away their coats, and sitting at their desks. If they didn’t do it right, they’d put their coats back on, line up, and do it over again. While the teachers preferred to get to the substantive instruction as soon as possible, Jim found investing time up front in learning routines led to more progress and less frustration in the long run, and his approach soon spread to our other schools.

  Some people think we are too obsessed with order, but it doesn’t stem from some preconceived ideology. Rather, it is based on experience. We’ve seen firsthand the difference between a school whose teachers make this investment in teaching management and routines and a school that doesn’t.

  While we were obviously serious about academics, we also believed school should be joyous and engaging. Every year, I took my own children to the Big Apple Circus, an old-fashioned one-ring circus, so I decided to take all of our students in kindergarten through second grade and hundreds of their parents to this circus. The children were reduced to stitches by the great clowns Bello and Grandma and were amazed by the acrobats from Italy, contortionists from China, equestrians from Kazakhstan, and a man from Spain who “juggled” five Ping-Pong balls with his mouth. We also took our kids to zoos, museums, farms, and the Paper Bag Players, a group of brilliant performers I’d enjoyed seeing as a child. Eventually, we realized it would also be good to bring performers into the school, so we brought in a juggler, a magician, and a remarkable marionettist I’d seen one day when I was walking in Central Park with my kids.

  Being co-located often presented us with challenges. One day, one of our students found a gun in Harlem 3’s building. We tried to find the principal of the co-located school, but, as usual, he was missing in action. DOE investigated and discovered he was regularly visiting his mistress during school hours. We also had trouble getting space to store books and supplies. We were always told the closets were full, but when I’d insist they be opened, I’d find dusty textbooks that hadn’t been used in decades. At one of our schools, we found a storage room in the basement that was empty except for a couch, a lamp, and a few personal items such as clothes, which the custodian removed at our request. A few days later, an elderly disheveled woman accosted me, saying she was a former teacher, that the co-located school’s former principal had agreed to let her live in the basement, and that I’d thrown out her belongings. I’d actually gotten occasional reports about an elderly woman who wandered around the schools but I’d had no idea she lived there.

  As we approached the end of our third school year, we had to figure out which teachers to keep. Most principals find it hard to let teachers go. They’re inclined to decide that a mediocre teacher is good enough or give her one more chance. Of course, it’s natural to feel compassion for a weak teacher, particularly one who’s really trying but just isn’t suited to the profession, but giving a teacher “one more chance” means thirty children will likely get an inadequate education for a year at a critical stage of their development. Principals sometimes unintentionally put the needs of teachers first because they are closer emotionally to the teachers than to the students. Since my own children attended Success, I was particularly aware of the impact that keeping a mediocre teacher had on kids. I wrote to my principals:

  We are not an employment agency. [You] cannot let your attachment to individuals override what is good for children. I think about it this way. If I would prefer for Hannah and Dillon NOT to have a certain teacher, I cannot in good conscience bring them back and have other people’s children suffer.

  That summer, a documentary about Success called The Lottery came out. It brilliantly weaved together our fight to get space for new schools with the stories of four families whose children were in our lottery. We arranged to screen this film for our families at the famous Apollo Theater. I took Culver, and when he learned at the end that some of the children in the film hadn’t won the lottery, he cried. “Mom,” he asked, “why don’t you open up more schools?” This comment was a deep relief for me since it meant that Culver understood the importance of my work and didn’t resent me for spending so much time on it.

  That summer, we also got our test scores. I was concerned about how well our students would do because SED had announced it was making the tests harder. Sure enough, passage rates plummeted citywide to 54 percent in math and 42 percent in English. Our students, however, continued to perform strongly: 95 percent passed in math and 88 percent in English.

  These strong test scores left me optimistic for the future. What I did not know, however, was that the 2010–2011 school year would see not only an existential threat to Success from our traditional enemies but the addition of a new one, a storied civil rights organization that would accuse us of being “slave masters.”

  24

  THURGOOD MARSHALL MUST BE SHAKING HIS HEAD

  2010–2011

  In 2010, 59 percent of Manhattan residents were white, but more than two-thirds of its district schools had fewer than 10 percent white students. The district school system’s design encourages segregation. First, elementary schools have small zones, so that even where housing projects are near expensive condominiums, the children living in them rarely attend the same schools. I
n some cases, this is intentional. For example, residents of Lincoln Towers, a private development, got the city to create a new school for them that was zoned to exclude children in a public housing project just two blocks away despite a lawsuit that correctly observed that this plan would cause segregation. Where affluent residents are zoned for schools with poorer students, the school system offers them escape hatches such as gifted and talented or dual language programs. Moreover, while it should be easier to integrate middle and high schools because older students can travel farther, the most desirable schools at this level have admissions criteria that children who’ve attended a failing elementary school rarely meet.

  There’s no malevolence behind this system. Rather, it’s the unintended result of affluent families’ efforts to ensure their own children are well educated. They rent pricey apartments or purchase homes zoned for the best schools, hire tutors to help their children get into gifted and talented programs, and find out about the best new magnet schools by the application deadline. Through these efforts, they snap up the spots at the best schools and disadvantaged families are left with the worst ones.

  In the fall of 2010, virtually all of Success’s 2,400 students were children of color. While we were giving these students an excellent education, I nonetheless felt we should do our part to diminish segregation by making a deliberate effort to attract a racially and socioeconomically diverse student body at our next school. We found the perfect site for such a school: a building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side that was just blocks away from both low-income housing and multimillion-dollar apartments. Unfortunately, the school this building contained, PS 145, was too academically weak to attract affluent families.

  Bill Perkins should have been delighted we were opening a school on the Upper West Side because he’d complained that “charter schools . . . are only being put in communities of color.” On October 19, however, he helped organize a protest at which he warned Upper West Siders that sharing space with a charter school “niggerizes you, it makes you second class.”21 Council Member Gale Brewer vowed to “strangle any parent I find who moved [their child] into a charter school.” (A couple of years later, Brewer would comment, “I don’t like Eva Moskowitz, I’ll be honest . . . I’ll tell her that, right to her face.”22 How does one even respond to that?) Rounding out the field was Noah Gotbaum, who was head of the Community Education Council and an aspiring politician who would soon bear the unique distinction of having his own stepmother endorse his opponent. With such an august assemblage leading the charge, Juan González couldn’t be far behind. He argued that Success shouldn’t be allowed to co-locate with PS 145 because, while underenrolled, PS 145 had “blossomed in recent years” and was sure to “grow under [a] new federal grant.”

  The following day, the Community Education Council held a hearing on our co-location that the Daily News accurately described as “virtual mob rule.” I had to attend our annual fund-raiser that night, but I sent one of our staff members, Larisa Beachy, to videotape the meeting so we’d have a record. Gotbaum didn’t like this so he had Larisa arrested and hauled off in handcuffs to the cheers of the crowd. I was livid. Larisa had a right under the New York Open Meetings Law to videotape this public meeting. Moreover, I felt terrible that Larisa, a young woman who’d taken this job to help disadvantaged children, had been subjected to this humiliation. However, I was proud of her for standing her ground. As Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “A woman is like a tea bag; you never know how strong it is until it’s in hot water.” When Larisa emailed her father, a former mayor of New London, Connecticut, about her arrest, he responded proudly, “You GO!!! girl.” However, the principal of the school where Larisa worked emailed me that “I want to make sure that the risks we ask people to take are reasonable and worthwhile. . . . [M]y father hat came on last night thinking about poor Larisa in handcuffs.” I replied: “Look at all the risks people have taken for justice, human rights, First Amendment rights. . . . The parent in us needs to be proud [because] there are principles worth standing up for.”

  After this incident, DOE added injury to insult by withdrawing our co-location. González had predicted that if only we were prevented from co-locating with PS 145, it would thrive and grow. In fact, five years later, its enrollment had shrunk by 37 percent, and its English passage rate had fallen to 15 percent. To this day, parents in this neighborhood still don’t have a good option for their kids since we weren’t allowed to open up there. As for the federal grant González mentioned, perhaps you’d like to know how your 11.5 million taxpayer dollars were spent. The grant was supposed to diminish segregation by increasing white enrollment at primarily minority schools like PS 145 and increasing minority enrollment at primarily white schools like PS 87. In the end, both PS 87 and PS 145 ended up more segregated than they started—and no, you’re not getting your $11.5 million back.

  In the middle of all this, Chancellor Joel Klein called to tell me he was resigning and asked me if I wanted to succeed him (although he didn’t say whether Bloomberg was on board with this). I decided, however, that I couldn’t abandon Success. I was sad to see Klein go. He found it deeply painful that other children weren’t getting the same quality public school education he’d had, and his commitment to rectifying that had led him to make enormous financial sacrifice and endure vitriolic opposition.

  DOE proposed another co-location site, PS 165, but again protests arose. As the Times noted: “Members of the teachers’ union and New York Communities for Change, which replaced . . . ACORN, are often present at rallies and copied on e-mails debating the next steps in the battle.” DOE withdrew its proposal and I called Deputy Chancellor Marc Sternberg in frustration to tell him he needed to identify a location and stand his ground. I’d take anything, I said. “Fine,” he replied sarcastically, “then you can have Brandeis,” which Sternberg probably figured was a nonstarter since it was a high school building with some tough kids. I figured, however, that even the toughest high school kids weren’t going to pick fights with kindergartners so I said, “Great!”

  Again, there was opposition. “We don’t need more options here,” said Gotbaum. “We have options. We have great schools.” Perhaps that was true for him, since he sent his children to PS 87, which raised tons of money through private donations (as well as $1.3 million in federal funds for enrolling more kids of color but not actually doing so). The options weren’t so great, however, for families who didn’t have a couple of million dollars to plop down on an apartment zoned for PS 87.

  Despite this opposition, however, DOE stuck to its guns and, on February 1, formally approved our location. Two weeks later, however, Jenny Sedlis, our head of external affairs, got an email out of the blue from an attorney who’d heard a lawsuit was going to be brought to challenge our co-location. This attorney, Emily Kim, had put her son in our lottery, and she offered to represent us for free if a lawsuit was brought. Jenny called Eric to ask if he’d heard of this woman’s firm, Arnold & Porter. Eric laughed; it was one of the best in the country. It was like Michael Jordan strolling by and asking if he could get into a pickup game. Eric went to meet with Kim. Ostensibly, it was about this case, but we had another agenda as well: finding a general counsel for Success. Eric was fulfilling this function as a part-time pro bono lawyer but Success was getting too big for that. It turned out that, in addition to being an excellent lawyer, Kim had previously taught in Africa and helped kids with special needs. Eric felt she might be the one. But first we figured we’d see how she did representing us pro bono.

  On April 8, the lawsuit Emily had warned us about was filed. The plaintiffs claimed that our elementary school students might sneak weapons into the building and also that, since our school would have “geographic diversity,” e.g., kids from Harlem, transporting them to school would contribute to pollution. Opposing integration on environmental grounds is, I guess, the politically correct form of bigotry.

  The lawsuit also advanced many hyper-technical objections to the approva
l process: that a hearing notice distributed forty-five days in advance had omitted the hearing date, an omission corrected two days later; and that it had taken five days to translate the notice into Spanish, although that was still forty days before the hearing. Not one single person claimed, however, that these mistakes had actually resulted in their missing the hearing on our co-location.

  Then, on May 18, a far bigger bombshell dropped. The UFT and NAACP brought a suit to invalidate nineteen charter school co-locations, including seven of ours, because the city had allegedly made mistakes in the “Educational Impact Statements” and “Building Utilization Plans” it had issued. These documents required that the city specify precisely how many rooms each school would get and set a schedule for sharing certain facilities such as the gym and cafeteria. The UFT and NAACP claimed we’d been given a disproportionate amount of space, citing examples of what seemed on the surface like unjust disparities: we got exclusive use of the cafeteria for breakfast at one school, while the three district schools shared it for theirs; we got the “big gym” at one school, while the district school got the “small gym”; we were allocated gym time at another school while a co-located school for special needs kids wasn’t. But in every case, there were simple explanations: our students ate breakfast alone because our school started earlier; the “big gym” held 369 students, just 9 more than the small gym, which held 360; the special needs school hadn’t been assigned gym time because that school’s principal said he didn’t want his kids using the gym which, whether or not that was a good idea, certainly wasn’t our fault.

  Moreover, the UFT and the NAACP weren’t asking that these inequities be fixed: that we use the small gym rather than the big gym, or that gym time be allocated to the school with special needs kids. Rather, they wanted the courts to prohibit us from using these buildings at all. Why? Because their goal wasn’t to fix inequities but to use the appearance of inequities to stop the spread of charters.