The Education of Eva Moskowitz

by Eva Moskowitz

  I then asked our director of literacy, Arin Lavinia, to make training Richard her number one priority. She first helped Richard master the literacy curriculum that Arin and I had designed. It had nine components including shared text, in which the whole class reads a brief passage together and then writes about it; read alouds, in which the teacher reads from a book, interspersing questions to help the students with their comprehension; and guided reading, in which a teacher helps a half dozen students who are at exactly the same level read a book that is slightly above that level.

  Arin also helped Richard master the two main methods by which our principals improve instruction. The first is leading planning meetings, which are like graduate seminars. Rather than assume that our teachers have fully understood a text, we have an intellectual group discussion to help them do so. We identify the essential meaning of the text and the craft and structure the author employs. This approach reflects our belief that great teaching requires far more preparation than most educators realize.

  Principals also improve instruction through coaching, which itself comes in two flavors. One is coaching in the moment: as the teacher teaches, the principal makes suggestions, such as telling the teacher to listen in on students’ “talk and turns.” If the principal feels that the teacher needs a demonstration of a particular teaching technique, the principal may even take over instruction for a few minutes to do so.

  Principals also give feedback after teacher observations. While all schools do this, we have a much quicker feedback loop. In an email the principal drafts during or immediately after the observation, she makes concrete suggestions, such as giving students more time to think of an answer before calling on students, and then checks in on the teacher later that day or the next day to see if these suggestions are being implemented successfully. If so, the principal commends the teacher and makes additional suggestions. This continuous improvement and quick feedback cycle works wonders. In district schools, the teachers’ union contract only allows teachers to be observed twice a year. Our teachers are observed daily by either a principal or assistant principal. We can do this in part because we keep the observations short, typically 5 minutes, which is enough time to come up with concrete suggestions for improvement. Principals also provide feedback based on their study of students’ test results and written work.

  This work—coaching teachers and leading planning sessions—is the heart of a principal’s job at Success. If I find a principal sitting alone in her office every time I visit a school, I worry that she doesn’t understand the true nature of her job.

  Arin led planning sessions at Harlem 3, so that Richard could see how to do them, and then prepared him to lead these planning sessions himself. She also showed him how to tell the difference between good and bad teaching and how to provide effective feedback.

  Richard found that many of his teachers just weren’t expecting enough of students both intellectually and behaviorally. Richard had very high standards for both teachers and students, which I suspect was in part due to his background as a professional dancer. Dancers know that achieving excellence requires hard work, concentration, precision, and lots of practice. Richard saw that rather than insisting that students do things and giving consequences if they refused, teachers were pleading with students. The teachers also lacked urgency. At Success, we’re always hustling because time is a finite resource. We try, for example, to minimize the amount of time between when one class ends and instruction at the next class begins. At Harlem 3, however, kids were sauntering between classes and then taking forever to settle down and start learning. Richard’s impressions were confirmed by Paola Zalkind, a principal in training at Harlem 3, who saw that it lacked the intensity and commitment to excellence of the two other Success schools at which she’d taught.

  I visited Harlem 3 frequently to see how Richard was doing and I often saw the father of one of our students sitting in the lobby. One day I spoke to this man, Emile Yoanson, and he explained to me that, due to his poor health, he didn’t want to travel to the school twice from the Bronx, where he lived, so he just spent the whole day sitting there. This shows the incredible lengths to which many of our parents go to provide their children with a good education. I further learned that although this man was married, his wife and another son were in the Ivory Coast where a civil war was raging. Given my own family’s background, I very much empathized with their plight, so I reached out to Senator Chuck Schumer, who helped us get visas for them. Then it turned out they didn’t have enough money for airfare, so we paid for that as well.

  On December 6, they arrived at Kennedy airport. A week later, Mr. Yoanson’s younger son, Segnonble, who didn’t speak a word of English, joined his brother, Christian, at Harlem 3. The family was overjoyed to be reunited after so many years and thanked us profusely. When all of the opposition to our schools gets me down, it’s little moments like these that keep me going.

  Meanwhile, Richard worked relentlessly to improve Harlem 3. Many students were arriving late, which caused them to miss instruction and distracted other students. To discourage lateness, Richard would regularly man the entrance where students arrived and confront parents who were bringing their children to school late. Some of these parents began dropping their children off at the corner so Richard responded by going to the local subway station to confront them. This very much reflected our “by any means necessary” approach to problems.

  Unfortunately, some teachers resisted Richard’s efforts to improve student behavior. Even though Richard is African American, they claimed that Richard was reinforcing negative stereotypes of minority kids by demanding that they speak respectfully. In fact, Richard learned from some faculty members who supported him that other faculty members who didn’t had decided to make his life as difficult as possible so he’d resign. They did so by acting disrespectfully toward him at faculty meetings, implying he lacked the qualifications to lead the school, and refusing to follow his directions. While it was undoubtedly true that Richard was hindered by his inexperience, undermining him didn’t help, particularly since I didn’t have a more experienced principal waiting in the wings to take over if Richard quit.

  Richard could have decreased opposition to his leadership by being more deferential to his teachers and allowing them to teach the way they wanted, but he knew this wasn’t why I’d made him a principal. Fortunately, he was courageous and determined not to let adult politics get in the way of giving his kids a great education. Some teachers, however, just weren’t willing to play ball with Richard, which presented him with a real dilemma. The last thing Richard needed was to lose teachers midyear but having teachers who refuse to follow the playbook is a big problem even if the teachers are competent. There is a scene in the wonderful basketball film Hoosiers. The best player on the team is making baskets but he isn’t following the team’s strategy of passing the ball before shooting, so the coach benches him. When another player fouls out, the team is left with only four players on the floor. “Coach, you need one more,” says the referee, to which the coach replies, “My team is on the floor.” I feel the same way. No matter how good a teacher is, if that teacher won’t play as part of the team, you’re better off without her. Mind you, it’s not a question of who is right. Reasonable minds can differ as to the best approach to pedagogy. However, a school’s educators need to be working from the same playbook.

  It’s easier to achieve this at a charter school. In district schools, wars will break out between competing pedagogical philosophies. With a charter school system, however, teachers can choose a charter school that reflects their philosophy. This, indeed, is exactly what had happened with Harlem 3’s former principal and the teachers who had left with her. But there were apparently still some teachers at Harlem 3 who weren’t on board with our philosophy and wouldn’t follow Richard’s direction, so he let them go with my full support.

  From this point on, it was a tremendous amount of work but at least Harlem 3’s teachers were all
pulling in the same direction and things gradually improved. That summer, we got our test results. Harlem 3’s English passage rate jumped from 72 percent to 89 percent and its math passage rate held steady at 93 percent. This incredible outcome was a testament to Richard’s determination and abilities given the turmoil the school had suffered, including the loss of dozens of staff members and the opposition of many who remained. It was also a testament to the support that Arin, Paola, and Kristina gave Richard. Three years later, Harlem 3 won the prestigious National Blue Ribbon Award.

  Interestingly, there was also a big improvement in the scores at the charter school that had gotten all of our teachers. Its English passage rate went from 33 percent to 77 percent in third grade and from 30 percent to 58 percent in fourth grade. I was glad that children at that school had benefited from the training we’d given their teachers, I just wished it had happened under different circumstances.

  Our year was marred by a tragic event. Christian Yoanson had been hospitalized with an illness and on June 8, we learned he’d died. Jenny Sedlis and I went to visit Christian’s parents at their home to console them. When we arrived, Mr. Yoanson had just returned from signing Christian’s death certificate and was unable to speak. I held him in my arms while he sobbed uncontrollably. When he stopped, he and Mrs. Yoanson talked about how much Success had meant to Christian. Right up until the end, they said, Christian had been talking about his eagerness to return to school. The walls, I noticed, bore not only many examples of Christian’s schoolwork but framed copies of newsletters and other materials we’d sent home.

  Christian’s family was completely overwhelmed by this loss and our entire community pulled together to help them through this difficult time. I asked my special assistant Maria Monforte Trivedi to arrange the funeral and help find a cemetery plot. Since cemetery plots in New York City were hard to come by, Maria’s own family donated an extra plot they owned. If you visit that cemetery today, you will find buried amid the Monfortes, a family of Italian descent, the grave of Christian Yoanson, an immigrant from the Ivory Coast taken at a tragically young age.

  While witnessing the Yoansons’s pain was heartbreaking, I took a small measure of comfort in knowing we’d at least reunited Mr. Yoanson with his wife and younger son, Segnonble, who, as I write this now, is a sixth-grader at Success whose accomplishments reflect his family’s great commitment to education.

  27

  GIVING AN HONEST DEFINITION TO THE WORD “PUBLIC”

  2011–2012

  I have to admit it: I’ve got a soft spot for Matt Damon. Good Will Hunting, Ocean’s Eleven, and those Bourne films . . . Sigh. But, alas, Damon doesn’t have a soft spot for me. At a rally in DC in the summer of 2011, he criticized me by name. It’s a strange experience watching a guy you’re used to rooting for in the movies make clear he isn’t rooting for you, but at least I was in good company. Obama had lamented: “I love Matt Damon, love the guy. Matt Damon said he was disappointed in my performance. Well, Matt, I just saw The Adjustment Bureau [Damon’s latest film], so right back at you, buddy.” In my case, Damon didn’t like the fact that we sent mailings to parents about our schools. I confess I found it curious he would begrudge my spending money telling disadvantaged families about their educational opportunities when far greater funds were spent on promoting the films in which he appeared. (Right back at you, buddy.)

  Notwithstanding Damon’s opposition, we decided in the fall of 2011 to open three new schools in Brooklyn. Many people warned me that continuing to expand so quickly could hurt the quality of our schools. I was conscious of that danger, but also of the fact that there were more than one million school-age children in New York City who desperately needed better educational options. We’d received nine thousand applicants for just nine hundred seats. We had a moral responsibility, I believed, to haul as many children into our lifeboat as we could without sinking it.

  One obstacle we faced was raising enough money to fund this rapid expansion, but a strong prospect soon emerged: a blunt and brilliant investor by the name of Daniel Loeb. He’d started his business career at twelve, making skateboards and investing the profits in the stock market, earning him the sobriquet Milo Minderbinder. By the end of college, he’d amassed $120,000, which he then proceeded to lose in one disastrous trade. Nonetheless, he went into finance and, in 1995, founded a hedge fund. Two years later, it earned an astonishing 98.3 percent annual return. By the time I met Daniel, he was managing billions of dollars.

  Daniel and his wife, Margaret, were also deeply committed to the causes in which they believed. They had played a major role in passing gay marriage legislation and were generous supporters of Prep for Prep, an organization for which I’d worked that helped gifted minority children. Daniel was looking around for a charter school to support and was going about it with the same thoroughness with which he chose his investments. He eventually concluded that Success Academy was the equivalent of an undervalued company: we were getting great results for kids, but we weren’t as popular with some funders as other charter schools because I was controversial. Since Daniel and Margaret cared about helping kids more than winning popularity contests, they generously agreed to give us $3 million, enough money to open all three of our Brooklyn schools. No Success funder had ever done that before.

  One of our schools, we decided, should be another mixed-income school and Jenny found the perfect location: Cobble Hill in District 15. This district had become increasingly diverse as more affluent families had come to the neighborhood, but most of its schools didn’t reflect this. While gentrification brought improvements to a few schools, it was quite uneven, and rising home prices often resulted in poor residents being pushed out of the neighborhoods zoned for these schools just when they improved. Enrollment of poor children in the two best schools in District 15 had fallen dramatically since 2004: from 62 percent to 17 percent at PS 58 and from 36 percent to 19 percent at PS 29. Poor children were generally relegated to schools like PS 15, where 95 percent of the students were poor and student achievement was dismal. Unfortunately, this tendency toward increased segregation reflects a national trend. From 2001 to 2014, highly segregated schools—those with more than 90 percent low-income students and students of color—doubled in number.23

  Given the considerable racial and economic segregation in District 15, we wanted to create a school that would serve a cross section of the district’s population, from residents of public housing to owners of multimillion-dollar brownstones. We also decided to open a school in Williamsburg, another diverse community in northern Brooklyn.

  On October 29, we held an information session regarding one of our proposed schools. Dozens of parents showed up, including one woman who told the Daily News: “I’m not zoned for the best school, so . . . one more . . . good educational option in this neighborhood is a very positive thing.” When I started my presentation, however, some people in the audience started heckling me. “If you can’t hear me out,” I said “we’ll have to cancel the meeting because I can’t shout over you.” But the heckling continued so I finally had to give up. One parent said afterward, “I’m just here to learn. It’s a joke. We’re not allowed to go to a forum to learn about something? We have a right to understand our options.”

  Another woman named Ismene Speliotis, however, said she was “happy with the way Eva left.” This woman, who’d organized the protest, described herself to the press as simply a parent and PTA member, neglecting to mention that she was also the executive director of ACORN’s housing affiliate.

  The usual misinformation campaign followed. At a December 14 hearing, a teacher at the school where we would be co-located claimed that the “gym was so crowded that high school students couldn’t take the required physical education classes in time to graduate.” This was a complete fiction. The building was massively underutilized, at only 57 percent capacity. Then, on January 11, 2012, we came across the following note on the Internet:

  January 13 at 5:30 p.m. there is
an IMPORTANT MEETING for District 15 parents interested in being plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the placement of the Cobble Hill Success Academy.

  Curiously, the notice didn’t say who was sponsoring the meeting but the address for it was the same as that of NYCC (a successor to ACORN after it closed due to a series of scandals), and the phone number listed belonged to an employee of the Alliance for Quality Education (AQE), one of the UFT’s many front groups.

  We asked a District 15 parent we knew to attend and while he was quickly kicked out, he learned the meeting would be led by a woman named Megan Hester who did community organizing for the Annenberg Institute, an affiliate of Brown University. It turned out she was one of five Annenberg employees, two of whom were previously associated with ACORN, to “provide research, training, and logistical support to the New York City Coalition for Educational Justice [CEJ].” CEJ was yet another member of the alphabet soup of union front groups. It fought virtually all of Mayor Bloomberg’s education reform policies and “organiz[ed] parents in schools . . . slated for closure or co-location.” Annenberg claimed that its role was merely to provide “strategic and technical support,” but, in reality, it ran CEJ. While CEJ’s Web site claimed it was “led by parents,” there wasn’t a single parent listed on the site and its “members” were a collection of unions and antireform interest groups including the UFT, NYCC, and The New York Civic Participation Project (which was itself a “collaboration of labor unions and community groups organizing union members”). CEJ’s meetings were held at Annenberg’s New York City office, and their phone numbers were almost identical. Finally, although CEJ’s reports didn’t list their authors, the meta-text shows these reports were in fact written by Ms. Hester and her colleagues at Annenberg. In short, Annenberg didn’t help parents express their views, it just passed off its employees’ own views as those of parents. It was their own think-tanky version of the UFT’s rent-a-mob tactic.