As a former professor, I was surprised to see that a university-sponsored institute would instigate a lawsuit to prevent a school from opening. It struck me as a rather brass-knuckles tactic for an institution of higher education. It was also a betrayal of Annenberg’s founder, the late Dr. Theodore Sizer, a well-respected educator. I’d served on a panel with Sizer, and he’d expressed enthusiastic support for charters and what Success was trying to accomplish. Indeed, he’d founded a charter school himself and supported the concept of a “market” in education. “Parental choice among schools,” he said, could play a critical role in advancing school quality since “[f]amily interest represents an important kind of assessment.” He’d also written that a charter school “open on a lottery basis to any child wherever that child may live—rich suburb or poor city—finally gives an honest definition to the word ‘public.’” This was exactly what we were trying to do in Cobble Hill—to create a diverse school by drawing students from a broader geography than most district schools. But now the institute Sizer had founded was trying to stop us from fulfilling his vision.
The mastermind behind Annenberg’s anti-charter organizing was Norm Fruchter, a former editor of the New Left Review who had defended Fidel Castro’s refusal to hold elections on the grounds that if people didn’t like it, they could just have another violent revolution. Fruchter’s role at Annenberg would have particularly appalled the late Walter Annenberg, a conservative businessman who’d donated $50 million to the institute named after him. I believe it would also have appalled Bill Gates and the late Harry Helmsley, businessmen whose foundations all supported charter schools but had nonetheless contributed to the Annenberg Institute, no doubt unaware of Annenberg’s clandestine anti-charter activities.
Annenberg’s lawsuit against Success was filed on February 8 by Arthur Schwartz, ACORN’s former general counsel, who claimed we shouldn’t be able to start a school in District 15 because we’d told SUNY that we expected to open our school in a neighboring district before finding the Cobble Hill building. While we’d obtained SUNY’s approval to change districts and gone through the city’s whole process of notices, hearings, and approval to get co-located, this wasn’t enough red tape for Schwartz.
Three weeks later, Schwartz brought a lawsuit against our Williamsburg school, this time claiming we hadn’t done “meaningful community outreach.” The lead plaintiff, Council Member Diana Reyna, claimed that our “marketing strategies . . . discriminated against Latino and low-income families.” Another opponent claimed our marketing had been “racist” and that we “only want[ed] the white middle-class” children in our schools.
Then, the Times published an op-ed piece titled “How Charter Schools Can Hurt” by Lucinda Rosenfeld, the parent of a student at PS 261, who claimed that if Success Academy Cobble Hill attracted any middle-class students, it would destroy PS 261 and “create a snowball effect in which [the] middle-class population ends up fleeing” the city. This middle-class flight Armageddon scenario struck me as farfetched given the pace of gentrification in Brooklyn. Surely there were enough middle-class families to populate one more diverse school, and other families in the district weren’t as satisfied as Ms. Rosenfeld with their existing options.
While I tried to fend off this public relations assault, Emily Kim and her team drafted our legal papers. Luckily, she was able to reunite the old band—Paul, Weiss and Arnold & Porter—and we’d carefully documented our extensive outreach efforts. We’d learned from bitter experience that politicians would ignore our phone calls and then claim we’d never reached out to them, so we’d made sure to put everything in writing this time around. In the case of our Williamsburg school, we’d written letters to twenty-six elected officials and community leaders including Council Member Reyna, the lead plaintiff in the Williamsburg lawsuit. In addition, we’d collected 8,300 signatures; repeatedly appeared before both the Community Education Council and the Education and Youth Services Committee of the local community board; mailed out numerous brochures; purchased outdoor advertisements on bus shelters, phone kiosks, and subway stations; put flyers under doors in public housing projects; and held eleven information sessions and twelve school tours. We’d also sent out five brochures in Spanish and advertised in Spanish. We explained all this in our legal papers, which we submitted in the Cobble Hill litigation on March 9 and in the Williamsburg litigation on March 23.
Emily also recruited parents whose children had applied to our schools to intervene in the lawsuit. Schwartz opposed the intervention: he was all for parents having a voice—unless they supported charter schools.
In the reply brief he submitted on April 2, Schwartz argued that it was our fault that his clients had ignored the letters we’d sent them because we’d sent “only one letter to each elected official,” rather than pestering them with multiple letters and hadn’t warned them “that if they fail[ed] to respond, they m[ight] not have another opportunity,” as if they were children who needed reminders to do their homework.
Meanwhile, despite claims that the community didn’t want our schools, applications poured in. Demand was particularly strong for our Cobble Hill school, which received 1,457 applications for just 172 spots. (Success Academy Upper West, by the way, now had 2,186 applicants for 89 seats, a higher ratio than Harvard.)
On May 30 and June 1, the court ruled in our favor in both lawsuits, finding that our outreach had been sufficient and that there was nothing untoward in our having switched Cobble Hill to District 15. But we faced one more obstacle before we could open. The law now required that if we renovated a facility, DOE had to spend an equal amount on the co-located school. It sounded fair, but in reality it led to wasteful expenditures. For example, at Upper West, we’d turned some classrooms into a lunchroom since we needed one. DOE therefore had to spend money renovating our co-located schools even though they didn’t need to build a lunchroom or have any other compelling needs for renovations. Now we needed to make renovations at our Brooklyn schools including electrical upgrades to run our SMART Boards, laptops, and air conditioners (since our school started in mid-August, which could be brutally hot). DOE, however, refused to let us make renovations we did need so that it wouldn’t have to spend money on renovations our co-located schools didn’t need. Moreover, it wasn’t just us; all charter schools were being prohibited from renovating their facilities.
I reached out to Mayor Bloomberg and he called me back—right in the middle of my nephew’s bar mitzvah. While I feared my family would never forgive me, I didn’t know whether I’d get another chance to talk to him so I stepped out and took his call. Bloomberg said the city just didn’t have the money to match the renovations that charter schools wanted to make. I responded that having served on the council, I knew full well that the city had an annual capital budget for schools of $2 billion and that the amounts at issue were trivial in comparison. If he didn’t let us make these renovations, I said, I’d install emergency generators and call the press to let them take pictures. The next sound I heard was a click of the phone hanging up.
About a week later, I got word that the administration had changed its mind: all charter school renovations, including Success’s, were now being approved. I don’t believe, however, that I had forced the mayor’s hand. Bloomberg wasn’t someone who could be pushed around. Rather, I believe my threat to make a fuss simply caused everyone to take a harder look at the situation and they concluded that allowing us to make these renovations made sense. After all, even if there was some waste of public funds, the net result would be a lot of renovations to city-owned buildings, much of which charter schools would pay for.
Sometimes, government needs shock therapy because lower-level bureaucrats don’t get the big picture. Around this same time, the US Department of Education suddenly decided that we were violating federal law by giving a preference in our lottery to English language learners (ELLs). I didn’t believe that Secretary Duncan himself would actually support this inane policy, so I wrote him:<
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The Department is threatening to withdraw millions of dollars. . . . This unconscionably bad policy imposes a cruel Sophie’s choice on Success. Either we must abandon our ELL preference, and serve fewer students from this needy population, or we must cut millions of dollars from our program, which will harm most of all these very same needy students. [This] threat[] is a gun pointed at our head.
I used such strong rhetoric so I’d be sure to get Duncan’s attention. The policy was soon changed.
In late August, our new Brooklyn schools opened. We were able to give the district another sorely needed integrated school. In 2016, our Cobble Hill school had precisely 50 percent free and reduced-price lunch students and very much reflected the district’s diversity with 27 percent white students, 26 percent Hispanic students, and 38 percent African American students. As for our Williamsburg school, despite the claims that we were only trying to serve white middle-class families, only 9 percent of the students are white and 75 percent of the students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch.
Remember Ms. Rosenfeld’s claim that we’d destroy PS 261 and cause middle-class flight? Well, surprise, surprise, it didn’t happen. As of 2016, PS 261 had exactly the same percentage of free and reduced-price lunch students it did the year before our school opened (44 percent). Indeed, PS 261’s principal commented that our school had “not had a negative” effect on PS 261 and that it was “really nice that parents have the ability to choose what they believe is best for their children and family, and what complements their belief about education.” Finally, we didn’t cause middle-class flight and turn Ms. Rosenfeld’s neighborhood into a slum. By 2016, town houses in her neighborhood were going for $4 million a pop.
Many people have accused Success of having terrible motives and have predicted that all sorts of horrible things would happen when our schools opened. These accusations and predictions have never proved accurate, but we have yet to receive an apology from the people who made them. I’m not holding my breath.
28
COMPETING IN THE NATIONALS
2011–2012
If you want to understand the level of our teachers’ commitment, witness the tale of Lydia Cuomo, a woman from New Hampshire whom we hired to teach at one of our Bronx schools. On August 19, 2011, she failed to show up for the first day of school and we soon learned why. Just blocks from the school, she’d been waylaid by a drunken man who had forced her into an alley, pulled out a gun, told her he’d “blow [her] head off” if she didn’t do what he said, and raped her. As he attacked her, Lydia saw something unimaginable: a badge. He was, it turned out, a New York City police officer and the gun he was holding to her head was his city-issued firearm.
It’s hard for any woman who’s been raped to feel safe again but imagine how much harder it is when the rapist is a policeman, someone whose presence on a dimly lit street is supposed to make her feel safe. One could have hardly blamed Lydia if she’d packed up her bags and returned to New Hampshire or looked for a job in a safer neighborhood, but she did neither. Rather, just weeks after the assault, she began teaching at our Bronx school. She also testified at a trial against her assailant and publicly advocated for better legal protections for rape victims. When she did so, she used her real name, an act of personal bravery and a public statement that the only person who need feel shame when a rape occurs is its perpetrator.
Sometimes teaching in a poor neighborhood can be risky and some of our educators have even been attacked by parents of the children they serve. A security camera caught an assault on Harlem 1’s principal and it was horrible to watch. The principal lay on the floor futilely trying to fend off the blows of a parent about three times her size until one of our staff members managed to pry the parent off her. The emotional impact of such attacks on educators can be highly damaging but educators can’t afford to shy away from difficult parent conversations for fear of being assaulted.
While we struggled with these issues, we also tried to improve our school design. At the beginning of the 2011–2012 academic year, I asked Sean O’Hanlon, our chess czar, to make our chess program the best in the country and he set about doing so. With 3,500 scholars in nine schools, some of our students were ready for stiffer competition so he decided that this year we should compete in the national chess tournament that took place in Nashville, Tennessee. This worried me since most of our opponents would be from suburban and private schools. I feared we’d get a drubbing that would undermine our students’ confidence and pride in their abilities. Sean assured me that he would improve our program to increase our scholars’ chances. He began running tournaments on weekends so our top players at different schools could compete against one another. He hired better chess coaches so our students could get the more advanced instruction they needed as their play improved. He switched his chess staff to a Tuesday-through-Saturday schedule so students could practice on the weekend.
Another area in which we made improvements was in our selection of books. I’d first realized their inadequacy when Dillon became a student at Success. We’d created a summer reading list with hundreds of suggestions, but when I read them to Dillon, I found that many were mediocre. The quality of books matters enormously. When teachers read certain books aloud, such as Charlotte’s Web or My Father’s Dragon, the students hung on every word and would beg the teacher not to stop. Great children’s books are also more instructive. Take Dr. Seuss’s books, which are like Shakespeare for children. Their rhymes and rhythms help children appreciate the beauty of language and understand how it works. Consider this stanza from The Cat in the Hat:
I know it is wet
And the sun is not sunny.
But we can have
Lots of good fun that is funny!
Dr. Seuss is implicitly teaching children that words can have noun and adjectival forms (sun and sunny). Moreover, as a child rereads this book and becomes more sophisticated, he may see Dr. Seuss’s subtle play on words: that unlike “sun” and “sunny,” the words “fun” and “funny” don’t have the same meaning.
Thus, just like adult books, children’s books can be great and we are fortunate to be living in a golden age for children’s literature. We have classics like Where the Wild Things Are, Stuart Little, James and the Giant Peach, Where the Sidewalk Ends, and A Wrinkle in Time, and more recent additions like The Giver, The Book Thief, Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member, and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Not all books are created equal and children should be encouraged as much as possible to read the best ones.
I found books for my own children at the Bank Street Book Store where a woman named Sara Yu always had great suggestions. I asked her to pull together a list of books for Success and it was so good I hired her to be our director of children’s literature. Here is what Sara wrote in one of our newsletters about her job:
My colleagues and I spend hours and hours discussing and selecting the best books to use for a particular unit. Earlier this year, I read more than 500 poems in one day to find the 20 or so that our middle school scholars would study that month. We consider lots of factors: the quality of the writing, plot and character development, accuracy in nonfiction, the Common Core standards, the goals of that particular unit, etc. But the final verdict usually sounds something like: “This is such a fifth-grade book—the kids are going to really get Kenny,” “Second-graders will think Clementine is hilarious,” or “Nope, I just don’t think kids will love it.”
Despite Sara’s talents, it’s unlikely a district school would have hired her because she didn’t even have a college degree much less formal teaching credentials, just talent and a love of children’s literature. Charter schools, however, have more flexibility in hiring.
Another area in which we sought to make improvements was test preparation. Many students dread standardized tests, which is unfortunate. Tests are a lot like an athletic competition: you practice hard, prepare yourself mentally for game day, and then you get to show
off your skills. Since schools hold pep rallies to get everyone excited about big athletic events, I decided to hold a “Slam the Exam” rally at which our students exuberantly chanted and sang songs like Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and Queen’s “We Will Rock You.” It instilled enthusiasm and confidence in our students.
But paying all of the people who were making these improvements cost a lot and we found we were running a deficit at the Network, the nonprofit entity which performed functions that it made sense to centralize, like designing the curriculum, training teachers, and managing renovations and technology. While each school was chipping in 10 percent of its budgets to cover the Network’s cost, it wasn’t enough. Unless we cut back on these services, which we felt would do great harm to our schools, we needed to increase the Network fee. We sought SUNY’s permission to increase this fee to 15 percent, which prompted Juan González to write that:
SUNY trustees are rushing to approve a whopping 50 percent increase in the annual per-pupil management fee the state pays to one of the city’s biggest and most controversial charter school operators.
In fact, we weren’t seeking to increase what the “state pays,” just change how that money was divvied up between our schools and our Network. We sought a correction but González responded, “My column did not say you were seeking an increase in state aid.” What about his statement that we were seeking an “increase in the annual per-pupil management fee the state pays”? That was accurate, he claimed, because the money for the fees the school paid ultimately came from the state. It was like saying that if a congressman bought a Mercedes with his government salary, it would be fair to write “government pays for congressman’s Mercedes.” González knew full well that readers would think the government was paying Success more in total. In fact, after González’s column, a prominent education activist wrote that we were trying “to reap more fees from taxpayers.” All this spooked SUNY, so they put off the vote on our much-needed fee increase.
The Education of Eva Moskowitz Page 21
