I liked this plan and I felt increasingly confident that I could develop the skills I needed to continue managing Success if I put my mind to it. I realized, however, that I also needed to do a better job warning them about potential risks and sharing my strategic thinking. My failure to do that was giving them the impression I was running Success by the seat of my pants. I also needed to take better account of how they expected a CEO to act. Private sector CEOs typically exude self-confidence and make great efforts to convince their board they are doing a great job. My management style, however, was to be very critical both of myself and of others because I was setting a high bar. For example, if the board asked me how recruiting was going, I’d say that we were doing a horrible job of attracting candidates and I didn’t know if we’d be able to hire enough. I realized I had to give them a more balanced view and do a better job explaining how we were going to handle the challenges we were facing.
I set out to right the ship in a meeting I had with my board in the summer of 2013. I presented to them the triumvirate plan Chuck and I had formulated and expressed my belief that I was fully up to the challenge of continuing to lead Success as its CEO. Fortunately, things had changed a little since the board had begun raising its concerns nearly a year earlier. By this time, Jody, who had a deft touch with powerful people from decades of working with strong personalities at the highest levels of philanthropy, had been with Success for eighteen months, and Keri, whom the board also greatly respected, had now been with Success for four years. Their presence and strong support for me helped combat the board’s concern that I was a micromanager who drove away capable people. I also reassured the board that I understood the need to further strengthen our management team. While I didn’t entirely alleviate their concerns, the meeting went reasonably well and they approved the triumvirate plan.
Given that things were now a bit more in control, I decided to do something in the summer of 2013 that I hadn’t done in more than ten years: take a real vacation. I’d taken days here and there, but nothing like the long biking trips that Eric and I had once enjoyed. I’d been looking forward to the day when our kids would be old enough to join us on such trips and I felt that day had finally come, at least if Hannah rode on a tandem bike with Eric. We planned an ambitious monthlong trip in the south of France. While we’d have to make some concessions to being older and having children—no more camping out in fields—we still intended to do the trip on our own rather than as part of a group and to figure out our route on the fly rather than plan it in advance.
Eric had great fun showing the kids how to pack light. We took only one change of clothing that we planned to wash by hand daily and Eric was very strict: he inspected our bags before departure and upon finding any extra clothes or other contraband, issued a tongue-in-cheek reprimand. As a result, we each brought only a knapsack that was about the size of a basketball. When airport personnel commented that we weren’t taking much baggage given that we were taking an international trip, Eric delighted in saying that this was because we were only traveling for a month.
We started our trip in Avignon and biked around five hundred miles in a big circle. We visited medieval castles, which our children particularly appreciated, and numerous Roman monuments including the arena at Nîmes; the ruins at Vaison la Romaine; the amphitheater at Orange; and the Pont du Gard, a huge bridge that was part of an aqueduct that once carried water twenty-six miles on a continuous downward slope from Uzès to Nîmes. It meant so much to Eric and me that we were able to share with our children this activity that had played such an important role in bringing us together in the first place.
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180 MICHAEL BROWNS
2013
In April 2013, Randi Weingarten wrote to Daniel Loeb that she and “a small group of pension fund trustees,” including “two funds that are current clients of yours,” wished to meet with him. Weingarten had come to recognize that unions could use their influence over public pension funds to strong-arm investment managers like Daniel to stop supporting education reform efforts. Weingarten justified this because the money being managed ultimately went to benefit union members, but unions didn’t really have any skin in the game: if pension investments performed poorly because managers were selected on grounds other than their investing abilities, taxpayers had to pick up the bill, not unions. While Weingarten’s tactics undoubtedly cowed some investment managers, Daniel didn’t take well to being bullied. “It’s important to make a determination,” he said, “what’s more important to you, your money or your principles? For me, it’s my principles.” Thus, rather than pulling back, Daniel doubled down and agreed to become chairman of Success’s board in October 2013.
Within the Network, we had an increasingly robust management team including Chief Academic Officer Michele Caracappa; Managing Director of Schools Jackie Albers; Managing Director of Science, Math, and Technology Stacey Gershkovich; and Managing Director of Elementary Schools Paola Zalkind. They are all extraordinary educators and leaders and were in large part responsible for the fact that our academic program had actually improved over time, not worsened as I’d feared might happen. Remarkably, three of the four had been among our very first crop of teachers.
However, there were areas where I felt Success was falling short of the ideal that I’d imagined when I’d founded it. One was athletic competition, which provides opportunities for parents to root for and take pride in their children and for students to develop confidence in themselves and camaraderie with their peers. This had certainly been true for Culver, who’d earned the nickname “Big Shot Moskowitz” for his basketball skills. While our students had played soccer since kindergarten, they weren’t progressing. They’d crowd around the ball, kicking at it wildly but with little passing or teamwork. I feared the AstroTurf fields we’d built were too small. We considered bussing our kids to larger fields but that would be expensive and would take precious time away from academics. We presented our problem to a new coach we’d hired, Boris Bozic, who’d played professional soccer in Serbia. It turned out we weren’t the first ones to grapple with this problem and Boris had a solution.
In the 1930s, a devout Catholic in Uruguay by the name of Juan Carlos Ceriani Gravier wanted the children in the YMCA program he ran to play soccer but, like us, lacked proper fields. He therefore modified the game so it could be played indoors. He decreased the size of the goals and the number of players, and used a heavier, smaller ball that went less far and bounced less high. Gravier’s invention, which came to be known as “Futsal,” spread throughout South America and revolutionized soccer. The fancy footwork and precise passing Futsal required would give rise to a new style of play that was more flamboyant and fast paced, exemplified by players like Messi, Ronaldo, Neymar, Zico, Sócrates, and Pelé. “Futsal makes you think and play fast,” said Pelé. “It makes you a better player.”
Not only would Futsal improve our students’ soccer skills, Boris explained, but our small AstroTurf fields and indoor gyms were perfect for it. We could have a world-class soccer program without wasting countless hours and spending loads of money bussing our kids to distant soccer fields. Boris created a program for Success that began in kindergarten with exercises such as kicking balls around cones to develop foot skills and agility. In third grade, students who showed the most commitment and talent would be selected to participate in a competitive soccer program, although all students who wanted to continue to learn soccer would have an opportunity to do so. Thousands of kids now participate in our soccer program.
In addition to soccer, I wanted to provide more opportunities for children to pursue their interests so we introduced an electives program for our middleschoolers. Each day began with an hour-long period in which students could choose classes in art, soccer, volleyball, musical theater, chess, entrepreneurship, newspaper/media studies, creative writing, or debate.
We also tried to do a better job of challenging our strongest students. When educators say that “every chi
ld” should be allowed to fulfill his potential, they often really mean “average and struggling students.” Every child should mean every child, including gifted children. They have just as much right to reach their potential as do struggling children. It’s easy to miss when strong students aren’t being challenged. Tests help identify struggling students, but if a gifted child aces a test, educators usually just pat themselves on the back. They don’t ask themselves how much of the material the student already knew or how much the student could have learned if he’d been challenged.
We started administering pretests to find out which students already knew what we were about to teach them. Once we identified gifted students, meeting their needs wasn’t easy, but we started giving more advanced students different homework or additional problems to do in class. We also gave kids opportunities to do independent work such as teaching themselves from books like the Challenge Math series by Ed Zaccaro.
We also pushed our teachers to increase the rigor for every student. Many teachers like to make things easy for kids. They come up with nifty little mnemonic devices that help students solve problems without really understanding them. They give kids sample questions that are nearly identical to questions that appear on tests. They use the simplest words possible when speaking to children for fear that some child won’t know a word they are using. They do all this with the best of intentions, figuring that the easier they make it for kids to learn, the more they will, but cutting up things into bite-size pieces often impedes children’s ability to learn how to tackle difficult problems.
Once, a girl who was struggling over what move to make next told Sean O’Hanlon that chess was hard. “Yeah,” he replied, “it’s supposed to be hard.” So is school. Intellectual struggle builds a child’s intellect just as lifting weights builds an athlete’s muscles, and children can do more than we think. At the height of their language acquisition, children learn seven words a day and that happens mainly just by hearing them used. If you use only the words a child already knows, you’re depriving him of the opportunity to learn new ones. We therefore asked our teachers to use more advanced vocabulary and to pitch their instruction at a higher level.
As the school year came to an end, I needed to figure out who I’d make principal of a new school we were opening in Harlem. Khari had long been gunning for this promotion and I felt he was now ready and was glad to give him this opportunity. For a midlife career changer like Khari, becoming a principal in the district schools would have been extremely difficult given the cost and time required in getting a principal’s license. Being able to shortcut these unnecessary formal requirements allowed him to succeed professionally and allowed us to access this nontraditional source of talent.
A year after I made him principal, an incident occurred that confirmed Khari’s commitment to our mission. He called to tell me he might miss the first day of school to join protests in Kansas City over the police shooting of Michael Brown. I thought it was more important that he be at his school, but the decision was his to make, so I just told him that if he got arrested, he should give me a call so I could make sure he had a good lawyer.
On Sunday night, he sent an email to his faculty explaining his decision:
Tomorrow morning, we will open the doors to another school year and greet over 180 children. Many of those children will look very much like Michael Brown did on his first day of school. My job is to be there for them. It is our responsibility to build an environment where children get the education they need to change the world, be power brokers, build institutions, and improve upon the design of a country where their lives—and the lives of their progeny—are protected, valued, and respected. Tomorrow, when our doors open, we will be standing against educational injustice. Tomorrow, there will be 180 Michael Browns walking through the door. Tomorrow begins the day we continue to get the Michael Browns of Harlem to college and beyond and KNOW that they will be prepared to engage the world on their terms.
Following this was a page or so of quite specific directives by Khari to his teachers to make sure that school started well.
Khari saw his work as a means of advancing social equality but understood the hard work that it truly requires. It’s not enough just to teach children about the civil rights movement and our country’s oppression of minorities. Knowing about past injustices won’t help children succeed in the future unless they also have the requisite academic skills, and teaching them requires hard work. It requires continually striving to improve, connecting with children emotionally, supporting one’s colleagues, always being punctual, and giving 100 percent day in and day out.
Fortunately, the opposition to Success had temporarily subsided but I had no illusions that we were out of the woods. The vitriol that some felt for us would bubble to the surface every now and then. An article in the Village Voice quoted one critic in Brooklyn as follows:
What the f_ _k? Who the hell are you? How do you get to decide we need a new school? . . . I get that Eva Moskowitz is sociopathic enough to put her own kids in this school to prove a point . . . [b]ut [n]o person of means would.
Incredibly, the article’s author was actually sympathetic to this woman and claimed that I was “trampl[ing] parents’ rights” by offering them the option of sending their children to our schools and that I was a “carpetbagger” because—I kid you not—I wasn’t from Brooklyn.
This continuing undercurrent of hostility to charters worried me because there was a looming danger on the horizon: we were about to lose our most important supporter.
32
TIME FOR EVA MOSKOWITZ TO STOP BEING TOLERATED, ENABLED, SUPPORTED
2013
The year 2013 was the final year of the reign of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the business titan who, like Plato’s philosopher king, had descended from his world of fathomless wealth and privilege to become “Mayor Mike” and govern over the shadowy affairs of municipal government. Over the years, our paths had intersected many times. Bloomberg had been one of my earliest campaign contributors and had served as mayor for most of my tenure on the council and all of the time I’d run Success. While we’d sometimes been at odds, we’d worked together more often than not, and Success’s growth was in large measure due to his unflagging support for charter schools and co-location.
Given how much I’d benefited from Bloomberg’s policies, some assumed we were best buddies. In fact, we never hit it off personally. Bloomberg is from Boston and perhaps I was a bit too much like the New York stereotype for his taste: impatient, brash, aggressive. For my part, I sometimes found him diffident and lacking in humility.
But that’s personalities. Substantively, I have nothing but respect for Bloomberg. Many people are in politics for fame, adulation, or power. Bloomberg didn’t care about any of that. He didn’t savor being called “Mr. Mayor” or being applauded or handing out awards. He didn’t seek adulation but instead discouraged it. Toward the end of his time in office, he explained his view:
If I finish my term in office . . . and have high approval ratings, then I wasted my last years in office. That high approval rating means you don’t upset anybody. . . . Well, you’re skiing the baby slope, for goodness’ sakes. Go to a steeper slope. You always want to . . . tackle the issues that are unpopular, that nobody else will go after.
Why would someone who didn’t care about being popular spend a half billion dollars of his own money so he could be mayor? There was only one reason as far as I could see: he loved the work. He believed there were important public policy issues facing the city and that he was the best qualified of its eight million citizens to address them; which of course was arrogant, but nonetheless correct. He left New York City a far better place than he’d found it not by advancing fundamental ideological change, as Giuliani had, but through better management. He focused on easing traffic, fixing the economy, improving the schools, decreasing smoking, beautifying the parks, and fighting crime. His administration planted more than 800,000 trees, turned a $6 billion
deficit into a $3 billion surplus, and cut the murder rate in half. Indeed, on November 26, 2012, something happened in New York City for the first time in recorded history: the city went a full day without a single murder, shooting, or stabbing.
While I was disappointed Bloomberg hadn’t taken a harder line on the UFT contract, he probably correctly judged that it just wasn’t politically feasible. I was more of a purist, but you know how that turned out. If Bloomberg had taken a similar route and lost his election, he wouldn’t have been around to continue the co-location policy that was so vital to the proliferation of charter schools. For me to be me, I needed him to be him.
I met with Bloomberg in the waning days of his administration and he seemed dispirited. The life expectancy for a man his age, he observed, wasn’t long. I was surprised that he was confiding in me and even more so by what he said next: that he doubted public education could be fixed in what was left of his lifetime. That one person could even think in these terms—of fixing education, rather than simply improving it or leaving one’s mark on it—reflected the scope of his ambitions. When most of us think about death, we worry about the winking out of our consciousness forever, about what, if anything, lies for us beyond this world; Bloomberg seemed more worried about what lay ahead for the world beyond Bloomberg, how we’d manage the problems of public education, health care, and gun control once he exited stage right.
They say of a great athlete that he is “playing a different game.” I’ve tried my best to contribute toward improving our city and I’d like to think I’ll leave my mark—but Bloomberg played a different game. He’ll go down in history not only as one of New York City’s greatest mayors, but one of our country’s greatest citizens.
The Education of Eva Moskowitz Page 24
