The Education of Eva Moskowitz

by Eva Moskowitz

  2014

  In 2005, Weingarten had started the UFT charter school to use “real, quantifiable student achievement” to disprove the “misguided and simplistic notion that the union contract is an impediment to success.”51 The UFT school, she’d said, would be the “perfect environment for the UFT to demonstrate that its educational priorities work.”52 Since the UFT and I had started charter schools at around the same time and with markedly different views on education, it was not lost on anyone that the fates of our respective schools could have a broader meaning. Indeed, one justification for charter schools is permitting educators to experiment with different approaches so you can see what works. Now, nearly a decade later, the results were in.

  At the nine Success schools with students old enough to take the state tests in 2014, 94 percent of the students passed the math test. Our schools outperformed not only New York City (35 percent) and New York state (36 percent) but also the city’s most affluent school district, District 2 (66 percent), and one of the state’s most affluent suburbs, Scarsdale (68 percent). Of the state’s top ten schools in math, four were Success schools. In science, all of our students—every student at every school—passed the exam. Ninety-nine percent got the top score of 4.

  In English, 64 percent of our students passed, outperforming New York City (29 percent), New York state (31 percent), and the city’s most affluent school district, District 2 (56 percent). The passage rate for our English language learners was eight times that of the city’s district schools (41 percent versus 3 percent) and was also higher than even the non-English-language learners in these schools.

  At Success Academy Bronx 2, located in the poorest congressional district in the state, 99 percent of our students passed the state math test. Out of New York state’s 3,528 schools, Bronx 2’s poor children of color bested nearly every other school in the state—including schools in wealthy suburbs and gifted and talented schools that selected their students. First place went to Success Academy Upper West, where 100 percent of our students scored proficient. At Bed-Stuy 1, where 95 percent of the students were minority, 81 percent scored proficient in English and 98 percent in math, with 80 percent receiving a 4. At Harlem Central, which de Blasio had sought to close, 96 percent of our students scored proficient in math.

  Some people try to explain away our results by saying that we serve fewer poor and special needs kids than the nearby district schools. Consider Bronx 2. Eighty-eight percent of our students there were Title I (meaning poor); at the district school in the same building, PS 55, 96 percent were Title I (8 percent more). Fourteen percent of our students had learning disabilities; at PS 55, 15 percent did (1 percent more). But while the differences between our students and PS 55’s were miniscule, the differences in results were huge: ninety-nine percent of our students were proficient in math compared to 15 percent at PS 55; 70 percent of our students were proficient in English compared to 7 percent at PS 55. Clearly, an 8 percent difference in poverty and a 1 percent difference in special needs doesn’t explain an 84 percent difference in math proficiency and a 63 percent difference in English proficiency.

  And by the way, even our Title 1 students were 97 percent proficient in math and 77 percent proficient in English. Our special needs students? One hundred percent of them were proficient in math. They beat their classmates. Go figure.

  As for the UFT’s schools, 2 percent of its eighth-graders passed in math (compared with 97 percent of Success’s eighth-graders) and 11 percent passed in English (compared with 94 percent at Success). Soon after getting these results, the UFT announced that it was closing its elementary and middle schools.

  I give Weingarten credit for putting her educational theories to the test but, when those theories failed, she sought to distance herself from her experiment. She claimed through a spokesperson that her “involvement with the school[] had ended years ago . . . shortly after she resigned as [the UFT’s] president in 2009” to become president of the national teachers’ union.53 In fact, she chaired the school’s board until at least September 30, 2010,54 a school year in which only 13 percent of the school’s eighth-graders scored proficient in math and only 22 percent in English.55 Thus, the school was already sinking by the time she abandoned ship. Ironically, when I’d founded Success, she had demanded to know whether, if I failed, I’d “blame others . . . [o]r . . . take responsibility for what goes wrong?”56 Yet, not only did she fail to take responsibility, she refused to reconsider the theory that her experiment was designed to test that the UFT contract wasn’t “an impediment to success.”

  Other members of the UFT’s board were Zakiyah Ansari, the spokesperson for AQE, one of the UFT front groups, and ACORN founder Bertha Lewis, who had criticized “privatization of public education”57 but for some reason considered the UFT’s charter school exempt from this charge. Since 2010, the UFT Charter School had been run by Shelia Evans-Tranumn, the SED regulator who’d killed our developmental kindergarten program. Under her leadership, the school’s performance went from bad to worse. Incredibly, the school even failed to comply with the regulatory requirements that Ms. Evans-Tranumn had enforced in her prior career, including performing criminal background checks on staff, having a Finance Committee, and complying with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and Open Meetings Law. While it may seem mean-spirited to make this observation, I do so to underscore a point. While regulations are crucial in ensuring that schools don’t discriminate, abuse students, or cheat on tests, giving regulators the power to dictate a school’s instructional approach—its curriculum, its selection of teachers, its policies for disciplining students—simply transfers authority away from the people on the ground, who are in the best position to make these decisions, and are responsible for the school’s results, to distant bureaucrats who have neither any proven competence in running schools nor any accountability for the results of their decisions.

  Comparing our results and those of the UFT’s school illustrates an important point about standardized tests. Suppose such tests didn’t exist and you, a reader of this book, were trying to evaluate my claim that Success’s schools are better than the UFT’s school. I could wax on eloquently about how all of our children are critical thinkers and creative problem solvers, are self-confident and self-actualized, write like F. Scott Fitzgerald and dance like Fred Astaire, and have wonderful portfolios of their work that I so wish I could append to this book so you could see them for yourselves, but alas that’s impossible (although perhaps I could include a couple of “representative” essays). The problem is that the UFT’s principal could make the same claims. How would you know who was telling the truth? You’d have to visit these schools and carefully compare student work at each school for children of the same age across multiple grades and multiple subjects. This just isn’t practical for you, or for parents, voters, or even superintendents of school districts. That is one of the reasons standardized tests are so important. Even if they don’t give you the whole picture, they are a practical and objective way to tell more or less how much a student is learning or how well a school is doing. The fact that 97 percent of our eighth-graders passed the math test, compared to 2 percent of the eighth-graders at the UFT charter school, may not tell you everything you’d like to know about these schools but it tells you something.

  Given our strong results, we applied in 2014 to open fourteen more charters, an unprecedented number, and were approved to do so, which led to an amusing Daily News editorial titled “Bill, Hug Eva” which encouraged de Blasio to work with me. Alas, I received no hugs, but de Blasio did exhibit a wariness toward me like that of a dog toward a porcupine it has once attempted to bite. As for the Gyurko coalition, while the administration had courted them like Casanova, once the battle with me was over, the administration’s ardor quickly cooled as Capital New York reported:

  Some [coalition members] said they came to believe that the mayor simply does not like charter schools. . . . [T]he soured relationship with City Hall
ultimately made the charter sector more homogenous in many of its policy goals and in its frustration with de Blasio . . .

  “If their goal was to unite the sector, mission accomplished,” said one coalition member who asked not to be identified. “Eva Moskowitz and I are saying the same thing now.”

  40

  EVA MOSKOWITZ IS GOING TO SAY SOMETHING TOMORROW

  2015

  A school should prepare children to be productive members of society but it should also help them appreciate the life of the mind and enjoy culture and art for its own sake. Knowing how important travel had been for me, I decided we should take some of our students on a trip to Greece and Turkey. Among those selected was Sydney McLeod, but I feared her health would prevent her from going. Her doctors discovered that, in addition to sickle cell anemia, she suffered from CVID, an immune system deficiency that can result in chronic infections. Just a few months before this trip, Sydney was admitted to the hospital with a bone infection. The doctors gave her a blood transfusion and performed surgery that required drilling into her bones. When she was released from the hospital, she needed a wheelchair, so we arranged for a daily car service so she could continue her studies.

  Gradually, however, her health improved, and by the summer of 2015, she was well enough to travel. She wrote of this trip:

  In Athens, we explored the Acropolis and the ancient agora of Athens, and walked where some of our greatest ancestors—Socrates, Plato, Pericles, and Euripides among them—had gone before us. Some of the stone slabs beneath our feet were the very ones that these “greats” of western civilization walked on. The Greek Parthenon stuck with us the most—what an incredible sight. We were able to see how massive and beautiful the structure was from the great white columns to the wonderful inscriptions. And have we mentioned the sacred precinct of Delphi and the eternal city of Ephesus? These sites helped us look at Greece’s history and made it come alive!

  As I read this, I thought of the bicycling trips Eric and I had taken on which we’d seen these very same sights. I was so happy that Sydney and her classmates were also being given the opportunity to experience them.

  Fortunately, our board members have helped expose our students to many cultural and professional opportunities. Daniel Loeb has brought Garry Kasparov, Salman Rushdie, and George Stephanopoulos to visit our schools. Tali Farhadian Weinstein, a former federal prosecutor, took our students to federal court where they met with prosecutors and a judge. In the fall of 2015, we were able to open up a pre-K program because we’d gotten the legislature to authorize charter schools to run pre-K. Given the demise of our DK program, I was glad we’d finally be able to serve younger children, but then de Blasio found a way to prevent us. The law specifically stated that “all . . . monitoring, programmatic review, and operational requirements . . . shall be the responsibility of” our authorizer, meaning SUNY. This meant the city couldn’t regulate our program, which was critical since de Blasio had never met a regulation he didn’t like. The city insisted, however, that we sign a contract that dictated every aspect of our program down to the minute and, when we refused, wouldn’t pay us, so we had to cancel our program. We sued and on June 8, 2017, five appellate judges ruled unanimously in our favor reasoning that “all” actually does mean “all.” As I write this, however, the city has refused to say whether it will actually comply with the court’s ruling.

  While I kept my focus on schooling, the press was increasingly viewing me as a potential mayoral candidate due to my high-profile battle with de Blasio. My detractors claimed that my every action was in service of a Machiavellian plot to become mayor. It simply wasn’t true but this perception was undermining my credibility as a charter school advocate. I therefore figured I should decide whether I really wanted to run for mayor in the next election cycle and, if not, take myself out of the running.

  The circumstances for running were propitious. De Blasio had antagonized many New Yorkers by making some impolitic remarks concerning the police; traveling to Iowa to engage in national politics rather than focusing on his job; arriving late at events, including a memorial for victims of a plane crash; and, of course, trying to evict our schools. Moreover, as the Times observed, I was “uniquely capable of reassembling the political coalition that coalesced behind Michael R. Bloomberg” and “a natural choice for a hodgepodge of communities frustrated by Mr. de Blasio, including white voters in Manhattan who have soured on the mayor, business leaders who have long viewed Mr. de Blasio with hostility and a diverse set of charter-school parents across the city.”

  I believed I could do a good job of managing the city, particularly with the experience I’d gotten running Success. I was also troubled by de Blasio’s leadership. While his commitment to progressive politics was no doubt sincere, it often expressed itself in class-warfare rhetoric that was imprudent and dangerous. While the issue of income inequality is a serious one, it must be approached delicately in an age when hedge fund managers can work from anywhere in the world with an Internet connection. Scare away the rich and you’ll kill the goose that laid the golden egg. In addition, so much of de Blasio’s outlook seemed driven by this oppositional view of politics: rather than promote “A Vision of One City,” he attacked “A Tale of Two Cities”; rather than articulating his own vision of education, he attacked Bloomberg’s. Finally, he had an ends-justify-the-means attitude toward ethics that I’d seen at work on the council and that manifested itself in several scandals in his administration.

  I was sorely tempted to take on de Blasio, and many people were encouraging me to do so and offering financial support. I was reluctant, however, to abandon Success. Not only were we changing the lives of ten thousand children directly, we were increasingly having a broader impact both by sharing our best practices with other schools and advocating for charter schools and reform. In theory, I’d have even more power to do good as mayor, but in practice the unions and the political establishment would likely fight me tooth and nail on the changes I’d want to make. I decided not to run.

  Now, I had a practical problem. I wanted to announce my decision but to do so in person because I knew there would be a lot of speculation about my motives and I wanted to answer reporters’ questions directly. I needed to set up a press conference but I didn’t want to reveal in advance what I’d be announcing or the journalists would publish stories before I had a chance to explain myself. Therefore, on October 7, I announced that the following day I was going to hold a press conference regarding my “political plans.” To my amazement, my email provoked a firestorm of speculation. I was intentionally “build[ing] suspense,” one reporter tweeted.58 Another claimed the whole thing was a hoax. A third was so impatient that he published an article with the bizarre headline “Eva Moskowitz Is Going to Say Something Tomorrow.”59

  De Blasio tried to diminish attendance at my announcement by offering reporters “a rare off-topic question and answer session” at his own competing press conference.60 It didn’t work. Dozens of reporters showed up to my press conference and, after a brief statement, I answered every question they had. I think that in the end, even those reporters who didn’t agree with my views at least respected me for believing in something and were disappointed they’d be deprived of a ringside seat at the de Blasio–Moskowitz title challenge.

  One of my motives for my announcement was to diminish the press’s interest in me and Success so I could focus on schooling. Rather than escaping the limelight, however, we got more coverage over the next sixth months than ever before—none of it good.

  41

  THE DOMINANT NARRATIVE ABOUT CHARTER SCHOOLS

  2015–2016

  In nearly two decades in the spotlight, I’ve had considerable dealings with the press, and by and large they do their job well. In the field of education, there is particularly good work being done by reporters who have decided to devote their career to writing about education. Many of these journalists don’t work for major papers but rather focus on publishing maga
zine articles or books or write online either on their own blogs or for sites such as Chalkbeat and the Hechinger Report. While there is also some good work done in major newspapers, they sometimes assign relatively junior reporters a tour of duty on the education beat before promoting them to cover matters considered more important. That practice produces decidedly mixed results, particularly if the reporter in question doesn’t have any prior experience in the field of education.

  Good journalism is absolutely critical, and that is why our country has generous legal protections for the press. Even when journalists are flat-out wrong and their errors cause real damage, they usually can’t be held liable unless they had “reckless disregard for the truth.” This is how it should be, but some journalists abuse this privilege. The next two chapters are about journalists whose bias led them to get things wrong with very serious consequences for Success, our wrongly impugned educators, and the charter school movement.

  In September 2015, I learned that a public television correspondent by the name of John Merrow was going to let a former Success student’s mother (whom I’ll call Jane Doe) talk about our treatment of her son on the air but not let us respond:

  John,

  [I’m told] you intend to allow Jane Doe to speak about our treatment of her son but refuse to allow us to tell our side of the story. That is unfair.

  Eva

  Dear Eva,

  Our story is . . . not about Jane and her son. We would not air unsubstantiated accusations . . .

  John

  John,

  I don’t understand. If Jane and her son are not part of the story, why is she going to be on the air? If she is making accusations about the treatment of her son, we’d like to know what they are and respond.