At Success, we aim to give our kids just as good an education as they’d get at a private or suburban public school, but we can’t run our schools the same way. It’s harder to maintain order when you have thirty kids in a class rather than fifteen and when many of your students have experienced emotional trauma. Moreover, while students at private schools learn to strive from their hyperachieving parents, many of our students have to be pushed to reach their potential.
We are nothing like Taylor’s caricature of our schools. If we were, then parents wouldn’t send their kids to our schools, particularly in neighborhoods like Cobble Hill and the Upper West Side where there are decent alternatives—but our schools are more strict than most district schools and I believe that Taylor and her editors were hostile to our approach because they just didn’t understand the need for it given their backgrounds.
When Taylor was writing her first article on Success, I sensed that she didn’t know much about public schools compared to other reporters with whom I’d dealt, so I asked her to spend a day at one of the district schools with which we were co-located so she’d understand what happens when a school serving disadvantaged children doesn’t have high standards for student behavior and a rigorous approach to academics. Given that we’d acceded to Taylor’s request to spend four full days in our schools unescorted, I thought asking her to spend one day in a district school was quite reasonable but she refused to seek permission to do so, claiming that she already knew what she’d find.
According to Taylor, her piece on Charlotte raised the question “How much do parents know of what goes on in their children’s classrooms?” Of course, it was this attitude that led her to largely ignore what the parents she’d interviewed had told her. I thought, however, that her piece raised a different question: how a reporter with so little knowledge of urban public schools could be so confident that watching a seventy-second video and speaking to a few demonstrably unreliable former employees made her better qualified to know what Charlotte’s classroom was really like than the parents of Charlotte’s students who visited her class regularly, spoke with their children daily, and in most cases were actually far more knowledgeable than Taylor about public schools.
But frankly, I blame Taylor’s editors more than Taylor herself. Taylor is an intelligent, hardworking reporter but, as Carl Bernstein once observed, “Reporters need good editors” and “this collaboration is what anchors the credibility of the press.” Rather than guiding Taylor, however, her editors just egged her on. Jamieson publicly announced that “You can’t have a bad day like that with a first-grader—I don’t care,” which struck me as an awfully emotional and unsympathetic view of the challenge of teaching. He and Virshup also claimed that they knew from the “body language” of the students in the seventy-second video that Charlotte acted like this frequently, evincing a confidence in their powers of observation rivaling that of Sherlock Holmes. Virshup also claimed she’d given us “every opportunity to . . . understand what our story was going to say ahead of time,” which was patently false given how the Times had sandbagged us with Jill’s and Jane’s comments.
Unfortunately, the damage these stories did wasn’t just to my feelings (although, yes, it does hurt to know that hundreds of thousands of people have read that I run schools that engaged in “child abuse”), but more important to our ability to educate our kids. After Taylor’s stories came out, Andy Malone, now principal of our high school, emailed me about a teaching candidate who’d visited our school:
She said, “I’m so relieved coming here, I read the article and I thought it had to be inaccurate, but now that I’ve seen the school I know that everyone is so loving here, the kids are so happy.” Which was comforting but also infuriating. I’m just so angry for our kids and parents and faculty.
While candidates who visit our schools learn the truth about them, many potential applicants don’t bother to apply in the first place. Frankly, it amazed me we got any applicants at all after Taylor’s articles came out. If our schools were in fact anything like what she described, I wouldn’t want to teach in them, much less devote my every waking hour to them and let them educate my own children.
But I feel most sorry for Charlotte and Candido. When their friends, parents, prospective employers, or romantic interests Google their names, the first page of results will consist largely of articles that wrongly condemn them for a single failure. They are fundamentally good and talented people who have devoted their lives to education and have suffered enormously and unfairly. I hope that through this book, more people will understand the truth about Charlotte and Candido, two passionate and talented educators who became casualties of the education wars.
43
THE EDUCATION OF EVA MOSKOWITZ
2003–2005
I was hopeful my committee’s hearings would contribute to real changes in the teachers’ union contract, which had expired in May 2003 and was now being renegotiated. Throughout 2003 and 2004, the city held firm, refusing to sign a contract that preserved “lockstep pay, seniority and life tenure,” which, said Klein, were “handcuffs” that prevented him from properly managing the system. In June 2005, however, the UFT brought twenty thousand teachers to a rally at Madison Square Garden at which Weingarten demanded a new contract and Bloomberg’s prospective Democratic opponents in the upcoming mayoral election spoke. The message was obvious: sign a new contract or we’ll back your Democratic opponent. In October, the city capitulated, signing a new contract with none of the fundamental reforms sought by Klein.
This development accelerated a shift in my views on public education. I already supported charter schools, but I’d nonetheless held the conventional view that most public schools would and should be district run. I’d begun, however, to question that view. Every year, more children attended charter schools and you didn’t have to be Einstein to see that there would come a day when most did if this trend continued. Maybe, I thought, this wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Maybe a public school system consisting principally of charter schools would be an improvement.
This change of heart wasn’t sudden. I didn’t go to sleep one night believing in traditional public schools and wake up the next morning believing in charters. Rather, my views on school choice evolved gradually from profound skepticism, to open-mindedness, to cautious support, and were the product of decades of experience with the public schools as a student and then as an elected official.
At the very first school I attended, PS 36 in Harlem, I saw just how poorly some students were being educated. Through my work with Cambodian refugees in high school, I saw that good public education was largely reserved for those who could afford expensive housing. As a council member, I increasingly came to understand how the public school system’s design contributed to segregation and inequality.
While it won’t come as news to most readers of this book that schools in poor communities tend to be worse, understand that there is a difference between reading about this in the newspaper or a book and coming face-to-face with a mother who is desperate because she knows her son isn’t learning anything at the failing school he is attending. Understand that there is a difference between knowing in the abstract that there are schools at which only 5 percent of the children are reading proficiently and actually visiting such a school and seeing hundreds of children who are just as precious to their parents as mine are to me but who you know won’t have a fair chance in life because of the inadequate education they are receiving. Firsthand experiences like these cause you to reexamine your views carefully, to make absolutely certain they aren’t based on faulty assumptions or prejudices or wishful thinking.
As a council member, I’d also become increasingly aware of the school system’s dysfunction. In this book, I’ve recounted some of what I saw: textbooks that arrived halfway through the school year; construction mishaps; forcing prospective teachers to waste half a day getting fingerprinted. Know, however, that these are just a few select examples of a mountain of ev
idence that came to my attention from one hundred hearings, three hundred school visits, and thousands of parent complaints that came to me as chair of the Education Committee.
Moreover, even at their best, the district schools weren’t innovative or well run, a point made by the late Albert Shanker, who was head of the American Federation of Teachers:
[P]ublic education operates like a planned economy, a bureaucratic system in which everybody’s role is spelled out in advance and there are few incentives for innovation and productivity. It’s no surprise that our school system doesn’t improve; it more resembles the communist economy than our own market economy.
While I was already convinced that the district schools weren’t in good shape, preparing for the contract hearings was nonetheless an eye-opener for me. Interviewing principals, superintendents, and teachers helped me understand just how impossible it was for them to succeed given the labor contracts, and how job protections created a vicious cycle. Teachers felt they’d been dealt an impossible hand: their principal was incompetent or their students were already woefully behind or their textbooks hadn’t arrived or all of the above. They didn’t feel they should be held accountable for failing to do the impossible so they understandably wanted job protections. However, since these job protections made success even harder for principals to achieve who were already struggling with other aspects of the system’s dysfunctionality, they too wanted job protections. Nobody wanted to be held accountable in a dysfunctional system, but the system couldn’t be cured of its dysfunction until everyone was held accountable.
Some felt the problem was that the people entering the teaching profession tended to be weak, but I’d seen plenty of idealistic and intelligent teachers on my school visits. The system’s dysfunction, however, took its toll on them. Some became so dispirited they left the profession or went to a suburban school; others burned out and became mediocre clock punchers; some heroically soldiered on, but even they rarely became the teachers they could have been.
Others claimed the solution was to increase education funds and reduce class size. There are limits, however, to how much we can afford to spend on education, and it’s not clear it would make much of a difference anyway. Take PS 241, which is co-located with one of our schools. In the 2014–2015 school year, it had an average class size of just 12.7 students and spent $4,239,478 on one hundred kids,73 $42,394 per student, but only two of those students passed the reading test that year.
In order to have any chance of fixing this system, I came to believe, we needed to radically change the labor contracts, which in turn required having elected officials who were willing to disagree with the UFT and stand up for children. I hoped to advance that goal by showing that even if you were independent of the UFT, you could survive politically. Obviously, that plan failed and the result was the opposite of what I’d hoped. Elected officials were more afraid of the UFT than ever and would tell Chancellor Klein, “I ain’t gonna get Eva’d.”
And I wasn’t the only one the unions went after, as the Times reported:
After trying to press [Gifford] Miller to cancel the hearings, Randi Weingarten, president of the teachers’ union, attended the hearings with Brian M. McLaughlin, president of the New York City Central Labor Council, sending a message that the unions as a whole were displeased . . .
“The old sense of discipline is gone, much to our disappointment,” said a union official close to Ms. Weingarten. When she was stopped as she left City Hall last week and asked to discuss Mr. Miller, Ms. Weingarten frowned.
With Gifford now on the outs, he did terribly in his bid to become mayor and the UFT soon managed to restore the “old sense of discipline.” Describing my hearings as a “biased,” “McCarthy-like” “star chamber,” Weingarten and McLaughlin made clear that the council should never again hold such hearings. The message was received. Council Member Robert Jackson, who became the next chair of the Education Committee, agreed that the council “should[n’t] be diving into examining contracts.”
I was also deeply troubled by the city’s announcement in June 2005 that the number of students passing the state English test had increased by an astonishing 14 percent. I suspected the test had simply gotten easier because district schools throughout the state had achieved similar or even larger gains. My suspicions were confirmed by the results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a test that isn’t changed to ensure accurate year to year comparisons and which showed no increase whatsoever in the number of students testing “proficient” and a miniscule increase in the number of students achieving “basic” literacy.* Yet at hearings I held, DOE claimed that the increase on the state tests was “not the result of differences in how the tests are constructed” but rather was due solely to “students’ increased knowledge and skills.” Not only did this fail the straight-face test, it fundamentally undermined the administration’s case for reform. You can’t simultaneously claim that you are handcuffed by the labor contracts and that you’re hitting the ball out of the park. They are completely incompatible messages.
My point here isn’t to criticize Bloomberg. He was quite savvy and had the best of intentions, so I presume that if he felt he had no choice but to play up the test scores and sign a bad contract with the UFT to win reelection, he was right. However, if even somebody as powerful and committed as Bloomberg couldn’t make fundamental reforms, I didn’t see how anybody else could. One columnist had observed, “If not now, when? If not Bloomberg, who?”74 The answers to those questions, I reluctantly concluded, were “never” and “nobody.”
My pessimism about reforming the district schools led me to take increasingly seriously the argument that we’d be better off if public education was principally provided by charter schools that were freed from the labor contracts, politics, and the stifling bureaucracy that plagued the district schools. I also wasn’t persuaded by the arguments against charter schools: that they wouldn’t be “accountable” because they weren’t government run, which struck me as weak given the government’s abysmal record running district schools; and that parents couldn’t be trusted to choose schools wisely, which was contrary to my experience that parents were in fact critical educational consumers and sent their children to weak schools not because they were blind to the flaws of these schools but rather because they lacked better alternatives.
The most baffling argument of all was that a district school system ensured equality since everybody was educated in the same system. In reality, the district school system was rife with inequality. I came to understand that the people who believed this argument weren’t comparing charter schools to the public school system that actually existed but rather to their theoretical ideal. They imagined a system that was integrated and fair, in which every child got an adequate education, in which class size was small and every teacher was brilliant and nurturing. While it’s admirable to aspire to these things, children attend school in the real world, and it’s unwise to reject charter schools in favor of an ideal unless there’s good reason to believe that the ideal is truly achievable. I’d come to believe it wasn’t.
I didn’t come to this conclusion lightly. After all, not only had I attended district schools, so had my parents, my brother, every one of my relatives who’d been born in this country, and my son. My grandmother and husband had even taught in the district schools. It felt almost disloyal to consider an alternative. Thus, even after my contract hearings in 2003, I continued to make fixing the district schools my top priority. I sought to address problems at particular schools that were brought to my attention and held hearings on a myriad of topics including teacher training, school safety, and science instruction, while handling other noneducational issues that arose including a dispute that was brewing about a sidewalk café application for a restaurant named Le Bilboquet.
44
LUCKY
What will the future hold for me? Part of me would love to be mayor for the simple reason that I love my city. Walt Whitman sa
id, “There is no place like it, no place with an atom of its glory, pride, and exultancy. It lays its hand upon a man’s bowels; he grows drunk with ecstasy; he grows young and full of glory, he feels that he can never die.” John Lennon, who died a New Yorker, said he regretted not having been born one. Ed Koch, in his later years, said, “I wake up every morning and say to myself, ‘Well, I’m still in New York. Thank you, God.’”
I love New Yorkers’ “chutzpah,” a Yiddish word for an attitude that is a cocktail of gall, audacity, brazen nerve, effrontery, guts, and arrogance. It is epitomized by a line in the film Casablanca that was penned by New York screenwriters Julius and Philip Epstein. When the Nazis ask Rick how he’d feel if they invaded his home town, he replies: “Well, there are certain sections of New York, Major, that I wouldn’t advise you to try to invade.”
I also feel a debt to New York City because it provided a refuge for my family when they fled from the Nazis, pogroms, and poverty. If America is the land of opportunity, New York is the city of opportunity and I’d like to make sure it continues to be.
I’m no longer sure, however, that I can best serve my city by becoming mayor. Perhaps I can do more for it by continuing to open more schools and improving the quality of education Success provides. When we began Success in 2006, 7 percent of the public school students in District 5 Central Harlem attended charters. Now, a decade later, 50 percent do, and it’s having an enormous impact. In 2006, District 5 ranked 28th out of New York City’s thirty-one school districts based upon the percentage of its elementary students, both district and charter, passing the state exams. Today, District 5 ranks 14th. This same pattern can be found throughout the city. Of the eight districts in which the highest percentage of students attend charter schools, all but one increased in the rankings over the last ten years, jumping eight spots on average. By contrast, not one of the districts that had a below average percentage of students in charters increased in the rankings and most fell. By increasing the number of charter schools across the city, we can dramatically increase educational opportunity.
The Education of Eva Moskowitz Page 34
