What bothered me most was Taylor’s unwillingness to put this incident in context. For seven months, we’d been getting reports that she was calling former employees to investigate the claims the unions had long made that we “counseled out” students. After all that digging, she’d come up with one case where, literally, our least experienced principal—he’d been on the job exactly twenty days—had made a mistake, had been reprimanded for it within three days, and had thereafter made sincere efforts to mend his ways. And moreover, those reprimands had been delivered not as a PR response to a press report, but ten months before Taylor had called us. To me, this proved that counseling out kids wasn’t our policy. According to Taylor, however, Candido’s list was proof that our “accomplishments are due, in part, to a practice of weeding out weak or difficult students.”
Let’s examine that claim. Our Fort Greene school didn’t have students in testing grades that year, but our nearby school in Bed-Stuy did and 99 percent of its third-graders, 75 out of 76 students, got a 4 on the state math test. In District 14, where that school is located, 9 percent of students got 4s. If the difference in our scores was due to the fact that we simply counseled out weaker students and kept the strong test takers, then in order to admit 75 strong test takers, we’d have to admit 833 students in total (since 9 percent of 833 is 75) and then counsel out 758 of them. If we were counseling out even a fraction of that number of students, our attrition rates would be dramatically higher than those of district schools, but they are actually lower. And yes, we explained all this to Taylor and, yes, she ignored it.
In 2016, WNYC public radio did what Taylor should have. It set out “to get beyond anecdotal reports” and look at the data on “whether, on the aggregate, tough discipline and even suspensions at charters would correlate with parents choosing to pull their kids out of these schools.”67 In particular, they “took a close look at Success Academy, which has been in the news lately.”68 (No kidding.) Their team included veteran education reporter Beth Fertig and “data gurus John Keefe, and Jenny Ye” who liked to “look at numbers dispassionately.”69 Just prying loose the data from DOE took a year. When they completed their analysis, they made public both their results and, unlike Merrow, the underlying data. They found no link between attrition and charter schools’ tougher discipline policies. In fact, at Candido’s school, attrition was 21 percent lower than the schools in the surrounding district. Network-wide, our attrition rate was 43 percent lower.
Yet, despite the Times’s purported concern about our attrition, it neither reported on this analysis nor did its own. Rather, as Alexander Russo of the Washington Monthly observed, WNYC’s analysis “was largely ignored” because it “contradict[ed] the dominant narrative about charter schools.” WNYC’s solid and dispassionate work went unrecognized while Taylor’s misleading and sensationalist reporting ricocheted across the Internet. Sadly, there seems to be little correlation between the quality of a journalist’s work and the platform they’re given.
And alas, Kate Taylor wasn’t done with us yet.
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HOW MUCH DO PARENTS KNOW OF WHAT GOES ON IN THEIR CHILDREN’S CLASSROOMS?
2016
On January 11, 2016, Taylor showed us a cell phone video which, unbeknownst to us, an assistant teacher had taken a year earlier. It showed one of our teachers ripping up a student’s paper and saying to her angrily “You’re confusing everybody. I’m very upset and very disappointed.” We immediately suspended this teacher, Charlotte Dial, and interviewed her colleagues, her students, and their parents to find out if she’d acted similarly on other occasions. We found she was universally regarded as a capable and loving, albeit demanding, teacher who did not ordinarily act as she had on this video. Moreover, she acknowledged her behavior had been inappropriate and told us she’d apologized to her class at the time. By interviewing the student who’d been reprimanded and her mother, we learned that the student didn’t recall the incident and hadn’t mentioned it to her mother at the time. While that doesn’t excuse Charlotte’s conduct, I was nonetheless glad to learn this student hadn’t been traumatized by this incident.
We decided not to terminate Charlotte but rather to suspend her and retrain her on interacting with students positively and respectfully.
As for Taylor, we suggested she interview the parents of Charlotte’s students to put this incident in context. Here are excerpts from that interview:
PARENT: [Ms. Dial] was very nurturing . . . we absolutely loved her.
PARENT: Very supportive, motivating, encouraging. I was overjoyed this year when I found out my son also had her.
PARENT: My child knew she loved him.
PARENT: I’ve been [a teacher] for twenty-five years so I’ve been in dozens, if not hundreds, of schools. No other school [has] as much warmth and nurturing as there is here.
PARENT: This is just an unfortunate minute and a half out of an otherwise amazing experience.
KATE TAYLOR: And have you or any of you ever seen anything like that?
PARENTS: No.
KATE TAYLOR: And how often are you in your child’s classroom?
PARENT: Every day.
PARENT: [Ms. Dial] is in the job she belongs in. She loves it and she loves children.
PARENT: I drove her a bunch of times back and forth to the Bronx for our soccer games, and she’s so devoted to closing the achievement gap. It’s just what her life is. She’s been doing it for seven years.
PARENT: Those seventy seconds could have been handled better, but that is not who she is, and that definitely is not who we are as a community and as a school.
PARENT: We can’t judge her or the whole school based on that. If you walk into any classroom now you’ll see a very loving and caring environment.
PARENT: This is an amazing school, and you hear that from 999 out of 1,000 families here. Was that one teacher over the line for sixty seconds? Yeah. Do I want that teacher removed? Not at all.
PARENT: We are not going to send our kids to a school where they’re being emotionally abused. Parents are very aware of whether our kids are happy or not in school and a lot of us spend a lot of time in school. I am also a former education reporter.
PARENT: It seems like there’s a whole lot of good stories here and they don’t seem to make their way into the Times.
TAYLOR: Talking to all of you is exactly to get this context. . . . [I] certainly recognize the fact that you are all here, and some of you have come from other schools and are extremely happy here, that’s obviously very significant. It says a lot. And I recognize that.
PARENT: And that will actually be printed? I mean, it’s a side that you’re going to share?
TAYLOR: I’m not talking to you so that I can not use it.
In fact, this was exactly what Taylor was doing. In the lengthy article she soon wrote, Taylor didn’t quote a single positive parent comment. Instead, she briefly quoted one parent saying that he’d be troubled “if you tell me that happens every single day,” but that “everyone is telling me about all the amazing things that she does all the other days.” It sounded like this parent, unlike the others, wasn’t sure how Charlotte ordinarily behaved (“if you tell me . . .”) and that he was relying on others, presumably Success itself, to tell him what was really going on (“everyone is telling me . . .”). Taylor didn’t mention that the other parents were confident they knew what was happening in Charlotte’s classroom because they visited it regularly and spoke to their children often, or that many were sophisticated educational consumers including a former education reporter, a teacher, and parents who’d taken their kids out of other schools. Nor did Taylor mention any of the comments about Charlotte being loving, nurturing, encouraging, and supportive.
But much more important, Taylor falsely claimed that Success encouraged teachers to act the way Charlotte had in the video, relying on a couple of former teachers whose demonstrably inaccurate claims she failed to fact-check. I’m going to use pseudonyms for these teachers be
cause I’m sympathetic to the difficulty they had in viewing the circumstances of their departure objectively. One, whom I’ll call Jane, claimed we’d encouraged her to “belittle” children and had resigned because she “no longer wanted to be part of an organization where adults could so easily demean children.” That, however, was flatly contrary to what she’d told the press when she’d resigned several years earlier. Then, she’d said she “still believe[d] in charters like Harlem Success because I’ve seen firsthand the amazing things they are doing for children,” that she’d resigned because it “wasn’t a sustainable life,” that resigning had been “one of the hardest choices I’ve ever had to make” and that it had made her “feel, on a personal level, like a failure.”70 Jane had then become the media’s “poster girl for charter school burnout”71 and two Times articles had reported she’d resigned because she’d “burned out.”72 Incredibly, however, not only did Taylor report Jane’s new story, which was flatly contrary to Jane’s prior one, Taylor didn’t even inform her readers about the inconsistency.
As for Jane’s claim that we’d encouraged her to belittle children, precisely the opposite was true. In 2009, for example, one of our principals wrote to Jane that he’d felt she “needed to recognize [student] progress more” and, when she’d made progress, wrote that he was “happy to see how positive and reinforcing you are with your scholars.” A year later, however, a student complained to me about Jane, as I wrote to her principal:
[The student said] kids feel Jane is mean. Being strict and mean are different. Important that we watch for tone and positivity and nurturance. [I] know [you are] working on [it].
However, despite the principal’s efforts to help Jane, I got complaints from parents that Jane was “too strict” and had to meet with them about this, which was quite unusual.
Another source of Taylor’s was an assistant teacher I’ll call Jill who said she’d “resigned . . . because she was so uncomfortable with the school’s approach,” which was like “witnessing child abuse.” Again, this was demonstrably untrue. Jill’s principal, a wonderful woman who’d been my own daughter’s third-grade teacher, had seen problems with Jill’s performance including “yelling at scholars,” “raising [her] voice” when “frustrated,” and “texting on phone while crossing the street with class,” a serious safety issue. Jill responded that she didn’t like “being judged in a negative way,” “found it very difficult to sit through sessions of feedback,” was unhappy that she was “not on the right path to becoming an LT [lead teacher],” and was upset because teaching was “the first thing I haven’t been good at.” She soon quit. In the email she sent explaining her decision, she didn’t say one word about disagreeing with our educational approach, much less “witnessing child abuse.” To the contrary, she said that her “heart was . . . invested” in “this job,” but that she’d been “criticized . . . to a point where I knew I could no longer make it work here.”
Again, I’m not faulting either Jill or Jane. It’s often hard for people to see painful things objectively. It was Taylor’s responsibility, however, to fact-check her sources. Rather than do so, she deliberately sandbagged us. She never told us what Jane was claiming so we couldn’t respond to it by suggesting, for example, that Taylor check her own paper’s news clippings. As for Jill, Taylor didn’t tell us about her claims until 6:14 p.m. the night before her story appeared. We immediately protested to Taylor that she was “ambushing” us with “serious allegations” to which “we can’t possibly respond this quickly,” particularly since I’d never even heard of this employee, but Taylor denied our request that we be given time to look into Jill’s claims. Like a detective who is so convinced a suspect is guilty that he fabricates evidence, Taylor didn’t want to learn anything that might undermine the credibility of the sources who supported her version of the truth.
Taylor wrote many articles in addition to those I’ve described here. Incredibly, while she was the Times’s principal education reporter, 34 percent of the total words she wrote on education over the course of a year—sixteen articles in total and four of her seven longest ones—were devoted to negative coverage of Success and me personally. None of her other articles involved serious investigative reporting and several were puff pieces. She wrote approvingly, for example, of PS 191, a district school where only 12 percent of the students passed the state test in English and 11 percent in math. Taylor suggested, however, that the true measure of PS 191 was DOE’s survey of the school’s parents: “94 percent described themselves as either satisfied or highly satisfied with their child’s education.” Curiously, although DOE administered this same anonymous survey to parents at charter schools, Taylor didn’t report on these results for Charlotte’s school. They showed not only that 98 percent of our parents were satisfied but that 82 percent were highly satisfied (compared with only 42 percent of PS 191’s parents) and that not one single parent in our entire school selected “teaching” as something that needed improvement.
As for the pesky little fact that PS 191 wasn’t teaching its students to read, there was a simple explanation: “73% of students attending PS 191 qualified for free or reduced-price lunch” and “what the tests are really measuring . . . is the privilege of the children and the parents’ educational level.” In other words, parents who aren’t well educated shouldn’t expect their children to be taught to read well enough to pass the state English test. (Of course, we manage to do so with students who are poorer on average than those at PS 191—but silly me, I forgot that we fake our scores by secretly beaming 90 percent of our kids to the planet Krypton.)
Taylor also reported approvingly of DOE’s intention to start “a gifted and talented program” at PS 191 to “attract wealthy parents to a mostly poor, nonwhite school,” without noting that having separate classes for wealthy white students isn’t the most authentic and beneficial form of integration. Nor did she include a single negative statement by an anonymous source or disgruntled former employee, although she found column space to note that PS 191’s “parents and teachers described the atmosphere as friendly and collaborative.”
While Taylor spent all of her time investigating Success, she ignored instances in which the district schools had knowingly tolerated far worse conduct than that in which Charlotte had engaged including:
A teacher at PS 194, who’d been reprimanded three times for corporal punishment but kept his job for years until he was finally arrested for throwing a seven-year-old special needs student across the hallway.
A teacher at PS 101 who wasn’t fired despite the demand of parents and eleven complaints of verbal abuse and corporal punishment, six of which were substantiated.
A teacher at MS 172 who wasn’t fired despite parent protests and the fact that he’d been caught “showing pornography to a fourteen-year-old student, buying him expensive gifts, sending him 513 text messages, and letting the student drive his car.”
From the outset, it was obvious that the Times was taking a very different approach to reporting on Success than other schools. Taylor’s first article on us asked parents of current and former Success students to contact the Times, a request the Times rarely makes. Their next article, which linked to this request, was listed on the Times’ Internet home page for six months although the Times ordinarily rotates out its education articles every three days so new ones can be listed. The following article that Taylor wrote contained yet another request that parents contact the Times. While all of this was going on, we got reports for months on end that Taylor was doing endless investigative work such as calling through lists of former teachers.
I’m not saying that Success should be immune from scrutiny, but if a newspaper as powerful as the Times assigns a reporter to spend a year digging up every negative thing it can find about a school and encourages her to report what she finds as negatively as possible, the result is inevitably misleading. Readers naturally will think that there are a disproportionate number of problems at that school rather than a disp
roportionate amount of resources being spent on finding problems with that school.
Now I’m going to share with you some facts about Taylor and her editors that I fear may come across as an ad hominem attack but I hope you’ll ultimately conclude isn’t. Taylor graduated from a private school that offered sailing and golf and whose reputation, according to a book she edited, was that “every girl had a ‘Saab, a shrink, and an eating disorder.’” Similarly, Taylor’s immediate editor, Amy Virshup, graduated from a wealthy suburban school that had skiing, golf, and sailing teams and where less than 5 percent of the students qualify for free or reduced-priced lunch and only 7 percent are students of color. Finally, Virshup’s boss, Wendell Jamieson, attended a private school where tuition currently runs $40,000 annually, although he ultimately graduated from a selective public high school.
There’s nothing wrong with going to schools like these. Indeed, I sent my eldest son to a private high school. Neither is it surprising that the Times would tend to hire graduates of these schools since they are usually quite capable and well educated. However, when an institution is filled with reporters who have so little experience with the type of schools 99 percent of Americans attend, it can create a blind spot.
The Education of Eva Moskowitz Page 33