Success now serves fifteen thousand students, making us equal in size to the entire public school system of a small city like Springfield, Illinois, but that’s still less than 2 percent of New York City’s public school population. We need to reach more students. We also need to improve the quality of the education we provide. Consider what is possible. James Mill, a nineteenth-century Scottish philosopher, attempted to find out how much a child could learn by having his own son undergo a rigorous course of study from a young age. His son began studying Greek at three and, having read many of its leading works by the age of eight, turned to Latin and algebra and thereafter to history, literature, science, and economics. By the age of twelve, this boy had an education far superior to that of most Ivy League graduates today. That boy, John Stuart Mill, went on to become a noted philosopher and economist. Can children learn as much today? And if not, how much can they learn? I don’t know, but I do know that what we’re achieving at Success is far short of what is possible, and that people will someday look at the education we offer today much as we now look at travel by horse and buggy.
But to get there, we need to make tremendous investments. Some people think teaching young children is simple because it’s all “easy stuff,” but while the content itself may be easy, figuring out how best to teach it isn’t. When we think about teaching, we usually think about explaining. To teach a word, we explain its meaning; to teach a grammatical rule, we explain how it works. Children, however, have a tremendous capacity for intuitive learning. Eight-year-olds learn seven new words per day primarily just by hearing them used. Just by listening and reading, children learn complex rules of grammar they don’t even consciously understand. Our entire approach to teaching may therefore be wrong. At a minimum, a tremendous investment needs to be made in creating an ideal curriculum from kindergarten through twelfth grade. How big an investment? Well, it’s certainly more complicated than designing a new car and its costs around $6 billion. We’ve only scratched the surface of what is possible, which is why I find the work at Success so exciting and fulfilling.
This outcome was by no means inevitable. In 1991, I was miserable. I had no confidence in myself or any plan for my future. Perhaps I’d have been reasonably happy as a professor but it would not have given me the excitement and satisfaction I’ve experienced as a public servant and educator. Getting these opportunities wasn’t the result of brilliant planning. On the contrary, as writing this book has made me profoundly aware, I got lucky. I don’t mean that just in the philosophical sense of saying that everyone should appreciate and be grateful for the good things in their life. I mean it in the most literal sense: I, Eva Moskowitz, happened to get an astonishing number of lucky breaks in life, and I believe that anybody who gets as many lucky breaks as me should at least have the decency to own up to it.
To begin with, I’m lucky even to have been born. Had my mother not escaped the Holocaust, which took six million Jews, including my great-grandmother Raice Margulies, or had my mother died of typhus like many other passengers on the SS Navemar, I would not be here today.
I was lucky to have such wonderful parents who taught me to love learning, to work hard, to value family, and who gave me more than my share of chutzpah.
I was lucky that I saw an article about Gifford Miller running for the city council at just the moment when I had some time to volunteer on his campaign and that he turned out to be a candidate worth supporting. So much flowed from that one chance.
I was lucky that, although I lost my first election, my opponent soon resigned, giving me the perfect opportunity to win the seat. And I was lucky that Gifford then ran for speaker and won, which enabled me to become chair of the council’s Education Committee.
I was lucky the Times didn’t endorse me for borough president since losing that race led to my founding Success.
I was lucky that Joel Greenblatt and John Petry had a vision for a network of charter schools that would offer better opportunities for students across the city and that they gave me the opportunity to run them.
I was lucky to be given the chance to work with so many incredibly talented and idealistic educators, only a few of whom I can manage to mention in this book, but all of whom deserve credit for Success’s achievements.
I was lucky that families gave us the opportunity to educate their children and that they have fought so hard to protect our schools.
I was lucky that Michael Bloomberg was elected mayor and that he appointed Joel Klein as chancellor. Without their support, Success Academies would be only a shadow of what it is today.
I was lucky Ed Cox was bold enough to lead the charge in granting Success three more charters when we didn’t have any test results for our first school.
I was lucky that when we needed funding to grow, so many philanthropists gave generously including Daniel and Margaret Loeb, Julian Robertson, John Paulson, John Scully, Don Fisher, Eli Broad, the Walton family, and many others.
I was lucky that the editorial boards of the New York Daily News and the New York Post have been such unflagging advocates for charter schools and educational quality.
Most of all, I was lucky that I met Eric. He has been both the love of my life and my partner in much of what I’ve accomplished. Had he not seen my potential and encouraged me, I would never have entered politics, and nothing that you read in this book would have happened. While Eric has never wanted to share the limelight, the advice and assistance he has given me at every turn has been immeasurable.
And I am so grateful that I was able to conceive three healthy children when at one point it seemed doubtful that I’d bear even one. I’ll never forget the moment that I held Eric’s hand tight, mourning my lost child, only to see the faint glimmer of Culver’s heartbeat on the sonogram screen.
What’s next? Who knows. But one thing I’ve learned is that chance events largely determine your path. When Napoleon’s aides recommended that an officer be promoted to general, Napoleon would respond: “I just want to know one thing: is he lucky?”
Yes, I am.
45
EXTRA CREDIT
Well, dear reader, we’ve reached the end of the road; that’s my life story or at least as much of it as I’ve lived so far, but being an educator, I can’t resist giving you a chance to earn extra credit. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to open up your mind to new ideas about education.
Success requires the will to question one’s intuitions. To take an example from another field, India’s government buys billions of dollars of food to address the problem of stunted growth among its country’s children. Scientists, however, have observed something puzzling: stunting is common even in families that can afford ample food. The principal culprit, it turns out, is sanitation: infants are exposed to so much human waste that their bodies are constantly fighting disease which, by the age of two, results in irreversible stunting. The seemingly obvious explanation for stunting, that it was due to malnutrition, turned out to be wrong.
Human intuition isn’t always a good guide to reality. Who would think that gravity could bend light or that a man traveling in a rocket ship at nearly the speed of light could return to earth to find himself ten years younger than his twin? But, as Albert Einstein taught us, these things are true. It’s easy to laugh at the fact that people used to think the sun traveled around the earth or that you could cure people by bleeding them; what’s much harder is to recognize that many of the things you believe now will seem just as foolish to people in the future.
Henry Fielding once observed:
There are a set of religious, or rather moral writers, who teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery, in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.
This tendency to imagine that the world is the way we’d like it to be, to look at it with rose-colored glasses, is commonplace in education. For example, we often idealize children. As Freud o
bserved, human beings didn’t evolve to live in civilized society. Neither did they evolve to attend school. If you start with the idea that children will naturally behave the way you want them to, that it’s just like planting a seed and watching it grow, you will be disappointed and less successful at teaching them. You are more likely to succeed if you accept that schooling often requires getting children to act contrary to their natural inclinations.
Finding out what truly works in education takes real commitment, courage, and reflectiveness. You must be willing to reexamine your beliefs every day. Because we do this at Success, many people find it hard to pigeonhole us: we look like traditionalists if you focus on our approach to discipline, but like progressives if you focus on our approach to instruction. Which are we really? Neither, because what we do isn’t about who we are, but what the kids need.
I’ve tried throughout this book to give you a sense of Success’s educational philosophy and practices so I won’t repeat all of them here, but I will share with you a few overarching themes and ideas. If you want to see what these principles look like in practice, go visit our virtual schools on the Success Academy Web site. Also, take a look at our Education Institute Library, which is also on our website. It reflects the efforts of our chief academic officer, Michele Caracappa, and her team to share with educators around the country the best practices we’ve developed over the last decade.
Here are our core educational values and practices:
Education Is for Kids, but About the Adults. Schools often focus on the changes children need to make, but it’s the adults who must change first. If a principal goes into a classroom and sees that a couple of students in the back are fooling around and the teacher isn’t noticing, the solution isn’t to talk to the students, but to talk to the teacher about improving her classroom management. It is adult mastery of content and preparation, the caliber of adult questioning and facilitation, and the quality of the demands adults place on kids’ thinking that determine a school’s success. Many schools blame the students when they don’t learn but it’s the adults who are responsible for ensuring that students learn.
Content Matters. Curriculum in many schools has been dumbed down and is often incoherent. Worksheets involving repetitive low-level thinking abound. Schools need to invest heavily in selecting and designing high-quality content and curriculum. This means choosing excellent books but it also means investing in lesson planning. As Tony Lombardi said to my committee, “planning is the heartbeat of teaching.”
Management Is Key. Excellence and high academic results don’t just happen. You can’t simply let a thousand flowers bloom. Educational leaders must be intentional and deliberate. They must manage their educational communities.
Young Children Need to Be Molded. Some educators think that schools can just tap into a child’s natural curiosity and desire to learn. While schools should nurture those instincts, that alone isn’t sufficient. Most children aren’t naturally studious, so you need to use every tool in your chest to help them make the right choices and conduct themselves in a productive way. Developing children morally and intellectually must be an intentional process that the adults invest time and thought into; it takes enormous work and energy to help students become their best selves.
Suspensions Are a Useful Disciplinary Tool. A suspension is really just the equivalent of what at home is called a timeout. Being kept out of school for a day or two for breaking the rules communicates to a child that following the rules is a condition of being in school, a concept that both parents and students can readily understand. Suspensions also communicate to other members of the community that their safety is really valued and that our commitment to community values and norms is real.
Schools Need to Do a Better Job of Providing Students with a Safe and Productive Learning Environment. Most parents agree with this, which is one of the reasons we had 17,000 applicants apply for 3,000 spots at ours schools in 2017. While some parents complain when their own children are disciplined, these parents rarely remove their children from our school because it’s most important to them that their own children are safe and aren’t bullied or distracted from learning by other misbehaving children.
Children Need to Struggle. Many educators think their job is to cut up intellectual work into bite-size pieces. This approach minimizes intellectual challenge. Learning is like weight lifting: being pushed makes you stronger. In the words of our senior manager of chess, Sean O’Hanlon, it’s supposed to be hard.
School Should Also Be Joyful. Some people think that a strict school can’t be joyful. Nonsense. Just as in the real world, there is a time for work and a time for play. Not allowing kids to make wisecracks and fool around in the middle of math class doesn’t mean students shouldn’t have fun at school. It’s a question of time and place. At Success, we have faculty vs student dodgeball games, watch slapstick films, hold contests at which students throw pies at their principal, go to the circus, and bring in jugglers and magicians. We also have an extremely robust student electives program since we believe that schools should help students discover their passion for art, dance, sports, theater, computer coding, debate, and music.
Small Class Size Isn’t as Important as Many Educators Think. Everything else being equal, smaller class size is better, but everything else isn’t equal. Having small class sizes is very expensive. Cut class size in half and you need twice as many teachers, which means virtually doubling a school’s costs. That’s why private schools with small class sizes often have a tuition of $50,000. New York City’s district schools spend so much on teachers that they have little money left over for other things. They spend an average of less than 3 percent of their budget on the following: instructional supplies and equipment (1 percent), textbooks (0.6 percent), library books and librarians (0.5 percent), and computer support (0.5 percent). At Success every classroom has a SMART Board, a modern blackboard that is actually a gigantic touch-screen monitor; every teacher has a laptop, every conceivable classroom supply, and access to a catalog of lesson plans and videotaped lessons; and every student gets a laptop computer starting in fourth grade. We also pay our teachers more than the district schools do and give them far more professional development. We can do all this strictly on government funding that is less than the district schools by having larger class sizes.
Educators Should Be Promoted to Leadership Positions Based on Performance. While district school principals must have a minimum of seven years of teaching experience and a principal’s license, none of Success’s principals are licensed and few have this much teaching experience. Licensing is unnecessary because a school is in a better position than regulators to determine whether an educator is capable of becoming a principal. As for experience, the amount an educator needs before becoming a principal varies greatly: some require only a couple of years while others will never be ready to lead no matter how much experience they get. The key is investing in on-the-job training for principals to help them become great leaders and managers.
A School’s Teachers Need to Function as a Team. Some teachers who join Success disagree with our philosophy and start marching to the beat of their own drum. The problem with this is not that we are necessarily right and they are wrong; reasonable minds can differ about how best to educate kids. The problem is that a school’s educators need to function as a team, which means working from the same playbook. If a teacher can’t in good conscience do that, she should get a job at a school whose philosophy she does support.
The same is true of parents. Some parents don’t agree with our approach to education. That’s fine. Different families have different values and want different things for their children. Parents who don’t like Success should find a school they do like. For somebody to enroll their child at Success and insist we change our model is like a person walking into a pizzeria and demanding sushi. If you want sushi, go to a sushi restaurant!
Schools, however, have an obligation to be transparent with parents and teache
rs about their design, philosophy, and practices so that parents and teachers know what they are signing up for. When I speak at enrollment meetings for parents who are considering sending their children to Success, I’m very blunt with them about the features of our school they may not like. For example, a parent who feels strongly that elementary school children shouldn’t have homework won’t like our schools.
Teachers Should Have Lots of In-School Professional Development. Teachers at Success receive the equivalent of thirteen weeks of professional development per year compared to a few days in district schools. It’s how we ensure high-quality teaching. Off the shelf professional development rarely works because teachers need to learn the playbook for their own school. Schools are also better situated to develop effective training for their own teachers because they can see the results. A school that outsources its teacher training is like a coach who doesn’t run his own practices.
Principals Should Be Focusing Most of Their Efforts on Improving Teachers. Principals should regularly provide professional development, lead planning sessions, and make frequent brief classroom observations followed by immediate practical suggestions for improvement. For principals to focus on improving instruction, they need to be relieved of other responsibilities. At Success, we have business operations managers who manage many of the schools’ critical operations including arrival, lunch, dismissal, procurement, facilities maintenance, and form collection. We also have educational managers who help students get special education services and provide data and analyses for principals so they can make the key strategic decisions that will improve teacher practice and student outcomes.
The Education of Eva Moskowitz Page 35