NYC's Charter School Smackdown: Who's the Real Panderer?

In an editorial which appeared in the New York Daily News on May 17th, the 59th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Ed, educator and charter schools advocate Eva Moskowitz asked the following question of Public Advocate, former City Council member and mayoral hopeful Bill de Blasio:

We're glad Bill de Blasio recognizes the great work of our schools, teachers and students, so it begs the question why he repeatedly vows to stop us from serving these very children if he becomes mayor," Moskowitz told the Daily News Tuesday. "New York's schoolchildren need a leader, not a panderer.

First: He didn't, actually. De Blasio praised individual students in those schools, not the schools themselves.

Second: Dr. Moskowitz's use of "begs the question" is erroneous. Small point. Anyone can make a mistake while fast-talking.

Third: The longer answer must begin with the recognition that the question of whether to support the charter schools movement in New York City is a complex one. It can be extraordinarily difficult to know exactly who the villains and heroes are in this conflict. There are many grey areas and the ground keeps shifting. On one hand, we have the desire for all children to receive the education they deserve; on the other, we hold out hope that the New York City public school system might function in a manner that is both effective and just.

It is easy to see how people who actually care about children can be seduced by the great white hope of corporate funding for private schools, but this solution increases the racism quotient in the already profoundly corrupt NYC DOE (New York City Department of Education) and it is in the best interest of New Yorkers to challenge it. I have praised the work of Eva Moskowitz in the past, but when trying to understand what's wrong--and right--with New York City public schools one travels steep and often labryinthine learning curve. The system and the issues change. The more I learn about the great white hope of "privatization," the more alarmed I become.

It's creepy and offensive to observe how Moskowitz operates in the midst of this conflict as, in an effort to defend against the accusation that her charter school initiatives are intrinsically racist, she trots out a cadre of black and Latino parents every time the NY1 (local television news) truck rolls up. This presentation is a public relations version of "Some of my best friends are..." The fact that some parents of black and Latino children rendered desperate by a racist, ineffectual and dumbed-down school system might be persuaded to laud charter schools in a sound-bite does not mean that the Eva Moskowitz solution is a just one.

During academic year 2011-2013 I worked as a volunteer in a struggling school housed in John Jay Complex in Brooklyn, one of the gargantuan buildings in which one of the city's "separate but equal" schools (as I have come to think of them) Millennium Brooklyn, was "colocated" ("Colocation" is DOEspeak for the act of plopping an unwelcome corporate-funded "public" school in a building wherein other schools already operate). The small, so-called "selective" high school was not a charter school but had received "articulation" funding--support for which only new schools are eligible.

With the advent of the shiny new school had been promised major improvements for the three other (all struggling) schools in the building. It never quite came off.

Amid much criticism, Millennium Brooklyn, which is 36% white, 19% Asian, 26% Latino and 22% black, made sure to admit enough students of color to stave off the sticking of "Apartheid High," a nickname that had threatened to adhere, as it..."articulated."

The shiny new school soon had an extensive after school program, makes use of the pool and has pristine classrooms with state of the art equipment, and the classroom in which I worked in that same building had an excellent, engaging, well prepared teacher, and not enough copies of Othello for the 50% of students, almost all black, who showed up for first period Senior English.

I was struck each time I departed the building, going from the mayhem and din of the "black kids" school to the educational oasis consecrated to the great white hope school. To say it was like "night and day" is as much an understatement as it is a cliché. Every time I passed the new "selective" school's well-appointed lounge with carpets and non-municipal-looking furnishings, I was appalled to find it empty. I noted that every teacher I spied through classroom door windows looked like a white sorority sister. I puzzled over the the "selective" school's apparent preference for white teachers. Separate but Equal in living color. Or not.

Unlike so many founders of DOE NYC separate but equal programs, Eva Moskowitz is not black student averse, and at first, I very much admired this in her at first. I give Moskowitz props for making her bones in Harlem. Moskowitz is smart enough to know that there is nothing wrong with the minds of students like those I saw struggling, last spring, to get through Othello. Moskowitz understands that the majority of such students are victims of cumulative educational malpractice, and of social promotion which results in the pushing of them through a system more dedicated to graduating them fraudulently than to educating. In my own brief incarnation as a public school English teacher, I saw, up close, how the sausage got made and found myself disgusted by this on a daily basis.

Institutional racism is the biggest problem facing the New York public schools.

The second largest problem is that too many of our teachers and principals are not smart enough. I know several extraordinarily intelligent public school teachers, people with powerful minds who became teachers because they were attracted to what can be a very exciting career, but unfortunately these appear to be the exception; they should be rule.

For those who believe, as I do, that the crisis in the public school system is due in part to its failure to attract and retain intellectually gifted pedagogues Eva Moskowitz can seem like a breath of fresh air. She is well educated--an intellectual of sorts. She attended two top-tier universities and has a doctorate in history. I do not doubt that she is an fine thinker and a talented educator. In a system dominated by graduates of quasi-academic teacher education progams, Moskowitz is a rarity.

But privatization of public schools is not the answer.

Many of the charter schools require parents to be heavily involved in their children's schools. Certainly this is optimal. I personally took immense pleasure in being involved in my childrens' schools, but not all children enjoy this luxury. The charter school movement discriminates, and harshly so, against children whose parents are not able, for whatever reasons, to be involved in their children's scholastic lives, despite that these are, more often than not, the ones who most need excellent schools.

Homeless families, families without computer access, very young parents, and non-English speaking parents are unlikely to even know about lotteries for the schools Eva Markowitz opens. Furthermore, children who are poor, challenged by learning disability, and already struggling, often wind up expelled from these programs when they fail to "succeed." Jettisoned from these dream schools, they land back in the very schools the charter school movement is currently engaged in savaging.

A civilized public education system must take seriously its obligation to educate all of its children, especially those who are struggling. It is naive and ethically improper to ignore the facet that every time a charter school opens, some weak school in its district, or even in its own building, takes a hit, yet privatization of schools is predicated on exactly that. The cost of a "separate but equal" solution will, down the line, be dear, a boost for the corrections industry (and it IS an industry) but not for much else.

New York City once had excellent public schools in which poor people could receive quality education. Feminism changed things. Something happened, fifty or sixty years ago, to the public school workforce, something from which the system never fully recovered. Fifty years ago an intelligent woman interested in medicine often defaulted to a career in nursing. A woman with a knack for reading, writing, philosophy, research and advocacy often became a school teacher instead of a lawyer. The system bled out, in a sense, and teaching wound up dumbed down.

Eva Moskowitz's "separate but equal" approach is attractive because we yearn for educators as intelligent as Moskowitz is. We want (and I would argue need) pedagogues with minds as strong as hers making policy and running schools. Intelligent people, however, make stupid mistakes.

I believe the dumbing down of teachers and the troubling alliance between (often costly and not generally rigorous) teacher education programs has thrust a plethora of mediocre and terrible teachers into the void feminism created. I think it is this trend which helped to render our school system a godawful swirling maelstrom of bloat, ineptitude and waste. One of the reasons that there are "50,000 students on waiting lists for charter schools" as Eva Moskowitz says, is that the system is in crisis. We need a better system. The system needs a better brain trust, not separate but equal, not more charter schools creating the need for more charter schools.

Moskowitz is right about one thing: "New York's schoolchildren need a leader, not a panderer." Those who would sell New York City's public school students to the highest corporate bidder while ramping up the already disgraceful quotient of institutional racism in the New York City public school system are just that, panderers.

Follow Michele Somerville on Twitter: www.twitter.com/NYpoet

Beware the Beast of Standardized Testing Frenzy

In September of 1988, I got a long-term substitute job teaching eighth grade English in a weak public middle school in a poor part of Brooklyn (New York City). I started in September, on the fifth or sixth day of school, in a position from which four substitute teachers had already fled, in horror, apparently, each after a day of teaching.  Most of my students, ages 14 and 15, were reading on about a fifth grade reading level. None could write a cohesive, grammatically correct paragraph. Few could discern between a sentence and a sentence fragment. Going was hard and slow, but after two weeks or so I managed to get most of them on the line. What this means in practical terms is that after two weeks half were handing in homework (up from zero %), they were reading short passages and had learned to produce mostly thoughtful and reasonably error-free three and four-sentence reflections on short texts they had read.

I was ready to start reeling them in when two things happened at once; I ordered copies of Autobiography of Malcolm X for my classes -- and the principal began to require me to postpone normal instruction in order to do standardized test prep every day.

I failed to fully grasp, at the time, that the test for which the students were supposed to prepare was one on which none of them were capable of faring well.  The test was for entrance into NYC specialized schools; I suspect not a child in that school was anywhere near being able to test into (the well-reputed) Bronx Science High School. For the first few days, I just did the test prep. I was new. I was on probation. I had no leverage. What choice did I have?

The materials themselves were godawful. There were spelling and grammar mistakes, erroneous definitions in vocabulary sections, and reading comprehension questions that made no sense. After three sessions of test prep, my students reverted to their former disinterested, class-disrupting selves. They started to see me, the teacher who had toughed out those two weeks and come through the other side, as the principal's tool. I quickly realized they were right. I was.

This principal had been commending me in the extreme for the progress my students had made in just a few weeks. So impressed by my students progress was she that the principal had already paraded district supervisors (unannounced) into my classroom on three occasions in order to demonstrating her own ability to turn a school around. For this reason, I expected an exchange between educators might take place when I went to talk with her about the matter of test prep lessons. There was no conversation. I didn't even sit down. "You'll teach test prep every day until the students take the test."

When the messenger came to the door each morning with the day's stack of booklets enough for four sections. I'd direct him to the tower of booklets by the window. He'd leave the books. It became routine, and the tower quickly became an outward sign of my refusal to obey my principal. Three feet of paper accumulated. (This in a school in which students were prohibited from taking books out of the building. My own class didn't even have a full set of textbooks students could use in class.) The students cracked wise about the stack as it grew and some started to come around.

During prep periods, I'd go through the booklets and scoop up vocabulary words. Those I would teach in a fast-paced, military-style drill (which the student) for five or ten minutes at the end of each reading writing lesson. This was effective. Students learned a lot of vocabulary fast and liked it.

But the prep periods started to disappear. Instead of coverages (wherein one substitutes for an absent teacher and can either use the time to teach -- which I usually did -- or to catch up on paperwork) the principal assigned me to fill out high school application forms in a file room. Although I thought this a poor use of the the time of an English teacher with four years of full-time elementary and secondary school classroom experience, two years of college teaching experience, many publications and a Masters degree; I welcomed the punishment, at first, because it allowed me access to my students permanent record cards. It was in the course of this busy work that I learned that every one of my eighth grade students had been left back at least once. In some cases, children had repeated two grades.

After a week or so the principal summoned me to discuss my stack of booklets by the window. I told her I'd get rid of the booklets but that I wouldn't do test prep every day. She informed me she'd would give me a "U" (for an "unsatisfactory" rating) if I failed to do the test prep, reminding me that a teacher with a provisional license (which I had) would have great difficulty securing a permanent position in what was then called the Board of Education.

That famous e.e. cummings line -- "there is some shit I will not eat" -- sounded in my head, all morning two days later, the day I quit.

I thought of these students yesterday as I watched Michael Bloomberg and New York City Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott take credit, in a televised press conference, for very slight improvements city students' performing on standardized tests. They have little to be proud of. Given the energy and emphasis Bloomberg et al invested in his strategy for educational reform, and given the amount of legitimate instruction he very likely sacrificed at the altar of the great white hope of standardized testing, those test scores should have been much, much higher!

When a teacher teaches to the test, he or she fails to teach what is not on the test. As most classroom teachers know, preparing students for standardized test is usually a lot easier than teaching students to think, do math, read intelligently and write. The frenzy for "teaching to the test" is already creating safe havens for pedagogical mediocrity, and is already offering uninspired, uninspiring teachers and administrators an easier way to nail down tenure and ride out teaching until pension time is nigh.

I am not anti-testing. I have helped my own children to prepare for standardized tests. I help other people's children prepare for standardized tests. Sometimes I am paid for this. Drilling children on math facts, teaching vocabulary, reading comprehension practice -- they are all good for learning. But a strong and appropriate curriculum at any level calls for a balance among introduction of new material, reinforcement and assessment. The more inventively conceived and imaginatively delivered lessons are, the more successful the learning at hand is likely to be. Test prep frenzy siphons imagination and inventiveness out of good teaching.

Ironically, it is not even classroom experience that yielded the minor improvements of which Bloomberg is inexplicable proud. It is more likely test scores crept up a bit as a result of Bloomberg's successful attempts at increasing institutional racism in the schools. Parents of children in under-supported, struggling schools don't hire after-school tutors as (mostly) white middle-class parents in stronger schools do. If anyone deserves credit for boosting New York City students' scores on standardized tests, it's those private tutors!

Black and brown students were not part of Bloomberg's standardized test success story. They didn't fare any better on these tests. Their scores went down. No surprise there. Privatization pay-offs go mostly to white middle-class schools. The mayor's pet barons don't want to pump money into so-called "failing" ("failing" being code for "black and brown") schools. Black and brown children whose parents can't secure charter placements are all-out casualties of Bloomberg's reforms.

I have been saying for years that the English Language Arts city-wide tests are not good tests. If we all learned anything from the inane pineapple question on this year's eighth-grade English Language Arts test, we learned that more intelligence needs to be brought to bear in the designing of these tests upon which so very much is predicated.

Students do not enjoy test prep, and while some boredom builds learning stamina, the tedium of mediocrity is very different from the tedium of rigor. Standardized test prep frenzy disseminates harmful levels of dumbed-down thinking throughout schools.

My two teenagers are studying on college campuses for a few weeks this summer. One called me at the start of the second day, earlier this week. She was extraordinarily excited. I expected to hear her wax prosaic about the food in the cafeteria, the beautiful campus, her roommate in the dorm, the freedom -- but the very first thing she said was: "Guess what Mom, I'm reading Aristotle!"

Most students, even underprepared ones, even the victims of systematic educational malpractice, crave rigor.

In 1988, when I began to prepare my students to read Autobiography of Malcolm X, I was shocked to discover that not one of my students had ever read a full-length work outside of school. Reading books was something other people, smart people did. The anticipation -- the knowledge that they would soon read a 300-page book that might not een bore them -- created a certain fervor, a light. Which standardized test frenzy quickly extinguished.

Even very young children should be required to endure worthy tedium but the story of the pineapple is neither Autobiography of Malcolm X, nor Aristotle's Poetics, and students know it.

Ask any NYC DOE student in grades 4 through 12; they'll tell you they feel like pawns in the game of politics that has spawned and now feeds the beast of standardized testing frenzy. Recently a large group of students at the public school some regard as the best school in New York City were found to have cheated on Regents exams. Students in the better NYC DOE schools generally get very high grades on these tests without any preparation, and most students at Stuyvesant, where the cheating scandal occurred, get perfect or near-perfect scores on these tests. Yet these highly intelligent, well-prepared students cheated.

I think we see in this a symptom of the pernicious and widespread malaise created by standardized testing frenzy, whereby it becomes everything. If we keep feeding the standardized testing beast, it will eventually gobble up genuine learning at every level. The system will wind up dumbed-down. Cheating will become a norm.

Especially highly intelligent students know that when their teachers begins handing out the preparation booklets for the upcoming standardized test, some more valuable lesson is, by necessity, being foreclosed upon.

When students are enraged by this, their anger is justifiable, because they know some educrat "suit," or perhaps their mayor, whose child had access to the finest schools, is "working" them.
Cheating, really.

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Politics and Education: Not So Strange Bedfellows

I wrote a "thank you" note to an eighth grade teacher on the morning of the last day of school this week. The teacher's a bit of a wise-ass; he cracks a lot of jokes, most of them, I gather, funny. Is he everyone's idea of an excellent teacher? It's hard to say. But he's smart, funny, actually teaches students to write five-paragraph essays on Humanities topics, and when my own child was finding herself lost (in a large, "gifted and talented" school which overall disappointed, in ways that could have been avoided) this highly intelligent teacher noticed and cared.

High intelligence and caring may sound like minimum basic requirements for teachers, but in even the best New York City schools, these qualities are all too scarce.

My children recoil in horror when I tell them I used to assign the occasional D+ or B++ to students on essays. Why not give the C- or the A-, they asked? More than not I rounded up.

But when my daughter presented me with her final middle-school report card, she found the grade the aforementioned teacher (whom I thanked) assigned a bit low. I thought it was a perfect grade. The teacher knew my girl was uncommonly able -- and I know she'd been dining out on aptitude for way to long. I was glad to see the teacher assign a grade designed to send a message -- a grade which is code for "We both know you could have gotten an A+ if you had tried even just a little." He cared.
A guy who lives a few blocks away from me pretty much won a congressional seat last night in New York local primary elections in Brooklyn, New York. He trounced his opponent, a pol I've been disliking from afar for years. I was not able to vote for my candidate of choice in this race, earlier this week because I live outside of his district, but I voted for Hakeem Jeffries once, several years ago when I lived where I could and I confess I did so with a mist in my eyes.

When Michael Bloomberg appointed Cathie Black two years ago, Jeffries, a black man educated in public secondary schools and undergraduate college, who went on to study become a Juris Doctor after studying at Georgetown and New York University, protested. Jeffries threw down with the teachers' union and opposed Bloomberg appointment of Black on the grounds that she was not an educator. I disagreed.

I liked the Cathie Black appointment, at first. I liked that Cathie Black was an outsider. I still think the Cathie Black appointment was a good one insofar as it shined a harsh light on what the work cut out for us was, vis á vis making the public schools work. The Cathy Black blunder led us to see that the schools were so deeply damaged by cronyism, racism, bureaucracy, anti-intellectualism and the malaise of mediocrity run amok that those in charge (the mayor et al) saw no other way out -- but to sell the soul of the schools to the devil of corporate interests under the pretext of (a misnomer if ever I heard one) "choice."

I liked that Cathie Black appointment didn't have an education degree. As an educator who sends two of my three children to public schools, I believe that the way teachers are trained and certified is the second-worst problem facing the schools, the first being the systematic institutional racism that permeates and compromises it at almost every turn. I viewed Cathie Black's lack of education credentials as a plus.

That was two years ago.

My thinking on the Bloomberg plan to "improve" schools has shifted. Thinking evolves. If it stays where it starts, it's not thinking.

I was standing on a corner a few nights talking with a fellow mom I've gotten to know through our work with under-educated students in under-served public schools. She articulated a question that's been rattling 'round my head for years; "Do the schools need 'reform'? Or to have the whole thing pulled up from the roots?" A couple of nights earlier, I'd enjoyed another conversation on the matter of education with a man who has worked the NYC DOE (and before that the NYC Board of Education) for many years. For the first time ever, I heard someone from inside the DOE worry aloud and fervently about how "choice" is ramping up institutional racism in the schools. He and I didn't agree on everything educational, but I think we agreed that we cared about the problem of educational reformers and complacent lifers not caring.

The truth is that educational partisanship is counterproductive. When it comes to education, imaginative solutions are the only way to go. One of Bloomberg's biggest mistakes is that he threw money at problems when he should have been throwing intelligence at them. Hakeem Jeffries, for whom I cannot currently vote, is a proponent of charter schools at present. This disappoints me. But people who care, self-correct.

The more I look at the charter school movement, the more I see wrong with it. On the other hand I was desperate enough to put my own child in a lottery for a charter school last fall, as a "just in case" measure. My own house isn't entirely clean on the charter issue; no one's house is. That might be the point. We all long to cut corners where the well-being of children is concerned.
The deeper I go in my investigation of schools, the more I realize that the politics and art of education are not like anything else, because children are the beneficiaries and the unwitting benefactors of "the system." People of principle go the extra distance for children. People of principle should cross lines they wouldn't otherwise cross in order to do right by children. Education is mysterious, like art, and political, too; so the bedfellows are often strange.

One constant is that all roads of "educational malpractice" always lead back to a lack of genuine concern for all of the children in the system.

The corporations that will only fund new schools sufficiently enrolled with white students, the educrat principal who's more interested in pension or building tenure than in students, the dumbed-down teacher education programs that certify teachers -- all have in common their lack of concern for students.

Much of my thinking about public education was shaped by working (for a brief time) in Board of Education schools in Brooklyn in the 1980's. Once I left off teaching children and began to teach young adults in New York City's public college system, I saw all too well what passes for readiness in graduates of city high schools (at least in areas of reading and writing).

In academic year 1985 -1986, I taught (honors and general) English at what was, at the time, one of the best high schools in the NYC system. Early on in the course of the school year, I realized that the students in my general English classes were, for the most part, no less intelligent than those in my honors sections. They were just less prepared, more forgotten and blacker.

I had over 1,500 students in the 15 years I worked as classroom teacher, but the minute I saw his name on campaign literature, I remembered all sorts of things about my former student, Hakeem Jeffries. I remembered him as a reserved and dignified guy with small handwriting and was one of the few in about a hundred who came up with something when I asked students to write a parody of a Renaissance poem at he end of the school year. The elephant in the room of my remembering, however, was that Hakeem was one of the few black students in an almost entirely white honors program. (Children in honors classes were admitted by a screening process, whereas the others were enrolled by zone.) I remembered wondering how that was was for 16 year-old Brooklyn kid, how it must have been a thing to finesse. I used to come home to my new husband in those days waxing prosaic about being torn -- by the ecstasy of having such strong students, and the agony of working in what I sometimes called a "segregated" school.

Even if I hadn't experienced that thrill of pulling the lever for a kid to whom I'd taught Farewell to Arms and All Quiet on the Western Front, I'd be watching Jeffries now, because he's a politician to watch. I venture this variation on a political cliché as I note that, at 15, Hakeem struck me as a mensch.
As I folded laundry and watched the primary election results come in early this week on NY's local Channel 1 on the eve of the last day of (NYCDOE) school, I found myself reflecting on my first year as a teacher with a NYC Board of Ed file number. I had about 125 students, five sections, and taught three different classes. I marked 110 compositions every weekend. I was a 26 year old pedagogical hot mess, no doubt. But students like Hakeem received regular quizzes on reading, learned a little grammar, wrote 20 formal essays in a year with lots of drafts, got pages of editorial feedback on writing, kept journals, read a few major literary works, learned some rhetoric and logic for writers, and how to make an argument with a pen.

I bumped into one of Hakeem's classmates, an attorney, on the street several years ago. She claimed that what she'd learned in our studies at Midwood helped her write for law school. It was a thrilling moment for many reasons, not the least of which was that one of my kids, then quite young, turned to me after, and said "So you really were a teacher! But I didn't do nearly enough for the 125 plus students I had at that school. The classes were way too large. The paperwork was way too voluminous, and the clerical tasks often compromised instruction.

The one time I voted for Hakeem, I got a little misty I pulling the lever. When it comes to former students, I'm a sap, but there there was more it than sentiment. As I left the Brooklyn Museum, where I had voted, I met Hakeem's mom. I introduced myself, and shook her hand. I was the mom of three young children at the time who understood, as a mother, why she was so proud. But I was proud too. Why?

I think of it as pride plus admiration divided by hope. I was moved by what Hakeem has made of an imperfect public education. Maybe it was myself of whom I was proud, because I know that when the future congressman sat in (roughly) the middle row attending a lesson on Erich Maria Remarque's World War I masterpiece that taught the world what war in the modern age truly was, Hakeem had a teacher who did one thing right; she cared.

Follow Michele Somerville on Twitter: www.twitter.com/NYpoet      

Dear Readers,

I'm glad to be back (after a taking time to work on my education memoir) blogging about education, and  thrilled, as well, to be teaching a bit for the first time in a too long!

Currently, I am writing about the city-wide testing in New York and about some of my experience working as a tutor. Some of these opinions and reflections will soon find its way into both my book and this site.

I hope, also to continue reposting pieces on Huffington Post.

A technological glitch has forced me to change the web address, so please note: The site is still called Bored-O-Ed but the address is as follows:

www.bored-o-education.com 

Thanks for reading.
Michele Somerville

Read these essays on Huffington Post: 

Separate but Nowhere Near Equal in Brooklyn

Fast one At Apartheid High 

"$10 Million for Children Left Behind by 'No Child Left Behind' "

"The New NYC Schools Chancellor Learned All He Needs to Know (to Fix the Schools) in Kindergarten"

"When 'Failing' Schools Close and Whiter Brighter Schools Open

"Why 8,000 Eighth-Grade NYC Students Don't Have High School Placements Yet"