We Continue to Underestimate Children

Eva Moskowitz was born in NYC and graduated from Stuyvesant High School. From 1999 to 2005 she served on the New York City council, chairing the education committee. And in 2006 she founded her first charter school, Harlem Success Academy. Today, the Success Academy network is the largest and best-performing public charter school network in New York City with 47 schools serving 17,000 students.

Host: Arthur Levitt

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is a closer look with Arthur Levitt. Arthur Levitt
is a former chairman of the u S Securities and
Exchange Commission, a Bloomberg LP board member, a senior advisor
to the Promontory Financial Group, and a policy adviser to
Goldman Sachs. This is a closer look at Eva Moscow
It's She was born in New York City graduated from

(00:21):
staves In High School. From nineteen nine nine to two
thousand and five, she served on the New York City Council,
chairing the Education Committee, and in two thousand and six
she founded her first charter school, Harlem Success Academy. Today,
the Success Academy Network is the largest and best performing

(00:45):
public charter school network in New York City, with forty
seven schools serving seventeen thousand students. She joins me now
for a closer look. You attended Stevenson, when of New
York's best public high schools. Was your experience a good one?

(01:06):
And does your desire to change our schools come from
that experience? Well, it was a good experience in some ways.
My father went to Stutson, my husband went to Stutson,
But my primary influence for the work that I do
now was really growing up in Harlem, going to district

(01:28):
side schools and seeing that when the schools are not
of tight quality, unless you have a parental backstop plans,
you can end up in some not very good places.
Public schools, you know, are supposed to be liberators, supporting

(01:53):
academic upward mobility and economic upward mobility, and unfortunately in
any neighborhoods, they have become discriminators. If you are assigned
to a failing school, your chances of getting out and
making it are very much diminished. And that in equity,

(02:16):
that lack of opportunity really led me to UH first
become an elected official and really work on the issue
of education and then start UH Success Academies. Tell us
about the beginning. You want to see it on the

(02:37):
New York City Council chairing the Education Committee. What happened
between this and founding your first charter school, Harlem Success Academy.
Sure well, I first sent close to seven years trying
to improve district schools and UH I served on the

(02:59):
city Council before mayoral controls, so there were still a
Board of Education with members on that board, and it
was really hard to improve I was very concerned about
art education and music education. I held hearings on procurement,

(03:20):
on science education, trying to make the New York City
District school system more responses to ordinary parents and teachers
and educators, and it was just really really challenging to
move the needle. So um I decided, rather than spending

(03:45):
all of my energy trying to fix a system that
was broken, what if by founding Success Academy, what if
I could get to educational nirvana for children? What if
I could make a better system of public education and
really reimagine of three great public education for kids. So

(04:11):
I started Harlem one in late August of two thousand six.
Today there are nearly fifty Success Academy schools CA or
twelve Educating Clothes. The seventh seen Sallies and Children. How
do you get your success? What is there about your

(04:33):
program that makes your students excel well? As you know,
education is complex and there are many factors, many ingredients
to great schools. But I would start with we have
created loving and nurturing school communities where every teacher knows

(04:58):
every child's name, And really our schools are educational communities
where there is a great deal of attention to the
joy of learning and engagement. I think somewhere along the
line educators forgot uh that we cannot treat children as

(05:19):
a captive audience. We have to treat children as if
they had a choice whether to be there or not.
And we've really got to look at schools from the
child's point of view. Is it interesting? Is it engaging?
Are we asking really good questions? Are we meeting them

(05:40):
where they're at? Struggling students might be at one place,
but students who are flying high might be at another place,
and schools have to meet all those children where they
are and move them north. I would also say of
our success is investment make in the adults, whether they

(06:03):
be teachers or assistant principles or principles. We have probably
the most robust training center and set of courses for
the professional development of educators. Even let me ask the
obvious question, why shouldn't we spend this energy and creativity

(06:26):
and money that's going into charter schools on fixing the
public schools instead. Well, we obviously should continue to try
and fix the district schools. We just have been doing
it for half a century and parents need immediate release.

(06:46):
If I'm the mother of three. My children are teenagers now,
but when they were little. If you have a five
year old, you can't wait a decade until the system improves.
You need a good kindergarten classroom right now. And so
what the charters do is provide excellence immediately, and that

(07:10):
is an important addition to the ecosystem that we can't
be against alternatives that are working right now, that are
free and excellent. Well, I've seen data that shows that
charter schools do not harm district schools. But is there
a case that you are diverting resources from public schools

(07:34):
and leaving them with the troubled students. Well, not only
are the charters not diverting resources, charters in New York City,
for example, get five thousand dollars less per child than
the distress So I believe in funding charity, so I
don't think it should be this way. But they're certainly
not harming the districts economically. They're actually providing needed release

(08:01):
at the moment. In terms of who they're serving, the
enrollment is by random lottery, and they are by and
large reflective of the communities in which they are located.
In terms of special needs children, in terms of homeless children,

(08:23):
in terms of economically disadvantaged children. It's not a perfect
apples to apples comparison because even within a district you
can have wide disparity in demographics, but they are by
and large reflective of the neighborhoods in which the schools
are located. Have you tried to work with the public

(08:46):
schools to share your best ideas? Can charter schools and
public schools work together? Yes? I do work with district schools,
both here in New York and all over the country.
Not only sharing for free are content and curriculum, but

(09:06):
we have something called the Successing Having me Ed Institute,
which is sort of a school for schoolers, and we
do training every year for teachers, for assistant principals, even
for superintendents. We also have something called the ED Partner
Chief Entity, which does tours and kind of pulled back

(09:30):
the curtains on what are some of the key elements
of a highly successful school. I know that Mayor Bloomberg
was supportive of the Harlem Success Academy. Is Mayor Doublasio
and Governor Cuomar. They equally supportive of what you're doing

(09:51):
well Mayor Bloomberg certainly was not just of the first school,
but of charters in general, and we certainly wouldn't at
nearly fifty schools without his deep commitments. The governor has
also been supportive of charters. Mayor did Lazio unfortunately not
so much. In fact, he's been quite hostile inten he

(10:19):
throughout three of our schools, and we had to really
fight back and ensure that success academy children and families
had access to building. He ultimately kind of abandoned his
kind of wacky scheme of hurting charter kids and families.

(10:41):
But it's been sort of posteen. It's really been this
piece resisted at every turn. He is very very closely
allied with the Teachers Union and they're not big fans
of charter. But also I think he has a worldview.
I don't think it's personal. I think he has a
world view that the only way to educate children is

(11:02):
through big government. And you know, that might have been
true in the nineteen seventies, but things have changed quite
a bit since that time. Public charter schools are one
of many reform strategies where you know, we over the

(11:23):
course of the thirteen year period have become the seventh
largest districts in the state of New York. You could
never do that in the district bureaucracy. It would just
take too long, too much money. You could maybe accomplish
that in a hundred year period, but charters are a

(11:44):
third way of doing things that immediately benefit children and
teaching and learning, and he's kind of threatened by that.
Do you think the current education secretary is effective? I'm
told you were disturbed when she admitted that she hadn't
visited any struggling schools during her whole tenure. I think

(12:09):
it has not been super effective. But you do have
to understand that education is a local and state matter.
The federal government has a limited impact. Obviously, they have
purse strings and can make certain investments, but most of
how you deliver the service is a local and state matter.

(12:33):
Some former teachers, even of yours, have complained that test
prep always comes first, narrowing the kind of work students do.
Is this just being practical? Test success is how we
get measured in life, like it or not. Well, we
have a very rich, broad curriculum that goes far beyond Frankly,

(12:57):
the New York State tests, which are not very vigorous
these days, so we expect our students to read poetry broadly,
and non fiction and science five these a week. Starting
in kindergartens, our students do about a hundred and thirty
five experiments every steady major scientific concepts. In middle school

(13:23):
they do four years of history World history, and fifth
two years of American history through World War two, and
then they spend a year on post nineteen American history,
reading primary source documents every single day. So our curriculum

(13:45):
is is quite broad. In high school, our kids take economics, statistics,
mechanical and electrical engineering. It's a broad liberal arts education
with a tremendous emphasis on science and math. Madic. Yes,
we do believe that kids should be prepared for the past,
but it's much much broader than that. There are complaints

(14:09):
that the atmosphere at the schools is too strict and unforgiving.
Now I've heard you say that it may feel restrained
or restrictive and go on to say, no one's going
to be checking and supporting you. Do you think you
expect too much or do the kids rise to the
bar that you set. I do believe that kids should

(14:33):
say please and thank you to the lunch ladies, and
should behaviorally respect one another. There shouldn't be fights in
schools or food fights in the cafeteria. We really believe
in protecting everyone's right to learn in the classroom. Look
are there, it's very recent that mayhem was acceptable for

(14:58):
most of Americans. Story and I say that as a
professional historian. The expectation was that classrooms were orderly and
there was a level of favility in the classroom. It's
only very recently where that becomes an outlier expectation, and
we have found that success that his right to the occasion.

(15:22):
Parents really appreciate the order and civility, and it it
sets the foundation for learning. Very hard to learn when
paper airplanes are going in every direction across the classroom.
Is that what's going on in most of the classrooms
in this part of the world. Well, many teachers in

(15:46):
the district system will tell you that it's extremely hard
to teach because there is so much chaos in the classroom,
and that mayhem is a real problem for educators. How
do you get around that, Well, we get around it
by really teaching our teachers how to do classroom management.

(16:09):
It is not the feeling but it is the floor
of teaching. You have to be able to manage the classroom.
And we have pretty big class sizes of certain two
in elementary, thirty four in middle and even thirty six
in high school, and so classroom management becomes just a
very important part of the job. But you can't expect

(16:32):
teachers to know how to do that. They have to
learn a system for doing it. And what it does
for teachers is it it frees them up to really
listen to kids and pay attention to the intellectual contributions
that students are making instead of playing wackable where they're

(16:54):
putting out behavioral fires all day long and not able
to really focus on the teaching and learning. And our
methodology at Success is quite student centers. And when you're
doing inquiry based learning, it's even more important than a
more traditional approach to pedagogy that the classroom is well managed,

(17:20):
because it's even harder with materials and materials management to
have chaos in the classroom when you want to have
student centers learning. I've read that your great test scores
helped you open more schools faster than any other charter
school leader in New York. Yet teaching to the test

(17:40):
is often criticized. You think we're coming to a day
when you won't have to be judged only on test scores.
We have a world class chess program. We have a
world class soccer program. We have about four thousand kids
playing soccer. We went to the international competition in Barcelona.
We have a first class debate program. You know, a

(18:04):
hundred percent of our kids were accepted to college and
off too really really great places. So I think this
notion that we are known for our test scores is
really not accurate anymore. But you know, at the beginning
that was the only sort of external validation of the

(18:26):
work we are doing. EVA Success Academy is a nonprofit
network that You've had some of the biggest names and
hedge funds behind you, Dan loebe Ken, Griffin, Paulson Singer.
Why did they get to be involved and why did
they want to be involved? Well, I think the hedge

(18:46):
fund sector in general disrupted a certain kind of status quo.
But I also think that these are individuals who believe
deeply in opportunity, at the value of education, and the
injustice of poor kids being trapped by schools that are

(19:08):
supposed to be serving them, and so it's just a
personal commitment to opportunity that really motivates some of these
influential people. What do you know about building and expanding
your charter network that you wish you had known when

(19:28):
you started. Well, I've learned a lot by trial and error.
I didn't initially think, for example, that I was going
to have to write our own curriculum in math and
science and literacy and history. I thought that you could
purchase those things. And you know, while there are publishing

(19:52):
companies that make millions of dollars, I didn't find it frankly,
rigorous enough or engaging enough for our kids, and so
I wish I had known that at the beginning, because
I kept trying these various curriculum to make the thing work.

(20:15):
I didn't understand when I started how important the teacher
and educator training was going to be and been quite
challenging to acquire the resources. It's sort of like you're
running schools, but then you're also running a school of education,
and that's a difficult. So I wish I had known that.

(20:38):
I read that one of the secrets of your success
is what you teach. For example, tell us about your
own English language arts curriculum. I think literacy, how is
that unique? Well, we believe in a poem a day.
Our kids are exposed to poet tree in kindergarten. We

(21:02):
think that it is really powerful to teach close reading
and interpretation. Our kids also white poems. We believe that
the sort of short you know packs a punch as
the brief genre, and kids can learn an awful lot
by reading and writing poetry. We also believe in a

(21:25):
project based learning, which is interdisciplinary explorations of certain topics
that we do a unit, for example, of second grade
on the Brooklyn Bridge, which ranges from the engineering of
building the bridge to the social history of the time period.

(21:47):
All of our kids ca three four to three units
of project based learning every single year. We also believe
in the richness of the pop We're big believers that
these kinds of questions that educators asked really determine the

(22:07):
quality of the learning. And if you ask the low
level question, you're going to get a low level answer.
And so we spend a lot of time and energy
creating rich writing tasks, and we find that that alone
improves the quality of the writing. I've read about the

(22:28):
high quality of the literature the students are expected to read.
How do you choose the books that are assigned to students?
This is a topic of much debate here at Success.
We spend a lot of time and energy curating those lists,
and we read voluminously children's literature. I have a team

(22:52):
of people here. I used to do it myself. Now
I have a team of people where we look at
all the Newberry Awards, for example, and we read that
literature and we asked ourselves what is the most high
quality books, including illustrations, that we can put in front
of our kids. And we also asked ourselves what are

(23:14):
they interested in and what do we think is going
to engage our sus Obviously, as the kids ascend the grades,
you know, canonical literature that has stood the teest of time.
You know, our kids are doing a series in high
school on the American Dreams, reading classics like as a

(23:37):
Great Dad, see the Scarlet Letter, Depth of Assails. And
we signed as many great books as we can, and
I think that our students find the literature curriculum really engaging.
Former New York City Council member, founder and CEO of

(24:01):
Success Academy charter schools, the largest and best performing public
charter school network in New York City. If you'd like
to hear more of her story, she recently published a memoir,
The Education of Eva Moskowitz, about how she became a

(24:23):
forward thinking education entrepreneur. Eva Moscowitz, thanks for joining us.
By the way, if you have comments about the show
or suggestions for topics, please email me at a Closer
Look at Bloomberg dot net. That's a closer look one

(24:43):
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at Arthur Levitt one word. This is a closer Look
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