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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781594030581 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Encounter Books |
| Publication date: | 12/15/2004 |
| Pages: | 237 |
| Product dimensions: | 7.26(w) x 8.96(h) x (d) |
Read an Excerpt
breaking free
Public School Lessons and the Imperative of School ChoiceBy Sol Stern
ENCOUNTER BOOKS
Copyright © 2003 Sol SternAll right reserved.
ISBN: 1893554074
Chapter One
P.S. 87: The Dream School of the Upper West Side
When my firstborn son was accepted at P.S. 87, also known as the William Tecumseh Sherman School, my wife and I felt as if we had secured his educational future. After all, P.S. 87 had just been written up by Parents magazine as one of the country's ten best elementary schools, public or private. Two New York Times profiles puffed it as one of the rare public schools that white middle-class parents still clamored to get their children into. But it was actually the real estate section of the Times that offered the best testimonial to the school's allure. Ads for apartments for sale or rent on the Upper West Side often carried the line: "P.S. 87 catchment area."
P.S. 87 was considered the Holy Grail of urban public education because it was providing quality instruction to a racially and economically mixed student body. During the time my two children were in attendance, it maintained about a 40 percent minority enrollment. My sons had many black and Hispanic friends, some of whose parents had immigrated to this country from Ethiopia, Ghana, Colombia and the Dominican Republic. The parents of their classmates were, variously, high-powered lawyers, well-known writers and college professors, custodians, factory workers, even welfare mothers. The school's progressive "child-centered" philosophy was supposed to serve all students, not merely the elite.
Even if my wife and I had been able to afford private school tuition, we would probably not have considered that option for our sons. The public schools had worked well for both of us. More importantly, we believed in their historic role of forging a common democratic and civic culture out of the nation's diversity. P.S. 87 seemed the perfect vehicle for accomplishing that goal.
P.S. 87 had languished through the 1970s, when middle-class parents shunned the school. As in any other enterprise, new leadership is almost always needed to revive schools that have fallen on bad times. In the case of P.S. 87 the rescuer who appeared on the scene was a middle-aged woman given to wearing long, flowing black dresses. Her name was Naomi Hill, and she soon became one of the legends of the New York City school system. At the time Mrs. Hill was appointed principal, enrollment at P.S. 87 had dropped from a high of 850 to a skeletal 350. The school was in disarray; Hill's predecessor had pitted parents and teachers against each other, and the children were out of control, straggling into the building late and sometimes maliciously setting off fire alarms. Music and art instruction had virtually disappeared, as had after-school programs.
Hill insisted that she had no master plan when she took on what looked to be a daunting task. "I never studied this stuff," she once told me. "I just made it up as I went along." In fact, she could have written the book on turning around a failing city school. The key to reviving P.S. 87 was to lure back the middle-class parents. Recruiting at neighborhood fairs and nursery schools, Hill turned out to be a superb salesperson. She sometimes brought along a poster board that said: "Have you considered the public school alternative?" To skeptical parents she offered this challenge: Take a chance on my school, and you can be partners in rebuilding it.
Hill was also not above offering extra inducements. One mother recalled how Hill made her pitch to a group of parents at a nursery school located on the Columbia University campus: "It never would have occurred to me to send my child to a school thirty blocks downtown. But she provided us with a sense of discovery. She really seemed to know early childhood education and convinced us she had a plan to meet the needs of our children. She also promised that our children would get the school's best kindergarten teacher. Eventually eight of us decided to go as a group." Within a few years, P.S. 87's enrollment was back up to seven hundred students, about hall of them white and middle-class. "We had to bring the parents back into the school actively and we had to make alliances with them," said Hill.
Since parents were welcome to visit classes, to volunteer, to drop in on the new principal anytime with problems or suggestions, they soon developed a feeling of "ownership." Even Mrs. Hill's office, furnished with comfortable couches and overstuffed chairs she had inherited when her mother died, offered a warm and friendly embrace. "It gave me a place where I could meet with parents and teachers that felt human," Hill said.
In turn, the parents provided Mrs. Hill with a powerful instrument to help effect the school's resurgence. By the time my son Jonathan enrolled in 1987, the Parents Association was taking in over $100,000 per year through street fairs, raffles and auctions. The money was used to pay for a full-time music teacher and a part-time art teacher and librarian, plus many other needed items and services. New parents flocking to the school also brought important connections. Some were active in local Democratic politics of worked for powerful law firms or had jobs in the media.
Hill had an uncanny knack for discovering which of her parents could be useful to the school. Knowing that I worked for the New York City Council president's office, for example, she drafted me to get city parking privileges restored for her teachers. I spent several months trying to convince my boss, Andrew Stein, that this was a major issue. I even got him to appeal to the city's transportation commissioner to remedy this injustice to one of the city's best schools. In the end, alas, the commissioner didn't owe my boss a favor and wouldn't restore the parking permits.
Anton Klein, the West Side community school district superintendent during most of Hill's tenure at P.S. 87, recalls several occasions when she dispatched her most assertive parents to lobby him for something extra that the school needed and that required him to overlook the rules. "Three very imposing-looking women would march into my office," said Klein. "One was a lawyer for the ACLU, one was an opera singer and one was an influential political activist. They were persuasive in terms of what they wanted for their school, and they would often get it."
Among the rewards of being a P.S. 87 parent was becoming a member of an embracing community. Many parents were veterans of 1960s activista, and the school was a little like revisiting those heady days again. Not only was your child in a happy, nurturing place and receiving what looked like an excellent education, but the integrated school you were helping to build seemed to be accomplishing one of the key objectives of the 1960s civil rights movement.
At a time when the cause of school integration was in retreat almost everywhere in the country, P.S. 87 showed that public schools could still provide equal educational opportunity for children of all races and economic classes. "Being a P.S. 87 parent changed my life," recalled Barbara Horowitz, one of Hill's first Parents Association presidents. "It was an intense personal experience. We worked together to create a real democratic and community school." My wife, Ruthie, and I joined hundreds of other parents one memorable spring weekend to help build a playground for the school-a kind of urban community barn-raising for the benefit of our children. It felt like Berkeley in the sixties all over again, but without the violent histrionics and anti-Americanism.
Yet the school's communalism would have made no difference without our chief executive's gift for finding and inspiring talented young teachers. Hill made clear to prospective teachers that despite the teachers' union contract limitation of the school day to six hours and twenty minutes, in P.S. 87 many teachers showed up long before the students arrived and stayed long after they left. Bending the rules, she often hired bright young people with only a B.A. degree and a substitute teaching license, and then protected these gifted beginners until they had accumulated the necessary graduate credits to obtain their permanent licenses. And she had the gritty determination to confront mediocre and incompetent teachers. Though she couldn't fire them, she occasionally was able to embarrass some into transferring out of the school.
I first gained an appreciation for Hill's abilities during Jonathan's very first days in the school. Over the summer we had learned that his kindergarten teacher would be an African American woman named Ursula Davis, reputed to have won a "teacher of the year" award. When I brought my son to his classroom on opening day, however, we were greeted by a very young, white woman named Lisa Golden. My heart sank as I realized that my son was not getting the "teacher of the year," who had moved on to a district staff development job over the summer, but a raw rookie.
Lisa Golden was all of twenty-three years old, didn't have a proper public school license and had never taught kindergarten before. Nevertheless, as is sometimes the case with so-called "uncertified" teachers, she turned out to be superb in the classroom. She was full of creative energy and figured out quickly how to manage a class of 25 five-year-olds. That first year, somewhat to my own surprise, I found myself telling friends that my son was receiving as good an education as he would have had in any $12,000-per-year private school.
Deborah Meier, one of the nation's leading progressive educators and the founder of several successful small schools in East Harlem, has written: "Every child is entitled to be in a school small enough that he or she can be known by name to every faculty member in the school and well known by at least a few." This seems quite sensible. Yet Naomi Hill concluded that in order to turn P.S. 87 around, she would have to enlarge the school back to what reformers like Meier have derided as "factory" size. "One of the advantages of recruiting more students," Hill told me, "was that I had more positions for teachers. That meant that I had more teachers whom I personally selected and more teachers who really wanted to be in the school and shared our philosophy."
Had she kept the school at 350 students, in other words, she would have been stuck with an unacceptably high percentage of incompetent, demoralized teachers protected by a state education law that guaranteed them a permanent job in the same building for life. But she could dilute their negative force by piling in students, opening new classrooms and hiring new teachers. Creating more staff positions also gave her a higher number of "cluster" positions for teachers who were supposed to cover classes when regular teachers were on their preparation periods. Thus she could shunt dysfunctional teachers out of the classroom into such less-than-demanding tasks as cafeteria or yard duty.
My optimism about Jonathan's education was tempered somewhat by the perception that burnt-out or incompetent teachers occupied a disproportionate amount of Hill's time. Each year, she and her parent "lobbyists" conspired over what to do about teachers who, under the union contract, were entitled to be assigned to the school as "seniority transfers." With the cooperation of a friendly district superintendent like Mr. Klein, the contract provisions could occasionally be ignored. One ruse was to hide any openings until shortly before the school year began, making it impossible for union transfers to file for the positions before they were already filled.
Still, for all of our principal's genius at skirting onerous union work rules, this remained a New York City public school. Always some unlucky children ended up in classes with teachers so bad that an entire year out of their educational life would be wasted. P.S. 87 never had enough cluster positions to hide all the incompetents. And despite our best efforts, some seniority transfers did succeed in getting jobs at the school without the principal's approval.
In the New York Observer, writer and new P.S. 87 parent James Lardner recounted his dismay at discovering that one of the school's nastiest "cafeteria operatives" was actually a veteran licensed teacher drawing top salary. Dubbing her "Mrs. Lungworthy," Lardner wrote that her "Marine Corps training camp methods" of dealing with small children made her seem an inappropriate choice for even the job of patrolling the school lunchroom. He expressed his outrage about the situation to a more experienced parent, who levelly replied, "Do you want her in the classroom teaching?"
Like Lardner, I quickly learned that the interests of employees often trumped the interests of children. One of the first things I noticed about the school was that the head custodian and his three helpers didn't always keep our building in tip-top repair. The janitors were allowed to run the school buildings as if they were their own property. Parent and community groups desiring to use the facility for after-school programs for kids were forced to pay exorbitant "opening fees" to the custodians. As a result, head custodians often made more money than the principals. Nepotism flourished among the custodial staff; many custodians hired their wives as secretaries. Principals who needed to get a light bulb or a window replaced and went to the custodian were told, "It's not in our contract." The principal would then have to wait-and wait-until the Board of Education's central maintenance department processed the work order.
If the board couldn't stand up to the thousand-member custodians' union, it was even less likely to take on the United Federation of Teachers, with its more than one hundred thousand dues-paying members. I was generally aware that in the years since I had last written about the teachers' union in Ramparts magazine in 1968 it had become the 800-pound gorilla of the school system, as well as a powerful force in city and state politics. P.S. 87 gave me my first up-close and personal look at how teachers' unions and their labor contracts impacted on the day-to-day operations of a school.
One morning early in my son Jonathan's fourth-grade year I noticed a bent, middle-aged man wandering around the school-yard as if in a stupor. He was carrying an old plastic shopping bag and his clothes were tattered and worn. My first thought was that a derelict had wandered onto the school grounds. Then, as the parents said goodbye to their children and started leaving the yard, I realized that he was actually a school employee on yard duty. I found out that this needy person, whom we all came to know by his first name (I will call him "Mr. B"), was actually a fully certified teacher who had recently transferred into the school under the seniority clause of the union contract. A gentle man, Mr.
Continues...
Excerpted from breaking free by Sol Stern Copyright © 2003 by Sol Stern. Excerpted by permission.
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