[inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] good evening. Welcome to the historical society. Im louise, the president seal. This evening i have the pleasure of interviewing Eva Moscowitz. Ceo of the Largest Charter School Network in new york. The Success Academy. Tonights program is part of the speaker series. I want to thank mr. Swartz for his great generosity and leadership which has enabled us to bring many prominent speakers to the stage. Our chairman emeritus was hoping to be with us this morning but his travel schedule conflicted with the programming. Im delighted that susan who has advised us is here and i would like to thank her and welcome her father that she has done on behalf of the New York Historical. [applause] tonights program must about an hour. Questions will be written on notecards. You should have received this as you entered in this morning. My colleagues are going up and down the island c can get a no card for them. The cards will be collected later in the program. So be a book signing this evening. Take place outside the main doors of the auditorium. Copies of the education more will be available for purchase in the store. Before i began, few brief introductory notes. On august 21, 2006 Eva Moscowitz opened up for School Called success harlem one. It served 165 scholars thats what eva calls her students. It started a revolution 11 years later the Success Academy network encompasses 46 schools serving over 14000 scholars from kindergarten to high school. Emily would say that its important but no cause for celebration. Associate celebrating. Her schools ranked first in math and english among all Public Schools in new york. I should add the average Family Income and her Success Academy school is 32000. In at 300,000. She has a ba from the university of pennsylvania and a phd from john hopkins. A mother of three children in a long time harlem resident. Her new book will be the focus of my questions tonight. For discussion i visited one of her schools recently aside may occasionally stretch my boundaries a little bit. Her book has a lot to teach about the complexities of running the score. Cms work. Like you are a huge demand the bottom of the ocean box with your feet tied together and hansen cuffs. We have to figure it out. So lets figure how she figured it out we need to get some semantics over with. What is a Charter School and how does it differ from traditional Public Schools . A Charter School is a Public School that is free from the bureaucracy on the one hand labor contracts on the other hand. It allows you to make decisions based on teaching and learning. It is not unregulated, the District Schools are subject to 20 volumes of regulation on the Charter Schools are subject to about ten. They are regulated with regard to health and safety. On the issues of teaching and learning you have freedom to innovate. Lets you back in time and talk about you decided to embark on a political career. Then we will move on to how you became chair of the committee and end up on the point at which Charter Schools were the future. Lets begin with what led you to a political career. I was a historian. Its great to be in this great institution. When i came in various people asked me if i had been here before and i said of course. I remember the old New York Historical society. It is a terrific institution. I very much enjoyed studying history and teaching at the college level. Publish rather than parish and even though i enjoyed the life of the mind without Public Education and k12 education was the key to opportunity. It bothered me that new york city was the greatest city owner make me that its public k12 education was not the model of the world. I wanted to do something about that problem. I used to say to my husband that when there was a section of the New York Times you look like an audience that remembers when there was a b section i would say the problem in the a section were hard to solve. The problem in the b section seemed solvable to me. I now have a different view that those b section problems, the politics of it make it very hard. I thought k12 education was in the of significant reform. I knew that from being a student in the School System and from reading the b section where every day there was a story about kids not getting the education they deserved and are entitled to. So i decided to run for office, it was a crazy idea at the time. I lost my first election although it was the closest race and then in 1999 i won. I benefited from good timing. I became chair of the Education Committee. It was an incredible honor. I did not realize it was such a sleepy institution. I remember joe klein asking me where did i learn to run the hearing. And i said i grew up watching certain hearings is so thats the way i ran the Education Committee hearing. I would say you are a mix of lightning rod in voice of reason is that Committee Try to work through some of the issues in Public Education. See talk about several things in the book. I was maybe one of the few City Council Members that read the charter it gave the Committee Oversight power and it had not been used or known about, much to joels chagrin my first hearing with on male control and i thought that was an important policy issue. At the time it was controversial that education would be like the administration for Childrens Services or consumer department. So i held hearings on male control. Then i went through other topics. I held literacy hearings hearings on music and dance and i tried to effectuate change. Starting to become clear that this is really harsh. The department of education cannot say how many are teachers there were. Do you have to pay the are teachers, Science Education i was told you cannot see Science Education before you teach kids to read. I have kids of my own on their constantly asking scientific questions. Why couldnt you teach it from the getgo. One of my last hearings was on toilet paper. I know that sounds ridiculous but im the leading expert still to this day on toilet paper in the new york city School System. I spent a month trying to understand how at the time of 15 billiondollar operating budget its now 31 billion. How come there is no toilet paper in the new york city School System and did they purchase toilet paper and if so how did they distribute it. What i discovered was in the affluent schools parents purchased the toilet paper in a poor schools kids went without. That seems acceptable. So i kept having hearings on topics. Even though i worked hard on us a Public Servant was really hard even with the power of subpoena to move this bureaucracy. Its not that they werent good people there but theres fingerpointing constantly trying to cover your tracks, excuses and the enduser, kids and families to not get what they needed and deserved. Even then i thought there had to be a way to fix this. It wasnt until later that i got pessimistic about our chances. You talk in the book about Charter School pioneers that you knew about their work. We are Ready Thinking about Charter Schools . I came out for Charter Schools and 97 in a pamphlet when i was running. The teacher came ringing down upon me so thats when things were more challenging. Remember in 1999 the law just past because it passed in 1998. It was anything at the time. It seemed to me to make sense to get parents choices i really thought that i wanted choices for my okay. Question only the affluent get choices for their kids so i wouldnt we give choices to poor parents who couldnt move to westchester or new jersey, why wouldnt we want to give a poor family that same choice. And so i came out in favor of them in 1999. I supported them on the city council but i had other thoughts of opening man schools. I was going to help and support the work other people were doing. You bring up the point that you thought all parents should have choices and all children should have the opportunity to go to a Better School of one were available. There are misconceptions about how students are chosen so maybe its a good place to talk about how they are selected and what involvement they have in their selection. What that process looks like civic Charter Schools admit by random lottery. There is a slight preference that its a random lottery selection. So we get students who have learning disabilities, we get very wide range of students. This year we had 17000 parents apply for their children. Only 3000 spots. So he said 28000 parents away. Those parents love those children just as much as the 3000 that got in. We find this a remarkably painful experience which is why we keep opening schools soon i you can forget the profound inequality that we offer in the city. We have deeply segregated schools where if you live in one neighborhood you are sent by government to go to a school that wasnt just feeling this year or last year, but in all likelihood has been feeling for half a century. If you can afford to rent or buy an apartment in another neighborhood you can send your kids to school where 90 or more are on grade level. So just to rehash this a bit, theres no testing applicants for tartar Charter Schools . Thats illegal to select, theres no admission other than random lottery. And theres no opportunity for parents to pull those strings. Total lottery with the exception of a slight preference for children who live in that district. So those who won the lottery or the school, i had the opportunity to visit harlow and the very beautiful, clean, very orderly, students are very well behaved and can you talk about how your approach to certain Student Learning has been and also database test. Maybe you can take us through the evolution of the methodolo methodology. I was one of the first charter leaders and charter founders when i open the first school. Many charter leaders wanted them to go to school that was warm and joyous, that believed in play. But also had rigorous academic expectations for kids. Tremendous believer in science so all of our kids to experiments. Like in kindergarten our students will do hundred 35 experiments by the end of the year. When i started i looked at Science Curriculum and i wanted to do momentum physics in kindergarten. List science salespeople said we do not have that. We teach momentum think in regard in a scientific topic can be simplified the most elemental aspects. Were a school that believes in gains. Think games have been underestimated. Kids pay a tremendous number of games. I dont, i watch him facilitate. But for 90 minutes which they kids complain about all the time because its hard to finish monopoly in 90 minutes, its more like four hours. Weve tried saving the games and wrapping them up and its all very complicated when you have 152nd graders. We do back at them in first grade. My favorite is a monopoly in seconds, all of our kids take chess. We think that kind of thinking a social and Emotional Development that occurs is as important as academic learning that can go on. We get these outstanding results you could come to the conclusion that somehow you will not see blocks in kindergarten. We have a black rim, were big on legos, our pedagogy is very progressive. People sometimes confuse the uniform with the uniform with the progressive pedagogy. So we create these magical houses in our house Trent High School is nine to 12. Inquiry based learning runs throughout. The k12 curriculum. We talk about our model being developed around joyful rigor. The fundamental purpose of school is to teach kids to think critically and creatively. Thats the organization. I want to come back to standardized testing and get some your thoughts about more generally. You mentioned uniforms. Talk about why they were uniforms. We think its easier for parents if you argued with your kid about what color tights you too might wish you did not have to have that discussion and, schooling perspective because you dont have to buy this different close we find it decreases competition over who has the nicest close. It allows everyone to focus on the learning of the social and emotional growth. We want to deemphasize the importance of close. Of students are focusing on learning, the learning is a joyful kind of learning. Most people dont associate test taking with joy. The test taking is important the skills are well honed to your schools i assume are you would not have such great results. They just answer the question of why people are so distraught over the number of tests that students take. Of the last decade there have been a crescendo in the number of assessments that students have. Certainly in new york state more generally but probably in new york city even more so. I think there is anxiety around testing and the roles of testing. I think there is a sense that filling out bubbles endlessly is not productive. I would agree. That it is not productive. I think just because a test is multiplechoice does not its you can have highquality im making a poor multiplechoice test. You can pour short response test are really thoughtful interesting and engaging problems. The problem is not the formant the test commits the quality of the question is have to ponder. I think the new york state tests are relatively good test. I think the mathematics test is not sufficiently difficult. I think im the only person boost math test are not hard enough. A lot of the test anxiety is misplaced. We do not get these outstanding results to through test prep. We get that because our students are reading a poem a day and their learning how to write and learning mathematical reasoning. You cannot bases, Cortes Lester in instruction every hour every day strong. You also can i get these outstanding results where the seventh Largest School district in size and number one in terms of student achievement. We took most of the top 25 spots in math in the state of new york. Weve outperformed the gifted and talented programs. You cannot get those results if youre not teaching kids well all along. You also can i get them if kids have a negative experience with testing. Kids dont. Theyre excited, their mind its a day when they can show how smart and creative and how much grid they have. They approach the test in a selfconfident way. They dont understand why adults are so worried about their fragility, we go to radio city hall and treated like an athletic sporting event where kids are doing cheer. Theyre ready to take those tests. We believe our kids cannot be afraid of tests. To be taken up from a long time to come putting sats. The need to be able to navigate this test very confidently itself confidently. None but also know how to think critically. With our history curriculum as a professional historian to do project based learning k through four which is very exploratory but that generates incredible enthusiasm by middle school we are organized in that discipline. In sixth grade we do the first half of American History through world war ii then eighth grade it is post 1945 those teachers never get past world war ii so the kids say what happened . Something must have happened. So we do post 1945 Bennett High School two years of World History and two years of american. It is reading of primary documents starting in second grade. So it is a very rich and robust curriculum and our kids love history as a result and we hope they will become permanent consumers in this institution because they will be learned and enthusiastic about the discipline. And the current exhibition on the vietnam war. Another topic that you raise and discuss in the book is your admiration for mayor koch and talking about the issues he grappled with once he became mayor at a point there was graffiti all over and loud music on the boombox wherever you went. Talk about that to how you developed the schools. I grew up in new york in the 1970s during the height of white flight and crime. It was pretty bad and dangerous. I still remember. And at the height of the heroin epidemic and social problems but then also more basic problems in terms of who was getting annoyed at me for stepping on dog poop. It was worse than dont step on a crack it was very challenging to navigate the sidewalk system as a sexual not to step on something and i remember the pooper law it was incredibly controversial they people were four and against and he prevailed and it seemed like common sense to clean up after your dog. And it did seem to make new york more livable. As a councilmember i took my constituent services very seriously every issue that constituents brought forward i didnt understand we could send a letter to say we will look into it i thought i was supposed to solve every single problem and i learned a lot about the cities lack of responsiveness. In my early days in elderly woman said there were as a pothole she had fallen into and hurt herself and she sent me a picture of it so i wrote to the department of transportation and they told me it was fixed. I wrote them a thank you later letter saying thank you and i happened to be walking by this is exactly where this woman said and there it was. It had not been fixed. No way. I took a picture of it and i learned my skeptical new yorker that when they say it is fixed it probably isnt and you have to check on everything so i ran round my district to fix all of these qualityoflife issues, i worked on the newspaper boxes there are a lot of issues and i took Government Service very seriously and i tried to fix whatever i could and i do think with bloomberg you got the 311 which i thought was great any citizen could call in a problem and sweating the small stuff is important and we do take that approach at the schools. If a light goes out or the air conditioner is broken, you cant take the attitude that is the way it is but if everybody acts as eyes and ears you can maintain a facility to be more comfortable for everyone. We take that attitude at the schools. I can see that. I have to say the school was spotless i assume do planted it that way but going through the shared space with the District School that was not the case. This occupies two wings. Maybe you can talk about co location . What does that mean and those various struggles . If you walk through Success Academy and the district academies one of the conclusions you could draw is the Charter School must have more money because it looks nicer. You would be wrong. Per pupil is thousands of dollars more from the district than the public Charter School but the reason ours looks nicer is they have to go through the incredible bureaucracy to order anything or fix anything Public Employees start off well meaning but cynicism gets them down and nobody fixes anything and it is run down over time but it is the opposite. Any little thing we see is broken, we are scrappy and we buy supplies at costco rather than going to the soviet style procurement to some of the new york City Education system we dont have to go 18 months to get a Bulletin Board operating in that way is hard to keep a facility the way you want it. But coal location is a policy associated with Charter Schools even though the vast majority of co location in new york city with multiple schools located in one facility most of those are district you probably only heard of it regard to Charter Schools because those of the co location that are controversial largely because unions have made them controversial they dont like Charter Schools and they dont like the idea of public Charter Schools getting the underutilized space and i was the author of that policy so there are many districts in new york that are overcrowded but then some districts are underutilized literally the rate is between 40 and 70 . The taxpayers have paid for this but those seats are empty i proposed and initially bloomberg did not take me up why not allow the underutilized seats let Charter Schools use them and let them open up in those district buildings and now that is the policy of new york city of the 46 schools almost all of them are located in District Schools and that means we can open schools much faster than if you had to build a building, raise the money, take the time to build the building it also take tremendous expertise where schooling and programming is hard enough but if a building is half empty underutilized you can open in that space and serve children to tackle that inequality really, really quickly. So we are co located sometimes with seven or eight schools. In my most dense co location there are nine schools in the building we have to schedule the cafeteria and auditorium and it is very complicated but real estate is precious in new york if you want to educate kids you need a building to do so. Host a little bit about teachers 165 students and in 2017 over 14000. Where do those teachers come from and what kind of training . Finding the teachers and the operational staff and the principles is one of our biggest challenges. It is very, very important we have talented educators in front of our kids. We looked under every rock with a National Recruitment effort and recruit all over the country and heavily in the tristate area. We do a tremendous amount of teacher and leader training from the founding of Success Academy. Thirteen weeks of teacher training every year for new and returning treat lung teachers. Very, very robust. Imagine you are Science Teacher coming to work at Success Academy working in the District School you may do science two days a week but we do it five days a week starting in kindergarten and it is experiments. You have to learn how to manage 32 kids doing momentum with balls and ramps . That is scary as a kindergarten teacher. With Lab Notebooks they have to be managed. They draw pictures because they dont write that that is a lot to manage. We have to teach our teachers how to do physics in court on guest kindergarten. There is robust training just to understand we have a standard curriculum for every Elementary School through second grade does a unit on the Brooklyn Bridge that is their project based unit so we can train all second grade teachers together and the assistant principal on how to manage that unit on the Brooklyn Bridge and show the principals and teachers what does high quality student work look like for this part of the union mom unit. That is standardized curriculum that allows you to train people and invest in training that would be difficult if every Elementary School had a different design. Host you have been in the news lately as a spokesperson for Charter Schools to have the ability to do their own teacher certification. Those of you reading about this debate will have seen you quoted many times over so say what will that mean for your schools and Charter Schools more generally . There is a Teacher Shortage that only in the state but nationally. Fewer people are going into teaching particularly in the stem fields and special education. There is a Teacher Shortage overall. But there is also a training deficit with trained teachers was something that has not been done. We certainly see math teachers that are not trained on conceptual math. English teachers who have not mastered the art of revision. So a set of regulations was voted on that allows highperformance charters to train their own charters and that contributes to our ability. So understand often the teachers who are best trained and up in the most affluent neighborhoods in the teachers that are poorly trained go to the least affluent areas but obviously we teach physics in ninth grade and World History doing 65000 years of Human History into years using primary documents you need highly qualified personnel to do that. This will allow us to train our own teachers which is a huge victory for poor kids in new york city. Host there are some Great Questions here. First, beginning her first year and a Charter High School in new orleans can you give one piece of advice for her first year . I have so many pieces of advice i try to limit to just one. For a firstyear teacher it can be unbelievably stressful and difficult. Remember every day why you wanted to teach in the first place and presumably it is love of kids and i hope the love of ideas. So those important techniques to become a great teacher at the end of the day you love your kids you can be a phenomenal teacher. Feel the joy of teaching as the joy of learning. Host what impressed me tremendously how much effort is into sharing best practices and how much support comes out of that for the teachers. What about the regular Public Schools are you sharing your findings with them your techniques and materials and Empirical Research . What kind of sharing do you do outside of your own network . A tremendous amount. We have the ed to toot Long Institute putting all of our k for curriculum for any educator anywhere in the world to use and understand Publishing Companies make hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars on intellectual property and we put it out there for all kids and all educators. Our intention over time is to put all curriculum out there for any educator to use. In addition to open the First Physical manifestation which is a school for schools as we call it. We have a k8 lab school and a Training Center we have been training educators in new york city and around the country for most of our existence but this will allow us to take it to an entirely new level to train superintendents and principals in the Training Center than they can go from the last school seeing first grade or seventh grade inaction then also go to the Training Center looking at scholar work and videos and understand. Host in Higher Education focusing on k12 but this question asks how you feel about Higher Education in the u. S. . Is that something allamerican do . Should there be more emphasis on vocational schools and apprenticeships . Obviously i come from the world of Higher Education so i have a slightly different perspective spending all this time in k12 i played the College Admissions game as a mother now i play that on a larger scale. We have aspirations to be at 100 schools educating 50000 students graduating 3000 every year so we have to get all of those kids into college but what distracts me is the funding available for poor kids. There are very few places that fully fund kids and now we go to this incredible effort and trouble to make sure kids are College Ready but yet those that fully fund the kids actually it is a very small number of the most highly selected schools. All of those combined could not take all of our kids. We have got to find a way to democratize Higher Education as well as her. And we are on the training side through the ed to institute to make sure our kids have access to resources that they can afford to go to college now that we got them ready. Host is there a homeSchool System anywhere in the country that you admire that you think is exemplary . Are there other countries around the world that have a way of instructing young people that you admire . I havent spent as much time as i would like to see the schools internationally. I did spend four days in china visiting. I was not impressed with the teaching but i was impressed with the level of hard work and parent talking about how heavy the backpack is i want to roll my eyes because they are working hours upon hours upon hours and there is no whining about hard work in china. They just expect that. That the teaching and learning is formulaic. It isnt about Critical Thinking in anyway but i have not had enough time to travel to see internationally the data fairly well and our kids are not competitive with many places around the world so it is a crisis this country is facing with the quality of education that we offer kids in terms of the u. S. Certainly i have been to many schools around the country and district education suffers from many of the same problems and new york is better than many urban areas. To have some pockets of learning going on. But it is pretty grim in new york city 90 of the schools do not work at the most basic level spending 31 billion per year they are not teaching them to read or count. Very basic level. The 10 that are are really in affluent neighborhood so that is that educational segregation i was talking about earlier that is a profound problem we have to morally grapple with. None of us want a permanent underclass and we will have one if you cannot turn the schools into centers of opportunity. And right now too many are the opposite of that. Host in the book you talk about encounters with parents that were not so positive. What can the parents be doing to ensure they instill a love of learning . The most important thing one can do as a parent is read to your children if you cant because of literacy or language, there is audiobook the bonding over books is important. We think as a school the most important thing we do, no matter the age level, is instill a love of reading. We go to enormous links to have carefully curated Classroom Library so we have books that match their interests. We make a big deal of book shopping several times a week. We read a tremendous amount in school and at home and we only see if there is only one thing we could do if we couldnt play monopoly or science five days a week that would be to teach our kids to be great readers. Then they can teach themselves anything. Host i will ask one last question. People have talked about you running for mayor of new york city. You have considered it yourself. Thinking of your next step is it more education . Empowering yourself in another way . I care deeply about the city and Public Service and elected office. It is incredibly important we have strong Public Servants and i might do that at some point but right now i am really focused on reimagining Public Education k12 and providing that point of what is possible. I think we have settled for a diminished reality when so much more is possible i am hoping to inspire all of you here and in all five boroughs to civic lead be engaged in this issue. We must have a worldclass social system School System so i am truly focused on reimagining what k12 could be and we could do a Tremendous Service to our kids and they will be better prepared in this complex world we live in. Tee4. Of scores of the passionate about education, the exact standards which i think has drawn people to her to lets say try to temper her enthusiasm that she has transcended all and appreciates the chance to talk to you and is glad that you came here. Thank you for having me. [applause] the book signing is right outside of the auditorium. Thank you for coming tonight