I began my teaching career 25 years ago, at a small independent school in a poor neighborhood of New York City. I was twenty-six, I had just moved to New York, and I needed a job. I liked kids, and I wanted to take the summers off while my girlfriend was getting her Ph.D.--and I wasn't yet suspicious of private schools--so I sent my resume out to every independent school in the city. I got two interviews, and I took a job teaching second grade at a small school in Harlem. The school was a small, warm community, and I have very fond memories of the students and colleagues I spent years with. I still don't quite know, however, what to think about the school overall, which now, looking back, seems to have adumbrated some the educational philanthropy boom of the past 20 years--and its problems.
Since I left Harlem, private money in education has gotten a lot of attention
I moved away from New York City in 2001. Over the past 20 years, there has been an unprecedented influx of private money into education policy, charter schools, and reforms, all ostensibly intended to improve education for children growing up in poverty. Small independent schools, many of them charters, have sprouted in poor neighborhoods everywhere. In Harlem alone, there are now at least twenty charter schools (and my old school itself, bowing to the logic of the situation, has become one of them). These charters are being pushed by boatloads of private money. Over a billion dollars a year is spent on education by philanthropic foundations, much of it by the big three: Walton, Broad and Gates. This private money has gotten tons of attention, but it has not improved outcomes in any meaningful way, as Gates himself has ruefully acknowledged. It is perhaps not surprising that the money hasn't made much of a difference, since while Bill and Melinda Gates, for example, have spent several billion dollars on education reform schemes over the last fifteen years, that is far less than 1% of what K-12 public schools in the US spend each and every year. Nevertheless, the Gates Foundation's cultural influence is outsized--and mostly, in my view, malign.
Inspired by Paolo Freire and Liberation Theology (but funded by Wall Street)
The school I taught at in Harlem was funded by private donations, and in many ways we were quite well-off. Although the school, housed in a few old rowhouses on a single block in a poor neighborhood, was shabby and poorly equipped by the standards of the public schools in Leafstrewn or Riverside, its physical plant was at least on par with the local public school, and some things about it were really nice. The atmosphere was a bit cramped, a bit shabby, but very homey. The school was small--fewer than two-hundred students from pre-K up through 8th grade--and each class had fewer than 20 students. Each class also had two teachers. This was one of the really big advantages of the school.
I remember a kid named Messiah who lived in the neighborhood. Messiah was six or seven, and he used to come by and hang out in our classroom, especially before the school year started. He wanted to go to our school, and I think he eventually did-, but for now he was enrolled at the local public school. I was shocked when Messiah told me that he had over 40 students in his class, and one teacher. My class had 18 students, and two teachers.
A very low student-teacher ratio was one thing we could do that the local public school couldn’t (we had a bit more money, our teaching staff wasn't unionized, and there wasn't tons of competition for well-educated young idealists like me). We also sent a fair number of kids to fancy private high schools. We had graduates at Collegiate, at the Darrow school, at Poly Prep, at Columbia Prep, and so on. We also had a nice reading room, run by a reading specialist and staffed by volunteer one-on-one tutors. The reading specialist, Judy, was competent and experienced, and the tutors were kind, smart and dedicated. I tutored in the reading room for a couple years after I left the school--I came in and read twice a week with one of my former students--but I was really unusual: as I recall, I seemed to be the only tutor who wasn’t a middle-aged woman from the rich section of Park Avenue.
This was really the strangest thing about the school: it was a sweet, homey environment that brought together very poor kids and very privileged adults. The wife of restaurateur Warner Leroy (of Tavern on the Green fame) tutored with me in the Reading Room. The head of our development office lived, in a fancy Rockland county enclave, next door to Mikhail Baryshnikov. The chair of the school’s board was born a Vanderbilt; we went up to her country place in Connecticut for our staff retreats. Famous people came through pretty regularly. I got to shake the hands of Tony Bennett and Bette Midler. Some Kennedy ladies toured the school one day. The school’s computer specialist was the son of Victor Navasky, publisher of The Nation.
As a young teacher at the school, I always had mixed feelings about the privileged folks who supported the place. On the one hand, the school was a radical experiment whose founder (and head of school) was an inspiring poet and visionary who was constantly quoting Paulo Freire and who had spent most of the days of his adult life warmly nurturing kids in a poor neighborhood far from his own privileged upbringing, and a lot of the individuals I met were really nice. Baryshnikov’s neighbor, Nick, was a great guy who was passionate about the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Bruno Navasky was very sweet and very smart. On the other hand, the school did not seem all that revolutionary, really. The school was a tiny pet project in a vast sea of poverty and dysfunction. It always seemed to me strange that the rich folks came up to our school, and gave money to our school, when we only served a small, nearly insignificant fraction of the hundreds of thousands of poor schoolchildren in New York. Why were they at our school, when Messiah’s school around the corner needed so much more?
Private Money Is Never Enough to Fix Large Public Problems
I'm going to write some more about this, but the school was a microcosm of the problems that come when private money comes in to try to help poor people:
First, the money was grossly inadequate to the job, and the model was totally unsustainable.
Second, the school gave the illusion of doing something about the problem and made rich people into heroes, and so discouraged any change in the larger system.
More tomorrow...
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