What Happened To My Middle School?
by Jonathan Mandell
25 November 02 Gotham Gazette

When I came up with the idea for a middle school focused on journalism -- the first such middle school in the nation -- I got the same strange reaction again and again.
"Are you going to stay involved?" asked Ida Montera, the principal of P.S.124, one of the elementary schools that would feed into my middle school. "The school needs your enthusiasm."
Parents of fifth graders in Park Slope, Sunset Park and Carroll Gardens said the same thing, as did the officials of school district 15: Will I stay involved? The school needed my enthusiasm.
Why WOULDN'T I stay involved, I replied. And why does it need my enthusiasm, I thought. Who am I? What it needs is a good principal, committed teachers, a rigorous program.
Five years later, the school still exists -- or so I had been told. The Secondary School of Journalism is one of three middle schools, soon to be high schools as well, that have taken up residence in the building that once housed John Jay High School in Park Slope.
But I have not been involved for years. In that time, the school has taken a bizarre journey that may or may not say something about the school system in general; it is hard to imagine -- or difficult to accept -- that its fate is typical.
New Schools Chancellor Joel Klein has taken up one of the mantras of educators in the city -- that regular New Yorkers, business people and professionals, must become involved in the public schools of the city if these schools are to succeed.
To which I can only reply: I tried.
A Dinner And A Dream
In 1995, I was a reporter for New York Newsday, writing an article about two cops whose child was going to P.S. 41 in Greenwich Village. I attended that elementary school, so it was something of a thrill to go back and interview the principal, though it was of course no longer the same person.
The new principal, Frank DeStefano, and I became good enough friends so that, some two years later, when he was appointed superintendent of school district 15 in Brooklyn, I called to congratulate him. He invited me to dine with him and a colleague of his a few weeks later.
At dinner, he talked about his new job. His major task, he told me, was to create new middle schools in order to keep the students in the district from going to more attractive middle schools in school district 2, his old district.
Each of the new schools, he explained, would focus around a specific theme. I did not understand this, so he explained: One would be for the performing arts, another would be for science and mathematics, another would be an "inclusion school" where "special ed" kids mixed with the non-disabled. A fourth school would be for foreign languages. There had to be a dozen middle schools in all, he said; he was looking for some more themes.
"Why not a school for journalism?" I blurted out. I don't recall his reacting. He and his friend, an assistant principal, started talking about something else.
While they were talking, I started thinking that what I had suggested so spontaneously was not such a bad idea. The skills the best journalists master are the same that you need to be a good student: the ability to learn quickly, research efficiently, write clearly, and to be engaged in your community and aware of what is happening in the world. One of the best things about journalism, I thought, is that it is about every subject on earth; anything you are interested in, you can write about. So why couldn't educators use journalism to motivate kids not yet interested in school?
A kid who has memorized 100 rap songs, say, but does not do his homework does not have a problem learning; the problem is getting him motivated to learn academic subjects. What if teachers asked that adolescent to transcribe those rap songs, to provide a glossary of rap terms, to interview a rap singer, to write his opinion about the controversy over rap lyrics? What if he were to meet a professional music critic, and, under that critic's supervision, research, report and write an article that would then be published or broadcast.
Journalism could even help students understand how valid and valuable the cultures and experiences of their classmates are. Indeed, a student who had gotten little joy or encouragement from school previously because of poor academic performance, might suddenly find herself sought after by her fellow journalism students, precisely because her experiences were worth re-telling.
I interrupted their conversation. "Hear me out," I said, and I made a pitch, the way I would pitch an editor. The ideas tumbled out of me, rooted in my experiences as a reporter, as a teacher of journalism to graduate students, and as someone who had himself first become inspired to be a writer back in (what was then called) junior high school.
I even came up with a name for the new middle school. It should be named, I said, after Manuel de Dios Unanue, the Spanish-language journalist who had been killed five years earlier on the order of the Colombia drug cartel for his investigations into the drug trade in Queens. He died in the line of duty, in pursuit of the truth.
By the end of the evening, Frank seemed convinced. He said he would write the proposal the next day and submit it to the school board the following Wednesday.
"You could be the co-director," he said.
I was shocked. "I don't know anything about education."
"You don't have to," he said. "That's the director's job."


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What Happened To My Middle School?
cont'd
by Jonathan Mandell
25 November 02
Birth Of A School
A month later, in September, 1997, I stood in front of the members of the district 15 community school board, the last representative of a dozen "option" schools making a formal presentation. About half the schools were extensions or variations of schools that already existed. There were also schools like the New School for Research in Natural and Social Sciences, which, the future director said, was to have a "brains-on or, if you will, minds-on approach to learning -- a different approach where excellence is the norm in all curriculum areas." I had to admit to myself that I did not know what the hell he was talking about.
I also did not completely understand the themes of some of the other schools, such as The Community School or The Brooklyn School for Global Studies.
But when it was my turn to talk, I explained that I worked as a reporter, and that, like any journalist, I take the best ideas from other people. "So, I would like to say that the Manuel de Dios Unanue School of Journalism will, like the New School for Research, emphasize research; like the Community School, have students become aware of their community and how individuals function in the world; like the Academy for the Performing Arts, invite professionals into the school; and, like the inclusion middle school, try to be as inclusive as possible."
This got a laugh and some applause. After I outlined the idea behind the school, I explained who Manuel de Dios Unanue was. With such a name, I said, students, parents and people in the community would be helped to understand that journalism is more than the weatherman on TV or the paparazzi who hounded Princess Di, that journalism can be of life-and-death importance; that journalists can make a difference.
When I finished, Mark Peters, a member of the school board who would later become its president, introduced himself and said: "Where did we find you?"
I was wondering that myself. To my alarm, I learned that the school board expected my school and all the others to be up and running the next school year. I hoped that the other schools were beginning with a firmer foundation than spontaneous inspiration. While the superintendent never brought up the idea of my being co-director again, he did recruit me to serve on the "planning committee." He brought in a long-time educator in the district, Eve MacCurry, to be president (I had refused the designation), and we set about recruiting the other members of the planning committee.
At the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where I taught, I ran into another adjunct professor, Jonathan Oatis, who turned out to be ideal for the planning committee. He not only worked for Reuters, as an editor and a writer, he was also a resident of district 15 with a child in elementary school there.
By the end, the planning committee featured about a dozen members in all, and they were impressive. Katherine Fry was a professor of radio and television at Brooklyn College. Jessica Siegel was a long-time faculty adviser for the newspaper at Seward Park High School and the subject of Sam Freedman's book about a year in her classroom, Small Victories. Cati Sorra and Amy Cohen were both parents of children who liked to write and wanted to attend the school when it opened.
For the next several months, we worked hard putting together the school. The new schools that struck me as the most organized and the most likely to succeed had some kind of institution or solid community behind them. So I sought such a sponsor for the journalism school, to provide not money so much as muscle and manpower.
I tried to interest the newspaper where I worked, Newsday, which was no longer covering Brooklyn and so turned down the idea without discussion, and Columbia Journalism School. The dean agreed to several meetings, but it became clear that the school was not willing to risk its prestige by getting too heavily involved in a school over which it would have no real control, and at a grade level in which it had no expertise. The dean suggested that we work with the Columbia Scholastic Press Association, which was one of the two national organizations for high school (and some middle school) student newspapers and journalism programs. There was also the National Elementary Schools Press Association, which included middle schools.
We attended these groups' conventions, sought advice from their star advisors on school newspapers, read the textbooks they recommended.
Inspiration, Not Vocation
The school we were working to create was not intended to prepare students for a career in journalism. Our idea was to offer a rigorous academic curriculum which would incorporate journalism as a learning tool for the standard subjects. The primary purpose of journalism in the journalism school would not be vocational, but inspirational.
Journalism could be used on occasion in the subject areas. The math teacher, for example, might use sports statistics to illustrate various concepts in math. The language arts teacher could show students the professional reviews of a novel or play that they would read for class. The science teacher could invite a science journalist to speak not only about the recent advances in the study of the brain, but also how he put his article together on the subject.
Any actual journalism, we figured, would take place in journalism electives. These would be hands-on workshops -- putting out the school newspaper, putting together a radio broadcast, developing a portfolio of photography, creating packages of reporting for the Web, shooting a video documentary of the neighborhood, compiling a Foxfire-like book of neighborhood culture. The best of these would then be published, broadcast or posted by our partners, the local professional newspapers or radio stations or web sites that would agree to showcase student work.
Much of this depended, of course, on our ability to attract professional journalist volunteers. Because of the name of the school, we were able to interest the New York chapter of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists to become an official sponsor and encourage its members to help.
This turned out to be a gold mine for talent. One of those who poured energy into the enterprise was Edna Negron. She was at the time the senior producer for Staten Island Live, the web site of the Staten Island Advance, and agreed to supervise the program in new media -- in 1998, when new media was in fact new. What made her ideal was that she once had been a middle school teacher. She had even grown up in the neighborhood in which the school was to be located, the border between Red Hook and Carroll Gardens.
We put together a newsletter -- the only middle school newsletter, I can guarantee you, in which the authors included a major newspaper film critic, a Pulitzer-prize winner, a reporter for Time magazine, a beat reporter for the Daily News and a producer of network television. It also included an essay, in both English and Spanish, by two fifth graders who were planning to attend the school about why they like to write.
To me, it was crucial that the director and at least one member of the staff have backgrounds as professional journalists. This would help insure that the school would remain a school of journalism in more than just its name. And there were plenty of teachers who had experience as journalists.
One, who had been recommended as the best journalism teacher in the city, had come to the end of her maternity leave and was looking for a job. Another teacher had worked for nine years as a reporter on a local Spanish-language newspaper.
But in December, the superintendent informed us that he had hired the director for the school, a co-director of a middle school in his old district. The extent of her experience in journalism was having written a few articles for her local newspaper while in college; she had never taught journalism. Eventually, they also hired a co-director who had been, albeit briefly, a professional journalist and had taught journalism. But the co-director did not work out, and when he left the school, his position was eliminated, for reasons that were never explained to me.
But the school was going to be a reality -- we were told it would be one of three small new schools in a building that currently housed a failing big school -- and I wanted to be part of it. So I eagerly agreed to attend middle school fairs, where I spoke about the school both to parents and to more ten-year-olds than I had ever met before.
Students Wanted
The Manuel de Dios Unanue Academy of Journalism was to be a very small school to begin with, just 60 students. As the director interviewed the students who were applying for admission, I wondered whether this idea would work with students so young. They did look awfully short. "When I say the word journalism, what does it mean to you?" the director asked.
"Writing?" one student offered.
"Reading," another said.
A third shrugged.
But then a fourth replied: "Writing, reading, books, papers, news, telling people stuff about what's happening."
The director asked groups of students, most of whom had never met before, to work together then and there to produce an editorial on whether public school students should wear school uniforms, a hot issue at the time. One of the r esulting editorials began: "Kids in public schools should not have to wear uniforms because in the first amendment of the Constitution it says that each individual has their own rights."
Over the director's shoulder, I read the essays the students were submitting as samples of their writing.
"Eleanor Roosevelt was one of the most admired women," one girl wrote. "She once said her life was to have kindness and make an effort to help other human beings rather than hurt them. She also said you get more joy out of giving joy to others and should put a good deal of thought into the happiness you are able to give. I think Eleanor Roosevelt was a good woman. When I grow up I want to be like Eleanor Roosevelt." When I grow up, I thought, I want to be like the kids who are going to go to this school.
Next Page: "Shut Out"


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What Happened To My Middle School?
cont'd
by Jonathan Mandell
25 November 02
Shut Out
After the school fairs, I wanted to continue to participate, but neither the superintendent nor the director would return my telephone calls, and the director would take up to a month to reply to each of my e-mail messages.
To my astonishment, the director officially disbanded the planning committee -- all those journalism professors, and professional journalists -- making no provisions to keep the members involved in the school. She said that the committee had accomplished little, and that the superintendent had told her that the school's Parent Teacher Association should continue our functions. So ended the participation in the school of the professional journalist volunteers who had been most dedicated to it.
When the Manuel de Dios Unanue School of Journalism opened on 610 Henry Street in September, 1998, I was not invited, despite my repeated requests, until six weeks into the semester.
The first thing I noticed was that there were no newspapers being delivered to the students of the journalism school, though another of the new schools was getting deliveries. I saw nothing that had much to do with journalism in the school. The first class project of the sixth grade had been to write letters to Diane Sawyer and Barbara Walters asking either of them to feature the new school on TV, which struck me as a more apt project for a school of public relations.
Worse, in one of the "journalism electives" classes, a teacher spent an entire period showing video excerpts of television sitcoms, the purpose of which, if I understood correctly, was some kind of comment about the effect on society of the mass media. The teachers had been free to determine what they wanted to teach as their journalism elective. Since none of the teachers had any background in journalism, most seemed to have simply come up with something they wanted to teach, and called it journalism, whether or not it was anything a professional journalist would recognize as such.
The director was defensive. Many of the students who had signed up for the school had not in fact enrolled, and half the students were "dumped" on her as the school opened. She had not been able to work full-time on putting the school together, she said, having been assigned other tasks in the district. "I know it took a while for me to get my shit together," she wrote in an e-mail. But now that the school was up and running, she said, she could concentrate on "the journalism component."
At a PTA meeting not long afterward, the director introduced me to the parents, emphasizing my professional credentials. "Jonathan and I have been working closely together over the past few months," she said. I was speechless at the audacity of her lie. It had taken me a long time to conclude what I still am reluctant to believe -- that I was seen of use to the school solely as publicist and cheerleader and shill. I had been used for my value as a dog and pony show to lure the parents into the school.
Still, I strove to stay involved, as did members of the Hispanic journalists group. I called up a number of prominent journalists and invited them to a "professional journalists day," assigning them to every classroom. Then, I left a message for the director saying that this event was going to happen unless I heard from her otherwise.
On the appointed day, everybody showed up -- Jonathan Capehart, Pulitzer-prize winning editorial writer for the Daily News. John Anderson, the film critic for Newsday, a sports writer who brought copies of his New York Times Magazine cover story, a magazine publisher, a photojournalist -- one well-established professional journalist for each classroom, some of them residents of the neighborhood. The teachers looked excited, the students seemed inspired; it was to my eyes a spectacular success.
The director was absent from school that day. She never followed up.
Decline And Merge
A while later, I heard that there was a new director of the Manuel de Dios Unanue Academy of Journalism. The old director had left before the end of the school year for another job in the district. The new director had done a great job in "repairing the damage," according to a journalist who had remained involved. She invited me to join the advisory council, which I did with great glee.
But the renaissance -- or, more accurately, reconstruction -- of the school was a relatively short-lived era, thanks to developments in the school district that began at the start of the third year of the school. They can be summed up by headlines that appeared in the New York Post:
$1M Deficit Has Bklyn School Big On Carpet
Levy Starts Probe Of Dist. 15's DeStefano
District $$ Woes Force Classroom Cutbacks
Big-Spending School Boss Hit In New Audit -- Also Broke Bid Rules, Hevesi Says
5 Slipping Schools Face Shutdown
Disgraced District 15 Official Is Sent Packing
New Dist. 15 Schools Boss: 'I'll Clean House'
After Frank resigned amid allegations of financial mismanagement and was replaced by the new superintendent, Carmen Farina, there were reports that the Manuel de Dios Unanue School of Journalism would be shorn of its name. I had been told (though, of course, never officially) that having a school named after a Latino was making it difficult to attract white parents. But taking away the name also took away some of the incentive for the Latino journalists to stay involved.
Even worse, the school of journalism was absurdly going to be "merged" with two of the other original small "option" schools, to create one school, The Secondary School of Law, Journalism and Research, as if these were all the same thing. Thus had occurred what I had most feared -- the school of journalism existed only as a name, and barely that.
Many of the other initial option schools, I read, had experienced similar fates, combined together, renamed, reorganized, or shut down completely.
Next Page: "Trick Or Treat"


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What Happened To My Middle School?
cont'd
by Jonathan Mandell
25 November 02
Trick Or Treat
On Halloween, 2002, I finally visited the Secondary School of Journalism, as part of a tour being given for prospective students and their parents by Abbie Reif, who is now its third principal. She had previously served as "building supervisor," for The Academy of Mathematical Thinking and the Academy for the Performing Arts, both of which were shut down.
There would be 600 students next fall in the journalism school, she said, which would eventually run from grades 6 through 12. The school is one of three the district has put in John Jay High School, part of its plan to replace the old John Jay, which was attended largely by minority students from outside the district.
None of the teachers I saw were the same as those who had initially been hired. Though the three schools in the building -- journalism, law and research -- had been combined into one school the year before, they had now been separated once again, Reiff explained, into three distinct schools. This had happened just before the school year began, so, though technically the school is now in its fifth year, the principal was talking as if it were a new school, and focusing not on what the school is, but on what she said it will be. "We are primarily in year one of a new school of journalism," she told the parents. "My goal, my vision, is that there will be a laptop set up in every classroom...I have a photojournalist lined up who is ready to help..."
During the hour tour, there were few mentions, even obliquely, of journalism in the school of journalism. At one point, the principal confided to the parents, "the arts are my real passion." I was not sure whether she meant, "as opposed to journalism."
Later, since the journalism in the school was always less important than its academic rigor, I tried to discover the school's track record. This was not so easy. Unlike older schools, it does not have a "report card" on the Department of Education web site. The only test scores I could find were last school year's sixth grade reading scores for the Secondary School for Law, Journalism and Research. Only about 22 percent of the tested students met state standards. I compared this with a similarly themed small school in district 2 in Manhattan, the Clinton School for Writers and Artists, which had almost three times as many of the students meeting state standards (58.7 percent).
The Brooklyn school's write-up on the "Inside Schools" website run by Advocates for Children, was not encouraging either. The reporter said that on the day she visited, conditions in one class "were chaotic, with arguments developing and students storming out."
Reif, whose name then was Zwillinger, is quoted on the web site: "We are not ready for prime time yet." A parent complains: "This school was thrown together in two months." What, I wondered, happened to the first four years?
I had wanted to talk to Reif after the tour, but she had not had the time to meet me. I e-mailed her, offering to become involved again if she were interested, requesting that we arrange a time to meet, and asking a lot of questions:
Why are none of the teachers the same?
Why have there been three principals in four years?
Why was the name Manuel de Dios Unanue dropped?
What is the journalism teacher's background in journalism, if any?
Does the school have any ongoing collaboration with professional journalists or institutions?
How could I become involved?
The principal sent back a brief e-mail saying that she would soon reply, and, when I followed up with a phone call, said she would get back to me. A month later, I still have not heard from her.