A Dinosaur's (Literary) Ancestors

"Real dinosaurs didn't like attention.  They didn't want anyone to see them.  That's why Bolivar lived in the busiest city in the world."

Bolivar has been getting a lot of justly deserved attention.  But he is not the first (fictional) dinosaur to find refuge in New York.

That would be - I think - Sinclair Sophocles, The Baby Dinosaur.  Published in its author's and illustrator's home of Vienna in 1971 and published in English in the United States in 1974, Sinclair has Bolivar beat by over 40 years.

You might think that a lot has changed in 40 years, and a lot has.  People lament the gentrification and write odes (through rose-colored glasses, in my opinion, possibly even hot-pink) to the gritty days of yore.

But some things never change.

In Sinclair Sophocles Friederike Mayrocker wrote, "You are probably wondering why the people in the street did not stare or scream when they saw a baby dinosaur walking by.  I am wondering, too, but the fact is - no one did.  People who live in cities are often like that."

Were truer words ever spoken (or written)?  We New Yorkers pride ourselves on not staring - not at celebrities, not at crazy people, not at the strange outfits or the strange things people carry with them.  Some people disparage this attitude as isolating.  We prefer to see it as respecting people's privacy.  Therefore people of all stripes, clothing and headgear- and dinosaurs - can ride the subway in peace.

Bolivar rides the subway undisturbed and unnoticed

The Lizard form the Park rides the subway, undisturbed and unnoticed

Man with giant red mouse ears rides the subway, undisturbed but noticed by me

Shopping at Fairway, of course

The 1 train does not stop here!

Bolivar is strikingly beautiful and detailed, leading to cries of recognition (Fairway! the subway tiles!) and the occasional calling out of an error (the 1 train does not stop at 81st St for the Museum of Natural History; that would be the B and C trains).  There also some clever visual jokes, some New York-related (the local hot dog joint is the Papaya Czar rather than the Papaya King) and some not (Sybil's mom uses a Pineapple brand laptop (or perhaps Pomegranate)).  The themes of friendship and when privacy becomes isolation, when anonymity turns into loneliness are treated with a light touch.

But for my money, Sinclair Sophocles is the winner here.  Both Bolivar and Sinclair are stories of a friendship between a child a dinosaur.  Both are absurd, although Sinclair Sophocles ventures into the surreal with a talking furniture dust cover that renders the wearer invisible.  But Sinclair elevates the theme of friendship with its beautiful ending, when Sinclair flashes his "promised sign" of forever friendship in the sky: the infinity sign.

After Sinclair Sophocles came the dinosaurs of Hudson Talbott's We're Back: A Dinosaur's Story (disappointing, in my opinion), followed by Mark Pett's Lizard from the Park, both of which, amazingly, feature the dinosaurs camouflaged as balloons the Thanksgiving Day Parade:

If we expand our search to include not just dinosaurs but reptiles in New York City more generally, we have Lyle the Crocodile who made his first appearance in 1962 in the classic The House on East 88th Street and Have You Seen My Dragon?, published in 2014.  And in Chalk (2010) we have a playground structure shaped like a dinosaur coming alive in a city that, while not specifically New York, certainly could be.

And underlying it all is that old "alligator in the sewer" urban legend, which dates back until at least the 1930s.  Steve Light, author and illustrator of Have You Seen My Dragon? notes that his father used to claim that the steam coming out of manhole covers was the breath of a dragon.

There is something about the intersection of the wild and the civilized and the line between privacy and isolation that fascinate us.  Perhaps that is why the legend of the urban dinosaur, unlike the dinosaur itself, will never become extinct.

HalleluYAH! HalleluYAH!

After my last post about books set in NYC, I picked up another book I'd been meaning to read, Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life, only to discover it too was set in New York.  But it got the details wrong and those mistakes nearly ruined the book for me.  True, the protagonist is a bit of an anxious kid, afraid to travel by himself in the city.  But certainly he's traveled with his mom!  My kids - and all those I know - know to use a Metrocard on the bus and to signal for their stop!  (In fact, NYC kids, from toddlerhood, beg to be the one to ring for their stop.  It's kind of like pressing the elevator button.)   All New York kids, except the most sheltered and wealthy, which Jeremy and his friend Lizzie clearly are not, would know these things.  Despite an appearance by the Museum of Natural History, this book could have been set anywhere.  Those two facts make it ineligible for my next books-set-in-NYC post.

Days later, a friend posted a photo of a page from Rachel Vail's book, Well, That Was Awkward on Facebook, in which the characters hear the "Halleluyah Guy" (a real, older man who walks the streets of the Upper West Side from approximately 100th to 110th St. shouting, "Glor-EE!  Glor-EE!  Jesus.  Jesus.  Jesus.  HalleluYAH!  HalleluYAH!"  and are relieved that he is well since they haven't heard him in a while.  The Facebook thread blew up with current and former Upper West Siders sharing their reminiscences about Halleluyah Guy and, just like the characters, sharing their concerns about whether he was still with us, until one commenter finally said she'd heard him recently.  Now THAT'S authenticity for you.

So I picked up the book, and on nearly every page was a reference to my neighborhood.  I drove my husband nuts by telling him about every mention of our local pizza place, bakery, bagel shop.  I started to wonder if the book was too authentic - too specific to a time and place to be universal.  (It's really specific.  Only people who lived between 96th St. and 112th St. and Amsterdam Avenue to Riverside knew what we were talking about.  Upper West Siders who live in the 70s had no idea.)  But it's not.  It's really about relationships - familial, platonic, and romantic.  It manages the trick of being both universal and specific, and its authenticity and accuracy have earned it a place on my next list of New York city books.

What errors in a book ruined or almost ruined a book for you?

New and New to Me New York Books

There must be more books written about and/or set in New York than any other city in the world. London might come close, Paris should be up there, but New York has to be the winner, don't you think?  I have absolutely no evidence to back up this claim, but it's my story and I'm stickin' to it. Here are some of them:

Picture Books

New

Stop Feedin' Da Boids by James Sage, illustrated by Pierre Pratt.   I wanted to love this book.  I love the title, resuscitating as it does a nearly-gone New York accent.  The first full double-page spread by illustrator Pierre Pratt of a scene in Brooklyn with the Brooklyn Bridge in the distance is perfection.  With its bright colors and its diversity of Brooklyn residents - a Hasid, a man in a wheelchair, a Muslim, a dogwalker, a skateboarder - it's both visually beautiful and so evocative of its setting.  And it's resurrection of the classic New York accent - perfect.  But the plot is lacking.  Swand, having moved from the country, is eager to find any signs of nature in New York. But soon her building is overrun with pigeons - and their noise and filth - due to her feeding them. The solution is obvious: stop feedin' da boids!  But it takes far too many pages to get there and the journey is not worth it.  Nonetheless, this book prompted me to check out Pratt's other work.  He's prolific, and I'd never heard of him before.

Pax and Blue by Lori Richmond. Another pigeon book.  This time, a pigeon ends up in the subway. Sweet but not saccharine, with more great NYC illustrations, including subway illustrations.  I love how only the title character is in color.


New to Me

Rosa-Too-Little, written and illustrated by Sue Felt.  One of my newly discovered finds, this book, published in 1950, is set uptown, seemingly in Spanish Harlem and features the local library branch.  So of course I love it! The street scene art is fantastic.

One Monday Morning by Uri Shulevitz.  A little boy who lives in a tenement building and takes the D train finds a way to amuse himself on a rainy day.  While the street sign is not easy to read, I'm pretty sure it says Broome Street.

Chapter Books

New

The Goat by Anne Fleming.  I wrote about this one here.  Love it.

The Doorman's Repose, written and illustrated by Chris Raschka.  This volume of interconnected stories set in a single apartment building, 777 Garden Avenue, a fictional short street that I imagine something like Claremont or Manhattan Avenue, is just so good.  From the doorman (think of Henry, featured in Judy Blume's Fudge books, but with more gravitas), the elevator (Otis, naturally), the cranky busybody (recalling Mrs. Mind-Your-Own-Business of Johanna Hurwitz's Riverside Kids series), the local mice  (one a psychiatrist (this must be the Upper West Side), who has learned her specialty by residing in the tissue box of her human equivalent, and a jazz musician, who has learned his art by living in a double bass), the super (Clementine's dad?), this book gives life to some of the "eight million stories" in the city.

Lucky Broken Girl by Ruth Behar.  In this semi-autobiographical novel, a Cuban Jewish immigrant girl to oft-literarily-neglected Queens is bedridden for a year after a car accident, and learns who her friends really are.  (Other books set in Queens include Gina by Bernard Waber (picture book), Twerp and its sequel Finding the Worm by Mark Goldblatt, and, in YA, Burn Baby Burn by Meg Medina.)

Apartment 1986 by Lisa Papademetriou.  Another book I wanted to like more than I did.  Callie skips school one day, but playing hooky suddenly becomes a habit she can't break.  Add in parents who are acting strangely, financial fraud, and a grandmother with a secret boyfriend, plus a friend facing a debilitating illness, and it all seemed a bit much to me.

York: The Shadow Cipher by Laura Ruby.  Set in a present-day but alternate NYC, where the subways are immaculate and never break down.  On second thought, maybe it's not just an alternate NYC but a fantasy NYC.  I just started reading this aloud to my 9-year-old.  I'll keep you posted!

New to Me

Stoneflight by Georgess McHargue.  Janie is stuck in the city for the summer.  Her parents are preoccupied with their jobs and their faltering marriage.  She takes refuge in her Morningside Height's building's rooftop, where she, by force of will (heart?) brings the stone carved griffin that stands atop it to life.  With scenes at the local library branch, the main 42nd street building, and a "vacation" in her uncle's Upper East Side townhouse, combined with flights on the griffin over Manhattan, I don't understand how this book has ever gone out of print. It's similarities to the recent adult book, The Gargoyle Hunters (preteen protagonist named - you guessed it, Griffin -  whose parents' marriage is on the rocks) makes me wonder whether that book's author read Stoneflight before he wrote his book.

Same Sun Here by Silas House and Neela Vaswani.  I grew up on the Lower East Side and I knew that this book featured letters between from a girl living there and a penpal in Kentucky.  And yet even I  was set around the turn or beginning of the last century, in the Lower East Side's heyday, as if real, young people don't live there anymore.  Of course, I was wrong.  Written in 2008 and set contemporaneously, this epistolary novel features Meena, a young Indian immigrant, on the LES, and River, a young boy who lives in Kentucky.  Meena has only recently rejoined her family in NYC from India after her parents and brother finally had enough money to pay for her to rejoin them. While the book deals with many of the issues you would expect - feelings of abandonment, homesickness - it also addresses body image (Meena writes to River about shaving her legs, which he is not pleased about, and her brother is the person who teaches her how), interracial relationships (her brother's girlfriend is Latina) and a sibling relationship that seems a little too good to be true.  And on River's side, the focus is on the environmental disaster of mountaintop removal done to facilitate coal mining.  The two bond over the stereotypes that both of them face but the book never seems preachy.


The Wizard of Washington Square by Jane Yolen.  David, new to NYC, meets the Wizard of Washington Square.  I have one quibble with  this book.  The boy's dog goes missing and his parents don't notice?!?  But it makes up for it with great descriptions of Washington Square Park in the late '60s, with people signing petitions without reading them, everyone having long hair, and a reference to the IRT (subway). And do those illustrations look familiar? Why, yes they do.  Do they perhaps remind you of a boy who's having a bad day?  A terrible day?  A terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day?  They should!  Ray Cruz is indeed the illustrator here.

What are your favorite new or lesser known children's books set in New York?

And the 2018 Newbery Goes To...

You heard it here first.  The 2018 Newbery is going to go to Anne Fleming's The Goat. Set in New York City, mostly in a single apartment building, it is funny yet deep, smart yet wacky and whimsical (without being annoying), surreal yet realistic, and utterly, completely original.

It is not a typical coming-of-age story.  There is no divorce, no friendship triangles, no crushes, no school drama.  In fact, there's no school.  There is no sibling rivarly (there are no siblings).  There is no conflict between a tween and her parents, no embarrassment as they all skip to Follow the Yellow Brick Road in public.  This all makes for a nice change from the usual middle-grade chapter book fare.

There *is* an orphan and death and 9/11, but ten years on, in a totally matter-of-fact, non-tear-jerker-ish way.

There is a musical about soccer (Americanized from hockey) moms.

There is a man who's had a stroke, a blind science-fiction-writing skateboarder, and an immigrant grandmother from an unnamed country.

There is an 11-year-old girl named Kid and her parents, Lisa and Bobby, and a dog named Cat.

And yes, there is a goat.

Or is there?

Yay for YA!

I'm not a big reader of YA.  Too much sappy romance, too many vampires, too many dead parents.  I know, there's plenty of YA that does not include any of those elements.  But I don't have the time or energy to seek those out.   But every now and then, a YA book will grab me.  A friend will recommend it, or a review will catch my eye, or I'll hear about a book that interests me and only realize later that it's been classified as Young Adult by... someone!  (Whom?  The publisher?  The Library of Congress?  The author?)

In the last 6 months or so, I have read three stand-out novels that someone, somewhere, has deemed Young Adult.

Conviction by Kelly Loy Gilbert, seems at first to be a book about baseball, but is really about faith, love, parenting, siblinghood, morality, the justice system, and a tug-of-war between familial loyalty and truth.  When I first started the book, I assumed the title referred to a belief system, but as I kept reading, I realized it also referred, cleverly, to a finding of guilty in the criminal justice system.  A fabulous book for adults, young and otherwise.

I picked up Burn Baby Burn for it's NYC 1977 Summer (Son of Sam, the blackout) setting.   Although I am too young to remember that summer, I lived through it, and am convinced I have a sort of collective memory about it, combined with living in NYC through the 80s and 90s.  Author Meg Medina, thankfully, does not wear rose-colored glasses and lament the gentrification of the city since then (yes, artist could afford apartments here back then, but they often got mugged as they traveled to and from them!).  Her 1977 Queens is the real deal, with a serial killer on the loose and looting erupting during the blackout.  But her characters have their problems writ small (although not to them), too.  Nora is eager to graduate high school and start her "real life" but her teachers are trying to convince her she's college material.  She has a crush on a coworker and there is domestic violence at home, of a sort not often addressed in fiction.  Again, you don't have to be a young adult to enjoy this book.  In fact, you will probably enjoy it more if you lived through that summer or lived in New York during its grittier days.

I've lately become intrigued by books set in the Middle Ages, possibly because there suddenly seem to be a slew of them being published (it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg scenario),  or maybe because of my daughter's fifth grade class trip to a place called Medieval Times.  With the publication of the highly anticipated The Inquisitor's Tale: Or, The Three Magical Children and Their Holy Dog in September, the trend continues.  In the meantime, pick up The Passion of Dolssa (written, strangely enough in my opinion, by the author of The Scandalous Sisterhood of Prickwillow Place, a perfectly fine book, but far inferior to this one) to satisfy your medieval cravings.  Dolssa believes she has a direct relationship with Jesus, who she says appears to her, and who endows her with the power to heal and work other miracles.  The Church has labelled her, and other women like her, a heretic. Dolssa takes refuge in a medieval village where three sisters protect her.  The middle sister, the local matchmaker, narrates the story.  However, I must make one confession.  At the very end of the book there is an epilogue of sorts.  An old woman is in prison and is speaking to someone outside the prison with instructions.  I could not figure out who the woman is.  Apparently I was not the only one who was confused (sigh of relief!), because the author posted an explanation online.  Nonetheless, the book is wonderful despite this lack of clarity (or perhaps despite my denseness!).

What YA books have you read and enjoyed?

What Do These Books Have in Common?

These books don't look like they have much in common, do they?  One is a mystery for kids involving a treasure hunt through New York landmarks and clues in the forms of poems,.  The other is fiction for adults about women working in the financial industry, based on the author's own experience.  It turns out that they were written by the same author, Maureen Sherry.

And, unusually, the children's book was published (although not necessarily written) first.  While there is no shortage of authors of fiction for adults trying their hands at children's books, particularly picture books (e.g. Harlan Coben, Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, John Grisham, inter alia), it is rarer for an author of children's books to then write for adults.

As for the books themselves, I definitely enjoyed Walls Within Walls.  Hand it to a child who loves From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.  Although the characters are not as fully realized as I'd like, and the plot point of the parents getting swept up in their newfound wealth strained credibility, especially for the mother, the plot was a fun romp through New York.  A sequel set in London is to be published next year.  I am only about one-third of the way through Opening Belle (I love the title!) but so far, it's an engrossing look at the male-dominated world of finance and how women operate in that world.  As someone who frequently used to be the only woman in a roomful of male lawyers, I can relate.

I hope Ms. Sherry writes many more books - for both children and adults.

More 2015 Favorites

So many good picture books came out this year!  Here are a few more favorites.

Ketzel, the Cat Who Composed. This story, based on real events about a cat who "composed" a piece of music for a competition, is utterly delightful.  I love how the illustrator captures the real composer's frustration, the cat's mischievousness, and the hustle and bustle of New York City.  By the way, ketzel means cat in Yiddish, and ketzele (pronounced KETZ-el-uh) is the diminutive.  You can even buy - separately - a CD of the piano competition at which the piece was played.

Tricky Vic: The Impossibly True Story of the Man Who Sold the Eiffel Tower, written and illustrated by Greg Pizzoli.  How clever to use fingerprints for the faces of the "bad guys!"  This unique book about a con man is great for older children.

In a Village by the Sea by Muon Van, illustrated by Amy Chu.  Lovely illustrations show a Vietnamese fisherman's family waiting for him to come back from the sea.  The story-within-a-story (or painting-within-a-painting) element has readers questioning what is real.

Americanine: A Haute Dog in New York. Kebbi's energetic pencil drawings capture New York's frenetic energy better than (almost?) any I've seen.  The conceit that the narrator is a French dog who is visiting New York for the first time is unnecessary (any ignorant visitor would do; e.g., an alien, or, even better for a children's book, a young child) except to create the occasional pun ("haute dog"), the art more than makes up for it.  And there's the Orthodox Jew who appears in almost every drawing... why?  Are there any other recurring characters?  I suspect spending a bit more time with this book would pay off.

Imaginary Fred.  Have you ever attended a concert where two imaginary friends were the musicians? Have you ever introduced your imaginary friend to your friend's imaginary friend? This take on imaginary friends is unique and hilarious.  The sight of the baffled audience listening to music played by the imaginary friends (or perhaps they only hear silence?) is priceless.  There are quite a few new books about imaginary friends this year (We Forgot Brock! is another, and a big hit with my students), but this is my favorite.  

Wait. This one is perfect for the toddler-preschool crowd.  Mommy's in a hurry, but look at all that she's missing out on!  A beautiful take on how children live - and force their parents to live - in the moment.  Portis's style reminds me a bit of Lauren Castillo's here, especially as this book is set in New York City like much of Castillo's work.  I wish I'd included this one in my mock Caldecott.

Leo:A Ghost Story.  Shades of blue predominate in this story about a ghost who saves the day and finds a friend.

A Fine Dessert: Four Centuries, Four Families, One Delicious Treat by Emily Jenkins, illustrated by Sophie Blackall.  Showing how one dessert - blackberry fool - has been made in different ways throughout time not only serves as a timeline of kitchen technology (bundle of twigs - whisk - mechanical mixer - electric mixer), but also shows societal changes throughout history.

Home, written and illustrated by Carson Ellis.  A palette of brown, blue, and red showcases all kinds of homes, from the real (apartments, wigwams, boats), to the imaginary (a home on the moon with a view of Earth, the home of a Norse god).  Pair it with A House is a House For Me for a fun discussion of houses and the completely different types of art (one stark and simple; one extremely detailed) in each book.

The Little Book of Big Fears.  A clever take on alphabet books (the missing letters spell GUTSY and BRAVE) that is perfect for your little worrier.

Swan: The Life and Dance of Anna Pavlova.  This poetic biography of Anna Pavlova has the reader enter a winter wonderland.

See You Next Year.  The pleasures of visiting the same vacation spot year after year, thrown into greater relief by one change - the making of a new friend.

The Tea Party in the Woods.  In black-and-white-and-shades-of-gray with touches of red and yellow, this book tells the sotry of Kikko as she tries to bring a pie to Grandma through the woods. Sound familiar?  Not quite!  Betsy Bird wrote the perfect review.  

A is for Anastasia

My daughter is reading the Anastasia books, which I loved as a kid.  I even reread the first one a few years ago in an attempt to figure out when my daughter might be ready for them.  Despite that, I got one fact about Anastasia very wrong.

In the first book in the series Anastasia lives in an apartment (her family later moves, to her initial horror, to the suburbs) with her hippie, artsy, uber-liberal parents (when a friend says his family donates to the March of Dimes, she responds that hers donates to the ACLU).  Her mom is a painter; her dad, a bearded English professor and poet.  They are straightforward with her about sex, bad words, feelings, and life in general.  They don't care about being like everyone else - in fact, they prefer not to be.  They celebrate Christmas but, to me, have a very Jewish sensibility.  The first book in the series was written in 1979.

Given that description, where do you think they would live?

New York, right?  The Upper West Side, back it when it was home to artist-intellectuals who had rent-controlled apartments.  Back when it was a bad neighborhood.  Back before the artists moved to (had to move to) Brooklyn (or even Queens!). 

Wrong!  Cambridge, Massachussetts.  Now, I guess this faulty recollection says more about me, the New York-centric reader than the characters, but still... I just cannot believe they are not Upper West Siders!!

Wherever she "lives," Anastasia is a treasure.  What other series could have both me and my 9-year-old daughter laughing out loud as we read separate books in the series silently to ourselves?  I can't think of any!

It is clear that Anastasia's parents have talked to her frankly about sex and growing up, but those issues do not dominate the books and, when they are included, often have a comic twist to them.  Having been written in the '70s, '80s, and '90s, these issues are also given a much-welcome lighter touch than I would think they would be given today.  When Anastasia develops what is pretty clearly a platonic crush on her female gym teacher, her mother reassures her that she is normal, but stops there.  No long discussion about homosexuality.  Not that books that do treat those issues differently aren't needed as well.

I also love the fact that Anastasia's parents, Myron and Katherine, are well-developed characters with their own interests (her poet father also loves classical music) and foibles.  While they mostly deal with Anastasia's, and her little brother Sam's, trials and tribulations (Sam has, in the years since I was the target audience for these books, gotten his own series), with patience and good humor, they too have their limits.  It is so refreshing to read a book where the parents are not killed off, are not caricatures, and are not absent whether physically or emotionally.  The Krupniks take their place in the pantheon of wonderful fictional parents, along with the Quimbys, as I discussed here.

Don't let the covers put you off (some have been updated - and not necessarily for the better!).  The books are not dated at all.  Go check them out of the library, then sneak them for yourself.  Now.

P.S. One day as I was checking the school library's catalog to see which of the Anastasia books we had, a third-grade girl, waiting for her turn to speak to me, spied the titles I was looking at and said, "Oh, Anastasia!  It's so sad what happened to her."  I paused, wracking my brain.  Nothing very bad happens to Anastasia.  But then I got it!  "Do you mean the Russian princess?," I asked.  She did.

P.P.S. I can think of few other authors with the range of Lois Lowry.  It's hard to imagine the same person writing the Anastasia books, The Giver (which I have not read), a Dear America book about a Shaker community in Maine during World War I, Number the Stars, about the Danish Resistance in World War II, and many others.

An Open Letter Re Education

I sent this today to Mayor-Elect Bill de Blasio and a slew of other government and school officials.

Dear Mayor-Elect de Blasio,

I write to you as a parent of two NYC public school children (3^rd grade and kindergarten), the daughter of two NYC public school teachers, a proud NYC public school graduate, and a concerned citizen.  My children have had, to date, wonderful teachers.  But the current atmosphere of education “reform” is making it almost impossible for those teachers to do their jobs.  With that in mind, I ask you to take action on the following education issues.

1      There need to be fewer, shorter, better designed tests which count for less in evaluating both our students and our teachers.  Class time devoted to test preparation – for any test – should be reduced and class time devoted to learning, discussion, questioning, and the arts should be restored.

2      The DOE should give schools a set amount of money to purchase any curriculum they choose.  There should not be certain subsidized curricula.  This subsidization results in schools like my daughters’ purchasing substandard curricula such as Pearson’s ReadyGen ELA curriculum.  In addition to being poorly designed, with books that are not age-appropriate, lessons which are too long (90 minutes!) and too boring (how many times can you answer the questions: what did you read, what did you learn, what questions do you have; they read each text three times), as of the middle of this school year, this curriculum is not complete and the schools do not have all their materials in their possession.  It is impossible for teachers to become familiar with the materials, make a considered judgment about them, modify the curriculum as appropriate, and teach without the materials.  But our local school purchased it because it was subsidized and any other choice was too expensive.  This is shameful.

3    Once a school chooses curricula, those curricula should be guides, not scripts and teachers should not suffer negative repercussions if they use their own creativity and expertise to depart from those curricula.  Rather, they should be commended for doing so.  For example, at my daughters’ school, the third grade students are required  to read a book which the third grade teachers think is inappropriate on many levels: reading level, vocabulary, context, content and literary quality.  Who should decide what book my daughter’s class reads?  The answer is obvious: her teacher.  Not Pearson, not the principal, and not me.  The specific book is irrelevant; teachers are being increasingly stripped of their autonomy and flexibility.  No wonder they are demoralized.  They are professionals and we should respect and trust their professional opinion.  Moreover, teachers at my daughters’ school have informed me that they get “in trouble” if they do things like assign homework they created rather than assign the curriculum-created workbook page.  Those modifications should be applauded, not excoriated. 

4      Cancel all contracts with Pearson.  It is hard for me to believe that in light of last spring’s egregious G&T scoring errors (I was one of the parents who brought these to the attention of the DOE.  Any kind of spot-checking by someone able to do 6^th grade math should have turned up the errors. Children with 99 on two portions of an exam should not end up with an overall score of 98.) and the recent fine by the State’s Attorney’s Office because its not-for-profit arm participated in the for-profit ventures of its corporate parent (see The New York Times, December 12, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/13/nyregion/educational-publishers-charity-accused-of-seeking-profits-will-pay-millions.html?_r=2&), the DOE does not have legal grounds to cancel Pearson’s contracts.  If it does not, those contracts should not be renewed.  Pearson makes money by selling the poorly designed, developmentally-inappropriate curricula mentioned above, and by selling poorly designed tests.  Pearson earns its position not by competence but via lobbying and campaign contributions (see http://influenceexplorer.com/organization/pearson-education/2ec67ad263c448739699876db162f88f ).  We should not turn education over to for-profit companies.

5      Reduce class size.  The current cap on class size for grades 1-5 is 32 students.  32!!  My older daughter’s class is approaching that limit, with 30 children.  Any teacher and any parent can tell you that 30 students and 1 teacher is just too many.  Students cannot get individualized attention, and the teacher is overwhelmed with grading tests and homework. 

6      Universal pre-K.  I fully support your proposal to provide truly universal pre-K.

7      Reduce or eliminate charter schools and hold the ones that exist to the same standards as traditional public schools.  Charter schools are destroying neighborhood schools.  The lotteries by which they enlist students are, of course self-selecting, and when students with problems – academic, behavioral, or otherwise – enroll, they are “counseled [that is kicked] out” sending those kids… you guessed it, back to their neighborhood schools.  Charters are “sharing” space with neighborhood schools, kicking those schools out of their own gyms, libraries, and auditoriums.  And yet studies show that charters, on average do no better job of educating our children.  This must stop.  No further charters should be granted and those that exist should not be renewed when they come up for renewal.  Instead, let’s improve all our schools. 

8      Appoint a former NYC public school teacher, and preferably a current or former NYC public school parent, as chancellor. 

9      Change the way teachers are evaluated.  Of course teachers should be evaluated.  But not primarily based on their students’ test scores.  Furthermore, it is ridiculous that principals are made to feel they must find something – anything -- to criticize in a teacher’s lesson, just as teachers feel compelled to give students 3s on their earlier report cards so that when they get 4s at the end of the year they can “show progress.”

1      The cost of hiring substitute teachers should not be borne by individual schools.  The DOE should have a fund to pay for substitute teachers. This should not come out of individual schools’ budgets.  One of the few advantages of having system as large as NYC’s, which otherwise, quite frankly, is unwieldy and whose size is often a disadvantage, is economies of scale: negotiating power for purchases, but also spreading the risk of a school having teachers who are pregnant, who have deaths in the family, and who have appendicitis (all of which happened at our school last year!).  The likelihood is that one school may need more subs one year; fewer the next.  Spread the risk.  Since these burdens currently fall on the school, last year my daughter, then in 2^nd grade, ended up spending several days in first grade, with her classmates spread out in other classes throughout the school, some in classes taught in a language they do not speak, because the school ran out of money to pay for subs back in April.

1     There should be a sliding scale of government assistance to schools, not tiers with hard and fast cut-offs.  This is not a “tale of two cities;” it’s a tale of three cities: the poor, the wealthy, and the middle class.  My daughters’ school has a student body which just barely misses the cut-off for Title 1 (i.e., poor) schools and yet does not have a student and parent body that can raise money like truly wealthy schools.  Just as the middle class is being squeezed, so are middle class (or lower middle class) schools – like ours.  I know this is a federal issue, but please, do what you can to create a sliding scale of government assistance, rather than tiers with hard and fast cut-offs.

I am looking forward to a new era in public education under your administration.  Please don’t disappoint me – or my children.