Game of Kings Read online

  After each chess club meeting, the desks are moved back into place for Weiss’s Friday classes, and the pieces are sorted into plastic shopping bags and tucked into one of the mustard-colored lockers in the back of the room. “I hope you come back,” Weiss says. Many of them will. Some of them will show up on occasion: once a week, once a month, once a semester. Some of them will never show up again. This is the nature of high school, of course; it is certainly the norm at Murrow, where a diversity of interests and activities is encouraged, and where responsibility is self-imposed. At Murrow, you are on your own. You can avail yourself of independent projects and individualized curricula and college prep programs and guidance counselors, and if you so choose, you can decline to attend classes at all. It is a tempting dynamic for a teenager. It is an atmosphere that has made Murrow both one of the most respected public schools in New York City and a place where self-reliance can degenerate into abject failure.

  Edward R. Murrow High School

  TWO

  BRUCKNER’S GAMBIT

  THE LEGEND WENT THAT THE MAN HAD COMPILED SOME SORT OF elephantine mental Rolodex, that he could cross-reference and collate an entire databank of several thousand names and faces and class schedules in the space between those prominent ears, that he was perhaps the only school administrator in America who knew more about your adolescent social life than you yourself.

  Even now, a year into his retirement, Saul Bruckner still elicits greetings from students making their way onto Avenue M on a brisk spring afternoon. They are taken aback by the sight of their former principal, a hunched and soft-spoken man with a beaklike nose, who has been likened to Kermit the Frog. They stop and they stare, as if their innermost thoughts have been exposed, as if they know the man can see right through them. “Lookin’ good, Mr. Bruckner,” one girl says, and it is not a greeting you’d ever expect a student to deliver to a principal, not when it’s delivered this way, so sincere, so casual. But Bruckner is not an ordinary authority figure. To those who attended Murrow for the first thirty years of its existence, he is a cult figure, the embodiment of all that set their school apart from every other school in New York City.

  Bruckner ate breakfast that morning at the Caraville Diner on Avenue M, a short distance from the school. Mostly, he has stayed away since his retirement; the way he figures, the inner workings of Murrow are no longer his problem. He could only get in the way. It was ten-thirty on a brisk day in May and he ordered a dish of soft-serve vanilla frozen yogurt. When a spoonful landed on the sleeve of his sport coat, he dabbed at it with a napkin. He didn’t much seem to care if it stained.

  Nobody is, nor will ever be, identified more closely with Murrow High School than Bruckner himself. In the school’s front hallway, near the security desk, someone has hung a street sign from the Bruckner Expressway, which runs through the Bronx but which now serves as a tribute to their former principal in Brooklyn. Over the years, Bruckner maintained an omnipotent presence at Murrow. He was a perpetual wanderer of the school’s grounds, a constant presence in hallways and classrooms, the type who kibitzed ceaselessly with students, who developed that curved spine by picking up garbage and scraps of paper left behind in the hallways. In the beginning, when the school opened, faculty wore name tags. Years passed, but Bruckner never took his off. Until the final few years of his tenure, in addition to his duties as principal, Bruckner also taught an advanced American history class every morning. It was one of Murrow’s most popular courses, steeped in current affairs and propelled by Socratic debate.

  “He knows everybody by name their freshman year,” one student told The New York Times.

  In truth, though, after three decades at Murrow, after four decades as an educator, much of the history has blurred into an indistinct tableau in Bruckner’s mind. Times have changed, and the original philosophy that Murrow was founded upon has been distorted by blatant overcrowding and lack of funding and the inevitability of city politics. This is partly why Bruckner left when he did. Murrow had been founded upon an experiment, and the laboratory was in danger of becoming corrupted. “It’s easier to destroy a school,” Bruckner says, “than to build one.”

  Long before Murrow was built, its roots were planted amid the tumult of the late 1960s, amid an era of labor disputes, amid the push-and-pull of civil rights and the issue of integration in New York City public schools. In 1968, battle lines had been drawn over community control of the schools, leading to a series of strikes that called the effectiveness of the entire system into question.

  The year after that, Bruckner became the assistant principal at John Dewey High, an experimental school that had been modeled upon the ideas formulated by a group of principals during a retreat in the early 1960s, in an attempt to devise a “dream school.” Dewey was the first high school of its kind in New York City, a $12 million human laboratory erected on Stillwell Avenue and Avenue X in Coney Island.

  At Dewey, grades did not exist; students were evaluated on a pass/fail system. Most classes were electives and independent study courses, selected by a computer based upon students’ interests and aptitudes. The school day was eight hours long. Instead of dividing the year into two semesters, Dewey ran its classes in six “cycles,” with the frequent turnover rate designed to keep students engaged and break the anonymity that’s often inherent in larger schools. Dewey also had no interscholastic sports. But its most distinctive trait was its atmosphere of personal freedom: Each student was granted “independent” time that they could utilize as they saw fit, by studying a foreign language or designing an individualized program or by hanging out in the hallways and doing absolutely nothing.

  Bruckner stayed at Dewey for five years before the political in-fighting between the teachers’ union and the administration drove him away. By then, he’d been recruited to oversee the inception of a new high school in central Brooklyn that was to operate under a similar system to Dewey’s, with some minor tweaks. The residents of that neighborhood, many of them Orthodox Jews, were skeptical. Midwood had always been seen as a sort of suburb in the heart of the city, and they didn’t want a massive (and, of course, integrated) school to destroy the character of their neighborhood. So they pushed for an experimental curriculum similar to Dewey’s, with an emphasis on independent study and electives and no interscholastic sports. They formed an advisory committee of parents who suggested, among other things, that the school construct a planetarium within the building.

  The building was supposed to open at the beginning of the school year in 1974, but an electricians’ strike forced Murrow to hold its first couple of months of classes in an annex at Midwood High School. The neighborhood remained skeptical; Bruckner counted only two welcome signs on the windows of nearby homes and businesses. They moved into the new building in November. It still wasn’t finished. The photography program operated out of a closet and a bathroom. A business teacher was forced to conduct a typing class without typewriters. The theater program held its first show, The Fantasticks, in the gym because there were no seats in the auditorium. There were seven hundred students in the school, and most of them had never been granted freedoms this expansive, and what happened was exactly what you think would happen.

  Creative disorder, some called it, in an attempt to devise a politically correct term for what happens when all hell breaks loose. “I was not a happy camper,” Bruckner says.

  And he didn’t know how to rectify the situation. One day around Christmastime, a nun who was also a school principal came to visit the school, to witness the manifestation of progressive educational theory. And Bruckner exposed her to this creative disorder, and he pleaded with her, as if entering a confessional booth. “Sister,” he said, “I’m responsible for all of this. Where do I go next?”

  The reply is one that Bruckner still remembers, thirty years later.

  “It’ll calm down,” she said.

  It took some time for the sister’s prophecy to reach fruition. In 1975, a man named Ron Weiss (no relation to Elio
t Weiss) requested a hardship transfer from a school on the Upper West Side and became a math teacher at Murrow. He knew nothing about the school or its system. He showed up that first day and he saw students strolling from room to room without hall passes, and he saw them clustered in the hallway with no bells to mark the beginning and end of class, and he began to think he had made one of the worst mistakes of his life. This, he thought, is how anarchy manifests itself. This is a riot waiting to happen. Classes were held four times a week instead of five, which meant cramming more material into each lesson, which meant more labor for teachers. On his second day, he called his supervisor and requested to be transferred back to Manhattan.

  Too late, he was told.

  “I thought this would never last,” he says now, after having spent much of the past three decades as an assistant principal under Bruckner. “I thought, ‘You’ll never make this work.’ But soon enough, within that chaos, we began to see that there was something special going on here.”

  The students at Murrow adjusted to their freedoms. The atmosphere was like a college campus; you had a great amount of leeway to do what you wanted, to study what you wanted, but if you did nothing you’d find yourself falling hopelessly behind. Those who didn’t adjust soon realized they weren’t cut out for this type of program, and either transferred out or were asked to leave. The theater program, a staple of the school from the beginning, thrived. Theater, Bruckner likes to say, is the closest thing Murrow has to a football team: among its graduates are an Oscar-winning actor (Marisa Tomei) and an acclaimed director (Darren Aronofsky).

  Within a few years, under Bruckner’s guidance, Murrow had found its niche. It was producing Intel science contest winners and National Merit Scholars and aspiring lawyers and budding astronomers. Murrow, with its four cycles of classes (instead of two semesters) and its simple grading system (E for Excellent, G for Good, S for Satisfactory, and N for No Credit) and its OPTA, or optional time, structured into the school day, soon built a better reputation than Dewey and Midwood and virtually every other public school in Brooklyn. The special education program also became one of the best in the city, in part, Bruckner says, because special ed kids weren’t quarantined from the school’s general population.

  There is no tracking at Murrow. Anyone can enroll in any class. When the education editor of The Christian Science Monitor showed up at Murrow in 1980, she bet Bruckner that she’d be able to determine which students in a class were special ed. After she failed, she wrote that Murrow had “one of the most sensitive and concerned high school administrations I’ve ever visited.”

  By then, Murrow was regularly landing on local and national lists of best high schools. It was championed by Diane Ravitch, back in 1984, as the prototypical example of “a good school.” As of 2001, ninety-two percent of Murrow graduates were going on to college. The experiment was a success, recognized as a “School of Excellence” by the U.S. Department of Education. More and more students applied for admission each year. In the 2004-05 school year, nearly ten thousand kids applied for nine hundred seats. “Student morale is undoubtedly lifted by awareness of the difficulty of gaining entry into Murrow,” Ravitch wrote.

  There are certain admissions quotas: Students who live in a zone immediately surrounding the school are automatically accepted, a provision meant to quell fears in the community when Murrow opened. Those who score in the top two percent of the citywide reading exam and list Murrow as their first choice of high schools are also guaranteed admission. Of the remaining students, fifty percent are selected randomly, and fifty percent are chosen by the school. In each category, sixteen percent of those who are chosen are reading at an above average level, sixteen percent are reading below average, and sixty-eight percent are reading within the average range.

  What that brings together, ideally, is a diverse and disparate mix, a school where cliques (such as those formed by athletic teams) are discouraged and a curriculums are tailored to students’ interests. Not that it always lives up to the ideal. “In essence,” Ron Weiss says, “it also attracts kids who don’t belong here. As many kids as are successful, there are a number that are unsuccessful.”

  Because of its unique properties, because it is so reliant upon the quality of the individual student, Murrow is a fragile environment. For years, Bruckner and his constant wanderings held it together. But in recent years, the old guard have been feeling the vibrations of change within the school hallways. Enrollment has grown and grown, up to four thousand students, and has reached a certain tipping point. If the school is too big, goes Bruckner’s theory, if the administration is no longer granted a wide berth of leeway in accepting students, all of the Murrow system’s assets are nullified. Students begin to slip through the cracks. In the last few years, Murrow has begun to accept transfer students from underperforming city schools, casualties of the No Child Left Behind Act. The decline has been subtle, but undeniable: As overall enrollment has increased, the graduation rate has slipped, from eighty-six percent to eighty-two percent. In 2003, a fourteen-year-old student was stabbed in the back in a school hallway; in 2004, the number of seniors attending college dipped below ninety percent for the first time. Certain liberties, like the freedom to wear hats or do-rags or hang out in the school’s courtyard (and maybe sneak a cigarette) have been curtailed by the new principal,Anthony Lodico. (Then again, not everyone would consider this to be such a detriment: “. . . the previous administration overlooked smoking and cutting class,” one teacher wrote on InsideSchools.org, an independent Web site that rates city schools. “Now,” the teacher wrote, “kids don’t get lost.”)

  There are exceptions, of course, those constants that continue to set Murrow apart. There is the theater program, still going strong, and a “virtual enterprise” business club that won first place in a national competition in 2004. And, of course, there is the chess team, which Bruckner has had little to do with over the years, and which has become largely self-sufficient by now, a product, almost entirely, of decades of labor by an enterprising math teacher with a vision of his own.

  Ilya Kotlyanskiy

  THREE

  FREEDOM OF CHOICE

  THE PARENTS EMERGE FROM A PALLID OCTOBER MORNING CLUTCHING double lattes and rumpled sections of the Sunday Times, and they stake out territory wherever they can: in the hallway, in an adjacent classroom, on hard-backed seats pulled up to cramped tables in the kitchen that serves as a holding area. Those who have nowhere else to go, those who lose out in this game of musical chairs, take up residence on the linoleum floor, which affords them the best view through the glass-paneled doors of the cafeteria, marked with skeins of yellow police tape and signs reminding them that, for the next few hours, they are confined to this perimeter:

  NO PARENTS, COACHES ALLOWED INSIDE.

  This is one of the first chess tournaments of the school year sponsored by The Right Move, a nonprofit organization founded and bankrolled mostly by Fred Goldhirsch, a Staten Island real-estate developer and a onetime board member of the now-defunct Manhattan Chess Club. The Right Move tournaments are free and open to every student in New York City, and they’re held on Sunday mornings at alternating sites. This one is taking place at the cafeteria of Brandeis High in Manhattan, a dank and sour-smelling room with faux-wood walls and sticky floors, located on the first floor of a brick school building nestled within the gentrified confines of the Upper West Side.

  There is a certain underlying paranoia present at most chess tournaments: There are fears of elaborate cheating schemes involving laptop computers and listening devices, fears of extraneous noise, fears of directors and organizers conspiring to affect the results, fears of attractive women, fears of opponents’ diet soft drinks encroaching upon the board, and, in this case, at the Right Move, there are fears of adults morphing into the overbearing beasts who have succeeded in wringing all the pleasure out of competitive youth sports. This concern is nothing new. It’s been true for several decades, ever since parents began falling int
o fisticuffs over their children’s competitive endeavors. In the 1980s, it grew so ugly that certain tournaments began barring parents from the room.

  Because of this, tournament officials do not take their jobs lightly. One of them is currently stationed in the row between the tables, a man with a shiny pink scalp and cherubic face who is known as Brother John. His full name is John McManus; he is a vice president of the Right Move, and once founded the chess team at St. Raymond’s, a Catholic school in the Bronx that has developed a reputation for producing Division I basketball talent. At its peak, St. Raymond’s finished nineteenth at the high-school nationals, and fourth in New York City, behind the traditional powers: Dalton, Stuyvesant, and Murrow. Then Brother John left to teach at a school for troubled boys in Albany, and because nobody at St. Ray’s cared about chess the way Brother John cared about chess, the program died. These days, Brother John commutes nearly three hours each way to be here at the Right Move tournaments on Sunday mornings, to spread the gospel of chess.

  Because it is free and because it is open to anyone, the Right Move pulls in a diverse crowd of participants. Some are public-school students who have come to the game through school-sponsored initiatives; some are private-school students from exclusive uptown enclaves who have just begun studying with their own personal teachers. They come from Harlem, where an African-American chess master named Maurice Ashley founded the city’s first successful public-school chess program, and they come from the Upper East Side, from Dalton, the city’s most accomplished private-school team. There are young boys scampering around in Space Ghost T-shirts and there is a teenager named Conrad wearing a Sid Vicious-inspired spiked-collar-and-wristbands ensemble. There is a beginner’s section (where a couple of the Murrow newbies, Renwick and Adalberto, have shown up to play), a youth section, and an open section, where Willy Edgard, Ilya Kotlyanskiy, Nile Smith, and Oscar Santana—four of Murrow’s top eight—are registered. Because these tournaments are held mostly as a public service, the prize money is paltry, at best, which keeps most of the best young players in the city, including Murrow’s top two boards, Sal and Alex, from showing up.