Street Gang (13 page)

The result of Cooney’s travels was a distilled, neatly structured fifty-five-page report entitled “The Potential Uses of Television in Preschool Education.”
⁹
Jettisoning statistics, citations, and psychoeducational jargon, Cooney wrote with authority, clarity, and brevity. In the opening pages she provided background about the long-overdue effort to address the educational needs of children aged three to five, especially those trapped in the underclass. The result of these years of neglect, she explained, was “an academic achievement gap between disadvantaged and middle-class children that manifests itself during the early school years and increases dramatically in the higher grades.” The root of the disparity was in the lack of intellectual stimulation for poor kids in the formative preschool years, so critical to brain development. For myriad reasons, some sociological, some economic, and some cultural, children of the underclass were arriving at the school door ill prepared and miles behind their middle-class peers. With little chance to catch up, these students got caught up in cycles of frustration, futility, and failure.

But evolving research in cognitive development suggested that aggressive intervention could compensate for what neglected children were not getting at home. At the University of Illinois, early education researcher Carl Bereiter was reporting dramatic success with an intensive academic program for four-year-olds. Over the course of a school year, his students, broken into small groups, attended daily two-hour sessions of language arts and basic arithmetic. The method, called direct verbal instruction, had all the charm of boot camp, but the results were startling: children who were a year or more behind their middle-class peers essentially caught up in several key areas by the time they were enrolled in school. And that was just one program; there were many others under way.

Although the National Education Association (NEA) had advocated an expansion of classrooms nationwide to include children a year younger than the eligible age for kindergarten, Cooney quoted an estimate in
Time
magazine that it would cost $2.75 billion annually to accommodate the five million four- and five-year-olds in that group, not counting the construction costs of new facilities. It was folly to think elected officials would have gone that far to support education reform, especially given that, at the time, nearly half of America’s school districts didn’t even offer kindergarten classes.

Emerging research and experimentation had suggested that children four and younger were ready to grasp kindergarten and first-grade concepts much sooner than previously thought, but were effectively being held back by outmoded ideas about their intellectual, social, and emotional capabilities. But a preschool revolution was rumbling, a shift of significance that coincided with the upheaval in civil rights, women’s rights, consumer rights, and environmental awareness.

The nursery school model already was in decline by the mid-1960s, a crumbling vestige of the heyday of Dr. Spock. Little was asked of the child in these programs beyond participation in games and songs and remaining quietly attentive during story time. At nursery schools, “self-selection of most activities is considered a sacred precept,” the report said, “the child incidentally learning all that is intellectually appropriate to his age and stage.”
¹⁰

“Until recently,” Cooney wrote,
¹¹
“educators were virtually ignoring the intellect of preschool children. . . . We may have been performing a tragic disservice to young children by not sooner recognizing that their emotional, physical, and intellectual needs are doubtless interdependent from infancy on.”

The reformists, adherents of a more cognitive model of preparing young minds, had nothing against fun and games in the proper context. They also recognized the importance of emotional and social growth, given that experiences during the first six years of a child’s life were of critical importance to his being able to think and learn. But to fail to offer preschoolers appropriate intellectual stimulus and challenge, they said, would be to squander brainpower and compromise their future. Cooney quoted headmistress Annemarie Roeper of the Roeper City and Country School for gifted children in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan: “Good adjustment is a basic necessity for learning” she said, “but learning also makes for good adjustment.”

Cooney’s report answered the very question Lloyd Morrisett posed at the dinner party. “Can a television series be designed which would actually realize the general and specific educational aims that have been suggested? I believe the answer is a resounding yes.”

Almost as an aside, she added, “I strongly urge that this series be made in color.”

 

Not long after Cooney returned to her job at Thirteen, following completion of the feasibility study, she and Lewis Freedman were summoned to the office of the station’s president, John W. “Jack” Kiermaier.

As they took their seats Kiermaier flipped through pages of a fat report on his desk, finally turning to Cooney. “I don’t mean to put you down,” he said, “but in fact, you are
not
an expert on [preschoolers]. This report is filled with ‘I think,’ ‘I believe,’ ‘I suggest.’ Exactly who are you to be saying this? Why would anyone be interested in
your
opinion?”

For a few moments there was awkward silence. Then Cooney cleared her throat and said, with sincerity, “Jack, I couldn’t agree with you more.”

There was silence again for a beat as Cooney collected her thoughts. Up until that point, no one in a position of influence had questioned the assertive tone of the study, or its conviction. She had been encouraged by Lloyd Morrisett not only to synthesize what she had learned during her cross-country interviews, but also to analyze and comment upon it.

Cooney finally spoke. “The Carnegie Corporation of New York is very interested in what I think. I know you find that difficult to believe, but that is the truth.”

“I just don’t understand it,” Kiermaier replied, not exactly a vote of confidence for his producer.

Cooney returned to her desk, thinking about what had gotten her to Channel Thirteen in the first place.

“Someone I was working with on the
U.S. Steel Hour
was leaving to go to Boston to work for an educational station, WGBH,” Cooney recalled. “I almost shouted, ‘Educational television! What’s
that
?’ My heart started pounding. I couldn’t believe there was such a thing and I knew in a flash that this was something I wanted to be part of. The problem was there wasn’t a station in New York at the time. But there was a lawsuit that pitted the Educational Broadcasting Corporation [EBC] against the owners of a commercial station, Channel Thirteen. EBC won the suit. I called everyone I knew in New York saying, ‘Get me to that general manager. I
have
to work there.’ ”

A friend of a friend smoothed the way for Cooney to speak by phone with Channel Thirteen’s general manager, Richard D. Heffner. The conversation went like this:

 

Heffner’s lack of interest in her did not deter Cooney, and she stayed in touch. “Sure I was bluffing when I said I could produce,” Cooney admitted, “but not when I said I knew who was who in public and cultural affairs, and when I said I could get good interviews. And I was such a big reader that I did, in fact, know the issues on foreign and domestic policy, and the civil rights movement, which became the great passion of those years for me.”

Heffner finally agreed to schedule a formal interview with Cooney, who, hobbled by a back injury and confined by a brace, nonetheless arrived well ahead of time at the decrepit offices of Channel Thirteen, directly above Lindy’s restaurant on Fifty-second Street. Heffner soon appeared, returning from lunch with a female colleague. “When I saw the lovely woman I was about to interview, I blurted, ‘I’m going to hire that dame.’ The woman I was with got pissed off, but I’ll tell you this: it doesn’t hurt to be beautiful and brilliant.”

It was a brief interview:

 

Cooney quickly devised a plan to weather a three-thousand-dollar pay cut. “I had a thousand dollars in the bank, and I figured I could use a hundred of it every month to make up the shortfall,” she said. “And I figured that by the time I ran out of money, I’d get a raise. It never crossed my mind that things wouldn’t work out exactly the way I’d envisioned them.”

One day early in her tenure at Thirteen, employees were assembled to meet the vice president of programming, Lewis Freedman. “There he sat, handsome as a movie star, with the resonant voice of a trained actor,” Cooney recalled. “He did what I had heard no other leader in public television do before: he articulated a thrilling and palpable vision of what public television could be. Where others had spoken in eye-glazing generalities about education and uplift, Lewis stunned us with the picture he created. He made us see what had lured him to that place—a place almost limitless in possibilities for providing illumination and excitement and innovation. It was, at least for me, an epiphany listening to him. I knew in an instant that I had been waiting to work with such a creative and intellectual force, and what a time we had. What days we saw!”
¹²

On a pitifully pinched budget, she and her associates had produced a steady stream of half-hour investigations—“Little Grandma Moses documentaries” Cooney called them—that were well received by Channel Thirteen’s viewers.
A Chance at the Beginning
, the film about Martin Deutsch’s work with Harlem preschoolers, was just one among many, all done on a shoestring.

“The station was really broke,” Cooney said. “But Lewis Freedman came up with one brilliant idea after another—one of which was doing teach-ins on major issues on television. Not only potentially riveting as a show concept, it had the added value of being cheap, the sine qua non of all the shows we did in that period. Lewis and I became a platonic, and less criminal, version of Bonnie and Clyde, traveling by car all over New Jersey and New York, trying to beg, borrow, or steal money from local antipoverty agencies in order to put on shows about their programs. Unlike Bonnie and Clyde, we were notably unsuccessful, probably because, in the spirit of the times, we were nonviolent.

“We finally went ahead without money and put on a three-hour antipoverty teach-in [entitled
Poverty, Antipoverty and the Poor
]. That show . . . [won] one of eight Emmys awarded to Channel Thirteen that year—amounting to three-quarters of those given in the region—all based on the ideas of Lewis Freedman, who won a special Emmy for presiding over such an unprecedented triumph.” Cooney, as producer, was awarded an Emmy for the broadcast.

The audience for the shows might have been comparatively small, by Nielsen ratings standards, but the viewers who did tune in were serious-minded adults who cared about matters of race, injustice, and the imbalance of opportunity in New York and beyond.

That inquisitive, argumentative schoolgirl from Phoenix was tackling topics that made Bud Brown, her rabble-rouser social studies teacher, quite proud. She had gumption.

From her earliest days at Thirteen, Cooney also produced the show she was hired for,
Court of Reason
. For Cooney, it was a trial by fire, for at the time she had no production experience. Yet her fair-mindedness and eagerness to understand all sides of an issue were powerful assets. “They were looking for someone with no ax to grind,” she said. “They got her.”

The logistics of lining up guests for
Court of Reason
would have made even a veteran producer apoplectic, let alone a rookie. “People love to appear on television, but getting four expert guests on a single subject was not an easy thing. I was in a constant stressful state. And it was
live
television.”

Given Cooney’s devotion to the station, it was little wonder that she had it in mind as the production center for the proposed preschool show. The feasibility study indicated as much. But that was not to be, at least as long as Jack Kiermaier was in charge.

“Neither Jack nor Lewis Freedman made any moves to get it, and they might have,” Cooney said. “Jack did not see the potential at all for Channel Thirteen.”

Freedman, who clashed with Kiermaier, was not long for the station. They disagreed over a play’s use of a line of dialogue containing a four-letter word. Freedman dug in his heels, insisting that the piece air as written. The impasse ended with his dismissal.

Soon thereafter, Cooney signed a one-year consultancy agreement with the Carnegie Corporation. It called for her to split her time between working on the preschool project with Morrisett, who aggressively recruited her, and working with Carnegie president Alan Jay Pifer on developing a national Citizens Committee for Public Television, which was envisioned as a high-minded lobbying group.

Morrisett and Pifer had urged Cooney to leave Channel Thirteen, and she did so with little regret. Out the door walked a woman who within a few short years would provide public television with its breakthrough program.