Andrea Gabor: Books and Pieces

Somewhere in the heart of Manhattan, Andrea Gabor resides with her cockerpoo, Argos, inherited from her daughter when she flew the coop to college. She listens to her “Mom Playlist” to ease her mind from a long day reporting education issues in New York while maintaining a high up position in CUNY Baruch’s honors journalism department.

It’s a “wonderful combo of contemporary rap, ballads etc. and oldies: Sam Cook, Beatles, Van Morrison, Elton John, Marvin Gaye,” she says.

She first found her love for journalism from close family friend Ben Burns, founding editor of Ebony Mag. Burns inspired her. He was the first Jewish editor of the Chicago Defender.

“He was blacklisted even before the McCarthy era from white pubs because he was, for a time, a member of the communist party,” she says. “I grew up on his stories of covering the Civil Rights movement. My parents were also very anti-Vietnam war. And then there was Watergate.”

“I grew up in Chicago, by the way, and reading the Chicago papers about local political corruption was great fun and somewhat addictive,” she continues on her early journalism years.

Her previous work as editor at Bloomberg in the education section produced numerous cutting opinion pieces about COVID’s effects in schools, teacher protests, de-emphasis on traditional grading and the elimination of SAT/ACT scores in the college application process.

Before her time at Bloomberg, three things happened while she was working at U.S. News and World Report: she got offered a job as an editor at the Harvard Biz Review, she got a book contract, and she got pregnant.

“One of the three had to go. So I decided to work on the book while raising a baby. I then got another book contract. But by then I had two kids who were both about to start school and I was ready to go back to work and the Baruch job seemed ideal from a balancing parenthood, book writing and journalism perspective,” she says.

Her Baruch job, at times, greatly informs her own journalism projects. She teaches a range of students who attended private or religious high schools and came with very high SAT/ACT scores to students with less impressive scores from struggling backgrounds.

“Some of my “regular” students are often just as impressive but never had the opportunities that the honors students had,” she says. “So, that influenced my thinking on the debate about testing for the specialized high schools and the column I wrote, which highlighted Chicago’s approach, which doesn’t eschew testing, but gives top-ranked kids from poor zip codes an equal shot at seats in specialized high schools.”

Her first book deal she mentioned, for A Man Who Discovered Quality, explores the work of brilliant Japanese iconoclast, W. Edwards Deming, whose philosophy on bottom-up management saved Ford in their struggles in the 70s and before that, transformed Toyota with great success.

Her second book, After the Education Wars, applies Deming’s philosophy of business to the business of education. After the Education Wars is an expansive view of effective developments in education starting at the teacher level, where it matters most to Gabor. The book explores specific instances where the rejection of traditional management of education and of Taylorist, top-down attitudes of education development saw major improvements to schools that were brave enough to do it.

How did Gabor become so tied to the issue?

“When Bloomberg became mayor, I grew fascinated with how business ideas were influencing education in his administration and elsewhere, and came to the conclusion that it was not for the better,” says Gabor.

She continues on the subject of her first book, “Deming was big on the importance of trust in organization; also on the need for top management to tap into the know-how of employees who work ‘closest to any given process’ and who can identify opportunities for improvement, which he argued was the key to quality improvement.”

Her kids, of course, are a key inspiration to a lot of her work in both teaching and reporting education. As a Type A with a Type A husband, she raised her kids with high expectations and “tons of opportunities in and outside school.”

“I have tremendous admiration for what my kids have done with their lives and for the wonderful human beings they’ve become,” she says. “But I’m also uber awed by some of my students who had many fewer opportunities, and much greater struggles, and still have made so much of their studies and their lives. And, equally important, become terrific human beings.”

In her spare time outside the classroom and the newsroom, Gabor is a reader. She says she has, “pretty eclectic reading tastes, which can be boiled down to serious lit.”

She’s been a part of a book club for about 30 years. During the pandemic she read the Decameron, and her recent favorites include Deacon King Kong and Harlem Shuffle, “interspersed with Scandinavian and British, atmospheric mysteries,” says Gabor. “And of course, a steady diet of education and political journalism.”

She also enjoys beefing up her skills in the kitchen–recently she tackled sourdough starter from scratch.