The Education of Eva Moskowitz

by Eva Moskowitz

  The UFT also wanted to restrict Bloomberg’s ability to close failing schools. When a school closed, its teachers remained on DOE’s payroll but couldn’t actually teach until another school chose them. The costs of these unwanted teachers had reached $200 million annually. Pressure was growing to stop paying them, which would effectively mean the end of tenure for teachers at failing schools.

  The UFT had figured out how to kill two birds with one stone. It got its allies in the assembly to propose a law requiring that any significant change in a school building’s utilization—i.e., a co-location or a school closure—be subject to a complicated approval process involving multiple hearings and the publication of an “Educational Impact Statement.” The UFT had borrowed this idea from the environmental laws that require the publication of “Environmental Impact Statements” for public work projects, which lawyers had used to strangle projects with red tape. In one famous case, a highway and park project in New York City called Westway was delayed for more than a decade, at which point the city had just given up on it. I feared the UFT would use this law to similar effect since, as the UFT itself eagerly observed, the law would require DOE to disclose “a long list of specific details” such as the “effect . . . on personnel needs, the costs of instruction, administration, transportation, and other support services” every time it wanted to change a school’s utilization.11 DOE would inevitably make mistakes in preparing these detailed statements, which the UFT could then exploit to bring lawsuits. The whole thing was perfectly constructed to gum up the works, but on its surface—and this was the UFT’s brilliance—it had that fresh minty taste of transparency and good government that could be sold to the media as reform. On July 16, this proposed legislation, which also contained other troubling provisions that would weaken mayoral control, was voted out of committee but the following day a dozen Democrats joined Republicans in voting it down.

  Harlem’s state senator, Bill Perkins, was pushing another bill, dubbed the “Eva Moratorium,” that would limit the number of charter schools that a single network could open. Perkins claimed my co-locations were causing conflict: “You have two parents . . . and all of a sudden here comes Eva Moskowitz to take over their school, unauthorized” and the “parents are fighting their neighbors.” Perkins was claiming my actions were unauthorized based on González’s false reporting. As for parents fighting, that happened only because ACORN and the UFT would manipulate district school parents by telling them we were secretly planning to gentrify their neighborhood or going to increase the class size in their schools.

  None of the anti-charter proposals had enough support to pass the Senate, but Bloomberg couldn’t afford a stalemate because mayoral control was expiring. He therefore concluded that he had no choice but to accept the proposed limitations on co-locations and school closures, in exchange for renewing mayoral control. The resulting compromise was enacted on August 11.

  This episode troubled me because it showed just how adept the UFT had become at getting legislation passed. It didn’t just hire lobbyists and make campaign contributions. It paid ACORN to stage protests, then called politically aligned journalists like González to write about the protests, then had politicians it supported hold hearings scripted with cue cards, then had other politicians introduce legislation that the UFT had drafted before the show had even begun but which would now be justified as necessary in light of the protests, stories, and hearings the UFT had manufactured. It was frighteningly effective.

  To this point, I’d stayed out of Albany politics, preferring to focus on running my schools, but I decided I could no longer do so. It had been a terrible year for us politically. Moreover, we were soon going to reach the cap on the number of charter schools allowed under state law. If we couldn’t get it lifted, New York’s charter school movement would be stuck in neutral. Things looked grim. However, events were playing out at the national level that could have a profound impact on our fight in Albany.

  20

  THE AUDACITY OF HUBRIS

  2008–2009

  There had long been signs that Barack Obama held views on education considered heretical in Democratic circles. On the topic of tuition vouchers, he’d said we should “see if the experiment works, and if it does, whatever my preconception, you do what’s best for the kids.” While doing “what’s best for the kids” might seem to be an unassailable proposition, vouchers were considered so abhorrent in Democratic circles that failing to express horror and revulsion at their mere mention was considered suspect. Not surprisingly, Obama had become more circumspect about his views on school choice as a presidential candidate, but his principal education advisor, Jon Schnur, was firmly in the education reform camp.

  As an Obama victory looked increasingly likely, Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), the organization founded by John Petry, began preparing a memo to Obama’s transition committee that would suggest people to appoint and policies to advance. In mid-October, DFER’s executive director, Joe Williams, whom I knew from the time he’d been a Daily News reporter, emailed me a draft of DFER’s memo. Joe observed:

  This is going to be one of the greatest inside baseball battles in edu-history. . . . [W]e’ve shared . . . our push list with people like Wendy Kopp, Ted Mitchell, Joel Klein, as well as key staffers from George Miller and Ted Kennedy’s staffs. . . . A lot of where this goes will depend on Jon Schnur, and all of this is designed to give him cover within the campaign. Joel Klein also will play a key role in rallying Broad, Gates, and prominent Dem donors behind whomever our coalition eventually gets behind for ed secretary.

  The day after Obama won, Joe got troubling news: Stanford professor Linda Darling-Hammond, an ideological ally of teachers’ unions, would be on Obama’s transition team. Her appointment particularly incensed Whitney Tilson since Darling-Hammond was perhaps best known for a study criticizing Teach For America, which Whitney had helped found. His immediate instinct was to pen a blistering blog post since, well, that was always his immediate instinct. Fearing, however, that this would simply chase the Obama administration into the arms of the unions, Joe made Whitney hold his fire until Joe could find out from Schnur what Darling-Hammond’s appointment meant. Schnur told Joe not to panic because transition roles were being given out as consolation prizes to people who weren’t going to get administration positions. Armed with this information, Joe got Whitney to stand down and made his final revisions to his memo, which he sent to Obama’s transition team on November 7. For Secretary of Education, Joe recommended either Chicago school superintendent Arne Duncan or Teach For America founder Wendy Kopp. The latter suggestion was a Joe Williams knuckleball: he knew Kopp wouldn’t get the nod but hoped she’d draw Darling-Hammond’s fire away from Duncan.

  DFER also recommended people for dozens of other positions, arguing that “A ‘team of rivals’ approach . . . in which the administration seeks to placate/nullify all of the various education interests by giving everyone a seat at the table, will do very little to advance any sort of agenda which could possibly be considered ‘change.’” Translation: we don’t want a seat at the table, we want all the seats. When DFER’s memo became public, one critic, riffing off the title of Obama’s book, The Audacity of Hope, pronounced Joe’s memo “the audacity of hubris.” Maybe—but it worked. Not only was Duncan appointed, so too were many of the other people DFER recommended.

  The Obama administration’s main focus, however, was the financial meltdown caused by the mortgage-backed securities debacle. Lehman Brothers had gone bankrupt, AIG and Citibank had been saved from the same fate only by a $100 billion government bailout, the stock market had suffered its worst week since the Great Depression, and Fannie Mae had dodged insolvency through a government takeover. The chairman of the Federal Reserve warned Congress that unless it passed Bush’s $700 billion emergency bailout immediately, “we may not have an economy on Monday.”

  Congress complied, but far more government spending was needed to pull the US economy out of its nose
dive. This plight put the normal Washington budget dynamic on its head. The green eyeshades who normally tried to rein in spending, but were now looking for ways to increase it, asked Schnur if he could find a way to take, say, $100 billion off of their hands. Indeed he could! He came up with the idea of creating a competitive grants program that would reward states for adopting educational reforms such as expanding access to charter schools and shutting down failing schools.

  The challenge was that few Democratic congressmen supported educational reform. One who did, however, was House Education and Labor Committee chairman George Miller, who was also an early Obama supporter and friendly with Schnur, whom he’d gotten to know when Schnur was associate director for education policy for Bill Clinton. Miller liked Schnur’s proposal and helped sell it to David Obey, the chair of the Appropriations Committee. Obey wasn’t wild about the competitive grants program but he did like the sound of $100 billion in education spending, so they agreed on a compromise: $5 billion would go to Schnur’s grants competition and the remaining $95 billion would be distributed to district schools. Normally Schnur’s proposal would have been heavily scrutinized and probably killed by the teachers’ unions, but there was so much pressure to pass Obama’s $800 billion economic stimulus package that Schnur’s program, dubbed Race to the Top, was swept forward like a twig on a tsunami.

  This was a huge win for DFER, and while Joe Williams had led DFER brilliantly, one could be forgiven for thinking a higher power supported education reform given the lucky breaks DFER had gotten: Obama’s early contact with DFER, his improbable election, Duncan’s friendship with Obama, Schnur’s role as an advisor to Obama, Miller’s ideological leanings and relationship with Schnur, and, most of all, the financial crisis, which, albeit awful for the country, had unleashed $100 billion in education spending.

  For my part, I certainly hoped this program would help with the politics in New York because we were about to reach the charter school cap and the teachers’ unions were becoming increasingly aggressive in their efforts to stop charters from expanding.

  21

  WITH WHOSE PERMISSION?

  2009–2010

  There is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage, than a new system,” observed Machiavelli, since “the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old institution and merely lukewarm defenders in those who gain by the new one.” This applied to the charter movement because legions of teachers and union members vigorously defended the district schools, which educated 97 percent of public school students in New York, and while many people supported charter schools in the abstract, they weren’t going to march in the street for our cause. That we’d even made it this far was sheer luck. Then governor George Pataki had gotten the legislature to pass the first charter school law by promising them a pay raise for doing so. Then, by the time we reached the cap on the number of charter schools allowed to open under the original law, Bloomberg, an avid supporter of charters, was at the height of his power.

  But luck doesn’t last forever. One day, a less sympathetic mayor or governor would be elected, and we’d be in deep trouble if we hadn’t gotten big enough to stand on our own two feet. This fact was not lost on the UFT. They knew that the bigger we got, the harder it would be to stop us, and by 2009, they’d decided to draw a line in the sand by opposing a second cap lift. Moreover, our strongest ally, Governor Eliot Spitzer, had resigned when his dalliances with a high-end call girl came to light. While his successor, David Paterson, also supported charters, he lacked Spitzer’s political skills and instinct for the jugular.

  Seeing an opening, the unions were using every tool at their disposal to oppose a cap lift: mobilizing their members; calling on legislators whose campaigns they’d funded; using ACORN and other front groups to stage parent rallies; planting stories with ideologically aligned reporters; and using their long-standing relationships with legislative staff members, many of whom had actually once worked for the UFT. Taking on the UFT would require challenging them on every front: fighting a ground war in the streets of New York City and an air war in the halls of Albany; soliciting news stories praising the accomplishments of charters and editorials decrying our opponents’ schemes to do us in; asking legislators who were sitting on the fence to take our side and pressing those who already had to take a firm stand.

  That our opponents weren’t letting up for a moment became clear on September 9, when they staged yet another protest outside PS 123, shouting slogans such as “No justice, no peace,” “Whose school? Our school!”, “Eva Moskowitz must go,” and “Eva Moskowitz is a poverty pimp.” They wouldn’t even give a safe corridor to our students who were forced to “dodge[] and weave[] between demonstrators to get into the building.”12 The Daily News reporter who covered this event from her desk claimed it was a parent rally. It wasn’t, as you can see for yourself on YouTube.13 In addition to teachers holding up signs such as “teachers don’t 4get,” the protesters’ signs and T-shirts identified them as members of various left-wing groups such as the “Class Struggle Education Workers,” the “PPP,” the “No To Mayoral Control Coalition,” and the “Internationalist Group,” which “fights for international socialist revolution, the conquest of power by the working class, led by its Leninist party, championing the cause of all the oppressed.” We later learned that this protest had grown out of a meeting that State Senator Bill Perkins had hosted.

  Our opponents continued to mine co-location drama for anti-charter articles. González wrote about an AstroTurf soccer field we’d built on a playground we shared with a co-located school. Although replacing asphalt with a more forgiving AstroTurf field that both schools could use would seem to be in everyone’s interest, González claimed that a complaint two parents had made about the field was proof there were “bitter space wars between charter schools and regular public schools.”

  Our opponents also claimed we were depriving district schools of needed space. Here is a typical example:

  A teacher from PS 241 painted a dire picture Tuesday of what happened to her school after Harlem Success Academy opened in her building in September 2009. “They have squeezed us and suffocated us almost into oblivion.”14

  Similarly, state senator Tom Duane, a perennial opponent, claimed that “[Success] aggressively annexed essential classroom and cluster room space” at PS 241.15

  Instead of investigating the accuracy of these claims, reporters usually just reported what each side said. Printing demonstrably untrue claims was apparently fair play, as long as they reported our denial. Now perhaps you’re thinking, “Well, Eva, maybe it’s not as black-and-white as you claim.” Okay. Let’s go through the data and you can decide for yourself.

  Every year, New York City publishes a document called the Blue Book that reports on the occupancy of the city’s public school buildings. It shows that many of the city’s most popular district schools function at more than 100 percent of their target capacity including PS 303 (181 percent), PS 51 (174 percent), PS 228 (173 percent), and PS 242 (165 percent). How is that possible? Do they have classes in the hallways? No, because the Blue Book’s target capacity calculation isn’t like an occupancy limit for a movie theater or an elevator. Capacity isn’t how many students a school can hold if every room is packed to the gills. Rather, it takes into account the need to have extra rooms for science labs, art, counseling, and special education. A school at 100 percent capacity is like a couple with one child living in a two-bedroom apartment: it’s just the right size.

  Now let’s look at the buildings Success occupies. I’m going to fast-forward to 2014 because we’d opened up more schools by then so there’s more data. According to the Blue Book, PS 241, the school I was supposedly suffocating, was in a building that could comfortably serve 1,118 students but its enrollment was 99 students. No, that’s not a typo. Absent a co-located school, it would have been at 9 percent capacity and virtually every student could have had hi
s own private classroom.

  “Okay, Eva,” you say, “but how much of that space did PS 241 get to use after you took all their rooms?” Great question! The space allocated to PS 241, the Blue Book says, was sufficient for 192 students. Thus, their facilities would have been comfortable for double their actual enrollment.

  “Sure, Eva,” you say, “you’ve cherry-picked one good example. But I wasn’t born yesterday. What about your other schools?” Okay, Woodstein, here is a chart concerning every single co-location we had in Harlem in the 2013–2014 school year:

  This chart shows that, absent co-location, these buildings would be at a third of their capacity on average, and that even with co-location they were only two-thirds full. In fact, buildings that have charter schools in them are actually less crowded on average than schools that don’t: 76 percent versus 104 percent.16 And these are facts, not opinions: you can look for yourself at the Blue Book, which was put out by a later mayor who wasn’t a big fan of charters, with the input of “principals . . . , the United Federation of Teachers, community groups, and elected officials.”

  Now, perhaps you’re thinking, “Okay, Eva, but even if you don’t cause overcrowding, you must admit that you make these schools more crowded than they’d otherwise be.” Actually, no, because we don’t grow our students in test tubes, we just serve the children who would be attending neighborhood public schools anyway. That was why the enrollment of students in Harlem district schools was shrinking. In fact, while opponents claimed we caused an increase in class size, the opposite was generally true. Thanks in part to yours truly, PS 241’s average class size fell to—wait for it—eleven students. Eleven!