But despite these facts, reporters continued to print stories that undermined not only our efforts to get the charter cap lifted but also to get co-locations for two new schools we were opening and for Harlem 2, which was running out of space at PS 123.
On November 26, DOE told us that it planned to co-locate Harlem 2 with Kappa II, a school DOE was phasing out, but I feared the city might abandon this plan if the opposition became too great. These fears increased on January 1, 2010, when Bill de Blasio, a former city council colleague who’d been elected public advocate, announced that his office would engage in “community organizing” to help parents keep Kappa II open.17 The late Village Voice columnist Wayne Barrett noted that there were two groups of parents whose fates were at issue—those of Kappa II and those of Success Academy 2—and yet de Blasio was only offering to help one of them, the group whose interests just happened to align with those of the UFT, which had given de Blasio $12,000 in campaign contributions.18
Back in Albany, the city’s effort to raise the cap was being led by a twenty-eight-year-old wunderkind named Micah Lasher who had graduated from Stuyvesant where he’d run the student newspaper, which the faculty had shut down after Micah wrote a column saying that teachers shouldn’t be appointed to Stuyvesant based on seniority. The paper had been allowed to reopen after a story ran in the Times noting that Micah had accused the school’s administration of “blackmail,” and presented it with a petition signed by half the student body. Coincidentally, Micah had been witness to the beginning of my political career as a fourteen-year-old volunteer on my first campaign and had presided over its end as campaign manager for the candidate who’d bested me in my final campaign. But one can’t afford to hold grudges in politics; I was just happy Micah was on my side this time around.
We had one thing going for us: under Obama’s Race to the Top grant competition, New York could win a $700 million grant if it adopted education reform measures such as raising the cap on charters. To remove the cheese without springing the trap, our opponents proposed legislation that would raise the cap on charters but then hobble us in other ways that would slow our growth, such as giving a district school’s parents the right to veto a co-location in their building. This sounded pro-democracy, but it would create a rigged vote since neighborhood residents who might want a charter school option but didn’t happen to send their child to the district school in question wouldn’t be allowed to vote. Our opponents also proposed ending SUNY’s power to grant charters.
Governor Paterson called a special legislative session for January 18, the day before the federal grant application was due, to pass pro-charter legislation. Perkins vigorously opposed this legislation, claiming that there was an “oversaturation of charter schools,” despite the fact that there were thousands of applicants on charter school waiting lists. He also maintained that charters were “separate, and inherently unequal,” implicitly likening them to segregated schools. While this was a stretch given that we selected our students by lottery rather than race, Perkins knew that parents whose children were stuck in failing schools found it terribly painful to see other children get advantages denied to their own, whatever the reason. Perkins’s perverse solution to this situation, however, was not to expand charters, so that more children could get a quality education, but to restrict them so fewer could.
Many people oppose charter school expansion because they believe it will ultimately hurt children and, while I fervently disagree, I appreciate their concerns. Perkins’s opposition, however, stemmed from a different place as another charter school leader explained in a Times article:
Geoffrey Canada, who . . . has a cordial relationship with the senator, said that much of Mr. Perkins’s ire seemed to stem from the fact that many people running Harlem’s charter schools are not from Harlem.
“When people say they are going to scale up . . . in Harlem, I think the question for some political leaders is, ‘With whose permission?’” Mr. Canada said.
Since Perkins had commented on another occasion, “Eva Moskowitz . . . acts as if she doesn’t need any authorization to do things,” I assume Perkins considered me one of these people who are “not from Harlem” although I lived and worked in Harlem, sent two of my children to schools there, and had actually attended a District 5 school myself. Canada, on the other hand, had graduated from a school in the suburbs of Long Island and now lived there and yet Perkins didn’t have a problem with his running schools in Harlem. Canada, however, was African American and that seemed to be what Perkins really cared about.
Perkins’s opposition to school choice was particularly curious given that he’d attended the exclusive private school Collegiate, and Brown University. Despite receiving this first-class education, he never hesitated to take the low road, accusing Bloomberg, for example, of “treating us like we’re some people on his plantation.” Perkins epitomized Henry Adams’s dim view that “politics, as a practice . . . [is] the systematic organization of hatreds.”
The legislature failed to pass any pro-charter legislation but New York submitted its federal grant application anyway. I hoped the application would be rejected since that would put pressure on the legislature to pass pro-charter legislation to strengthen a second round application.
To keep the pressure on, we asked our parents to go to Albany on February 3 to meet with their representatives. “My son read a book last week called Caps for Sale,” responded one parent. “He is five. I was not able to read at that level till I was seven. Please save a seat for me on the 6:30 a.m. bus.” After attending a rally with hundreds of other charter school parents, our parents met with several legislators. One legislator who refused to meet was Perkins. Parents were so fed up with his repeatedly dodging their requests that they tracked him down and confronted him in the hallway. If Perkins had instructed his chief of staff to prevent their meeting with him, said one parent sarcastically, “You need to triple her pay, ’cause she does her job.”
While the air war took place in Albany, the ground war in the city raged on. At a February 22 hearing on Harlem 2’s proposed colocation, opponents claimed the city was closing Kappa II to make room for Success. In fact, the city was closing Kappa II because only 9 percent of its students were reading at grade level. I, however, was a convenient villain. “It’s a shame,” said one opponent, “that people like Eva Moskowitz are coming in to divide our black and Latino community.” At another co-location hearing, ACORN operative Jonathan Westin was present to make sure their anti-charter message was repeated. “[A]fter the school,” said one speaker, “they’re coming after your apartments.” While “chairing the Education Committee,” said another, I’d been secretly making “plans to take over Harlem and our public schools.” Council Member Inez Dickens accused us of engaging in “hostile slash and burn corporate takeover tactics that would be envied by Genghis Khan.”
Using scenes like this, the UFT maintained that co-locations were “pitting parents against parents.” It was brilliant. The UFT would rile parents up by telling them we were going to increase class size at their schools or were responsible for plans to close them, and would then blame us for the resulting strife.
We fought back by emphasizing how much demand there was for charter schools, particularly ours, which had received 7,000 applications for 1,100 spots. In some Harlem zip codes, 63 percent of age-eligible children had applied to Success. For a school we were opening in the Bronx, we had twenty-eight applicants per seat.
On February 26, Governor Paterson announced that he wouldn’t be running for reelection that fall due in part to a brewing scandal involving a romance with a longtime aide. Paterson’s lame-duck status made him even weaker and our opponents seized on this by trying to push through legislation on March 12 that, while raising the cap, contained poison pills that would leave charters worse off overall. Fortunately, it didn’t pass but the vote was too close for comfort. The teachers union soon announced it would be targeting five state senators who’d opposed the legi
slation including a courageous freshman senator named Craig Johnson whose potential challenger was offered a $200,000 war chest.
Our only hope was that the federal government would reject New York’s grant application and I was increasingly fearful it wouldn’t. Hardly any states had passed pro-charter legislation so the bar for a winning application might be set quite low. Secretary Duncan, however, said that wouldn’t happen. “This is not a race to the middle,” he declared, “this is a race to the top,” and he made good on his rhetoric on March 29 by rejecting all but two of the applications that had been submitted including New York’s.
The next round of applications was due on June 1 and we ratcheted up the pressure in various ways including soliciting favorable newspaper editorials that said that the legislature would be responsible for losing $700 million in federal money if they didn’t pass pro-charter legislation. The elephant in the room was Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, who’d announced he was running for governor and was virtually certain to win. Both sides had been lobbying him to take a stand and on May 23, he did. He declared that the cap should be lifted, that SED shouldn’t get a monopoly on charter authorizing, that “New York must be the leader [in] education reform,” and that he opposed any restrictions on co-locations that would be “a poison pill that prevents opening new charter schools.” We were elated by this full-throated support. This wasn’t the type of mealy-mouthed pronouncements that politicians typically make on controversial issues.
With the June 1 deadline rapidly approaching, the parties were in virtually continuous negotiations. My name was coming up so much, one of the city’s negotiators told me, that the entire dispute could probably be settled by promising never to give me another co-location. Sheldon Silver, the assembly speaker, was refusing to lift the cap without anti-co-location provisions, and on May 27, the city walked out of the negotiations. It looked like there really wouldn’t be a deal after all. Then Silver blinked. He called the city back to negotiations and gave up on his strongest anti-co-location demands. At 10:30 p.m. that night, the parties announced they’d reached a deal. It required DOE to prepare a “Building Utilization Plan” that would lay out in detail exactly how the schools would share space and would require DOE to spend matching funds on a district school when a co-located charter school fixed up its facilities. I wasn’t wild about either of these requirements. The Building Utilization Plan was just one more chance for DOE to make mistakes that the UFT could exploit in a lawsuit. As for the matching funds, I was all for the city fixing up its facilities but I worried the end result might be to prohibit us in the future from using private funds to fix up ours because the city didn’t want to match our expenditures. These provisions, however, were far less damaging than the poison pills our opponents had proposed, and we’d gotten the cap lifted, we could keep on growing. That wouldn’t have happened without Obama’s Race to the Top program. His support was absolutely crucial to the growth of charter schools at this critical time in our history.
That fall, state senator Craig Johnson’s support for charter schools cost him his seat. While he only served one term, he used it to provide critical support on two major educational issues, mayoral control and the cap lift. In my mind, it’s better to be a one-term legislator who votes his conscience than a veteran legislator who betrays it.
22
DOING SOMETHING WORTH WRITING
1994–1999
In the summer of 1994, I returned to New York City, which had elected mayor Rudolph Giuliani in my absence. Such is the nature of politics that Giuliani probably wouldn’t have been elected but for a car accident that occurred on August 19, 1991. The final car of a motorcade carrying the leader of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic religious sect accidentally struck and killed seven-year-old Gavin Cato, the son of Guyanese immigrants. Hundreds of mainly African American protesters began shouting, “Jews! Jews! Jews!” and three days of rioting ensued in which an Israeli flag was burned, 27 cars were destroyed, 152 police officers were injured, 225 robberies and burglaries were committed, and, most troubling of all, a young man named Yankel Rosenbaum was fatally stabbed. Many Jews believed Mayor Dinkins had gone easy on the protesters for political reasons. While that probably wasn’t true, his restrained personality didn’t serve him well in situations like these. New Yorkers preferred mayors like Koch and La Guardia whose brash and larger-than-life personalities suggested they could tame the city.
In hindsight, however, Dinkins served the city well. When he took office, the murder rate had been growing steadily for three decades. Dinkins increased the size of the police force and appointed a police commissioner, Ray Kelly, who adopted a community policing approach that contributed to an astonishing reduction in crime in the years that followed. Dinkins also cleaned up Times Square, decreased homelessness to its lowest level in twenty years, ran a largely scandal-free administration, and conducted himself both in office and afterward with considerable dignity and goodwill.
When I returned to the city, I didn’t know what direction my career would take but I did manage to finish my academic book In Therapy We Trust: America’s Obsession with Self-Fulfillment, a history of psychological thinking in American culture. It began with Phineas Quimby, an early nineteenth-century spiritual teacher and mesmerist who invented a “talking cure,” and went through the TV talk shows and twelve-step programs of the 1980s and 1990s. I felt adrift and it frightened me.
For as long as I could remember, I’d always been focused on some goal or other. Now I had nothing—no book to write, no career to pursue, no plan for the future.
On December 1, 1995, just days after sending off my manuscript, I read that a city council member had resigned and that an aide to Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney named Gifford Miller was running to fill the vacancy. I decided I’d finally take Eric up on his suggestion that I give politics a try. I called up Miller’s campaign to volunteer my services and, to my great surprise, Miller himself answered. When could I start, he asked. Right away, I said. Fifteen minutes later I walked to the address he gave me.
From Hollywood films, I imagined his campaign office would be crammed with desks and posters and filled with a cacophony of ringing telephones and shouting voices. Instead, Miller was running his campaign out of his apartment and he had no staff other than an elderly and frail chain-smoking man who ran the local political club. But Miller, a well-spoken twenty-six-year-old graduate of Princeton University, impressed me.
Two opponents quickly emerged: Judith Marcus, a Republican who’d worked for the retiring council member, and Drew Schiff, a Democrat who was a doctor and the son-in-law of Vice President Al Gore. Since this would be a “special election” in which there would be no primary, Miller feared he and Schiff would split the Democratic vote and Marcus would win. His immediate focus, however, was collecting enough signatures to get on the ballot. This was surprisingly hard. First, there were many technicalities designed to trip up outsiders. Signatures had to be witnessed by either a registered voter in the council district or a notary public. If someone wasn’t a registered Democrat or had previously signed another candidate’s petition, his signature didn’t count. Most important, the person had to be a registered voter in the council district, which was challenging since somebody walking down the street on the Upper East Side is as likely to be from Queens or Sweden as from around the corner. Then, right in the middle of the three weeks we had to collect signatures, a massive snowstorm hit and people who are trudging through slush aren’t eager to stop and sign petitions.
When I’d volunteered, I figured I’d just be answering phones. Instead, Miller put me in charge of getting him on the ballot. The campaign swallowed me whole. I worked from morning till night seven days a week. Three weeks later, we had more than enough signatures. Schiff, however, did not, so the election was now a straight-up contest between a Democrat and a Republican in a district that leaned Democratic. Miller won with 57 percent of the vote. This was an important lesson in the reality of local elections: they u
sually turned not on soaring oratory or debates or carefully crafted position papers but on hard work and good organizational skills. I felt good that I’d been able to make a difference.
Miller asked me to be his chief of staff, and while I was considering that offer, I got three others: statewide director of volunteer recruitment for the Clinton-Gore campaign, head of fund-raising for the state Democratic Party, and campaign director for Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney. I was astonished. In academia, you could spend six years slaving away on a doctorate and fail to get a single job offer; after six weeks in politics, I had four.
Eric, I realized, had been right. Politics came naturally to me. Compared to academia, it was like falling off a log. I was good at the practical organization work involved in politics and at getting people to work hard. Moreover, I was excited by the idea that I could use my skills to help people. It reminded me of the satisfaction I’d gotten from helping Cambodian refugees. Given that education was my field, I was particularly interested in improving the public school system. One should either write something worth reading or do something worth writing, Benjamin Franklin once said. Perhaps, I realized, I was better suited to the latter than the former.
Moreover, I’d come up with an idea for running for office myself: challenging my representative on the city council, a Republican named Andrew Eristoff. When I’d floated this idea to Eric, he’d observed that while he was all for my getting into politics, Eristoff was an incumbent from a well-established Upper East Side family that was worth about a half billion dollars. But for some reason this didn’t faze me, and I had a plan for winning that I thought just might work. I saw that politics at the local level was a lot about convincing people to vote for you by having direct personal contact with them so I felt I could win if I campaigned really hard for a really long time. Moreover, I’d figured out how to give myself a head start. Congresswoman Maloney was up for reelection a year before Eristoff was. If I accepted her offer to run her campaign, I could meet local donors, volunteers, and activists, while simultaneously helping a well-respected congresswoman get reelected.
The Education of Eva Moskowitz Page 15