The Education of Eva Moskowitz

by Eva Moskowitz

  But the fact that these claims were ridiculous by no means meant we’d prevail. In one case, Girls Prep, a charter school that Eric had founded, had lost its co-location because DOE’s impact statement had failed to mention that a small school in a building with several schools was going to lose a couple of rooms it didn’t need. The co-location was annulled and Girls Prep had to rent private space for $1 million, but the rooms Girls Prep was going to use just sat empty. Thus, a school that served poor girls had been forced to stuff a million dollars down a rat hole because DOE had made a technical error.

  In another case, the UFT had successfully sued to prevent DOE from closing seventeen schools. Even if these schools deserved to be closed, the court had ruled, DOE couldn’t do so because its educational impact statements hadn’t listed every single extracurricular program at these schools and similar programs at other schools. Moreover, DOE couldn’t correct these errors because school closures had to be approved six months in advance. Thus, when the city made a mistake, it was game over for the coming year. None of this was accidental; the law was intended to slow down school closures and charter growth.

  This decision illustrates why the government has such trouble running good schools. Bloomberg thought the best solution to failing schools was to close them while the UFT and its allies thought the best solution was to fix them. The lawsuit, however, didn’t resolve that conflict since it didn’t permanently prohibit Bloomberg from closing these schools. Rather, it merely required him to keep them on death row for another year, a bad outcome no matter what view you took on school closings. This type of tug-of-war is inherent in the political process and just isn’t a good way to run schools.

  Thus, there were some bad precedents for us and the NAACP’s participation in this lawsuit lent it moral credibility. Why, you ask, was the NAACP involved given that we served primarily African American kids whose families desperately wanted them to attend Success? First, the UFT gave money to the NAACP. Second, the NAACP’s membership included many unionized teachers who wanted to protect the district schools, and comparatively few younger members with school-age children concerned about improving the quality of the public schools.

  This lawsuit illustrated the UFT’s tactical brilliance and long-term thinking. The UFT had managed to create this fiction that sharing space with a charter school was harming district schools with rent-a-mob protests and the help of ideological accomplices like González and politicians the UFT had supported. Then the UFT had used the fiction it had invented to support legislation it had drafted that was brilliantly disguised as good-government transparency but in fact could be deployed to tie up charter schools in red tape, and now it was springing this trap that it had been been carefully constructing for years and was doing so with moral credibility it was renting from the NAACP.

  I’m used to high-stakes poker and don’t scare easily, but this lawsuit frightened me. If we lost, we’d have to shut down most of our schools, abandon hundreds of students who would end up in dysfunctional district schools, and lay off half of our teachers. I wracked my brain to think of a contingency plan. I considered finding alternative facilities, but existing school buildings weren’t just lying around waiting to be used. Moreover, we had neither the time nor the money to turn a non-school building into a school, which is quite an undertaking given the stringent safety and architectural requirements for schools. Eventually, I just gave up on figuring out a contingency plan. There wasn’t one. Losing meant disaster.

  I set about figuring out how to win the lawsuit. Judges claim they base their decisions only on the law, but I believe public opinion matters in a case like this. For that reason, I felt I couldn’t ignore the NAACP’s involvement, that we had to protest the NAACP. My staff thought I was nuts. Who protests the NAACP? I felt, however, we had to make clear that the NAACP’s views were at odds with those of the families in Harlem the NAACP purported to represent. I wanted to make it clear, however, that we weren’t against the NAACP, just their position on this one issue, so we decided to have our students wear T-shirts that said Future NAACP Member. This reflected our belief that the NAACP’s opposition to charter schools was backward-looking and that the NAACP would in time come to support charter schools.

  On May 26, thousands of children wearing “Future NAACP Member” T-shirts and parents carrying signs that read “NAACP: Don’t Divide Us, Unite Us” marched to the plaza at 125th Street and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard.

  The speakers communicated their outrage and despair at the NAACP’s actions. “I could barely believe my ears,” said one of our teachers, “when I found out that the NAACP was trying to shut down some of the most successful schools serving black and brown children in our city.” A parent said:

  My child cannot be told that she’s not going to get to go to her school in September. I cannot look her in the eye, as a parent, and tell her, “Well, the problem is that this group of people that Mommy told you about during Black History Month, that did all those great things a long time ago—they want to stop you from doing great things . . .”

  NAACP, please, don’t turn your back on my little girl. Turn your back on this lawsuit instead.

  Thousands of African American parents protesting the NAACP was a man-bites-dog story that drew considerable attention. Many prominent African American leaders bemoaned the NAACP’s actions. Kevin Chavous observed that “in the heavens above, legendary figures such as Thurgood Marshall, Walter White and Roy Wilkins must be shaking their heads” to see the NAACP become “the target of a protest by the people it was created to serve.” The NAACP “seems to have switched sides,” wrote United Negro College Fund president Michael L. Lomax. “It’s fighting not for the right of kids of color to get a good education, but to keep failing public schools open and to limit kids’ ability to go to public schools that are working.” The NAACP’s “unholy alliance” with the UFT, wrote Daily News columnist Stanley Crouch, was “proof of how low a great civil rights organization has fallen since its days of advocating for racial equality.”

  In response to the rally, the NAACP claimed we’d “unfairly singled” them out. Really? They’d sued to evict our schools and we were singling them out? Hazel Dukes, the NAACP’s New York leader, commented that parents “can march and have rallies all day long” but “[w]e will not respond.” It was startling to hear the NAACP proudly declare its indifference to heartfelt protest by the very people whose interests it purported to champion.

  The NAACP and UFT responded with a counterprotest in front of our offices. It was small and consisted entirely of politicians, union officials, and paid staff. Dukes spoke first. “I live here in Harlem,” she said repeatedly. This was the thinly veiled “you don’t belong here” charge to which I’d been subjected by City Council Member Arroyo. She then made some vacuous remarks about being for “all” kids but failed to explain how this could be squared with the fact that her actions would hurt our kids. Perkins claimed that “Co-location is a form of segregation [because] you put a wall between one kid and another kid.” It seemed to me, however, that putting us in a whole other building rather than co-locating us would make us more separate, not less. Dukes soon called an African American founder of another charter school a “dumbass,” telling him, “You went to Harvard on my back, not because you’re smart, not because you worked hard.”

  One of our parents emailed Dukes:

  Due to this wonderful school, my daughter can read. . . . If you . . . continue on this horrible lawsuit against my daughter’s school and the fellow eighteen charter schools, it will not be the best legacy to leave behind . . .

  Dukes responded: “You are not a member of the NAACP and don’t understand that you are doing the business of slave masters.”

  Seeing that things were getting out of hand, Ben Jealous, head of the NAACP, went into damage control mode. They’d “just had no idea,” he claimed, “how much tension [the lawsuit] would create.” Of course, who could possibly predict anyone would get in a tizzy
over a little thing like a lawsuit to evict nineteen schools? Jealous claimed the NAACP was “open to all options to settle this suit.” That was news to our ears because we would have been happy to exchange the infinitesimally larger “big gym” for the “small gym” and assign gym time to the special needs students, but we’d have to see whether Jealous would really stand up to the UFT to advocate for such a compromise.

  The NAACP and the UFT did let Geoffrey Canada’s schools out of the lawsuit, recognizing the stupidity of taking on the most prominent African American educator in the country. While I was happy for Canada’s schools, I was distressed that hundreds of students for whom I was responsible might suffer just because I didn’t qualify for this favorable treatment.

  Fortunately, the great law firm Paul, Weiss agreed to represent us pro bono. There were two legal issues. The first was whether space in the co-located schools had been allocated fairly. On that point, we felt good because, well, it had been. But there was another issue: whether the Building Utilization Plans (BUPs) had adequately explained why the allocation of space was fair. For example, we were scheduled to use the cafeteria alone for breakfast because our school day began earlier. But, said the UFT and the NAACP, it wasn’t enough to explain that now, you had to have explained that in the BUP itself.

  So why not just revise the BUPs? That’s exactly what the city wanted to do, but we figured the UFT and the NAACP would argue that the BUPs couldn’t be revised after the co-location was approved. The city went ahead anyway, allocating gym time to the special education school and explaining why our students ate breakfast alone and how the big gym was virtually the same size as the small gym.

  Just as we predicted, the UFT and the NAACP claimed it was too late to revise the BUPs to address the inequities identified in the lawsuit, that the court’s only option was to annul our co-locations. The NAACP’s duplicity in taking this position was truly astounding given Jealous’s claim that he was “eager to discuss all options for redressing the inequities . . . and ensuring all kids can attend their school of choice this fall.”

  With the issues fully briefed, our fate was now in the hands of the court. On July 21, 2011, the court ruled. We’d won! The BUP modifications were legal, the court ruled, and had addressed the issues the NAACP and the UFT had identified. Then on August 13, the court issued another decision dismissing the lawsuit against Upper West as well.

  I was incredibly relieved. These lawsuits had weighed upon me more than anything else in my professional career. Losing them would have been far worse than the two elections I’d lost because it would have affected thousands of students and their families.

  Two weeks later, Upper West opened. Just as we’d hoped, it was racially and economically integrated: a third of the students were white, a third were Latino, a quarter were African American, and the remainder were Asian and multiracial. Among them was Emily Kim’s son. Moreover, since she’d become one of the city’s leading authorities on charter school law and had been a fearsome and tireless advocate for us in the litigations, we offered her the job of general counsel, which she accepted.

  When families in our Harlem schools learned we’d opened up a school on the Upper West Side, many immediately suspected it must be better since their experience in the district schools was that people of color always got the short end of the stick. To address their concerns, I had a delegation of parents from our Harlem schools visit our Upper West Side school. What they found surprised them. Everything—the uniforms, the curriculum, the teaching methods, the disciplinary policies—was exactly the same. That was because, from the very beginning, we’d designed Success not for a particular race or class or ethnic group but for all students.

  25

  PRAYING WHILE RUNNING

  2000–2001

  Henry Stern, the city’s brilliant and quirky parks commissioner who’d graduated from the Bronx High School of Science at fifteen and from Harvard Law School at twenty-two, gave everyone with whom he dealt a parks department badge emblazoned with a nickname he’d selected for you. Mine, I was horrified to learn, would be “Buffy,” which sounded to me like a name for an airheaded bimbo. Stern told me, however, that it was actually a compliment: he disliked Reba White Williams, so for defeating her, he’d dubbed me Buffy the Vampire Slayer. However, as I got to know more about the council, I wondered at times whether the vampire hadn’t gotten the better of the bargain.

  I joined the council at a time of transition. The city’s charter had recently been rewritten to give the council more power, but many of my colleagues had been elected before this happened, when the council tended to attract weak candidates. Fortunately, however, the council had a strong leader: Speaker Peter Vallone, a devout Catholic from Queens, a man of considerable integrity and common sense who was underestimated by the media because he had an old-school working-class air about him.

  Backbenchers like me had little power on the council. The grown-ups—Vallone, the mayor, and other politically influential players such as the heads of the Democratic county committees—would hash out legislative deals and then order us to approve them. At no time was our lowly status more apparent than during budget season. The city’s budget, at $39 billion, was the fourth largest in the nation after those of the federal government, California, and New York state, but most council members had little influence over it. Rather, much as one jingles a key chain before a crying baby, Vallone would give us a few hundred thousand dollars to allocate to nonprofits in our district to distract us from our lack of input into how the remaining $38.99 billion dollars would be spent. My colleagues would then waste their time trading these sums like baseball cards. A council member would offer to match my $10,000 contribution to my favorite nonprofit if I’d match his $10,000 contribution to his, although we’d reach precisely the same result if we each gave our own favorite nonprofits $20,000 each.

  As one of the council’s newest members, I had even less influence than most, so I had to find creative ways to get things done. Sometimes I did this by bridging the ideological gap between my colleagues, who leaned left, and the Giuliani administration, which leaned right. For example, Giuliani had set aside $20 million for tuition vouchers but the council wouldn’t allow this. I figured maybe we could compromise by spending the money on charter schools. My proposed compromise was accepted and I found it both surprising and exhilarating that charter schools were going to get $20 million just because I’d had an idea and made a few phone calls.

  While I supported charter schools, I still saw them largely as a sideshow and my principal focus was on fixing the district schools. I discovered, for example, that the escalators at the School of Art and Design, the premier graphic arts school in the city, had been broken for three years, so I got them fixed after a year of relentless effort. At PS 6, my alma mater, I helped get a library built in record time by busting through many bureaucratic hurdles.

  Since my powers as a junior member of the council were modest, I focused most of my energy on solving constituent complaints. I noticed, however, that my staff’s efforts were often unavailing. We’d write a letter and follow up with multiple phone calls and nothing would happen. Henceforth, I told my staff, we’d write three follow-up emails, so we’d have a paper trail, and then go to the press if we didn’t have a satisfactory response. Over time, the departments figured out it was easier to solve our constituent problems than deal with the press.

  I liked working on constituent complaints both because it was concrete—you knew you’d helped someone—and also because it gave me a window into problems with the city’s bureaucracy that were affecting people throughout the city. I learned, for example, that students at a new school in my district, the Life Sciences Secondary School, hadn’t gotten their textbooks a month into the school year. When I asked DOE about it, they told me not to worry my pretty little head because the books had been ordered and would arrive “soon.” The students, however, told me the same thing had happened the prior year and I wanted to get to t
he bottom of the problem so it didn’t recur. I asked to see the purchase orders to find out if the books had been ordered late. When the DOE refused to give them to me, I issued a press release charging the department with a “culture of secrecy.” This was true, but I also knew it was the type of incendiary language that could help draw press attention. Both the Times and the Daily News wrote stories and DOE promised to “respond to Ms. Moskowitz’s letter and her allegations promptly” and also ordered all of the city’s “principals . . . to go class to class and find out what textbooks were missing and why.”

  The following spring, parents at this same school told me that they feared their children would fail the statewide chemistry exam because they’d had a string of five incompetent chemistry teachers. I again went to the newspapers and this time was able to get DOE to pay for tutoring, but while this enabled some students to pass, for many, it was too little too late.

  Another common constituent complaint was the absence of an academically rigorous public high school on the Upper East Side. DOE claimed there wasn’t a site available, so I began looking and found a building that the auction house Sotheby’s had just vacated. DOE agreed to open the Eleanor Roosevelt High School there. (Curiously, a real estate agent later brought a lawsuit claiming I’d unfairly deprived her of a commission by functioning as an unpaid broker for the site.)

  While solving these complaints proved satisfying, I was convinced these problems were systemic, that there were other schools at which textbooks were arriving late and where teachers were incompetent. In theory, the council’s Education Committee, on which I sat, was supposed to look into these issues but it wasn’t very effective. The committee’s chair was often late, so I’d find myself making frantic phone calls to track her down while witnesses we’d invited to testify cooled their heels. When the hearings did start, council members would focus on problems at particular schools in their district rather than exploring the systemic issues that were causing these problems.