Later that day, I learned that several of my coalition partners had agreed to meet with de Blasio. I was upset that they hadn’t consulted me since we’d agreed at the beginning to formulate our strategy together. This was part of de Blasio’s divide-and-conquer strategy and it worried me. To date, de Blasio had only succeeded in getting Gyurko’s group on board; far more damage would be done if de Blasio succeeded in chipping away at the coalition I’d formed. I got them to delay the meeting so we could come up with specific demands to present, such as committing to approving a certain number of co-locations, so that de Blasio couldn’t pull the wool over their eyes by talking in general terms.
On March 18, a poll came out showing that only 38 percent of voters approved of de Blasio’s handling of the public schools. A subsequent poll showed voters particularly disapproved of his handling of charter schools. Billy Easton of AQE, a union-funded education advocacy group, sent a memo to de Blasio recommending that he “quickly give a major education speech,” which de Blasio did on March 23.
In writing about this speech, the Times observed that de Blasio had sought to strike “a conciliatory tone, acknowledging missteps and emphasizing common ground.” That sounded like a swell idea if it meant he’d no longer denounce me as public enemy number one, but I was more interested in learning what he planned to do about our three schools, so I read on. Quoting a theologian, de Blasio said, “The noise of these shallow waters prevents us from listening to the sounds out of the depth.” He wanted, he said, “to create a fullness, a totality, a completeness.” I didn’t know what this meant but it sure didn’t sound like “Sorry I took your buildings, you can have ’em back.”
After this excursion into existentialism, de Blasio got down to business. “The answer,” he said, “is not to save a few of our children only[,] to find an escape route that some can follow and others can’t [but] to fix the entire system.” This was a false choice. Sure, no single school, whether district or charter or parochial, can alone fix the system. But create enough good schools and they will. Every good school, of whatever kind, contributes to the solution.
De Blasio did not acknowledge that evicting our schools had been a mistake and accepted fault on only one point: he hadn’t “measure[d] up when it came to explaining [his] decisions” and on that score, he promised “to right the ship now.” In other words, he was going to do a better job of telling us why he’d been right all along. Once you cut through his “shallow waters” mumbo jumbo, he wasn’t giving an inch.
Predictably, his speech was praised by the Gyurko coalition, which de Blasio had continued to court by personally meeting with them and even promising them space not only for their schools but also their pre-K programs as well. All sorts of goodies would be made available just so long as they continued to side with de Blasio against me. Deputy Mayor Richard Buery stroked Rich Berlin by emailing him “you have a big fan in the mayor.” “We are on his side big time,” Berlin responded, “and will help however we can.” It astonished me that a fellow educator could so enthusiastically support our eviction.
Now we waited for Albany to act and they soon did. On the afternoon of March 28, just as the meeting between de Blasio and the other charter school leaders was about to take place, Cuomo and the legislature announced they’d reached an agreement on a new law that would prohibit the city from charging rent or revoking any existing co-locations and would require the city to provide new or expanding charter schools with either facilities or a rent subsidy. It was a huge victory. “The law,” observed the Wall Street Journal, “represents a reversal of fortune for Mr. de Blasio.” “It turns de Blasio’s campaign promise on its head,” observed another commentator. “Instead of Eva Moskowitz paying him rent, he’ll be paying her rent.”43
So we celebrated. The legislature had come to our rescue and saved our schools. Or so we thought.
37
TRAGIC THINGS HAPPEN
2014
On March 29, the day after the legislative agreement was announced, we got to see the legislative language. No charter school co-location, it said, could be “revoked, overturned, or withdrawn, nor shall any such [co-location] that has not been . . . withdrawn . . . as of the effective date of this act fail to be implemented.” I emailed Emily Kim and Eric: “This language seems great, no?” Not really, they responded. The city, the law said, had to implement co-locations except those that had already been withdrawn, and de Blasio had arguably already withdrawn ours.
Surely, I thought, this hadn’t been the legislature’s intention given that de Blasio’s treatment of our schools was the principal reason for the law. It would be like the Greeks leaving Troy without Helen. We tried to get the law fixed in what was called the “cleanup bill,” a law that was passed to fix late-night drafting mistakes made in the annual budget law, but nobody wanted to reopen this can of worms. So we’d worked 24/7 for months on end, brought thousands of parents to Albany, and won an incredible victory by getting historic legislation passed—only to find ourselves back at square one and running out of time.
We came up with an idea for a compromise to propose to the city. Our middle school had been slated to move because we needed more room as we added seventh and eighth grades, but the school’s existing grades—fifth and sixth—could fit in the building in which the school was currently located. Thus, if we left those grades where they were, and only put the seventh and eighth grades in the PS 811 building, we’d need only a few rooms which we could get from the Success elementary school that was already there. Though splitting our school wouldn’t be ideal for us, it would completely resolve the city’s concerns since PS 811 wouldn’t have to give up one single room. On April 2, Emily wrote a letter to the city proposing this solution. The city quickly rejected it, however, and wouldn’t explain why. If I had any doubts whatsoever that the city’s actions were political, this removed them.
We sought to keep the pressure on by reactivating our media campaign, asking Cuomo to intercede, and amending our claims before SED to argue that the new law protected our co-locations (although we knew this was debatable). On April 3, we had a conference call with the city, which was represented by Deputy Mayor Tony Shorris, Zachary Carter (the city’s top lawyer), and a half dozen other staff members, a surprisingly large and high-powered contingent. Emily and Eric represented Success. Shorris offered us a former parochial school building in West Harlem for our middle school but asked us to delay opening our two elementary schools for a year. We’d consider the parochial school, Emily said, but not delaying our elementary schools. Shorris then asked us to postpone our lottery, claiming that it would be irresponsible to go forward with them since the city didn’t have sites for our elementary schools. When Emily refused, Shorris claimed the city had the legal authority to prevent us. This made Eric livid. Not only did the city lack such authority, it was obvious that Shorris’s real concern was that it would be harder for the city to wriggle out of finding us space once we’d selected students. Eric observed that we’d unfortunately become quite accustomed to running lotteries in the face of uncertainty, as the de Blasio administration was just the latest in a string of opponents trying to prevent us from opening schools. We did agree, however, to tell SED it could delay deciding on our petition for ten days to give the city time to find us space for our schools.
I feared Shorris was just trying to run out the clock on us, to string us along until it was too late for us to open and the press had lost interest, so we’d therefore insisted that the city propose new school buildings for us by April 7. When the city missed this deadline, we let them know we planned to hold a press conference the following day. Cuomo somehow got wind of this, and offered to oversee our negotiations with the city if we didn’t go forward with our press conference. I couldn’t turn him down, but I worried he’d pressure me to reach a compromise that would be bad for our schools and the families we served. I wasn’t against compromise where there were legitimate competing interests, but I saw no reason to sacrif
ice the needs of children just to serve de Blasio’s political agenda. Moreover, I felt that this was as good a time as any to bring these issues to a head. De Blasio wanted to show that there was a new sheriff in town and that he could slow down charter school growth. I wanted to show the opposite: that he’d underestimated the public’s support for charter schools and that Bloomberg’s policy of providing co-locations should continue. De Blasio was now trying to beat a strategic retreat from the fight he’d started because he was losing, which was precisely why I wanted to finish it. However, to avoid giving Cuomo the impression that this was some type of personal vendetta against de Blasio, which it wasn’t, I’d have to remain calm, which would be challenging since Shorris had a smartest-guy-in-the-room swagger that rubbed me the wrong way.
We set a meeting for April 11 at 2 p.m. in Cuomo’s Manhattan office. The participants were me; Shorris; Cuomo; and Larry Schwartz, Cuomo’s chief of staff. Shorris offered us two elementary school sites: one in Jamaica, Queens, and one in midtown Manhattan. The Manhattan site was only available for a year, however, because the city had already agreed to sell it to a developer. That, I said, was a nonstarter; I couldn’t admit students to a school with no idea where it would be located a year later. Moreover, midtown would be a tough commute for the families, who were from downtown, the school’s original location. Shorris said dismissively that this wasn’t a big deal, that he lived in Brooklyn and managed to get his kids to a school in Manhattan. This comment infuriated me. Shorris had pulled down more than a million dollars a year at his last job, so he could afford taxis and babysitters. Getting kids to a distant school was much harder for poor families. Shorris’s comment was symptomatic of a bigger problem. People at the top level of government were out of touch. Sure, some sent their children to public schools, and never failed to pat themselves on the back for doing so, but only the best ones. De Blasio’s children, for example, had attended schools in Park Slope, one of the city’s chicest neighborhoods, and then Beacon and Brooklyn Tech, two of the city’s most selective high schools. Similarly, Shorris sent his child to the most selective public school in the entire city. These schools bore utterly no resemblance to the dismal schools the children who’d won our lottery would have to attend if our schools couldn’t open.
Seeing my frustration rise, Cuomo asked Shorris and Schwartz to step outside. I feared he was now going to insist I accept a bad compromise. Instead, speaking in a frank but friendly manner, he said he just wanted to make sure I understood that if I didn’t compromise, I might lose and walk away with nothing. I responded that I did understand this but was not willing to give up on opening our schools. What I didn’t say was that I regarded defeat as preferable to surrender. A compromise with de Blasio would be an implicit endorsement of the outcome. If de Blasio was going to kill these schools, to take away these educational opportunities parents wanted for their children, I wanted the world to know that he’d done it. This was the best way to ensure that de Blasio didn’t do to other charter schools what he’d done to us. Then, at least, our loss would serve some purpose.
Cuomo called Schwartz and Shorris back in and told us to keep working toward a solution. Shorris demanded a media cease-fire and I agreed to give him another week to come up with more concrete proposals that specified not only what buildings they were offering but how long we’d have them, who’d fix them up, and whether the city would provide security and maintenance as it did for district schools. A week later, the city hadn’t clarified any of this nor come up with a permanent location for our Manhattan elementary school. I extended my deadline to April 22, but when the city failed yet again to meet it, I went through with my press conference. “I thought this was settled,” said one of our parents. “The mayor went on television and said he’d find space. He’s stated repeatedly that he’s a public school parent—surely he must know how we must feel, not knowing where our kids will be next year.”
Reading about all of this drama, you might think that this was what I did with most of my time, but I still had schools to run and crises arose daily. For example, I got safety alerts whenever a serious safety issue arose at one of our schools such as nearby gunfire, child abuse, or student injuries, and in April alone, I received twenty-nine of them. I also had to make sure instruction remained excellent; winning a battle to get buildings from de Blasio would be a Pyrrhic victory if it so distracted us from instruction that our schools declined in quality.
One day, April 24, can suffice to reveal how crazy this period was. We had three major events scheduled for the following week: the state math tests; a move to new headquarters; and our annual gala, the biggest fund-raising event of the year. On April 24, I woke up at 5 a.m. to find an email stating that Cuomo wanted to meet with me and Shorris at 1:30 p.m. An hour later, Richard Seigler called to tell me that Sidy Fofana, the boy who’d built a pretend building for Harlem Central from blocks, had died from falling off the roof of a forty-three-story building. I was horrified. How could such a thing happen? A nine-year-old boy gone? I thought of his poor parents and of his teachers. After calming myself, I called Keri Hoyt and Vanessa Bangser, the principal of Bronx 2, to get their help. By 8:35 a.m., Keri had formulated a detailed plan that involved dozens of people, including arranging for the psychologists from all of our schools to speak with Sidy’s teachers and his classmates and their families. Meanwhile, Vanessa and I both went to Harlem 3 to help out. By 9:30 a.m., we’d notified all of Harlem 3’s parents about this tragedy and arranged meetings to tell Sidy’s classmates and their parents about his death.
Next, I raced downtown to sign off on the renovations at our new headquarters and then to my meeting with Shorris and Cuomo. Shorris complained that finding a school facility in downtown Manhattan impossible. This was exactly what I’d feared: that he’d simply throw up his hands at a certain point and declare that the city couldn’t solve the problem it had created.
About a month earlier, Eric had told me that a building in northern Manhattan was being vacated by Mother Cabrini, a parochial school. Since it was at the other end of Manhattan, it wasn’t a good replacement for our downtown school. However, I now accepted that I would have to give up on opening a school downtown, but I figured that if I could get the city to rent the Mother Cabrini building for us, at least we could meet the needs of another community. Thus, much to everyone’s surprise, I made this proposal and Shorris agreed to look into it. I added, however, that I wasn’t granting any more extensions. SED was set to rule the following day, April 25, and if we didn’t reach a deal by then, I’d tell SED to go ahead and decide our legal claims, let the chips fall where they may. Everyone wanted to avoid that, so we agreed the parties would meet the following day beginning at 9 a.m. and wouldn’t leave “until all terms on all three proposed sites are agreed upon.”
But my day wasn’t done yet. A teacher had witnessed a parent push her child angrily and then flee the building, so we reported the incident to the authorities and arranged for the child’s grandmother to pick her up. I was also concerned that students at our other schools would learn of Sidy’s death and might have questions about it, so I wrote the following to our teachers:
We wanted to make sure you had resources to help you tomorrow should scholars or families ask you any questions about what happened.
Attached you will find a document that should be helpful. In addition, here are answers to the frequent questions we got at Harlem 3 today.
How did he fall? We don’t know.
Why did this happen? Tragic things happen and we don’t always know why they do. It can be very upsetting, but that’s why we’re all here to support one another.
What happens when you die? Not all families believe the same thing, so it’s really something to talk with your family about.
Throughout the day, I’d been furiously emailing every moment I could—in elevators, in cabs, in the bathroom, and while walking, which I did by trailing a few feet behind my assistant like a duck following its mother. In the m
idst of Sidy’s death, and all that we were doing to help our children through that tragedy, I was dealing with other matters such as our high school math curriculum, making sure we had copies of the state tests we were about to give, reviewing our practice test data for the upcoming state math tests, overseeing our schools’ participation in a charter school study, negotiating with a university that was helping train our teachers, planning our gala, improving our computer science instruction, monitoring our investment in our database systems, and approving the payment of forty-two purchase orders totaling more than $1 million. At 10:49 p.m. that night, I sent my final email in which I forwarded a request for information from one of Cuomo’s aides.
That was my April 24.
The following day, I attended Sidy’s funeral along with most of Harlem 3’s teachers. As Sidy’s family was Muslim, we wore headscarves and bowed down on our knees for most of the funeral, which was conducted in Arabic. There is nothing more painful than attending a child’s funeral. All of that potential, that joy Sidy brought to school every day, had evaporated in an instant.
While I mourned, our facilities team negotiated. It consisted of Emily, Pete Cymrot (who worked with Emily), and Kris Cheung (our head of facilities). The city had a far larger contingent, including representatives from DOE, the School Construction Authority, and the law department. A top Cuomo aide, Ian Rosenblum, oversaw the negotiations.
Emily had drafted a term sheet covering the minutest of details concerning renovations, maintenance, and security for each of the buildings. The city initially balked at many of the terms, but Emily is a ferocious negotiator. When the city objected to building an AstroTurf field for our Queens school, Emily showed them pictures of the football stadium to which we’d have had access at our original site. Hour after hour, the negotiations went on and when nighttime came, the city’s negotiators began leaving one by one. Those who remained, eager to join their colleagues, became increasingly pliant. At 1:31 a.m., Emily wrote me that the deal was done. I felt an enormous sense of relief. For six months, we’d been fighting this battle. Finally, we were done, having achieved both a good result for our students and a law that would help the entire charter sector.
The Education of Eva Moskowitz Page 29