In Greece, we were so moved by seeing the Parthenon that we visited it again the following day. In Italy, we loved the Coliseum in Rome, the cathedral at Orvieto, the leaning tower of Pisa, and bicycling through the Tuscan and Umbrian countryside with its enchanting hilltop towns. In Siena, we met up with a family friend who took us to see the blessing of a horse that would represent his wife’s neighborhood in the Palio, a race on the cobblestones of the central square that had been held annually for nearly four hundred years. The horse we saw blessed won, so we were able to join in the festivities, a bacchanalian outdoor feast that went on until the wee hours of the morning.
We soaked it all in just as my parents had two decades earlier. Even now, I can remember large portions of these trips virtually day by day. It’s hard to convey just what a magical experience it was. Imagine spending months bicycling through foreign countries, eating delicious meals, seeing beautiful landscapes, visiting historic sites, exploring ancient towns, and doing all of this in the prime of your youth and with the love of your life.
When we returned to the United States, I decided to apply to graduate school given my love for studying history. I chose Johns Hopkins, which had an outstanding program and gave me a generous financial aid package. Eric taught science at a public school in East Harlem during my first year, but got a teaching job in Baltimore the following year. That summer, the Iran-Contra hearings took place and we couldn’t tear ourselves away from them. They featured a collection of characters straight from central casting: the pipe-smoking Admiral John Poindexter; Ollie North with his boyish American grin and ramrod-straight posture; Fawn Hall, the beautiful and loyal aide who’d helped him destroy documents, in one case by secreting them out under her dress; North’s fiercely combative counsel, Washington legal powerhouse Brendan Sullivan who, when a senator complained that he was making too many objections, famously shot back, “I am not a potted plant!”; and Arthur Liman, a brilliant and quirky New York lawyer whose manner was once said to be “Walter Matthau doing a Perry Mason impersonation.” When North impishly observed that he thought he’d destroyed all copies of a document Liman was grilling him about, Liman replied, “Colonel, my eyesight has suffered from reading what you left behind.” At the time, watching these hearings felt like an indulgence, but doing so came in handy later when I came to chair a committee.
Eric was interested in politics so the following year he got a job working for Harlem congressman Charlie Rangel and we moved to DC, where I continued working on my dissertation. We lived on Capitol Hill. On Saturday nights, I’d keep Eric company while he cooked, drinking wine and listening to a wonderful public radio show called Hot Jazz Saturday Night. Afterward, we’d stroll down Constitution Avenue to the Capitol and look out over the mall.
I found writing my dissertation challenging. Seeing me struggle, Eric suggested one day that I should go into politics since I was good with people. I dismissed the idea. I could no more imagine myself as a politician than as an astronaut.
As for Eric, although he had a lot of interests—politics, writing, investing—he didn’t seem to be pursuing any concrete career plans and I feared that I wouldn’t be able to count on him to be much of a breadwinner. I asked my mother whether this should dissuade me from marrying him. It shouldn’t, she said, if I truly loved him, which I did. In 1989, Eric proposed, although that’s a charitable description; there was no ring or bended knee or romantic spot, just a suggestion Eric made at a diner as casually as if he were proposing we go to a movie. But knowing Eric was clueless in these matters, I took his lack of calculation as a mark of sincerity rather than a sign of indifference.
We were wed on July 2, 1989, on the lawn of my parents’ house in upstate New York under a chuppah my father had made from branches cut from trees on our property. Our wedding processional was a recording by Duke Ellington, whose music we’d come to love from listening to Hot Jazz Saturday Night, and the ceremony ended with the upbeat Ellington song “I’m Such a Lucky So and So.” It was a beautiful summer day, and while I suppose that, just as all infants are cute, all weddings are beautiful, I do think there was something especially magical about ours.
And, in keeping with my family’s tradition of parsimony, it was cheap! Soup to nuts, it cost $600, although that was more, I suppose, than my parents’ half a wedding cake and day trip to Sausalito. We’d bought our clothes from thrift stores, Eric cooked for our ninety guests, Eric’s aunt Franny baked a cake (which had two little bicyclists at the top!), and a friend of ours made tablecloths from lace and red fabric (though I admit I think my father took matters too far when, having been sent to the store for crushed ice and apparently seeing no need for such an extravagance, he returned with cubes and a hammer).
My parents were happy with Eric, as he had all of the qualities of a good Jewish boy other than actually being Jewish. Grandma Frances told me, however, that she disapproved of my marrying a goy. I was hurt but not resentful. I didn’t take lightly the fact that I was breaking a chain of Jewish marriages that had probably lasted for millennia; I just loved Eric.
For our honeymoon, we of course took a bicycle trip, this time in the south of France, which had beautiful countryside, delicious food, and a great network of small roads. We biked from Nice to the beautiful city of Avignon and back in a large circle, enjoying Provence’s Roman ruins, quaint towns, and wonderful cuisine.
That fall, I continued working on my dissertation and managed to get a one-year stint as an assistant professor at the University of Virginia. Since I was just twenty-five, my youthful appearance made for some awkward moments. When I sat down at the round seminar table on the first day of class, a student asked me if I’d “heard anything about Moskowitz.”
One day, Eric suddenly announced he’d decided to apply to law school. Predictably, he had decided to do so not because he’d figured out what he’d do with a law degree, but rather because his interest in the law had been piqued by some articles on constitutional law that had come across his desk at work. Eric got into Columbia Law School so in August of 1990, we returned to New York City.
In our absence, New York had continued the upward trajectory it had begun in the Koch years. Wall Street was booming and its wealth trickled down to innumerable other businesses, from law and accounting firms to car dealerships and restaurants. The trickle, however, dried up before it reached the bottom: unemployment in poor neighborhoods was high and homelessness was rampant. Moreover, a crack epidemic had pushed the murder rate to record levels. There was a growing sense that while Koch had been the man for the time, that time had passed. The city chose a Harlem politician by the name of David Dinkins to replace him.
I didn’t know what to expect from Eric in law school since his level of studiousness had fluctuated dramatically. It turned out that Eric’s instinct that he’d enjoy law school was correct and he thrived as never before. At the end of the year, he finished among the top five students in his class and he got a summer position with Cleary Gottlieb, arguably the country’s best international law firm. In his final year, Eric won the law school’s moot court competition and got a prestigious position as a clerk to a federal district court judge.
I was glad to see Eric fulfilling his potential but I felt I wasn’t. I’d earned my PhD in record time but had been unable to find a permanent teaching position. I’d found a one-year stint at a college in New Jersey quite dispiriting since the students had no enthusiasm for history. I was trying to turn my dissertation into a book but was finding it hard. Eric encouraged me to look into other careers. I made a documentary about how ordinary women experienced the changes brought about by the women’s lib movement. Years later, it was picked up by a video distributor that sold it to many universities, but nobody was interested in it at the time so my prospects as a documentarian looked poor. I sunk into depression. I was so used to having a sense of direction and purpose that I felt lost without them. All of my self-confidence and self-esteem drained out of me. I began seeing a psychotherapist
twice a week. It didn’t help. I had no idea of how to get out of this hole or if I ever would.
In 1993, I managed to get a job at Vanderbilt University. While it was just a one-year position, Vanderbilt was so prestigious that it could be a springboard for a permanent position elsewhere. I became more optimistic about an academic career. While it was difficult to be away from Eric, who was doing his clerkship in New York City, I enjoyed teaching at Vanderbilt as the students were enthusiastic and bright and my colleagues were friendly and capable.
Then I was informed that a permanent position had opened up and was encouraged to apply. This should have been a no-brainer but I was reluctant to do so as I feared I’d never truly feel at home in Nashville. My hesitation raised a more profound question: whether I was really committed to academic life and the sacrifices it entailed. Most academics were willing to live anywhere for a chance to pursue the life of the mind. I wasn’t so sure. While I enjoyed learning about history, I still found writing a struggle. Moreover, an article I’d written had been rejected for publication for what I believed were political reasons. I feared I’d have to conform to academia’s politically correct culture to advance.
I struggled with whether to withdraw my name from consideration, as my diary entries from this time show:
February 6: I want to escape but will I be happy once I do? Will I find something else? I don’t have the same kind of self-doubt I had a year ago, but will [it] come back? Withdraw[ing] feels somehow suicidal. Could I find a niche for myself? How do you make a difference in society?
February 7: Going back and forth feeling tormented by this decision.
February 22: Spent weekend with Eric. We decided I will be coming to NYC to write my book.
February 24: I’m turning thirty and I don’t have a job. But other people have taken a while to find themselves.
February 26: Sometimes I feel so inadequate in this profession. All these intellectuals expect me to know all this stuff that I don’t know about. I long to feel competent and confident. Is there another profession that I would feel better about? Or is this my psychological destiny?
February 28: Looking at my letter [withdrawing my name] made me anxious. It feels like such a gamble. Heading into the unknown is so scary.
19
AN EVA MORATORIUM
2009
Unlike many unions, which exercise power with a bludgeon, the UFT was actually quite sophisticated. Much like a good film director who can use subtle cinematic techniques like camera angles to manipulate your reactions, the UFT could control events without most people even realizing it was pulling the strings. I knew something was afoot, however, when on June 2, 2009, Harlem 2’s principal emailed me that protestors were outside the school chanting “Whose school? Our school!” and “HSA, go away!” Since this was occurring right outside our classrooms and was upsetting to our young students, our principal “ask[ed] them politely to move,” but they “shouted [him] down.”
Daily News columnist Juan González covered the protest, reporting a parent’s claim that “half the current fifth-graders at PS 123 have been reassigned . . . to make room for . . . the Moskowitz charter school.” This was completely false. González hadn’t in fact spoken to a single parent who claimed they’d been forced to take their child out of PS 123. Rather, he’d interviewed a parent who had speculated about why other children had left. In reality, fifth-graders who graduated from PS 123’s elementary school weren’t required to attend its middle school and many had simply chosen not to as there were better alternatives.
González struck again on July 2 with an article about our taking over rooms from PS 123:
No one was expecting the moving men when they arrived Thursday morning at PS 123 in Harlem.
Not Principal Beverly Lewis, nor any of her staff, nor any of the school’s parent leaders.
“These strangers suddenly appeared, went up to the third floor, removed the cylinder locks from a bunch of classroom doors and started moving out all the furniture and computers, and piling everything up in the gym,” said one teacher . . .
The moving men claimed they had orders . . . to make way for an expansion of the Harlem Success Academy.
In a subsequent story, one of González’s colleagues repeated González’s claim that “Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy had movers break locks off doors.”
What really happened on July 2? I’ll let my email exchange with González tell the story. It began with an email from González at 2:19 p.m.:
I’m told that workmen hired by Harlem Success came to the school today, drilled off the locks on a half dozen classrooms and began removing furniture . . . without notifying the principal or anyone else in the building.
I replied:
You have not been given the correct facts. There is a space allocation agreement which allocated the rooms in question to Success. On May 18, Tom Taratko, director of space planning at DOE, wrote to Dr. Lewis and me: “This allocation will take effect on July 1st.” Similarly, on June 30, Timothy George of DOE wrote to the custodian, copying Dr. Lewis, “Dear All: This agreement is in place and shall take effect tomorrow July 1st.”
Indeed, Dr. Lewis herself recently acknowledged the July 1 date in an email.
We did not drill off the locks. In fact, the custodian opened up the locks for us with a key.
González responded:
I personally saw holes in the doors where the locks would normally go. . . . If the custodian had opened the doors with a key, the locks would presumably still be there.
I responded:
The custodian removed the locks. This is DOE’s standard operating procedure when a new tenant moves in.
DOE does this for security reasons; it doesn’t want the old school to have the keys for classrooms it’s no longer using.
Everything I told González was reflected in the written record or could be confirmed by DOE but he nonetheless went ahead with his story, claiming that our move was unauthorized and we’d drilled out the locks. He didn’t even publish our denials that we’d drilled out the locks or mention the emails we’d gotten authorizing our move. The only reference to our position in the article was a statement that “Moskowitz denies impropriety,” which made it sound like I wasn’t denying having drilled out the locks without authorization but just thought it was fine and dandy to do so. Even when we got written statements from DOE that they had removed the locks, not us, González refused to correct his story.
In dealing with dozens of journalists who’d written more than a hundred articles about me, I’d never encountered one who was as willing as González to print outright lies to advance his ideological agenda. Moreover, this wasn’t just about my feelings being hurt (although they certainly were, since González’s article portrayed me as lawless). The bad press could be used as ammunition to limit co-locations or cause DOE to delay our getting access to these rooms, which we needed so we could renovate them before our teachers arrived in early August.
González’s articles also engaged in ad hominem attacks on me. He wrote that my “critics, who include educators, parents, the teachers’ union and Harlem political leaders, say she is a relentless self-promoter.” Writing that I’m viewed as a bad person by all sorts of unnamed good people (educators, parents . . . probably nuns and animal lovers too) isn’t journalism, it’s character assassination.
I wanted to fight back to stop this endless string of lies, but I was advised that suing or objecting publicly wouldn’t do any good and would likely just make the misleading coverage worse, so I dropped the matter. It had become clear to me by this point that some in the media had an accountability problem. Usually, people in our society are held accountable for their wrongful conduct either by the press or by the legal system, but neither works well for the press because journalists are reluctant to criticize their colleagues and libel lawsuits are generally a fool’s errand. I’ve therefore tried to follow Benjamin Franklin’s advice not to pick fights with those who buy ink by the
barrel. Since many people follow that advice, however, the press often gets away with reckless and biased reporting, which is problematic given their importance to our society. As George Orwell observed, “He who controls the past controls the future.” If people believe that charter schools have been harmful in the past, then charters won’t be allowed to expand in the future. For many years, I refrained from publicly criticizing the press. I’ve decided, however, that the press is too important for me to remain silent.
Five days after González’s article, another protest was held outside PS 123. One person held a sign that said “Eva, go home! Pigs at the trough!” with a picture of me as a pig. The education blog Chalkbeat noted that ACORN organizers were at this rally, which was the UFT go-to front group. In the yearlong period ending two weeks after this protest, the UFT paid ACORN and its successor $325,616.
On July 10, ACORN staged yet another protest at PS 123 which was attended by my former colleague Tony Avella, who repeated the false claim that we were pushing out PS 123 students, and my former opponent Scott Stringer, who claimed that we were “strangers to the community” despite the fact that most of our parents, including me, lived in Harlem.
That day, the union’s endgame was revealed: state legislation was introduced to limit the mayor’s power to co-locate charters. The unions understood that if parent demand was the fuel for charter school growth, facilities were the oxygen because they allowed charters to bypass the lengthy capital-intensive process of building new school facilities. The UFT had chosen its moment well because a critical law that gave Bloomberg more control over the school system than his predecessors was set to expire. The assembly, which was controlled by the UFT, could hold the renewal of this law hostage unless legislation was passed to limit co-locations.
The Education of Eva Moskowitz Page 13
