While the council’s dysfunction was quite dispiriting, I was hoping things would improve in 2002, when term limits would force thirty-six of the council’s fifty-one members out of office. Post columnist Jack Newfield expressed the sentiments of many New Yorkers regarding this development when he wrote, “I am against capital punishment—except in the case of Adolf Eichmann. And I am against term limits—except in the case of the City Council.” On February 6, 2001, the council members who were going to be forced out introduced a bill to overturn term limits. Vallone opposed the bill and my colleagues usually did what he said, but this concerned something on which they had unusually strong convictions: their own political careers. The bill was referred to the Government Operations Committee, of which I was a member, and the vote was set for March 15. Of the committee’s nine members, five, including me, voted to keep term limits.
Since Vallone was term limited, this meant we’d have a new speaker the following year. Gifford Miller asked me to support him for this position. Backroom politics weren’t my strength so I had little ability to handicap his chances, but I agreed to support him since I felt he’d be a good speaker. Gifford also managed to recruit another colleague of ours, Christine Quinn, and he explained his plan to us. Rather than wait for the new council members to get elected to ask for their support, Gifford wanted to ask candidates for their support now and help them get elected if they agreed to provide it.
In the months that followed, the three of us spent countless hours together and developed a real camaraderie despite our very different backgrounds. Gifford had grown up on Fifth Avenue in the lap of luxury and gone to the very best schools: St. Bernard’s, an elite private school; Middlesex, a boarding school; and Princeton. But he came from the kind of wealthy family that had a strong sense of public service. His father had served in the Johnson and Kennedy administrations and his mother had revived a large formal garden in Central Park called the Conservatory Garden.
Chris’s maternal grandmother had emigrated from Ireland as a third-class passenger aboard the Titanic, whose sinking she’d survived by pushing past the crew who’d tried to keep her in steerage. “When the other girls dropped to their knees to pray,” Chris’s grandmother told her, “I took a run for it.” The moral of this story, Chris once told a priest, was that her grandmother knew there was a time for praying and a time for running. The priest, however, had another interpretation. “Your grandmother,” he said, “knew you could pray while running.” Chris’s father was a union shop steward and Chris herself had attended parochial school and then Trinity College, after which she’d become a community organizer and then entered politics as an aide.
As a Jew who’d attended public school, I came from yet another background, but despite these differences, we shared a common vision. A few years earlier, the Times had observed that the council was “an unpredictable place of raucous, chaotic and sometimes absurd debates, reflecting a governing body still learning to handle its new role.” We wanted to professionalize the council, to make it worthy of exercising its recently acquired powers.
The task before us was to help elect the dozen or so candidates who’d agreed to support Gifford. Most were inexperienced, so our job was to guide them through the process of collecting signatures to get on the ballot, street campaigning, showing up to events on time, handing out literature, and raising money—all of the organizational work you need to succeed in local politics.
While I was excited by this new chapter of my political career, one personal issue troubled me. I wanted another child but had been unable to get pregnant again. Eric and I went back to a fertility specialist and, after a couple of expensive in vitro fertilizations, I became pregnant, but then miscarried. I was devastated. The prospects for my having another child were increasingly small. In the six years that Eric and I had been trying to have children, we’d succeeded only once and, at the age of thirty-five, my odds were only getting slimmer. I decided at least for the moment to refrain from further medical procedures and hope that, despite the long odds, I’d become pregnant naturally.
I turned my attention back to helping Gifford become speaker. Campaigning all over the city led to many strange adventures. When I went to meet a candidate named James Davis at his home, only his mother was there, and while I waited for him to arrive, I smelled something burning. It turned out that his mother had forgotten something on the stove, causing a fire in the kitchen. When Davis finally arrived, I was on the front stoop and the firemen who’d put out the fire were emerging from his home.
Another candidate we supported was a former police officer named Hiram Monserrate. Everything seemed to be going pretty well until Monserrate was arrested on the eve of the election for defacing his opponent’s campaign posters. We had to bail him out to ensure that he’d actually be able to campaign on Election Day.
Since I was also on the ballot, I spent Election Day campaigning in my own district. It was a beautiful September day: sunny, cool, and cloudless. I was handing out literature and greeting voters on Sixteenth Street and First Avenue when I noticed an airplane flying unusually low. Suddenly, it slammed into one of the twin towers and thick black smoke began pouring out of the building. People gathered around me, watching in horror. Then there was an explosion from the other tower. Black smoke was now pouring from both towers and we soon got word it had been another plane and that the Pentagon was also being attacked. Then, as we looked on, one of the towers began crumbling, eliciting gasps of surprise and cries of horror since we knew the building contained thousands of our fellow citizens whose lives were being extinguished before our eyes.
I tried reaching Eric, but the cell phone lines were overwhelmed. I soon learned that the election had been canceled and, as the subways weren’t working, I began walking home. Thousands of other New Yorkers were also pouring out of buildings and walking home as F-15 fighter planes flew overhead. It was surreal and horrifying: the images of the buildings falling that we couldn’t get out of our heads, the billowing clouds of dust, the people walking uptown with worried and bewildered expressions on their faces, the busy signals on our phones. It felt like the city had been transformed into a war zone.
Eric and I decided to get away from the city for the weekend. From a distance, it felt like 9/11 had perhaps just been a terrible nightmare, but when we returned, we saw that the twin towers, which had risen majestically above all of the city’s other skyscrapers, were missing from the skyline, which brought back home to us the reality of what had happened.
In the weeks that followed, the city went through a period of mourning. For weeks on end, the Times ran a series called “Portraits of Grief” that contained photographs and brief remembrances of most of the more than three thousand New Yorkers who’d lost their lives. Everyone, it seemed, knew someone who’d perished.
In the wake of the attacks, it seemed strange just to go on with the lives we’d led before and yet, of course, we had to go on, which in my case meant returning to campaigning. I did so, and won my primary easily. In the mayoral race, Bloomberg won the Republican primary, and Mark Green, a fairly liberal candidate who’d begun his career working for Ralph Nader, won the Democratic primary. Despite his wealth, Bloomberg was considered a long shot in the general election because Democrats outnumbered Republicans by six to one, but a perfect storm was in the making. Many New Yorkers were worried about the impact 9/11 would have on our city’s economy. In the short term, the attack had harmed fourteen thousand downtown businesses. In the longer term, 9/11 threatened to fundamentally undermine the city’s financial sector. Financial firms had already been moving their back-office operations out of the city in search of lower taxes and cheaper labor. Now, they worried about concentrating critical operations in a city that was a target for international terrorists. Given these concerns, electing a businessman who’d made his fortune on Wall Street, the very industry most threatened by 9/11, was an increasingly attractive proposition. But even then, Bloomberg still would not have won had
Green not made the bizarre decision to endorse a proposal to let Giuliani extend his term by three months so he could deal with the aftermath of 9/11. It was tantamount to an admission by Green that he wasn’t up to leading the city in times of crisis. On Election Day, New Yorkers agreed and chose Bloomberg.
Most of the dozen or so council candidates who’d agreed to support Gifford for speaker prevailed, and Gifford sealed the deal by making a strategic alliance with the Queens council members. One member who’d backed the other leading contender, Angel Rodriguez, told Gifford that he’d done so because Rodriguez had promised “license plate 1,” a reference to the special license plates that council members got.
Three months later, Rodriguez was indicted for a $1.5 million extortion scheme. While I was offended by Rodriguez’s betrayal of the public trust, I was also puzzled and saddened. In my dealings with him, he’d always been affable and kind. His son had even interned in my office. His foolishness stunned me. Over the ensuing years, many of my colleagues would go to jail and, aside from the question of ethics, I was always amazed at their willingness to risk their careers and freedom for money they could surely have lived without.
Now that Gifford had been elected speaker, we turned to governing. The first order of business was appointing committee chairs. Naturally, I wanted to chair the Education Committee. The UFT opposed this but Gifford told them he didn’t really have a choice: not only had I played critical roles in his election as a council member and speaker, I was eminently qualified for the position as a graduate of the New York City public schools and a former professor.
I was excited about chairing the Education Committee. I felt that I could really make an impact by shedding light on issues that nobody else had dared talk about. In the two years that I’d been sitting on the Education Committee, the press had largely ignored our hearings, and for good reason. We rounded up the usual suspects, asked the usual questions, and elicited the usual answers. It was like a Greek play: you knew the ending in advance. It wasn’t about investigating or fact-finding but about reaffirming faith in the Democratic educational catechism: more money, smaller class size, and teacher autonomy. As a former academic, I believed in the power of ideas and the value of robust discourse. I wanted to get people thinking, and by that I meant not just my colleagues but everybody: the administration, the press, nonprofit groups, people working in the schools, and ultimately the general public.
I also knew how lucky I’d been to get this position. Sure, I’d worked hard, but I’d also gotten many good breaks: coming across that article in the Times about Gifford’s election just when I had time on my hands; running against an incumbent who soon resigned; supporting Gifford for speaker. I’d been fortunate to land this position and I was determined to make the most of it.
26
MY TEAM IS ON THE FLOOR
2011–2012
Replacing a principal at Success is a big deal. We have to identify someone with sufficient drive and talent, train her, and then help her get to know the school community before taking the reins. To allow time for all this, we ask principals who intend to leave to give us as much advance notice as possible, ideally two years. Thus, it came as a great surprise when, on April 25, 2011, less than two months before the end of the school year, Harlem 3’s principal told me she wouldn’t be returning. That wasn’t enough time to train a principal even if we had somebody who was ready to be trained, which we didn’t. But somebody had to run Harlem 3 so I chose Harlem 4’s dean, Richard Seigler. Richard was only twenty-four years old and had just two years of teaching under his belt, one as a dance instructor, but I’d come to believe he had real leadership potential. He’d first come to my attention when I’d seen his students give a dance performance that was far better than those at our other schools. This flowed from Richard’s self-confidence and sense of purpose. In Richard’s first year with us, he’d noticed that students were occasionally missing his dance class to meet with other teachers about behavioral issues. Many brand-new teachers would have been too intimidated to object, but Richard wrote his colleagues:
Dance is part of the curriculum and all my instructional time is valuable. If a child is out of control, please feel free to reprimand them during your own classroom time. Thank you in advance for your cooperation.
Richard wasn’t afraid to ruffle a few feathers and that’s a critical quality in a leader. Principals who worry too much about being popular end up following rather than leading. While leaders must treat teachers fairly, they need to make their own decisions about what is fair and reasonable, not look to others to tell them.
But despite Richard’s potential, I wouldn’t have promoted him so quickly if I could have avoided it. Before becoming an elementary school principal, a teacher should have several years of instructional experience in at least a couple of different grades to understand the scope of the elementary school curriculum and how young children learn. We’d have to give Richard a crash course in this, so I emailed Paul Fucaloro, copying Keri Hoyt:
EVA: Richard will need a lot of support! Hope you can help!!!!
PAUL: Fine! We will need to know his knowledge base in ELA and math.
EVA: Zilcho.
PAUL: Oy vey iz mir!!!!! He better be a quick learner. I can meet him on Fridays and give him specific things to study during the weekends. We can visit classes together, explore lesson planning and effective lesson delivery, then assessment/reteaching plan. He must get a feel of what Literacy and Math instruction should look like as scholars ascend the grades.
EVA: Would be a huge help.
PAUL: Done! May I work starting this Friday at Harlem 4 from 10–12? Should I start both on Literacy and Math in K and 1 this week, then give a study assignment, which I will forward to you Keri, in advance?
KERI HOYT: Would you mind meeting at 3? Richard’s plan is to help work the door at Harlem 3 over the next couple of weeks to learn the families’ names, etc.
EVA: I would focus on 1st grade. Frankly K and 1 are in worse shape at Harlem 3.
Then, at 4:27 p.m. the following day, just twenty-seven hours after my first email, Paul sent a comprehensive plan for training Richard. In that brief period, we’d figured out how, where, when, and who would train Richard. I believe this nimble and non-bureaucratic approach to solving problems is a key to success.
But another thing worried me. Harlem 3 was our weakest school because the outgoing principal had placed teacher happiness ahead of student achievement. While good teacher morale is important, a school’s ultimate priority must be providing students with an excellent education, and achieving excellence in any field requires some amount of sacrifice. Most of our teachers ultimately embrace this sacrifice when they come to understand how much it improves their instruction and the impact it will have on the lives of their students. However, just as many people need a personal trainer to help them achieve their fitness goals, teachers often need a principal to push them to reach their potential, to help them understand the intensity that excellence requires. Harlem 3’s former principal hadn’t done that because she’d never truly been on board with our philosophy. Richard would therefore have the unenviable task not only of replacing a popular principal but of informing teachers that their instruction might not be as good as they’d been led to believe.
Knowing some teachers might not want to return next year, my HR staff wanted to convince them to stay on, but I discouraged this:
It does no one any good to have unhappy campers on the bus. We will not be setting Richard up for success if people are grumbling. If teachers or staff are hesitant they will quit [later]. That will be far worse for the kids.
Rather than pressuring teachers to stay, we told them they should return only if they were truly committed to the Harlem 3 educational community and to let us know their decision as promptly as possible so we could hire replacements if necessary. Some did choose to leave, but most decided to stay on.
That summer, we got our test scores and, as I’d feared, Ha
rlem 3’s English passage rate, 72 percent, was the weakest of our four schools. By contrast, 85 percent of Harlem 1’s students had passed the ELA test. Then, as if the challenge facing Richard wasn’t big enough already, teachers who’d previously told us they’d be staying began resigning. By the second day of school, nine had resigned, virtually all to work with Harlem 3’s former principal, who’d taken a job at another charter school. I didn’t mind their resigning, but I did mind that, despite our pleas, they were doing so at the last minute when good candidates would be hard to find and would miss our teacher training. I also felt terrible for Richard since this exodus must surely have felt to him like a vote of no confidence. Then, to add insult to injury, Richard’s business operations manager resigned on the first day of school.
I worried I’d dealt Richard an impossible hand, particularly given his lack of experience. At a minimum, he’d need enormous support to succeed. To begin with, we’d have to find him a new business operations manager (BOM) to help him with logistics such as making sure forms were collected and figuring out how to move kids around the building in an efficient manner. While these things may sound mundane, they really matter. Without permission slips, students can’t go on field trips; without a good plan for getting kids to and from the lunchroom, traffic jams occur that cause misbehavior, mayhem, and lost instructional time. To ensure that Harlem 3 didn’t descend into chaos, Kristina Exline, who was in charge of all of the BOMs, agreed to fill in for the missing BOM while she trained a new one.
The Education of Eva Moskowitz Page 19
