The Education of Eva Moskowitz

by Eva Moskowitz

  While this battle played out, thirteen of our kids flew to Nashville to compete in the national chess tournament, which had 1,500 competitors in total. I went to see it and was astonished at our students’ powers of concentration. They played three games every day and each game could last up to four hours. The key to success, Sean told me, was patience: carefully analyzing each move and refraining from moves that might seem good at first blush but which had a hidden flaw such as leaving a piece unprotected. Playing well for up to twelve hours a day requires incredible powers of concentration and endurance, which is why chess is such valuable intellectual training.

  Sean had selected Harlem 2 and Harlem 3, our two strongest teams, to compete in the tournament. By the tournament’s second day, Harlem 2 was in second place, trailing the top school by only a half point, and Harlem 3 was in third. By the third day, Harlem 2 had jumped into first place and Harlem 3 had fallen to fourth. In the final round, Harlem 3’s strongest player, my son Dillon, was matched up against Harlem 2’s top scholar, Jameek. Dillon won, which unfortunately, knocked Harlem 2 out of first place, but it still placed second, and Harlem 3 placed fourth. Individually, Dillon placed second, winning seven out of eight games. As both a parent and a school leader, I was proud. Here we’d never before competed in the nationals and our schools had finished second and fourth!

  I soon learned that our students had also done well on the state tests that year. Eighty-eight percent had passed in English and 97 percent in math. This was more than twice as well as the district elementary schools in Central Harlem, in which 32 percent of students passed in English and 40 percent in math.

  As for our fee increase, we’d gotten SUNY to put it back on the agenda for its June 25 meeting. González again opposed it, claiming it would be “the rich . . . getting richer,” which made it sound like we’d be spending the money on caviar and champagne, not providing a better education for disadvantaged kids, and wasn’t even true since the total amount of money wouldn’t increase. Fortunately, SUNY ignored González this time around.

  González’s opposition was astonishingly cynical, even by his standards. He knew full well that our fee increase wouldn’t cost taxpayers a dime nor did he ever identify any other harm it would cause. Thus, I can only conclude that he opposed our fee increase solely because he wanted to hobble us in any way he could, even if doing so would harm children. Over the years, González’s monomaniacal hatred of Success led him to write twenty-four negative columns about us. González is both smart and industrious and could have rendered an enormous service to New York City by trying to shed light on why hundreds of its schools were failing to provide their students with an adequate education. Instead, he sought to tear down a network of schools whose students were mastering rigorous academic content, acing state tests, winning national chess competitions, and whose teachers were making great personal sacrifices, even putting their safety at risk, to help students attain these achievements. What a sad waste of his talents.

  29

  THE REDHEAD WITH THE VORACIOUS APPETITE FOR DATA

  2002–2004

  At noon on January 1, 2002, I sat in the audience as Mike Bloomberg, New York’s billionaire businessman, gave his inaugural address on the steps of city hall. Four months earlier, the twin towers would have been clearly visible from where Bloomberg stood; now they were just a heap of rubble being carted off by a never-ending procession of dump trucks. But while these towers didn’t loom over Bloomberg’s inauguration physically, they did psychologically. September 11 had both injured the city’s economy and blown an enormous hole in its budget. Belt tightening, warned Bloomberg, would be necessary, but “even though we must sacrifice now,” he added, “let us not forget we are still a city of big dreams, of big ideas, big projects, and a big heart.”

  Bloomberg also indicated that he intended to obtain greater control over the city’s school system. The existing governance structure had come about in response to community demands for greater local control culminating in December 1966, when protesters took over the meeting hall of the board of education and declared themselves the people’s board of education. Mayor Lindsay responded to these demands with an experiment in which the residents of the Ocean Hill–Brownsville area of Brooklyn were allowed to elect a local school board to run their schools. The board they elected appointed a superintendent who soon dismissed thirteen teachers and six administrators. Terrified at what might happen if this model was adopted more broadly, the teachers’ union staged a citywide strike demanding reinstatement of the dismissed teachers.

  The state education commissioner resolved this crisis by taking over the Ocean Hill–Brownsville schools and reinstating the teachers who’d been dismissed, while the legislature passed a law to address the demands for more local control. Their solution was to give the borough presidents the power to appoint a majority of the members of the board of education, which would share power with thirty community school districts. The problem with this governance structure was that power was so dissipated that the buck stopped nowhere.

  For decades, mayors had been trying to wrest back control of the schools but the very same features that made this Rube Goldberg structure ineffective also made it difficult to dislodge. Unions liked it because the dissipation of authority diminished the risk that any dramatic and unwelcome changes would be made. Politicians liked it because the community school boards provided opportunities for political patronage.

  Bloomberg, however, was determined to succeed where his predecessors had failed and, in a speech to the council, reiterated his intention to get control over the city’s schools. I supported the changes Bloomberg sought, but I didn’t have a vote on the matter as the governance structure was dictated by state law. To get it changed, Bloomberg would have to deal with Albany’s Wizard of Oz, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, who was the apotheosis of George Orwell’s dark vision of power as an end in itself. Because he was not burdened with any discernible philosophy of government or particular legislative ambitions, he could evaluate every decision with one single consideration in mind: retaining power. This power enabled him to earn millions of dollars in what were later proved to be kickbacks.

  Since Silver wouldn’t want to antagonize the teachers’ union, Bloomberg had his work cut out for him. Moreover, when an issue was in play, Silver didn’t like his colleagues to discuss it publicly since they might commit themselves to a position or, even worse, arrive at a consensus. Thus, a shroud of silence descended over Albany. I felt, however, that an important issue like this should be subject to public debate, so I arranged to have hearings on it myself even though the council lacked the legal authority to change this law. To have the desired impact, however, we’d need to have strong witnesses. The easy catches were politicians, who always welcomed the limelight, and former DOE chancellors, who were eager to share the frustrations they’d experienced with the city’s cockamamy system of school governance. There were two big fish, though, that I particularly wanted to land: former mayor Ed Koch, who was well respected and would draw media attention, and Bloomberg himself, who was the protagonist in this matter. Koch readily agreed to testify. Bloomberg’s advisors, however, were cool to the idea of his testifying. Just as presidents don’t testify before Congress because it would make them look like supplicants before what should be an equal branch of government, mayors typically don’t testify before the council. The only exception was David Dinkins, who had appeared before the council to argue for sanctions against South Africa. I argued that Bloomberg should make another exception because this would be his chance to make his case to the public. Bloomberg’s aides, however, were reluctant to put a newly minted mayor in a forum over which he had little control, and in which he might be subjected to hostile questioning.

  While trying to convince Bloomberg to testify, I was also struggling with how to ensure the committee examined witnesses intelligently. At the committee’s last high-profile hearing, the press had commented that the committee had proved it
self “worthless” since most of its members had “daydreamed” through the hearings and, when they did speak, merely “revealed how little they kn[e]w.” I pondered how to elevate the level of questioning. I then remembered that in the Iran-Contra hearings, attorneys working for the committee had done most of the questioning. Moreover, it just so happened that Gifford had recently hired a Hofstra Law School professor named Eric Lane who had played a leading role in rewriting the city’s charter to give the council more power. Who better to examine witnesses about governance of the school system than a lawyer who’d just rewritten the city’s governance structure? Professor Lane readily agreed to play this role and then I got another piece of good news: Bloomberg had decided to testify after all.

  Koch was our leadoff witness. Here was a man who’d run the city when I was a kid, a larger-than-life personality, and he was now testifying before a committee I chaired. He began his testimony by noting that as a result of “term limits and the new people, there is a spirit which didn’t exist here for the last fifteen or more years.” This was gratifying to hear given how hard Gifford, Chris, and I had worked to improve the council. Koch then proceeded to testify that the current system of school governance was “shameful” and that “the chancellor should be no different than a commissioner of any other agency,” meaning that he should be directly appointed by the mayor. Following our plan, I let Professor Lane ask Koch questions, didn’t ask any myself, and hoped that my colleagues would follow suit, which most did.

  Virtually all of the dozens of witnesses who testified favored changing the law in some way, but many of their proposals were impractical. Borough president Adolfo Carrión proposed that the mayor select the board of education from individuals nominated by a civilian panel. And who would select the civilian panel? The council, the mayor, and the borough presidents, he said. Thus, he took what could be a one-step process—appointing a chancellor—and turned it into a four-step process: 1) politicians would appoint the civilian panel; 2) the panel would make nominations; 3) the mayor would select the board from these nominees; 4) the board would select a chancellor. It reflected this misguided view that, like laundering dirty money, you could take politics out of democracy by creating layers of bureaucracy. In reality, doing so just leads to paralysis and lack of accountability, which was exactly what was wrong with the existing system.

  Randi Weingarten also testified, and I was curious as to what tone she’d take since she’d fervently opposed my appointment. She began as follows:

  We have had staff at your hearings . . . all week long, and I do not think in the history of the City Council [have] there been . . . hearings that are so comprehensive, that touch all bases, that really attempt to . . . be a fact-finding body. . . . It was a real public service, and I think our staff was particularly impressed by the way you did that.

  While I’d like to think those comments were sincere, I suspect she was buttering me up to make amends for having opposed my appointment. On the merits of the issue, she said she supported change but was vague on the details. She was negotiating a new contract for her members so she wanted to trade her support for a generous pay raise, not give it away for free.

  Bloomberg was the final witness and he argued forcefully for “abolish[ing] the board of education” and giving the mayor “sole control over the appointment of the schools chancellor, with the chancellor reporting directly to the mayor.”

  The hearings were widely covered and I followed up by trying to get my colleagues to publicly support mayoral control. While they were leery of doing so, especially Albert Vann, who’d risen to prominence as a proponent of local control during the Ocean Hill–Brownsville dispute, I got them to support letting the mayor appoint six out of eleven members of a board of education, which would effectively give him control, albeit with some additional transparency since the board would have public meetings. On March 20, we announced this proposal, which Bloomberg called “encouraging.”

  Predictably, Silver resisted any changes, and his negotiations with Bloomberg devolved into public sparring. On June 6, however, they reached a deal that was quite similar to the one we’d recommended months earlier: a board of education with thirteen members, eight of whom would be appointed by the mayor, would run the school system. It was the biggest change in the city’s public school system in decades and I was excited to have played a role in bringing it about.

  Soon thereafter, Eric left the law firm at which he’d been working and hung up his own shingle as he’d never enjoyed the paper pushing involved in big firm practice and wanted to get into court more. A few weeks later, he ran into an old friend of his, Bryan Lawrence, who’d recently made partner at the investment banking firm Lazard Frères and was looking for a philanthropic cause to support. They came up with the idea of starting an all-girls charter school so that parents wouldn’t be deprived of that option just because they were unable to afford private school. Playing off the name of one of the most prominent private girls’ schools, Eric dubbed their project “Spence for cents.” Together, they recruited a board including many people from the business world and the headmistress of Brearley, a private girls’ school. Their application was approved and the school opened a couple years later.

  A month after Bloomberg got control of the school system, he announced his pick for chancellor: Joel Klein, a lawyer who’d led the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division. Some people criticized Bloomberg for appointing a noneducator, but I felt that since the public schools were a big monopoly with all of its typical ills—lack of innovation, unresponsiveness to consumers, and a mediocre product—we needed a trustbuster. Indeed, when I first met with Klein, I told him he should think of himself as having been appointed premier of the former Soviet Union.

  I felt the conditions were ripe for real change since we had a mayor who had real control of the schools and who’d appointed a strong chancellor. Moreover, as chair of the Education Committee, I could help them fix the schools by exposing problems and proposing solutions. Indeed, I soon came up with an idea that would become my single most important contribution in my time on the council.

  Even though the city had built new schools with 45,000 new seats in the last decade, I’d been hearing complaints that many schools were overcrowded and I wanted to understand how this could be. Given my academic background, I loved solving mysteries and studying documents so this was right up my alley. I learned the city published something called the “Blue Book,” which showed every public school building’s capacity and current enrollment. I examined it and found that while many school buildings were indeed overcrowded, many others were half empty. Altogether, the city’s underutilized buildings could hold 63,000 additional students, more than Boston’s entire public school population. We were spending hundreds of millions of dollars to build new schools when we already had considerable excess space on our hands. I therefore wrote a Daily News op-ed proposing that the city “make its excess space available to charter schools to draw students from overutilized to underutilized school districts.” The New York Sun editorialized in favor of this proposal since it would “introduc[e] choice and experimentation into New York City’s school system” but warned it might “meet stiff resistance from the local educational bureaucracy.”

  When I learned that the KIPP schools were planning to open a charter school in Harlem, I proposed KIPP be placed in one of six underutilized buildings I’d identified. DOE’s bureaucracy told Klein that I was misinformed and there was no excess room, but Klein, however, insisted on looking at the data himself and confirmed that there was. He placed KIPP at one of the schools I’d identified and began aggressively implementing the policy I’d recommended, which came to be known as “co-location.”

  In addition to running the Education Committee, I sought to get funds for nonprofits in my district, including several millions dollars for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which I figured made up for coins I’d stolen from their fountain as a kid. I also helped Gifford in his efforts to
manage the council. He often consulted me on ethical issues since he knew I had high standards in this area. For example, the chairman of the council’s budget committee wanted to join a law firm that often lobbied his committee. He claimed it wouldn’t pose a conflict because he’d recuse himself from any issue on which his firm lobbied. This was laughable. Even if the chairman didn’t vote on the issue, the other committee members would want to please their chairman by making his firm’s client happy. This, of course, was the whole reason this firm wanted to hire him. Gifford forbade the council member from accepting the offer. Through actions like this, Gifford raised the ethical standards of the council.

  Several of our colleagues, however, were a real embarrassment to the city. One was Charles Barron, who held a reception for Robert Mugabe, a brutal dictator whose security forces regularly engaged in human rights atrocities. To Barron, however, Mugabe was an “African Hero” and he dismissed the human rights violations because “You didn’t care about black Africans when whites were killing them.” Many of my colleagues including Bill de Blasio went to this reception. Barron later said he sometimes felt that he wanted “to go up to the closest white person and say, ‘You can’t understand this, it’s a black thing,’ and then slap him just for my mental health.”

  Before all this, I’d taken Barron seriously. He’d given a speech in which he complained that all of the portraits in City Hall were of white men. This seemed like a fair point so I called Professor Kenneth Jackson, who was president of the New-York Historical Society, and asked him if he had any portraits of historically important African Americans that he could lend to the council. Sure, he said, so I scurried back to Barron to tell him the good news. Barron, however, was completely uninterested and I eventually figured out that he didn’t want to address the problem, just complain about it.