On the personal front, I had become pregnant, much to my surprise given my prior difficulties, and on January 23, 2003, gave birth to a healthy redheaded boy whom we named Dillon. To avoid letting up on my work, I took him around with me as much as possible, and at my next hearings, as the Times reported, “Ms. Moskowitz held her 5-week-old son . . . in her lap, presiding with a burp cloth on her shoulder.” Even more to my surprise, I became pregnant again just nine months later. It seemed like I was getting more fertile with age, not less. Go figure. When I went to the hospital to give birth, Culver said he hoped it wouldn’t hurt when they cut open my belly, not knowing how babies actually come out, so I explained it to him. He responded, “You’ve got to be kidding,” which is pretty much how most women feel about childbirth. I gave birth to a girl whom Eric and I named Hannah. I was overjoyed since I’d long wanted to have three children and to have a daughter. Since Eric and I lived on the Upper East Side, we were among those fortunate New Yorkers who had good public school options. We sent Culver to PS 290, a progressive school with wonderful project-based learning that I later incorporated into the design of Success Academy.
While I’d generally been supportive of Bloomberg’s efforts to improve the schools, I increasingly found myself in conflict with his administration. On January 3, 2003, the Times published a profile on me titled “City Council’s Unapologetically Demanding Voice”:
It’s no wonder, really, that Education Department officials refused to show up at City Councilwoman Eva S. Moskowitz’s hearings.
It cannot be a picnic to answer to the redhead in the red suit with the voracious appetite for data. Not easy to be told your department deserves an “F” for its school transfer policy or to be grilled about the status of capital projects . . .
While the administration chafed at my oversight, I felt this was shortsighted. It was my job as chair of the Education Committee to expose problems and build pressure for change. Besides, if I was perceived as being their lapdog, then my support for changes like mayoral control and imposing a standardized curriculum would have done the administration little good. Moreover, I had access to information that Klein didn’t because DOE bureaucracy preferred to paint a rosy picture for him. My information came straight from unhappy constituents who told me what was really going on in their children’s classrooms. For example, one constituent told me that the rug in her daughter’s classroom was so dirty that students were getting rashes. It turned out that when DOE had decided elementary school classrooms should be outfitted with rugs, nobody had realized the custodians’ contract didn’t require vacuuming.
I also passed a bill requiring the mayor to report quarterly on the status of capital projects. When Bloomberg vetoed it, the New York Sun editorialized: “Why the mayor would veto this bill—which simply requires the schools chancellor to report quarterly to the council on ongoing construction and repair projects, and notify it in the case of major delays or cost overruns—just as the state has given the council the responsibility to approve the school system’s $7 billion five-year capital budget, is a puzzle.” The council overrode Bloomberg’s veto.
Another dispute I had with DOE concerned the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which gave parents the right to transfer students out of failing schools. Out of 220,000 students in failing schools, only 1,500 had gotten transfers. Many parents, my staff learned, hadn’t been notified of their rights and many others who’d sought transfers had only been offered spots at other failing schools. Indeed, the system seemed designed to make it hard for parents to exercise their right to transfer. For example, Kamyah Harper, a mother in Queens, found out just days before the school year began that the school to which her son had been assigned, MS 198, had just been designated a failing school. She immediately called District 27 to get a transfer but was told it was too late even though she’d never previously been notified that the school was failing.
I asked DOE to testify at a hearing regarding failing school transfers and they responded that their job was “to educate children, not Eva Moskowitz.” I have to admit that’s a nice zinger, but DOE was in fact subject to the council’s oversight so I threatened to subpoena the department. DOE agreed to testify and announced an overhaul of the transfer process a day before my hearing.
In practice, however, little changed so I wrote a letter to US secretary of education Rod Paige demanding the federal government enforce the transfer provision. He ignored my letter, probably figuring that a member of the New York City Council couldn’t cause much trouble. The Wall Street Journal editorialized:
If the Administration is alienating the likes of Ms. Moskowitz—a strong proponent of charter schools and public school choice—something is wrong . . . Ms. Moskowitz [wrote that] New York is making “a mockery of the NCLB Act that [federal education officials] are charged with implementing and enforcing.” Her letter is dated August 6, and she’s still waiting for a reply.
Paige called me the next morning.
I had this faith that if I kept on pushing, the system would change, particularly with Klein and Bloomberg in charge. The more I looked into things, however, the more I became aware of just how dysfunctional and resistant to reform the school system was. Take a simple thing like trying to get in touch with your school. As a result of complaints from parents, I had my staff place calls to 110 schools between 4 p.m. and 5 p.m. At half of the schools, nobody answered; you couldn’t even leave a message.
In addition, enormous sums were being wasted on constructing and renovating buildings. DOE was spending $438 per square foot to build new buildings, nearly twice as much as the $240 per square foot that Bronx Prep, the charter school Eric had helped start, had spent on its new building. Moreover, that greater expense didn’t assure the work was done well. At PS 24 in Brooklyn, the building’s entire facade had to be torn down and rebuilt just four years after the building opened. Renovations were also inefficient and expensive. At Curtis High School on Staten Island, for example, renovations had gone 455 percent over budget. One principal told me she was at her wits’ end because, after years of delays, the city had finally gotten around to fixing a gym floor that had been damaged by a leaky roof but it had soon been ruined because DOE hadn’t fixed the roof first. Another area of waste was scaffolding, which the law required for construction to protect pedestrians from falling bricks. While that made sense, DOE was taking so long to get around to fixing the facades that it was spending a fortune on scaffolding, which was rented on a monthly basis. About five hundred schools had such scaffolding. At PS 186 in Brooklyn, they’d spent $500,000 on scaffolding.
One of my colleagues got DOE to purchase air conditioners for PS 261 in Brooklyn, but they’d been sitting in storage for two years before the School Construction Authority got around to installing them. When I obtained funding for a music room at a school, I went to hear music played in the room and it sounded wonderful, which was great, but then I went to the classroom next door and the music sounded wonderful there too, which wasn’t so great. The contractors had omitted insulation from the rooms figuring nobody would check. I made them redo it, but this type of shoddy work was no doubt overlooked 99 percent of the time.
The dysfunction of the school system also took a terrible toll on teachers. Some people believed that nobody wanted to become a teacher because it was a low-status profession, but I came across a lot of talented and energetic teachers on my school visits. The problem was that many were driven out of the profession or became demoralized. Right from the start, the system seemed to suggest that their time wasn’t valued. For example, new teachers had to get fingerprinted. After getting complaints about the time it required, I sent a staff member to investigate. She had to wait four hours to get fingerprinted and anybody who arrived after 3 p.m. was told to return the following day. Teachers had to waste half a day on something that should have taken minutes. Moreover, this was just one step in a lengthy hiring process that involved visits to innumerable offices, and once they were hired, it often to
ok DOE months to put them on the payroll.
Another problem was that the seniority system resulted in new teachers being assigned to the most difficult schools whose discipline problems they were ill equipped to handle. At JHS 226 in Ozone Park, teachers threatened to walk off the job when three of them were assaulted by students in a two-day period. At Norman Thomas High School, a student had punched a pregnant teacher in the stomach and said, “I’m going to kick the baby out of you. I’m going to make you have that baby.” Instead of immediately suspending the student, DOE had allowed him to return to school until his suspension hearing took place. While I appreciate the desire to be mindful of student rights, you’re going to lose your best teachers if you don’t keep them safe.
I held hearings on a plethora of subjects including school lunches, facilities’ maintenance, small schools, math instruction, education for incarcerated juveniles, bilingual education, gifted and talented programs, and school safety. But there was one topic that I’d shied away from: the union contracts that governed the schools’ teachers, administrators, and custodians. I knew that taking on this topic might end my political career, and while I was willing to make that sacrifice, I wanted to be sure that if I did, I at least did this important topic justice. To do so, I needed to learn how to control committee hearings and handle difficult witnesses, to identify sources of information and expand my knowledge of the school system, and to develop relationships with reporters and earn a reputation for fairness. After two years as chair, I was finally ready.
30
THE TRIUMVIRATE
2012–2013
In just six years, Success had grown from one school with 275 students and a $4 million budget to fourteen schools with 4,000 students and a $72 million budget, and I was increasingly worried about my ability to manage it. Every year, it was a desperate race to get ready for the first day of school. Here’s the report I gave to my board about what we’d done to open in 2012:
[Renovated] Fourteen buildings—seven brand new—in thirty-six days
[Hired] 310 new school employees
Hosted a seventeen-day leader summit with seventy-plus school leaders
Ran a fifteen-day [training] with 520 teachers
Managed eleven major vendor groups, coordinating orders, delivery, and assembly of thousands of items (from principals’ desks to pencils) to fourteen locations, up to the right floor and the right room, while navigating all renovations and summer school
Defended five lawsuits/challenges to commissioner, two court appeals
Moved our data center; collected, imaged, and assigned more than 1,200 laptops, 500 iPads; equipped every room with a SMART Board
Mac mini, and readied fourteen schools with wireless, printers, phones, and copiers
Welcomed 1,402 new families
While we’d managed to open, it had felt like we were on the precipice of disaster. It wasn’t until days before school began that we’d renovated the last classroom and until weeks afterward that we’d hired our last teacher. My board felt we were lurching from one crisis to another: lawsuits, bad legislation, critical press stories, principals quitting at the last minute, and all the operational challenges created by our rapid expansion. Then a survey we’d commissioned found that while our employees had strong feelings of “personal accomplishment,” many felt they lacked “work-life balance.” My board feared I was running people into the ground. They also suspected that I was micromanaging my subordinates rather than delegating more responsibility to them as Success grew.
All of these concerns fed into what I would call the parable of the start-up, which went as follows. Start-up founders think out of the box, ignore naysayers, drive people to excellence, and micromanage. Long-term managers, however, must nurture talent, minimize risk, and delegate responsibility. The very qualities that make a founder successful often prevent her from becoming a long-term manager, but the founder resists bringing on such a manager because she loves her baby and doesn’t trust anyone else to care for it—which, of course, is yet another symptom of those very failings that require her replacement. Some of the board members began to feel that maybe this parable applied to me, that I lacked the managerial chops to run an organization as large as Success. They proposed bringing on a CEO to take on the principal management function and elevating me to a founder/visionary/strategic leader role.
I was very conflicted. I did have concerns about my managerial abilities. I’d never worked in a large well-managed organization, been mentored by a strong executive, or studied business management. I was therefore learning on the job. For example, when we made a job offer to a new teacher, we’d often tried to match her current salary to get her to join but as we got larger, teachers began noticing disparities in their salaries we couldn’t really justify. I learned that it’s perilous to make ad hoc compensation decisions in a large organization. I had little experience dealing with these kinds of issues. I also worried I was losing control of the organization. Sometimes I’d find out a school was doing something crazy, I’d ask why, and the principal would say that it was a policy dictated by the Network even though I’d never even heard of the policy much less approved it.
So perhaps the board was right that I lacked the skills to continue managing Success. Moreover, this strategic-thinker role sounded attractive since I’d be spared the headaches of daily management. Another part of me felt, however, that this idea that I could just hand over everything to some brilliant manager was too good to be true. One reason we’d achieved so much at Success was that I’d rejected the orthodoxies to which others clung. I had refused to believe disadvantaged kids admitted through a lottery system couldn’t be as academically successful as students in affluent suburbs. I feared a new CEO would be “realistic” about what our kids could achieve and that we’d end up with mediocrity.
I also felt that my board might be overestimating how hard I was making people work. My board members came from professions where eighty-hour workweeks were common so they probably assumed that if our employees were complaining, they must be working a hundred hours a week. In truth, nobody at Success worked as hard as big-firm lawyers or investment bankers. Sure, it wasn’t a nine-to-five job, but we were seeking to revolutionize urban education and revolutions don’t lend themselves to forty-hour workweeks.
But perhaps that was no longer a realistic way to look at things; perhaps I needed to accept that there was a limited supply of people who had the level of commitment I wanted and that my fear that letting someone else run Success would lead to mediocrity was just a symptom of founder’s syndrome.
I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to make an error out of possessiveness or hubris but neither did I want to abdicate my responsibility out of timidity. I decided to see if I could learn more about managing a large organization, so I sought the advice of several people from the business world including one of my funders, John Fisher. He recommended I meet with Mickey Drexler, who had turned around Ann Taylor, played a big role at Gap, and now ran J.Crew. After exchanging a few pleasantries, Drexler pressed an intercom button that broadcast throughout J.Crew’s entire headquarters and asked if anyone knew anything about me. Calls began pouring in and Drexler put each one on speaker, keeping my presence secret until the end when he took a mischievous delight in telling them I’d been listening to every word they’d said. (Their comments very much depended upon whether they knew somebody at Success or had just read about me in the papers. If the former, their comments were generally favorable; if the latter, not so much.)
I told Drexler I needed his advice on scaling Success without sacrificing quality. Drexler proceeded to grill me about my own thoughts on this. After doing so at length, Drexler finally appeared ready to provide me with the advice for which I’d come. To my surprise, however, he proceeded to tell me that I already knew how to scale. I told him I feared I was a micromanager who had unreasonable standards. Drexler scoffed at this, saying I wasn’t half as bad as he was. He got involved in the
smallest details of clothing design, personally interviewed every single person who was hired for the corporate headquarters, and visited J.Crew stores incessantly.
It was quite bewildering. I felt like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz when the Good Witch of the North tells her that she’d had the power to get back to Kansas all along but just hadn’t known it. But over time I thought about it more and began to feel greater confidence. While Drexler was extremely impressive, he hadn’t appeared to have supernatural powers. Rather, he seemed to have many of the same qualities I had: high standards, attention to detail, and an anti-red-tape attitude as reflected in his unconventional use of his intercom.
I also sought the advice of one of my board members, Chuck Strauch, who had managed several businesses he’d started from scratch. I found Chuck to be wonderfully practical, wise, and kind. We were an odd couple—he’s a conservative Republican from South Carolina and I’m a liberal New York Jew—but for some reason we hit it off instantly. Chuck felt that I was capable of running Success but that I needed a different organizational structure in which fewer people reported to me. He suggested I establish a triumvirate of three vice presidents who would report to me: Keri, who had impressed everybody with her abilities; Jody Friedman, our head of external affairs, who was exceptionally well regarded and more experienced than most of Success’s employees as she’d worked for decades at Princeton; and a new person we’d hire who had enough business experience to help us adopt private sector best practices and deal with scaling issues.
The Education of Eva Moskowitz Page 23
