I gave some thought to running for mayor myself, as I’d long been interested in the job and felt I had a shot at winning, but I didn’t feel I’d gotten Success to a point where I could leave it. Of the candidates seeking to succeed Bloomberg, my favorite was Chris Quinn, who’d worked with me to help Gifford Miller become speaker and now held that position herself. She was pragmatic, intelligent, ethical, and supportive of charter schools. She had four opponents, two of whom particularly worried me. One was my former colleague Comptroller John Liu. While I liked him personally, he wasn’t supportive of charter schools and his campaign treasurer had been convicted for accepting improper campaign donations. But the real nightmare scenario for Success would be the election of my former colleague Bill de Blasio, who claimed he wasn’t anti-charter but somehow ended up opposing every policy that would help us and supporting every one that would hurt us. As public advocate, he’d put out a joint report critical of co-location with the Alliance for Quality Education (AQE), a union-funded group. For a government agency to issue a joint report with a private advocacy group is just bizarre. Imagine if the Justice Department put out a joint report with the American Civil Liberties Union or the National Rifle Association. It just isn’t done, and the fact that de Blasio would so nakedly turn his office into a mouthpiece for union propaganda was deeply troubling.
Moreover, it became increasingly apparent that de Blasio was not only anti-charter but anti–Eva Moskowitz. At a mayoral debate, he announced that, “Another thing that has to change starting in January is that Eva Moskowitz cannot continue to have the run of the place.” Then, on April 24, he held a press conference in which he claimed that Success had received favorable treatment because some of the fluorescent light fixtures at our Cobble Hill school had been replaced while those at the co-located school hadn’t.
“Time and time again,” he said, “we’ve seen a Tale of Two Cities, with resources lavished on Success Academy while traditional public schools in the same building lacked the most basic necessities.”24
This claim was utterly false. First, the city hadn’t “lavished” funding on us; we’d paid to replace our own light fixtures. Second, not only did the co-located district school have “basic necessities,” the city had actually spent $2 million on our co-located schools to give them “new wiring, locker rooms, [and] a dance and fitness center” for this school, “as well as creating and upgrading classrooms for students with disabilities,” because of the state law requiring matching expenditures on district school facilities.25 And finally, the district schools’ light fixtures were scheduled to be replaced that summer anyway.
This was a hot-button issue because the light fixtures contained PCBs, a health hazard. De Blasio was implicitly claiming that DOE was putting the health of our children ahead of those of district school students, an incendiary charge. In fact, the risks had been overblown and had nothing to do with why we’d replaced some of our fixtures. We’d done so only in hallways that were being renovated and purely for aesthetic reasons; if safety had been our concern, we’d have replaced the classroom fixtures as well. Neither was it true that DOE was prioritizing replacing our fixtures. Of our fourteen schools, eleven had been treated exactly the same as their co-located district schools: either none of the fixtures in both schools had been replaced (six buildings), all had (three buildings), or some had (two buildings). And our three other schools had been treated worse: none of their fixtures had been replaced, while some of those in the district schools had.
But de Blasio insisted I was getting special treatment, claiming: “It’s time for Eva Moskowitz’s privilege and power to end.”26 One would think “privilege and power” would be something snazzy like the use of the city’s police helicopters or a wing at Gracie Mansion, not a bunch of fluorescent light fixtures.
Eager to get in on the Eva bashing, my former colleague John Liu seized on an opportunity when a light fixture at PS 123 malfunctioned. An expert hired by DOE later concluded that the fixture had “overheat[ed], causing a burning or smoking odor” and that no toxins whatsoever had been emitted,27 but Liu and Robert Jackson demanded “an immediate and thorough investigation into legal and environmental violations associated with toxic PCB lights.” “Two schools,” they claimed, “have had environmentally hazardous incidents with PCB lighting” and “Both schools are co-located with schools run by Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy.” This made it sound like I was somehow responsible for environmental violations. In fact, the incident at PS 123 had nothing to do with me or with Success nor was it even an “environmental hazard,” and there had been no incident at all at our Cobble Hill school. Nonetheless the news blog DNAinfo reported that “a burst light bulb released a toxic cloud of chemicals Tuesday and . . . caused the school to be evacuated.” A “toxic cloud”! Evacuation! The absurdity just grew. Suddenly, it was Chernobyl in Harlem!
In May, the UFT held a mayoral forum that one newspaper described as a contest among the candidates to “prove that they despise former Council member Eva Moskowitz even more than the UFT does.”28 When asked what Times columnist Michael Powell called the “would you toss Eva Moskowitz into the dragon’s mouth question,”29 mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner (yes, he of selfie infamy) was so exasperated at the silliness of this exercise that he commented sarcastically, “I have no bloody idea. . . . Uh, sure. . . . It seems to be the answer of the day.”30 The question, however, was right in de Blasio’s strike zone. He proudly declared that it was “time for Eva Moskowitz to stop having the run of the place. . . . She has to stop being tolerated, enabled, supported. . . . It wouldn’t happen if she didn’t have a lot of money and power and political privilege behind her, and if DOE didn’t say, ‘Yes, ma’am,’ every single time. That’s going to end when I’m mayor.”31
Call me silly, but isn’t saying someone shouldn’t be tolerated a little, well, intolerant?
Then, de Blasio yet again invoked my name at a forum in June, declaring that, “There’s no way in hell Eva Moskowitz should get free rent.” You may wonder whether I was shacked up in some Fifth Avenue palazzo at taxpayer expense. Not quite. De Blasio was talking about the fact that Success, like all other district and charter schools, doesn’t pay rent on the public school facilities it uses.
De Blasio had now criticized me at least four times in public forums, usually with intemperate language like “hell,” “tolerated,” and “yes, ma’am” thrown in. There are eight million other private citizens in New York City, including slumlords, drug dealers, insider traders, murderers, rapists, tax cheats, Ponzi schemers, and embezzlers, but I was the only one whom de Blasio had repeatedly singled out by name. I was an educator of primarily poor and minority kids, but somehow I’d become public enemy number one.
But what troubled me more than de Blasio’s personal attacks was his proposed policies. He wanted to charge charter schools rent because, “There are charters that are much, much better endowed in terms of resources than the public sector ever hoped to be.” In fact, that generally wasn’t true, and it certainly wasn’t true of Success: we deliberately spent no more per pupil than the district schools. The money we raised went to pay the start-up costs for our new schools: for furniture, books, technology, renovations, and to cover the operating deficits these schools ran in their first few years. De Blasio’s claim was particularly ironic because his own son attended Brooklyn Tech, a district school with an $8.7 million endowment and a student body selected by means of a rigorous test. But de Blasio didn’t think his son’s selective school with a generous endowment should pay rent, only a charter school serving primarily disadvantaged students selected by lottery.
After the mayoral debate in May, the Times editorialized that “Shoehorning [charter schools] into existing school buildings over local objections can alienate parents and reinforce among students a harmful sense of being separate and unequal.” I couldn’t believe it. The phrase “separate and unequal” was the battle cry of the most extreme opponents of charter schools. Great, I
thought; most of the candidates were already vowing to restrict co-location to suck up to the UFT, and now the Times was egging them on as well. Fortunately, although bizarrely, the Times reversed itself just two months later, editorializing against “a proposal by the teachers’ union that would give a local community panel veto power” over co-locations.
As summer began, Weiner was leading the pack with 25 percent, followed closely by Chris with 20 percent. De Blasio had only 13 percent and the UFT’s endorsement had gone to another candidate, Bill Thompson, despite de Blasio’s promises to do everything to me short of driving a wooden stake through my heart. Even the UFT, it seemed, recognized that de Blasio was too far to the left to get elected in this day and age. Then Weiner’s candidacy was derailed by his sexually explicit text messages and the polls soon showed that Chris was in the lead with 27 percent.
Yet Chris didn’t seem to be really clicking with the voters. People had trouble relating to her, and Democrats who had Bloomberg fatigue felt she was too close to him. De Blasio’s numbers started inching up, and on August 4, the Times published an article on de Blasio that began as follows:
In a mayor’s race crammed with celebrity razzle-dazzle, historic candidacies and tabloid turns, a gangly liberal from Brooklyn is quietly surging into the top tier of the field by talking about decidedly unglamorous topics: neglected hospitals, a swelling poverty rate and a broken prekindergarten system.
The article might as well have been an endorsement. It touched all the right points. “Gangly” and “quietly surging” were brushstrokes evoking the prototypical strong but soft-spoken leader (think Lincoln), while “unglamorous topics” rather than “razzle-dazzle” suggested he was substantive and concerned with real issues. In fact, the “unglamorous topics” the Times listed were anything but. Repairing infrastructure, balancing the budget, and reining in pensions are the types of things that must be done but that don’t earn you points with voters. De Blasio’s platform was precisely the opposite: a grab bag of goodies for people whose support he wanted. His position on hospitals appealed to New York’s most influential union, 1199, which endorsed him; his position on pre-K appealed to voters with young children; and his promise to redistribute the wealth appealed to all of the voters who figured they’d be on the receiving end of the redistribution. Finally, the article even featured a picture of de Blasio in church (church!!) looking adoringly at his African American wife. If de Blasio had staged the picture himself, it couldn’t have been better.
Meanwhile, Chris seemed paralyzed by the fear that she’d lose her lead. She was an intelligent, funny, and warm person but none of this was coming across to voters. It saddened me both as a friend who wanted her to win and as a citizen who wanted her to be my mayor.
With de Blasio’s numbers growing, the press finally started to take a more critical look at him but he’d peaked at just the right moment. It was too late for the press to dig up dirt, for his competitors to do much damage by refocusing their firepower on him, or for the voters to have second thoughts. Now in the lead, de Blasio didn’t back off of his anti-charter hostility an iota. To the question “Should charter schools be supported and increased?” de Blasio had responded, “No. We don’t need new charters.”32 Then, on September 3, de Blasio put out a press release that called for “an immediate halt to co-location . . . plans for the remainder of Bloomberg’s term,” claiming that the co-locations being considered would result in “overcrowded” schools and “larger class sizes.” De Blasio also objected to Bloomberg approving co-locations that would take effect after he left office although this was no different from bidding out work on a tunnel that would begin in the next mayor’s term. You can’t put all government business on hold during the last year of a mayor’s term or government would grind to a halt every four years.
On September 10, de Blasio won the Democratic primary with just over 40 percent of the vote and it was clear that the Republican candidate had no chance. My nightmare scenario had come to pass. New York City was about to elect a mayor who was anti-charter, anti-Success, and anti-me. More important, the proposals he’d made—limiting future co-locations, revoking past ones, and charging rent—would be disastrous for charters and the students they served.
For many years, the charter movement had been lucky. While much of the political establishment was hostile to charters, when it came to the top positions of governor and mayor, the pro-charter candidates had somehow always ended up on top: Bloomberg, Giuliani, Pataki, Spitzer, Paterson, and Cuomo. I’d long known that we had to prepare ourselves for the day when our luck ran out and we had to stand on our own two feet. That day had now come.
In my career in politics and education, I’d seen a lot of action: I’d been written about hundreds of times, protested, sued, attacked in the media and in mailings, and fought pitched battles with political opponents, regulators, and unions. But it would all pale in significance compared to the maelstrom that engulfed me when de Blasio took office.
33
HOW MANY UNIONS DOES IT TAKE TO SCREW IN A LIGHT BULB?
2003
On July 23, 2003, I was on the floor of the city council chambers when several shots rang out. Gifford’s bodyguard, who was standing next to me, dropped to his knees, pointed his gun up toward the balcony, and fired. Terrified, I dove under a table. Thoughts raced through my mind. Was this another terrorist attack?
After what seemed like ages, the police told us everything was safe and I crawled out from underneath the table. I soon learned that James Davis, one of the candidates I’d helped elect, had been shot by the candidate I’d helped him beat, Othniel Askew. Sadly, Davis died before medics arrived, as did Askew, whom Gifford’s bodyguard had shot. We later learned that Davis had brought Askew to city hall to honor him for his work. Ironically, Askew had managed to get a gun into city hall because Davis had escorted him into the building and they’d been waved past security.
When I recovered from this disturbing incident, I returned to my work on the hearings I was planning to hold on the union contracts for the school system’s teachers, administrators, custodians, paraprofessionals, and guidance counselors. These contracts determined virtually every aspect of how the city’s schools were run: how employees were hired, fired, compensated, promoted, and supervised; what each type of employee could and could not be required to do; how much money was spent to maintain each school building; how often parent-teacher conferences could be held; where a teacher could be assigned; how often a principal could go into her classroom; what subjects she was allowed to teach; and the number and length of breaks to which she was entitled. Yet, despite their importance, these contracts were little understood. In part, that was because they were abstruse. The teachers’ contract alone ran 77,841 words, which is 4 times as long as Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets, 5 times as long as Albert Einstein’s paper on the general theory of relativity, 10 times as long as the United States Constitution (including all 27 amendments), 59 times as long as the Declaration of Independence, and 286 times as long as the Gettysburg Address. Placed end to end, its pages would be taller than the United States Capitol Building and about two-thirds the height of the Washington Monument.
But the primary reason nobody had scrutinized these contracts was that the unions didn’t want them to, and I knew my decision to do so could have profound consequences for my career. While I’d annoyed the teachers’ union, Weingarten had been sending out signals that she was willing to let bygones be bygones. She’d praised my hearings on mayoral control and observed that it was “interesting” to watch my views “evolve.” In other words, just “evolve” a little bit more and all will be forgiven. Plainly that would be the smart career move, but I didn’t see the logic of advancing a career in public service at the cost of serving the public.
To help the public understand these lengthy and obscure contracts and why they mattered, I’d first have to understand them myself. My academic background again came in handy, as did the assistance of a brilliant and h
ardworking attorney by the name of Mark Goldey whom I’d recently hired for the committee. After studying the language of these contracts for six months, we sought to understand their real-world impact by speaking with superintendents, principals, and teachers. Finally, we needed some way to summarize what we’d learned and, realizing that we essentially wanted to create a CliffsNotes, we created booklets in the same style and called them “Council Notes.”
We decided to hold one day of hearings on each of the three main contracts—those for the custodians, teachers, and principals. The most important one, we believed, was the teachers’ contract, and the most relevant witnesses to testify about its impact were principals, since its provisions dictated how they managed teachers. While many principals had readily confided in us that the teachers’ contract interfered with their management of teachers, most were petrified about saying so publicly for fear of retribution from the teachers’ union. Mark suggested we record interviews with them and play them back with sound distortion. Three principals agreed to testify in this manner and two more were brave enough to testify live.
I kept my plans secret as long as possible since I feared that when word got out, the unions would try to stop the hearings. Sure enough, as soon as I went public, elected officials began calling me to cancel them. Even a United States senator called me. Only one elected official expressed support: Congressman Charles Rangel of Harlem, who told me it was about time someone stood up to the teachers’ union. While I appreciated his providing this encouragement privately, it wasn’t exactly comforting that he was unwilling to do so publicly despite having held his seat for decades.
A couple of days before the hearings were set to begin, one of the principals who’d agreed to testify live canceled because he’d gotten intimidating phone calls, including ones from his own union. I begged him not to pull out, but it was to no avail. I began panicking. The most important witnesses in the entire hearings were principals and now I had only one left who was willing to testify live. I feared he’d pull out too and I’d be left with nothing. Although I have an independent streak, it was all beginning to feel like too much. My witnesses were being intimidated and the entire Democratic political establishment was closing ranks against me. I’d been willing to risk my political career for these hearings, but if they fell apart, and I failed to educate the public, it would all be for naught. My failure would just embolden the unions and reinforce their power. Maybe this time, I’d really overreached.
The Education of Eva Moskowitz Page 25
