LOMBARDI: [I]f I’m going to keep someone three, four years potentially at unsatisfactory ratings, I have thirty students in that class that are affected in day-to-day instruction . . .
Lombardi had been quite forthright about the conflict between what was in the interest of his students and the system as a whole, but Jackson tried to suggest that he was just being lazy:
COUNCIL MEMBER JACKSON: So . . . you . . . take the easy route?
LOMBARDI: [I] take the route that I can get the best potential out of the students in front of me . . .
Another colleague of mine continued on this line of attack:
COUNCIL MEMBER RECCHIA: Okay. So, basically you passed on the problem.
LOMBARDI: I admitted to that.
COUNCIL MEMBER RECCHIA: . . . so the heck with everybody else, just what’s best for Tony Lombardi.
LOMBARDI: Well, not specifically for me, for what’s best for the school I’m operating, yes . . .
Here Lombardi was just dealing with the impossible situation in which he’d been put and was having the courage to expose himself to criticism to fix the system, unlike other principals who did exactly the same thing but wouldn’t admit to it, but rather than thanking Lombardi for his honesty, my colleagues attacked him as if all of the problems with the entire New York City public school system were due to one principal in Queens who wasn’t weeding out bad teachers.
Dan Weisberg, a DOE witness, also testified about how the contract’s work rules limited principals’ abilities to manage teachers. After I questioned him, my colleague Bill de Blasio took his turn. He claimed that “Oppressive work rules . . . is . . . spin,” and that trying to change them was “put[ting] the cart before the horse” because first we needed to provide “competitive salaries” and better “work conditions”—in other words, the UFT’s agenda. Weisberg responded that the contract affected teacher morale. He observed that if he was “a new teacher coming in with a lot of idealistic ardor . . . and down the hall I see a teacher who is merely punching the clock . . . at a certain point my ardor is going to start to fade because I see no difference in the way I’m treated versus the way that person who is punching the clock is treated.” De Blasio countered dismissively that “every single one of us in our work life has sat in that room where the person next to us is being paid twice as much and was doing half as much work” but that “it’s the manager who has to find a way to make the team work nonetheless.” “Good managers,” he claimed, “find a way to get the most out of people, and make the rules less relevant.”
De Blasio’s position made no sense to me. Of course, you want a manager to play the hand she’s dealt as best as she can, but you also want to give her a better hand to play if possible. Moreover, de Blasio seemed to imagine a world in which every principal is some superstar who can overcome every conceivable obstacle to achieve success. In reality, many principals could barely succeed even in ideal conditions.
Interestingly, ten years after these hearings, Lombardi retired and his school PTA threw him a party at which its president commented: “If a teacher makes a mistake, he’s going to call you out on it. . . . He’s demanding. He wants success.” She also noted “the UFT, they’re probably happy he’s leaving.”35 She had no idea how truly she spoke.
34
A SHOT ACROSS THE BOW
2013
With de Blasio’s election now a fait accompli, I began to contemplate the damage he could do to charter schools as mayor. He’d proposed a moratorium on new co-locations and threatened to revoke those that had already been approved. Success’s would plainly be first on the chopping block given his hostile rhetoric. He’d also threatened to make charters pay rent if we received private philanthropy, but we needed those funds to pay the start-up costs for new schools. In fact, if we had to pay market rent, which would be $30 million annually to start, we’d not only be unable to expand, we’d have to slash classroom spending.
Noah didn’t wait till it started raining to build his ark, so I began thinking about how we could save ourselves. My fear was that de Blasio would overestimate the strength of his hand. Aside from Success, charter schools had never been terribly active politically because they’d never had to be. De Blasio might therefore assume there would be little political cost to going after us, particularly since he’d been basking in the adulation of supporters who cheered his every attack upon us. In his mind, his ascendance reflected a fundamental ideological shift away from Bloomberg’s policies. In reality, he’d beaten weak opponents in a Democratic primary that favored left-leaning candidates. Most New Yorkers did not share his hostility to charter schools. I felt confident that if de Blasio revoked charter co-locations or charged us rent, we could get most of the public on our side. Under the policy of mayoral control for which I’d fought, however, de Blasio held all the cards. Even if we managed to make him regret going after charter schools, he might well stay the course to avoid the humiliation of caving in to pressure. We needed to fire a shot across his bow so he’d realize it was a bad idea to take us on before he committed himself.
De Blasio had said that he didn’t intend to make every charter school pay rent or revoke every charter school’s co-locations so it was clear he intended to use a divide-and-conquer strategy. If other charter leaders let de Blasio treat me as the charter sector’s whipping boy, they’d get more merciful treatment when it came time to determine which co-locations would be revoked and how much rent each school would have to pay. In the long run, however, once we were divided, every charter school would be at his mercy. To show de Blasio this strategy wouldn’t work, we’d have to demonstrate our determination to stand together. Getting other charter leaders to agree to this, however, was easier said than done. Most were intimidated by power, felt out of their depth in politics, and were reluctant to throw in their lot with a woman the mayor had publicly declared shouldn’t be tolerated. My colleagues were political pacifists who believed that every dispute could be resolved through compromise and reason. I subscribe to Frederick Douglass’s belief that this isn’t always so:
If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.
The obstacle I faced in delivering this message, however, was that some believed I favored conflict because it would advance my political career. I found it strange to be thought of this way. I still saw myself as an educator—a college professor and charter school leader who’d had a brief interlude in politics. It seemed like only yesterday that I was being dismissed as too naive for politics. Now, all of a sudden, I was some modern-day Machiavelli ready to sacrifice children on the altar of my political ambition. Never mind that my support for educational reform had actually hurt my political prospects as demonstrated by my loss in the borough president’s race.
But I’d had one stroke of good fortune. I’d mentioned my concerns to Kevin Hall, head of the Charter School Growth Fund, a nonprofit that supported many leading charter schools including Success. Kevin didn’t want to see the fund’s huge investment in New York charters undermined, so he’d convened a meeting on August 13 with the leaders of the charter schools the fund supported: Morty Ballen of Explore, Brett Peiser of Uncommon Schools, Doug McCurry of Achievement First, and me. He’d urged us to work together to prevent harm to the charter sector, precisely what I was hoping for. Three days after de Blasio won the primary, I reconvened this group on a conference call along with several other charter school leaders. I explained my shot-across-the-bow theory, trying my best to sound like Russell Crowe in the movie Gladiator when he says, “Whatever comes out of these gates, we have a better chance of survival if we work together. . . . If we stay together, we survive.”
Fortunately, de Blasio had made one miscalculation. When making his proposal that “well-resourced” charter schools pay rent, he probably fig
ured this would affect Success most because our opponents liked portraying us as rich. The reality, however, was that most of the other charter networks raised more money than we did, so his proposal was even more threatening to them. They reluctantly concluded they had to take him on.
We agreed that our first collective action would be a march across the Brooklyn Bridge, ending at city hall. I proposed that in order to make it clear we were willing to stand up to de Blasio, our parents carry signs that said, “What about my Dante?” in reference to de Blasio’s son, who had figured prominently in his campaign. I wanted to make the point that while it was great that de Blasio had done well by his son, being mayor was about helping other people’s children get opportunities. My colleagues, however, were adamantly opposed to referencing Dante and I realized they were right. We were looking to fire a shot across de Blasio’s bow, not at it. Besides, de Blasio would understand the purpose of our march without our taking a jab at him. We agreed instead on the slogans “Charter Schools Are Public Schools” and “My Child, My Choice.”
With this plan in place, we turned toward organizing our march, which we’d scheduled for October 2. This was just two weeks away and we needed a big turnout; a poorly attended rally would be worse than none at all since the whole point was to show our strength. Luckily, an idealistic young man named Jeremiah Kittredge had recently founded an organization called Families for Excellent Schools to serve as a counterweight to the UFT’s parent-organizing efforts. Kittredge agreed to help us organize the march and reach out to charter schools that weren’t already part of our coalition.
As October 2 approached, we checked the weather forecasts incessantly since our biggest fear was rain and, sure enough, that’s exactly what the weathermen were predicting. When I woke up on the big day, however, it wasn’t raining, just cloudy, and just as I arrived at Brooklyn’s Cadman Plaza, where the march was to begin, the sun emerged from the clouds. My heart jumped as I saw thousands of parents and children wearing bright green T-shirts bearing our slogans. After listening to inspiring speeches by both parents and teachers, our march began. Everyone’s bucket list should include walking over the Brooklyn Bridge with its massive neo-Gothic stone towers, intersecting diagonal and vertical cables, wooden pedestrian walkway, and wonderful view of downtown Manhattan, New York Harbor, and the Statue of Liberty. Added to this inspiring picture on this day was a river of seventeen thousand marchers stretching from one end of the bridge to the other. So many parents came that it took five hours for everyone to cross.
The march was widely covered. The headlines read: “Sea of Parents and Advocates Take to Streets for Charter Schools,”36 “Parents’ Historic March for Charter Schools,”37 and “Charter School Rally Sends Message to Bill de Blasio.”38 We’d accomplished what we’d set out to do; now, we’d have to see whether it had the desired effect.
We figured de Blasio’s choice of a chancellor might be an early sign of how hostile he’d be as mayor. He ended up plucking a former deputy chancellor named Carmen Fariña out of retirement. I knew her well, as she’d led the schools in my council district and had been principal of my alma mater PS 6. While she wasn’t a vociferous charter school opponent, neither was she a reformer, and I doubted she’d stand up to de Blasio if he decided to throw us under the bus. De Blasio’s appointments to the Panel on Educational Priorities were also troubling, particularly Norm Fruchter, whose program at the Annenberg Institute had spearheaded the lawsuit against our Cobble Hill school.
Soon after his inauguration, de Blasio announced that he was cutting all capital funding for charter school facilities. While I wasn’t happy about this, that money was small potatoes. The real question was what he’d do on co-locations and rent. As I nervously awaited his pronouncements, I began contemplating whether I could strike a deal with de Blasio. While I hadn’t appreciated his nasty comments, I was willing to let bygones be bygones if we could agree on something that was in the best interests of the children. I figured I might have to undergo some ritualistic public humiliation so de Blasio could show his more rabid supporters I no longer had “the run of the place,” but that was a price I was willing to pay if I could do a deal that was good for our students. Eric said I should be willing to give up co-locations for two of Success’s new schools in exchange for preserving the rest of the sector. Our existing schools were a different matter. If de Blasio terminated their co-locations, children we were already educating would be thrown into dysfunctional low-performing district schools. That I couldn’t accept. Besides, no matter how much de Blasio despised me, he’d never go that far.
35
SAVE THE 194
2014
On the morning of February 27, 2014, I was at Harlem 1 meeting with teachers and principals when I got a call from Deputy Chancellor Kathleen Grimm. The city, she said, was revoking three of our co-locations: those of two new elementary schools and of our Harlem Central middle school. I gasped in surprise. I couldn’t believe the city would really throw kids at one of our existing schools out on the street, so I asked her to repeat what she’d said. She did. I’d heard correctly. What, I asked, would happen to the students at our Harlem Central school? She was silent.
I hung up and broke down in tears. I was stunned. We’d been educating Harlem Central’s children since kindergarten. Now, unless we could somehow get this decision reversed, we’d be forced to abandon them.
My mind began racing. I’d have to speak with parents and tell Harlem Central’s principal, an idealistic young man named Andrew Malone who had put his heart and soul into creating this school, that all of his effort had been for nothing. It felt like the time I’d lost my first council race. I’d made promises to people, led them to believe in me, and now I was failing them.
I was determined to fight de Blasio but I was by no means confident I could win. Just as I’d feared, he was using a divide-and-conquer strategy. Although he’d made slight adjustments to the co-locations of a few other charter schools, Success’s were the only ones he’d revoked. The city did double backflips to justify this result. During the campaign, de Blasio had claimed that Bloomberg’s co-locations were problematic because they caused “overcrowd[ing]” and “larger class sizes.” He’d now had DOE scrutinize these co-locations for a month and hadn’t found a single co-location that should be revoked on these grounds.
However, he still had to make good on his promise not to tolerate me so he came up with brand-new rationales for revoking our co-locations. He revoked the co-locations for our elementary schools, which were slated to share space in high school buildings, on the grounds that it was “more appropriate . . . to co-locate additional high schools” in such buildings because they could share “spaces (such as science labs, shop rooms, and libraries).” This had nothing to do with how co-located schools were actually run. If there were two schools in a building with six science labs, the schools wouldn’t share all six rooms but take three each. Our elementary schools could do that just as well as a high school. Indeed, this was exactly what we did at our Upper West and Union Square elementary schools, both of which were co-located with high schools. Moreover, even if there had been merit to de Blasio’s rationale, it hardly seemed a sufficiently compelling basis for revoking co-locations that had already been lawfully approved.
The basis for knocking out the co-location for our Harlem Central Middle School was equally flimsy. Because this school was growing too big for its existing co-location, we’d been approved to move into another building that contained one of our existing elementary schools and a special education program, PS 811. To make room for our middle school, our elementary school was going to give up thirteen rooms and PS 811 was going to give up three rooms. As explained in the Educational Impact Statement,39 DOE’s plan was to shrink PS 811’s enrollment by thirty students so that PS 811 would have eighty-four students in seventeen rooms, or just over five students per room. The loss of thirty special education seats at PS 811 would be more than made up for by “three new sc
hool buildings” opening in Manhattan “that will be able to accommodate . . . approximately 180” special education students.
Most important, PS 811 wouldn’t give up its three rooms right away but rather over the course of three years. That meant PS 811 could decrease its enrollment gradually “by placing fewer new students in [PS 811] each year” as existing students graduated. This way, no students would be forced out of PS 811. The administration, however, just lied about this. Chancellor Fariña claimed that “There are kids in that building who would have to leave.”40 De Blasio also said he’d revoked Success’s co-location because “We do not want to displace any special ed kids.”
But some of the press bought it anyway. The Daily News published an opinion piece by my old foe Noah Gotbaum claiming that the colocation would have required “mov[ing] one-third of [PS 811’s] autistic and severely emotionally disturbed children out of the building.” Similarly, New York Times reporter Ginia Bellafante reported that our co-location “would also have displaced a vast number of children with special needs.” We wrote to Ms. Bellafante that she was wrong. She responded:
[The] co-location would force challenged kids who might have been educated at [PS 811] to be educated elsewhere, at other schools in Manhattan, requiring longer or more complicated commutes. That would seem to suit the definition of displacement.
In fact, she had utterly no support for her theory that children would have longer commutes. PS 811 wasn’t a zoned school but a specialized school that served students who were bussed in from all over Manhattan. There was no evidence that the three new co-locations DOE was opening up would be any less convenient for prospective students than PS 811; in fact, increasing the total number of locations serving special education students would result in students having shorter commutes on average. Not even DOE had advanced Bellafante’s inconvenient commute theory; she’d just made it up out of thin air to justify her misleading article. Incredibly, the Times refused to correct the story; you can read it to this day.
The Education of Eva Moskowitz Page 27
