The Education of Eva Moskowitz

by Eva Moskowitz

  However, to say all’s well that ends well would be disingenuous. It was an enormous waste of time, energy, and, most important, taxpayer money. The city soon projected it would spend more than $5 million per year on our three school buildings, a completely unnecessary expense.44 It was also an enormous distraction for de Blasio’s administration. He’d complained that Bloomberg had focused too much on charter schools and said he wanted to shift the attention back to district schools. That’s what he should have done. However, instead of focusing his efforts on making the district schools better, he’d tried to hamstring charter schools, which put them front and center. Diane Ravitch—no fan of mine—would later ask: “How did a [network of schools] that serves a tiny portion of New York’s students manage to hijack the education reforms of a new mayor with a huge popular mandate?”45 The answer is that we didn’t; de Blasio hijacked his own agenda.

  Some people feel I’d wanted to pick a fight with de Blasio. Nothing could be further from the truth. I wanted to focus on education. I don’t enjoy conflict and I’m naturally a pretty cowardly person. I can’t stand to watch violent movies, I dread getting shots at the doctor, I jump five feet in the air if someone sneaks up on me, and I worry about everything. But I wasn’t going to let de Blasio take away our schools. The philosopher Lao Tzu said “loving someone deeply gives you courage.” So does loving a cause.

  Sidy’s death continued to weigh upon the Harlem 3 community and upon me personally. Several days after his funeral, I wrote to my faculty: “Schooling is about giving life to kids. Schooling is about getting kids to make the most out of life. Death is the opposite of everything we do.” Sidy’s best friend was particularly distraught and said, “It should have been me.” This boy disappeared one day and his mother found him on the roof of their building. We gave him counseling and made sure to keep a close eye on him.

  To give the Harlem 3 community closure, we held a memorial service for Sidy. As students were there, we focused more on celebrating Sidy’s life than mourning his death. The ceremony began with remembrances by Sidy’s teachers and a reading of a letter from the dean of NYU’s School of Dentistry honoring Sidy’s ambition to become a dentist. Richard Seigler presented college scholarships in Sidy’s honor to his four siblings and to one of his classmates. At the suggestion of one of Sidy’s teachers, we ended the ceremony with a soccer game by Sidy’s teammates to celebrate his passion for this sport.

  The mystery of Sidy’s death, of how he’d ended up on the roof and why he’d fallen off, was never answered. A small consolation was knowing that in August, Sidy’s younger brother Salif would be entering Harlem 3’s kindergarten. It was a reminder that amid death and tragedy, children bring hope and renewal.

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  RELEASING ATOMIC SECRETS TO THE RUSSIANS

  2003

  By the second day of my contract hearings, even the balconies were full, which was unheard of for a city council committee hearing. Word had gotten around that Randi Weingarten would be testifying and this was the showdown for which everybody had been waiting. Even journalists who weren’t covering the hearings were there just to watch. Given the intense media and political interest—the council chambers had the electric atmosphere of an arena before a heavyweight boxing championship—I worried about remaining calm and composed.

  The success of the hearings would turn in large measure on how well I handled Weingarten, which worried me since she was a tough customer. Before joining the UFT, she’d been a big-firm lawyer and could be quite aggressive. I learned this the hard way when I’d appeared with her on television and had been unable to get a word in edgewise. I feared she’d now filibuster me by giving long speeches and refusing to answer my questions. Ordinarily, a chair could exercise a certain amount of control over committee proceedings, but if I tried to rein Weingarten in, my colleagues might take her side, claiming I wasn’t giving her a chance to speak. The path I had to walk was a narrow one: giving Weingarten a fair chance to present her views but not giving her so much leeway that she hijacked the proceedings.

  Weingarten immediately went on offense, attacking Lombardi, and bragging about the fact that she’d gotten the other principal to cancel his appearance because “he knew we were going to show [his] antiunion animus,” and claiming I was “demoniz[ing]” teachers. As for the summaries we’d provided:

  The inaccuracies and the misconceptions . . . are too numerous for me to rebut here. We’ll do that in a separate document, but you can be sure, Eva, that our separate document will . . . be printed by a union shop.

  No such summary was ever released.

  Weingarten went on interminably. Her opening remarks alone ran more than eight thousand words, longer than the entirety of Lombardi’s testimony, including his opening statement. Among other things, Weingarten claimed it took just 65.5 days on average to terminate a teacher. It sounded very objective, particularly with that “.5,” but it was quite misleading because it referred only to the length of the dismissal hearings themselves. Lombardi and other principals had testified that they couldn’t even start the dismissal proceedings until they’d spent at least two years building a record: giving feedback to the teacher, U-rating the teacher multiple years in a row, and fighting the teacher’s grievances every step of the way. I asked Weingarten about the estimates the principals had given me:

  MOSKOWITZ: So they’re way off?

  WEINGARTEN: Whatever [DOE’s] internal processes are, that is a management responsibility . . .

  MOSKOWITZ: There’s nothing that requires them to go through an extended grievance process?

  WEINGARTEN: No, there is not.

  MOSKOWITZ: And if they don’t document, will they succeed?

  WEINGARTEN: Eva, in any hearing that somebody goes through, somebody has to get up and say why they want somebody terminated.

  This was particularly disingenuous because, as Weingarten knew full well, the UFT had a whole staff of attorneys whose sole mission in life was to make it impossible to terminate a teacher without creating an extensive record that included multiple U ratings.

  I also asked Weingarten questions about seniority, but getting her to answer them was virtually impossible. She’d go on long tangents or attacks or quibble with terminology. I finally expressed my frustration:

  MOSKOWITZ: These are simple straightforward questions. Is it the case under the UFT transfer plan that a principal could have to accept a candidate sight unseen; is that correct, or incorrect?

  WEINGARTEN: Again, there is no, and I don’t mean to be a pest, but there is no UFT transfer plan. There is a plan that was negotiated starting in the mid-sixties between the Department of Education and the UFT.

  MOSKOWITZ: Could you answer my question? Is it the case that a principal under any circumstance could have to take a candidate without ever having interviewed them; yes or no?

  WEINGARTEN: Yes.

  Getting that “yes” took five minutes. Being a trained litigator, Weingarten knew that I had a limited amount of time and that the more obstructive she was, the less ground I could cover.

  Weingarten claimed that only 10 percent of vacancies had been filled through seniority because most schools were using the alternative “school-based option” for hiring teachers. However, even this approach required that candidates with the most seniority be hired unless “a less experienced applicant . . . possesses extraordinary qualifications.” Moreover, in order to get this very limited flexibility, the principal had to give up control over hiring to a personnel committee “[t]he majority of [whose] members shall be teachers selected by the UFT chapter.”

  But rather than get into those complexities, I focused on a much simpler point, which was whether seniority rights were a good thing:

  MOSKOWITZ: [Y]our point is that the seniority transfer option is only exercised by 10 percent, but if my kid has one of those teachers, I don’t care because it’s my child . . .

  WEINGARTEN: Is the chair saying to me that you believe that anybody who exerc
ises the seniority transfer is therefore a bad teacher?

  MOSKOWITZ: Of course not. You’re implying that because it’s only 10 percent it may be okay, and I’m suggesting if it is a bad thing, and it affects 10 percent of the vacancies, we have a problem. So, let’s get to the larger issue, which is whether it’s a bad thing or not. And I’m asking. I’m asking.

  WEINGARTEN: First off, I am not implying that seniority transfers are a bad thing or a good thing. I am telling you—you’ve asked me, and I guess this is something where you clearly do not believe, and if you want to get to seniority, let’s talk about it, you clearly do not believe that seniority or experience . . .

  MOSKOWITZ: I’m not going to have you tell me what I believe and don’t believe. What I’d like to understand is your view of it.

  At this point, Weingarten launched into yet another one of her filibusters, this one totaling 419 words, whose essence was the following:

  WEINGARTEN: [I]f you read the contract, what it does say is that . . . qualifications trump everything. [I]f people are equally qualified, then the most experienced person tends to get a job.

  This sleight of hand showed Weingarten’s lawyering skills. The only thing the contract said about “qualifications” was that a properly licensed teacher was “qualified.” For an English position, an applicant licensed in English was more qualified than an applicant licensed in math. However, if you had one hundred candidates who were licensed to teach English, they were considered equally qualified, so you had to hire the most senior one even if another candidate had won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

  I next asked Weingarten whether she objected to the Education Committee examining the teachers’ contract. She said “Eva, from the first moment you raised this with me, I never had an objection to you looking at the contract.” Given the UFT’s efforts to get the hearings canceled, this was certainly news to me! I pressed her further, however, and she explained that she objected to the timing of the hearings because negotiations were ongoing. In other words, she didn’t want the hearings to be held at a time when they could actually have an impact.

  After I finished, my colleagues pitched Weingarten softball questions that allowed her to repeat many of the points she’d already made. She’d also brought along a teacher whose purpose became clear when one of my colleagues started asking her questions:

  COUNCIL MEMBER RECCHIA: Talking about Principal Lombardi, now, you worked for him; is that correct?

  ROSEMARIE PARKER: And I still do.

  RECCHIA: Is it a fact today, does he have two classes of special ed in his fourth . . .

  MS. PARKER: He has no special ed classes in the fourth grade this year . . .

  RECCHIA: And isn’t it a fact that the reason why his fourth-grade reading scores went up is because he got rid of the special ed students in the fourth grade?

  MS. PARKER: [H]e has declined the amount of special ed classes in the school so their scores cannot impact the overall scores of the school.

  This line of inquiry was completely irrelevant, and had been orchestrated simply to embarrass Lombardi. Given that the UFT was willing to launch such an obviously ad hominem attack on Lombardi in a room crowded with journalists, I feared what they’d do to him when those journalists weren’t around. The next day, he’d have to go back to school and work with this woman who had just publicly attacked him. This was why it had been so hard to get any other principals to testify.

  Council Member de Blasio used part of his time to rebut my contention that witnesses were being intimidated although he’d just witnessed it happening. He, however, soon made it clear that he supported only “whistle-blower[s] in the classic sense,” which apparently didn’t include those who criticized labor contracts.

  The third day of hearings would echo an issue I’d raised in my very first campaign, principal tenure. Tenure for a management position struck me as particularly problematic. Someone who asks to be put in a position with greater compensation and power should also accept greater accountability. Moreover, the tenure rules ultimately made it harder for a principal to succeed because they applied to assistant principals as well. Thus, while DOE had recently given principals more control over their budgets—whether to buy new computers or new textbooks, and whether to hire a volleyball coach or a bandleader—when it came to their most critical decisions, the selection of the management team that would help them carry out their vision, they were hamstrung, as Daniel Weisberg, DOE’s executive director for labor policy, explained:

  [L]ifetime tenure rules . . . make it next to impossible to discharge an assistant principal. . . . [A]lso . . . a principal who recruits a promising new assistant principal and invests the time to train him or her, can have the assistant principal bumped out of his or her position at any time by a more senior assistant principal displaced from another school.

  The contract also made it harder to turn around failing schools:

  Principals . . . may inherit substandard assistant principals who do not share their goals or priorities. . . . If principals were able to freely choose their assistant principals, we [could] install entire turnaround teams of principals and assistant principals in chronically failing schools.

  Former principal Bernard Gassaway testified about the problems he’d faced:

  I inherited nine assistant principals . . . [who had] contributed to the downfall of that particular school. . . . [I]t took me . . . three to four years, actually, before I was able to shape my team. . . . While I’m battling my team, so-called team members, I’m not giving the attention . . . that I need to give to . . . instruction.

  I asked why the DOE hadn’t changed the contract:

  MOSKOWITZ: Did the department want to give principals [the] ability to select their assistant principals?

  WEISBERG: Yes.

  MOSKOWITZ: And the [administrators’ union] opposed that?

  WEISBERG: They filed an improper practice charge with [the Public Employee Relations Board] challenging that reform, yes.

  Why would the administrators’ union oppose giving its own members the ability to select their assistant principals? Because it represented both principals and assistant principals and there were more of the latter than the former.

  The final witness that day was the administrators’ union president, Jill Levy, who said we had no business examining the contracts because we lacked “jurisdiction . . . in the collective bargaining process.” Given that the council was responsible for approving a school budget of around $10 billion, most of which was spent on labor, the idea that we shouldn’t worry our pretty little heads about how this money was being spent struck me as an astonishingly narrow view of our responsibilities to children and taxpayers.

  The following day, we heard from our final witness, Chancellor Klein. He spoke thoughtfully and eloquently about the impact of the labor contracts upon the school system and his determination to make changes; I’ll spare you the details, however, as it covered much of the same ground as the witnesses who’d preceded him. After he testified, I brought the hearings to a close.

  While those who attended the Education Committee’s hearings learned how the city’s labor contracts affected the public schools, press coverage was required to reach a broader audience. Fortunately, we got it in spades. Ironically, it was the unions’ opposition to the hearings that ensured their success. We’d take on a topic that had been “all but taboo until the Education Committee’s hearings,”46 and the result, observed The Economist, was “four days of drama.”47 A Bloomberg aide commented “You’d think she was releasing atomic secrets to the Russians.”48 A New York Observer columnist wrote:

  City Council hearings generally pass with little or no notice in the media. Not these. . . . Ms. Moskowitz’s confrontation with Ms. Weingarten was particularly memorable. As political theater, it doesn’t get much more dramatic than this.49

  Moreover, while the drama was the draw, the press also got into the substance by describing the “arcane work rules” the contra
cts contained such as those against custodians painting above ten feet, changing ballasts, vacuuming rugs, or replacing more than seventy-five floor tiles per month; against teachers monitoring corridors or supervising lunchrooms; against paying bonuses to principals or higher salaries to teachers in hard-to-fill positions such as science; against transferring assistant principals or selecting teachers based on suitability and merit rather than seniority; and against terminating teachers without wading through a paralyzing thicket of grievance procedures.

  As for the Bloomberg administration, while it had initially viewed the hearings as a “distraction,” that changed:

  With each passing day—as the public learns about custodians who won’t vacuum and bad teachers who cannot be fired—many in the administration are starting to see the upside. “What we are seeing,” said one Bloomberg aide, “are all the contractual things that make it very difficult to improve the way children are taught.”50

  I was pleased that the hearings had contributed to public understanding of these contracts. What I hadn’t appreciated, however, was the impact these hearings would come to have on my own views.

  39

  EVA MOSKOWITZ AND I ARE SAYING THE SAME THING NOW