The Education of Eva Moskowitz Read online

  Dedication

  The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once said, “All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”

  This is a story about the second stage.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1: Le Bilboquet

  2: I Ain’t Gonna Get Eva’d

  3: Chaim’s Children

  4: The Ultimate Charter School Bake-Off

  5: Weevils!

  6: The Fucaloro Method

  7: The Catch

  8: Songs of a Refugee

  9: Get Us the Damn Space!

  10: I Hope My Board Fires Me

  11: Catnip Jelly

  12: Culture Data

  13: Tarzan and Jane Are Back Again

  14: Take Offense, It’s Okay

  15: I’ll Be Damned If I’m Going to Lose You

  16: Even Olympic Athletes Cry

  17: Froebel’s Gift

  18: I’m Such a Lucky So and So

  19: An Eva Moratorium

  20: The Audacity of Hubris

  21: With Whose Permission?

  22: Doing Something Worth Writing

  23: Mom, Why Don’t You Open Up More Schools?

  24: Thurgood Marshall Must Be Shaking His Head

  25: Praying While Running

  26: My Team Is on the Floor

  27: Giving an Honest Definition to the Word “Public”

  28: Competing in the Nationals

  29: The Redhead with the Voracious Appetite for Data

  30: The Triumvirate

  31: 180 Michael Browns

  32: Time for Eva Moskowitz to Stop Being Tolerated, Enabled, Supported

  33: How Many Unions Does It Take to Screw in a Light Bulb?

  34: A Shot Across the Bow

  35: Save the 194

  36: A Tale of Two Rallies

  37: Tragic Things Happen

  38: Releasing Atomic Secrets to the Russians

  39: Eva Moskowitz and I Are Saying the Same Thing Now

  40: Eva Moskowitz Is Going to Say Something Tomorrow

  41: The Dominant Narrative About Charter Schools

  42: How Much Do Parents Know of What Goes on in Their Children’s Classrooms?

  43: The Education of Eva Moskowitz

  44: Lucky

  45: Extra Credit

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  About the Author

  Also by Eva Moskowitz

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  LE BILBOQUET

  2004–2005

  Trouble was brewing. Ron Perelman, a financial titan, prominent philanthropist, alumnus of several messy public divorces, and champion of a referendum that had imposed term limits in New York City, was opposing a sidewalk café permit application by Le Bilboquet, a chic restaurant in the district I represented on the New York City Council. This dispute had all the makings of a juicy press story and I wanted no part of it. I’d be charged with doing favors for a wealthy constituent if I opposed the application, and, if I supported it, I’d be charged with ignoring my constituents’ concerns. But alas, neutrality wasn’t an option since I was legally part of the approval process, which went like this: the community board held hearings and made a recommendation to the local council member (me), who made a recommendation to the council’s zoning and franchising subcommittee, which held more hearings and made a recommendation to the Land Use Committee, which made a recommendation to the council, which then voted yea or nay. It took, on average, 465 days. Yes, all for a sidewalk café permit. Welcome to my world.

  Now, to some, sidewalk cafés are a charming feature of city life that enliven the streets and provide opportunities to dine alfresco in the urban landscape. To others, however, they are an appropriation of public space by rapacious businessmen who obstruct already congested sidewalks and inflict noisy late-night revelry on residential neighborhoods. My constituents tended toward the latter view and could afford to care about things like this since they were a virtual who’s who in the worlds of business (Michael Bloomberg, Jamie Dimon), movies (Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Spike Lee, Bill Murray), music (Mariah Carey), politics (Rudy Giuliani, Eliot Spitzer), art (Jeff Koons), and comedy (Joan Rivers). I represented Manhattan’s famous “Silk Stocking District,” which included the most expensive real estate per foot in the country, world-famous museums, and startlingly expensive private schools with names like Spence, Chapin, and Nightingale-Bamford.

  My view on sidewalk cafés was simple: I did whatever my community board told me to. They held hearings at which they heard directly from neighborhood residents—why second-guess them? Besides, I had my hands full running the committee that oversaw the city’s enormous public school system. So if anybody came to see me about a sidewalk café permit, I told ‘em: talk to the community board; I do whatever they tell me. And boy was I glad to have this policy now.

  But one other thing worried me. Not being born yesterday, I knew my campaign staff would soon receive one of those oh-so-rare but gratifying unsolicited contributions from some good-hearted citizen who had spontaneously recognized my merits as a public servant. Then, only after depositing the check, would we learn the contributor was a lobbyist for Perelman. We could refund the contribution, but if the press had gotten wind of this story by that point, it would look like I’d done so only because I’d been caught with my hand in the cookie jar. I therefore directed my staff to scrutinize every unsolicited contribution we received and, if it was in any way associated with Perelman—even if it was from Perelman’s second cousin’s lawyer’s podiatrist’s stepbrother’s mistress—to return it immediately. Sure enough, we soon got a nice fat check from a lawyer who, when we asked what had inspired his newfound generosity, disclosed that he worked for Perelman. We immediately returned the check, and when I got a phone call from Perelman I said—oh how I loved saying!—talk to the community board, I just work here.

  So he did. In fact, he provided a video showing that Le Bilboquet was already serving drinks outside, which people would imbibe while sitting on the steps of his town house, leaving behind a trail of cigarette butts. This was a huge no-no, so the community board turned down the application. Made sense to me—but again, not my department. I passed the recommendation along to the Zoning and Franchising Subcommittee.

  Just as I’d feared, the press took an interest. Not even the New York Times, which usually turned up its nose at boldface names’ stories, could resist. Ron Perelman! A chic Upper East Side café! Yes, it was gossip, but it was the caviar of gossip. I told the Times reporter exactly what had happened: how I’d supported my community board’s recommendation, which was always my practice, how I’d instructed my staff from the outset to return any checks they received from Perelman, and how they’d done so. I’d predicted exactly what would happen and had acted scrupulously and consistently. There was no way I could be criticized.

  Oh, how naive I was.

  Here’s an excerpt from the article the Times published titled “Steak Frites and Stardom vs. Power and Politics”:

  This is a story about four tables and eight chairs, the billionaire cosmetics executive who would not brook them, and an ambitious councilwoman who took a phone call. It will not end prettily . . .

  Mr. Perelman’s lawyer . . . made a campaign contribution to Ms. Moskowitz, who wants to run for Manhattan borough president. On Tuesday, the councilwoman instructed her staff to return the check.

  Ms. Moskowitz said . . . she simply wanted to go along with the rec
ommendation of the community board . . . and was too busy with issues like teachers’ contracts and school construction budgets to look into the matter more deeply . . .

  Philippe Delgrange, the owner of Le Bilboquet . . . who is of French and Belgian descent, said the dispute feels personal . . . “Maybe he doesn’t like the Belgians or French.”

  By saying we’d returned the check “on Tuesday,” rather than “immediately,” the reporter implied we’d delayed doing so until she’d come sniffing around. Moreover, she didn’t mention that I always deferred to the community board or that I did so because the board heard directly from the community, so it just sounded like I was making this up or was too busy to do my job. It was a textbook example of writing the lead on the way to the ballpark.

  Rule number one of journalism, I was learning, is that trying to get in between a journalist and a story he wants to tell is like trying to stop a herd of stampeding cattle. Stories headlined “Council Member Acts Ethically, Follows Policies Consistently” don’t sell newspapers. So while this journalist didn’t lie, she left out critical facts and spun those she did report to conform to the story she’d wanted to tell from the outset. For example, since Perelman had been cast as the story’s antagonist, he couldn’t just be some ordinary home owner who wanted peace and quiet; he had to have some ulterior motive such as being prejudiced against . . . Belgians, because, of course, everybody has it in for those Belgians.1

  A late-nineteenth-century Tammany Hall politician named “Big Tim” Sullivan once said, “I don’t care what the newspapers say about me as long as they spell my name right.” Maybe I should be like Big Tim, but I’m not. I try to be ethical and it pains me when people think I’m not. As a council member, I’d worked hard to be squeaky-clean, even turning down a stipend to which I was entitled for chairing the Education Committee, which God knows I could have used since my husband, three children, and I were living in a one-bedroom apartment.

  Besides, my reputation was one of the few things I had going for me. I was quite unpopular with the city’s unions and the Democratic political machine because I wouldn’t toe the party line. For example, I was the sole council member to vote against a law requiring the buyer of an office building to continue employing the prior owner’s maintenance workers. I had nothing against maintenance workers, but I didn’t see why we should have special employment laws for commercial buildings that didn’t apply to other businesses like movie theaters, supermarkets, and apartment buildings. Doing this was a recipe for creating a crazy patchwork of laws.

  I was also one of only three council members to vote against a law introduced by my colleague Bill de Blasio, a bright and ambitious council member whom I’d gotten to know when he ran Hillary Clinton’s first Senate campaign. His proposed law would allow unions to circumvent the limits on campaign contributions by making them through multiple affiliated entities (such as a local union and its parent). For de Blasio, increasing the power of unions, which would advance his progressive political agenda, trumped the goal of limiting the influence of money in politics. De Blasio’s bill would also advance his own career since he’d been fined for receiving more than $20,000 in contributions from the New York Hotel and Motel Trades Council and its Local 6, both of which listed the exact same person as having the authority to decide who received their contributions.

  In addition to voting against their bills, I also endeared myself to my colleagues by introducing some of my own. For example, I proposed a law to ban politicians from putting their names on big signs at capital construction projects, since I didn’t think politicians should get free advertising on projects for which taxpayers were paying. My bill was about as popular with my colleagues as a ham sandwich at a bar mitzvah.

  Fortunately, I was more popular with my constituents since I was attentive to their quality of life concerns. For example, they hated the plastic newspaper racks that littered the streets, so I asked Karim Rashid, a top designer whose clients included Prada and Giorgio Armani, to design new ones. He came up with a version made of silver fiberglass that stood atop mushroomlike bulbous pedestals so it “looked like a growth from the ground” and tilted gracefully backward so that the papers were easier to remove. “Yet another pair of words you’re likely to find only in New York: stylish newsracks,” commented one paper.

  Another big issue was pets. In the summer of 2004, I learned that an angry crowd of dog owners was demanding that something be done about a pit bull that had attacked an eight-pound Chihuahua named Frank. A legal loophole prevented the police from doing anything about dog-on-dog violence, so I proposed legislation to fix it.

  But the part of my job that I cared about most was chairing the council’s Education Committee. I’d previously been a professor of history and had gotten into politics primarily to improve public education. I’d held dozens of hearings about problems with the public school system. Many newspapers had editorialized in favor of the reforms I’d advocated but the Times hadn’t, so I was elated when I finally got a call from a member of its editorial board. I returned the call immediately, prepared to wax eloquently about everything I’d learned from my many hearings and school visits. Instead, I was asked about my dog legislation. Oh well.

  Of the educational issues on which I’d been prepared to wax eloquently, the most important was overhauling the work rules and job protections for school employees. As schools chancellor Joel Klein observed, “lockstep pay, seniority and life tenure . . . act as handcuffs and prevent us from making the changes that will encourage and support excellence in our system.”2 Klein had proposed removing these handcuffs by adopting an eight-page “thin contract” for teachers. Conditions for reform seemed ideal since the teachers’ contract had just expired, I’d just held hearings on reforming them, and we had a mayor, Michael Bloomberg, whose wealth had enabled him to get elected without union support. As one columnist aptly observed, “If not now, when? If not Bloomberg, who?”3

  On October 20, however, the New York Post reported that the city was close to reaching a deal that would allow the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) “to keep the vast majority of the privileges enshrined in past contracts.” I was deeply troubled by this as I believed that reforming this contract was critical to improving the school system. I publicly called on Bloomberg to “stand strong.” Bloomberg, however, accused me of “grandstanding” and the city council’s speaker called my letter “destructive to the process.” Ouch. “Eva found out last week what it is like to play in the big leagues,” observed a political consultant, “the mayor and the speaker are jockeying for position on education, and Eva got in the way.” This wasn’t the first time I’d annoyed Bloomberg. He’d called hearings I’d held on shortages of basic supplies like toilet paper “a tempest in a toilet bowl.”

  Notwithstanding these rebuffs, I felt I’d accomplished a lot on the council. Not only had I passed more laws than any other sitting council member, but I’d also held eighty-eight Education Committee hearings that delved into important issues. Those on the union contracts had drawn national attention and had advanced public understanding of the impact these contracts had on teaching and learning. But those hearings had served an additional purpose. While I appreciated that teachers needed to unionize to level the playing field when negotiating with their monopoly employer, the government, I felt that the UFT had become too powerful, that its ability to give marching orders to nearly every elected official in the city was undermining the quality of education the city’s children were receiving. I hoped that by challenging the UFT’s hegemony, I could embolden other elected officials to undertake some of the critical reforms that were necessary to fix the public school system.

  But to really make the point that opposing the UFT wasn’t political suicide, I needed a second act: getting elected to higher office. I’d set my sights on Manhattan borough president and I liked my chances. I’d already gotten elected without the UFT’s endorsement—the only Democratic official in all of New York City to do so—an
d I had a long list of supporters, a willingness to campaign hard, and an appealing résumé as an educator and good-government advocate. Precisely because I had everything going for me except the UFT’s support, the race was the perfect test case for whether it was possible to stand up to the teachers’ union and live to tell the tale. I’d soon find out.

  2

  I AIN’T GONNA GET EVA’D

  2005

  On February 14, 2005, standing on the steps of city hall surrounded by more than two hundred supporters, I announced my campaign for borough president. I’d arrived at the council in 1999, I observed, “with a baby in one arm and a copy of the city charter in the other” and “six years, eighty Education Committee hearings, ten laws, and two more kids later, I am ready to do more.”

  While I had the advantage of being the most well-known of the nine candidates in the race, I was a persona non grata with the Democratic machine. It hadn’t always been this way. During most of my time on the council, I’d had fairly collegial relationships with my colleagues. All that had changed, however, when I’d held hearings on the labor contracts and become the UFT’s public enemy number one.

  These tensions bubbled to the surface in a Times article with the headline “Mayoral Ambitions and Sharp Elbows; Councilwoman Spars Way into a Position of Influence”:

  [E]ven as her aggressive, confrontational style has set her apart on a legislative body known less for fomenting change than for renaming streets, it has also alienated many of her colleagues. [A] common refrain is that the councilwoman’s ambitions exceed her political skills [and she] fails to . . . build coalitions with other council members.

  In fact, my ability to build coalitions was precisely what had allowed me to pass so many laws. My views on the labor contracts, however, were diametrically opposed to those of my colleagues so I’d inevitably alienated them when I’d taken on this issue.

  Assemblyman Scott Stringer soon emerged as my leading opponent, racking up the endorsements of many elected officials and of several unions, including the UFT. While none of this was surprising, it meant that I’d need to sweep the newspaper endorsements to win the election. The Times endorsement alone was worth about 10 percent of the vote.