The Education of Eva Moskowitz Read online

  MOSKOWITZ: Well, you wouldn’t like our schools very much because we have about twenty-seven kids [per class] in kindergarten.

  Fidler’s assumption that our class sizes were smaller reflected the flaw in his approach to the hearings. Here was an opportunity to learn something from a former colleague such as why we had large class sizes or why so many parents wanted to send their children to our schools despite our large class sizes but Fidler instead just wanted to attack me.

  The following day, the press coverage focused mainly on the index cards with questions, which the press called “cue cards.” Randi Weingarten went on television to defend them, provoking a New York Post editorial titled “Hide Those Puppet Strings!”

  “Handing out index cards in the middle of a hearing creates the appearance of impropriety,” [Weingarten] said.

  Ah, yes. The old “appearance of impropriety” dodge.

  A more honest response would have been: “Handing out index cards in the middle of a hearing clues the public in on who’s truly calling the City Council’s shots.”

  Two weeks later, we held our lottery at which 5,000 applicants vied for just 450 seats. It’s too bad that the members of the council’s Education Committee didn’t attend. They missed an opportunity to find out why so many parents were desperate to get their children into charter schools.

  15

  I’LL BE DAMNED IF I’M GOING TO LOSE YOU

  1965–1982

  While my family took refuge in upstate New York, the city we’d abandoned went through dark times. The seeds of its undoing had been planted years earlier. In 1965, the city had elected as mayor a maverick Republican congressman named John Lindsay who was handsome, athletic, and witty, a civic superhero who fought political battles by day and hobnobbed with movie stars by night. When the transit workers crippled the city on the day Lindsay took office, however, he appeased them with a new contract that precipitated an avalanche of demands by other unions. The sanitation workers got four successive pension sweeteners, the last of which allowed them to retire at 50 percent of their salary after just twenty years of service. “Goddamn,” declared the negotiator for the transit workers, “if the garbage men get ‘20/50’ so can we”—and so they did. Moreover, that 50 percent would now be based not on a worker’s average earnings in recent years but on his compensation in his final year, including overtime, so transit workers conspired to assign overtime to colleagues on the verge of retirement.

  These successes upset the order of the universe as the city’s police and firemen regarded themselves as the most equal of the city’s civil servants and therefore deserving of its most generous pensions. Their unions rose to the challenge. Heart disease was deemed a job-related condition allowing immediate retirement at virtually full pay, and pension investment surpluses were henceforth distributed annually rather than retained to cover shortfalls, which taxpayers would now have to cover.

  The unions’ tactics became ever more aggressive. Two unions, DC 37 and the Teamsters, conspired to paralyze the city one morning by strategically abandoning trucks on major highways and leaving all but two of the city’s twenty-nine movable bridges in an open position to prevent traffic from crossing. This lawlessness was rewarded with an increase in prescription drug, dental, and life insurance benefits.

  So great was the city’s extravagance that it had to borrow heavily despite a booming economy. Then the 1973 Arab oil embargo sparked a recession, and the city’s bloated municipal workforce and generous labor contracts, which had been extravagant at the best of times, became disastrous in what were now the worst of times. The city’s debt spiraled out of control and was so great by 1975 that investors balked at buying the bonds the city needed to keep its deficit-spending merry-go-round running.

  Mayor Abraham Beame, who inherited this mess, laid off some workers and demanded that those who remained forego an impending 6 percent pay increase that had been negotiated in better times. The unions responded with aggressive job actions: sanitation workers walked off the job; highway workers blocked traffic on the Henry Hudson Parkway; labor leaders led tens of thousands of civil servants in a raucous protest in the financial district; and police officers blocked traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge and then deflated the tires on the waiting cars.

  The municipal unions considered declaring a “general strike” by the city’s entire labor force. While these were common in some European nations, they were virtually unheard of in the United States, where strikes were reserved for negotiating individual labor contracts. This raised the question of whether the city would move toward a more European political model in which unions used their collective power to push the government toward a high tax/high benefits welfare state.

  With the battle lines now clearly drawn, high noon took place not in New York City but in Washington, DC, where city and state officials lobbied President Ford to support a federal bailout. Ford’s response was summarized in a now famous Daily News headline: “Ford to New York: Drop Dead.” The city’s plight, Ford asserted, was the result of “bad financial management” since “No city can expect to remain solvent if it allows its expenses to increase by an average of 12 percent every year, while its tax revenues are increasing by only 4 to 5 percent per year.” If the city didn’t want to pay its debts, said Ford, there was a simple solution: declare bankruptcy.

  This option, however, was particularly problematic for New York because Wall Street’s firms had unwritten the city’s bonds, sold them to customers, and owned many of them either directly or through companies they managed. The financial industry would suffer a terrible blow if these obligations weren’t honored and bankruptcy would imperil workers’ labor contracts and pensions. After staring over the precipice, the parties reached a grand bargain: the unions would accept layoffs and forfeit wage increases; the state would raise taxes; and the federal government would provide inexpensive financing to ease the city’s cash flow problem.

  The city made good on its promise by laying off sixty thousand municipal workers, including a quarter of the city’s teachers. While necessary, the layoffs took a severe toll not only on the workers themselves but on the city they’d served. Streets were strewn with trash, potholes multiplied, and subways came less frequently and broke down more often. The loss of police officers, a weak economy, and a heroin epidemic together fueled an explosion in crime so great that its perpetrators no longer even felt the need for concealment. In midtown Manhattan, prostitutes sold their wares openly. On the Lower East Side, addicts lined up in the street to buy heroin and cocaine from stores run out of abandoned buildings. In Harlem, dealers brazenly established open-air markets in which they shouted out the street names of their products: “Star Trek,” “Jaws,” and “Malcolm’s Gold.” Drug addicts stole car radios so frequently that rather than replace them, New Yorkers instead put “no radio” signs on their car windows. Adding insult to injury, Times Square, once heralded for its Broadway theaters, became a destination spot for seeing porn films and peep shows.

  The city of Breakfast at Tiffany’s—sophisticated, swanky, and exuberant—had become that of Taxi Driver—filthy, dangerous, and amoral—and its middle class began fleeing this fetid chaos in droves. Those who remained felt increasingly helpless as they witnessed their city being ravaged by crime and decay, a feeling punctuated by the police department’s announcement on January 30, 1977, that a serial killer was on the loose. On March 8, he struck again. Nineteen-year-old Virginia Voskerichian had vainly held up a textbook to defend herself, but the killer’s bullet had penetrated it and killed her. Two more victims fell in April, and this time the killer left a note so lurid and chilling that it might have been ripped from the pages of a crime novel:

  I am the “Son of Sam . . .” Sam loves to drink blood. “Go out and kill” commands father Sam. Behind our house some rest. Mostly young—raped and slaughtered—their blood drained—just bones now.

  I am the “Monster”—“Beelzebub”—the “Chubby Behemoth.” I love to hunt.
Prowling the streets looking for fair game—tasty meat. The women of Queens are z prettyist of all . . . I live for the hunt-my life. Blood for papa . . .

  Police—Let me haunt you with these words; I’ll be back! I’ll be back!

  To be interpreted as—bang, bang, bang, bang, bang—ugh!!

  Yours in murder

  Mr. Monster

  Statistically speaking, Son of Sam’s murders were a drop in the bucket in a city where five people were murdered every day. Psychologically, however, the failure of the police to capture a man who was so openly taunting them symbolized the city’s inability to protect its citizens from crime.

  Then, Son of Sam penned a letter to the Daily News:

  Hello from the gutters of N.Y.C. which are filled with dog manure, vomit, stale wine, urine and blood. Hello from the sewers of N.Y.C. which swallow up these delicacies when they are washed away by the sweeper trucks. Hello from the cracks in the sidewalks of N.Y.C. and from the ants that dwell in these cracks and feed in the dried blood of the dead that has settled into the cracks.

  This lurid description of the city suggested that Son of Sam was a product of its decadence and decay, a social mutation born of its toxic muck.

  Not until August 10, more than a year after he’d first struck, was Son of Sam finally caught. He greeted his captors with a question: “What took you so long?” By then, another humiliating blow had been struck. On July 13, a lightning strike and a single loose locking nut at a power station thirty-five miles north of the city led to a citywide blackout. Lawlessness and rioting ensued. Gangs of youths brazenly backed up their cars to stores and filled them with stolen electronics. On one thirty-five-block section of a major avenue in Brooklyn, vandals looted 134 stores and set 45 ablaze. In total, 550 police officers were injured, 1,616 stores were looted, 1,037 fires broke out, and 3,776 people were arrested, the largest mass arrest in city history.

  This mayhem boosted the mayoral candidacy of a quirky congressman named Ed Koch who cast himself as a “liberal with sanity,” which, by New York City standards, made him the law and order candidate. As New Yorkers were in the mood for some law and order, Koch won.

  New York was coming dangerously close to its “last one to leave, turn off the lights” moment, but Koch appeared confident in his ability to right the ship and, like his contemporary President Reagan, was utterly unburdened by his responsibilities. When transit workers soon struck, Koch, unlike Lindsay, relished the fight. Walking across the Brooklyn Bridge in solidarity with commuters, he proclaimed, “We’re not going to let these bastards bring us to our knees!” He proudly declared, “I’m not the type to get ulcers. I give them.” He led with a marvelous sense of showmanship and chutzpah characterized by his trademark question, always delivered with a broad grin, “How’m I doing?”

  Koch reassured New Yorkers both with his self-confident leadership and love of his city at a time when many feared big cities were becoming relics of the past whose sole inhabitants would be an urban underclass unable to afford the nirvana of suburban life. When later in life he managed to acquire a hard-to-come-by Manhattan burial spot for himself, he commented, “I don’t want to leave Manhattan, even when I’m gone. This is my home.” Koch used his infectious love of his city to battle the despair that had enveloped it. He was a cheerleader in dark times like Churchill or Roosevelt, albeit on a smaller scale, and managed to stem the exodus by sheer force of personality.

  Koch also succeeded by acknowledging the plight of the city’s middle class. He knew there was a limit to what they would endure, to the number of crimes they would suffer and the amount of taxes they would pay before they decided that enough was enough and decamped for the suburbs. For that reason, generosity toward the city’s civil servants and its poorer inhabitants had to be balanced against the city’s need to honor its social contract to provide the city’s middle class with a measure of civility in exchange for carrying the city’s tax burden. Squeeze them too much, Koch understood, and you’d kill the goose that laid the golden egg.

  Like the broadcaster in the 1976 film Network, Koch let the city’s middle class know that it was all right to say, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore.” He also sought to reassure them that the city was moving in the right direction by focusing on immediately visible change. One of the more irksome aspects of city life was riding subways defaced with graffiti while being assaulted with loud music emanating from boom boxes. This public flouting of authority, Koch believed, made subways feel lawless and unsafe, a perception that became reality as law-abiding citizens retreated. Koch therefore cracked down on radio use, had the subway cars repainted, and, to deter further graffiti, surrounded the train yards with two fences covered with barbed wire and German shepherds roaming between them.

  Under Koch’s leadership, things began looking up. My family decided we’d try to return to the city. To accomplish this, my brother, Andre, would apply to college a year early and I’d try to get into my father’s alma mater, Stuyvesant. I studied endlessly for Stuyvesant’s notoriously difficult test, as it would determine not only where I’d go to school but where my family would live. Fortunately, I passed and Andre got into college early, so in the summer of 1979, we moved back to the city.

  When I went to Stuyvesant on September 11, 1979, for the first day of school, I was overwhelmed both by the number of students, three thousand in total, and how different they were from Granville’s. The girl who had the locker next to mine sported a Mohawk, a nose ring, a huge chain around her neck, and an electric guitar on her back. I tried to strike up a conversation by asking if she played in a band. “Yeah,” she said unenthusiastically. “What’s its name?” I asked. “Steaming Vomit,” she replied.

  But in time I came to appreciate my classmates, who were bright and ambitious and came from a variety of backgrounds. I befriended Sung-Hee Suh, a girl of Korean descent who would go on to become a federal prosecutor, and Karen Klein, who had a Japanese mother and a Jewish father who was editor of the New York Times Magazine.

  Some of Stuyvesant’s teachers were superb, including Elaine Grist, a wonderful and hardworking history teacher. Many, however, were disengaged or ill-prepared. My AP physics teacher sometimes showed up to class drunk and would simply put his head on his desk and sleep, so I ended up learning physics from the Russian émigré students in this class who for some reason seemed to know it all already. This was part of a broader dysfunction at the school that manifested itself in many ways. The girls’ bathroom stalls, for example, didn’t have doors, so girls used the bathrooms at a hospital across the street. One year we didn’t have enough basketballs, so we practiced by dribbling and shooting imaginary balls.

  In my junior year, I heard about an organization helping refugees from Cambodia’s civil war. I was particularly sympathetic to their plight since I remembered from my childhood how Nixon had bombed Cambodia. I decided to volunteer and was assigned a family that needed an apartment. I walked around the neighborhood in which this family wanted to live and called the numbers on For Rent signs I saw. Many of the landlords were wary of renting to refugees, but I argued that they shouldn’t discriminate since we were all descendants of immigrants. I succeeded in convincing one landlord and when I returned to share the good news, every member of the family I was helping hugged me. I found it exhilarating that I’d been able to make a difference in their lives. Word soon got around that I was quite diligent and families began showing up asking in broken English for “Eva.”

  Then a family that I’d helped find an apartment in Sunset Park asked me to help them find a school as well. I knew from my experience at PS 36 that schools varied in quality, so I wanted to be sure I found them a good one. I wandered around Sunset Park until I found a school and went to the main office. I was ignored for a long time, and when a woman finally acknowledged my presence, she was quite unfriendly and couldn’t tell me anything about the school, which seemed like a bad sign. I kept on walking and I found another school in an
adjacent neighborhood where I’d looked at apartments but found they were too expensive. This time around, the person with whom I spoke was far friendlier and was able to tell me about the school, which sounded good. She also told me, however, that only children zoned for the school could go to it. I asked her what she thought of the school for which my Cambodian family was zoned and she said: “If you love your child, you wouldn’t send him to that school.” I visited more schools and noticed that the best ones were invariably in neighborhoods where I’d determined my Cambodian families couldn’t afford to live. It struck me as terribly wrong that the quality of the education their children would receive would be determined by the apartment they could afford to rent.

  In my senior year, I decided to work on Stuyvesant’s yearbook and I threw myself into the process with a particular sense of mission. I wanted the yearbook to reflect the unique spirit and character of our school and express our class’s collective experience as students. When we took our faculty pictures, we encouraged them to vamp for the cameras. One posed with the bicycle he rode to work; another held up a sign with a number on it as if he were a convict; a third, who taught history, held a globe. And rather than focusing myopically on what had happened within the walls of our school, we aimed to acknowledge the impact of external events on our experience.

  We laid out a section combining pictures linking these two worlds: pictures of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant and students wearing No Nukes T-shirts; of the historic King Tut and Picasso shows and of students painting; of the launching of the space shuttle and of students studying science; of John Lennon, who’d been murdered, and of students playing music; of Prince Charles and Lady Di marrying and of students kissing. Other sections had collections of wonderful color photos of students captured in a variety of activities and were accompanied by essays about our time together and quotes from authors ranging from Dr. Seuss to Sartre to the Doors.