The Education of Eva Moskowitz Read online

  I’d also need to campaign hard, so I began a punishing schedule of street campaigning, fund-raising, and house parties. In the middle of all this, my husband, Eric, suggested I visit a school in Queens that a client of his was funding. Eric was a business lawyer who also did a lot of work, mainly pro bono, for charter schools, which are public schools that are run by an independent board. Eric had been a founding board member of one of the city’s first charter schools and then had gone on to found another charter school by the name of Girls Prep with a friend of his, Bryan Lawrence. Then, to help spur the creation of more charter schools, Bryan and Eric had held an event for aspiring charter school founders to meet potential donors. They’d gotten help from Whitney Tilson, a hedge fund manager and education reform blogger with a severe case of graphomania and an email distribution list the size of the phone book, and Boykin Curry, a friend of Bryan’s who was rich, brainy, ceaselessly gregarious, and owned an apartment with a massive terrace overlooking Central Park that was perfect for such events. More than a hundred people showed up, among them an investor named John Petry.

  Petry later asked Eric to help him apply for a charter for a school that would use a reading program called Success for All in which students were evaluated every eight weeks and assigned to small groups with other students who were at the same reading level. Petry’s partner, Joel Greenblatt, really liked this program because, like the investing system he was famous for creating, it was simple, practical, and effective. Greenblatt had therefore contributed $2 million to expand the use of this program at PS 65 in Queens. Eric had visited the school and been impressed by it, so he suggested I do likewise. I did and was equally impressed.

  Petry was also in the middle of founding an organization called Democrats for Education Reform to encourage Democratic politicians to support charter schools and other education reform efforts. His comrades in this endeavor were Tilson, Curry, and Charlie Ledley, an investor who has since been immortalized in the film The Big Short for turning $100,000 into $120 million by betting against subprime mortgages. Their first event took place on June 3, at Curry’s apartment, which was quickly becoming the unofficial headquarters of New York’s education reform movement. So many people came that Curry had to commandeer a bar downstairs for the overflow crowd to hear the featured speaker, a junior senator by the name of Barack Obama.

  As the borough president race entered the homestretch, I campaigned harder and harder, from 6 a.m. until 10 p.m. most days, including several events per evening. We also began mailing our campaign literature. I wanted it to convey my relentless devotion to solving constituents’ problems, and my advisors came up with the slogan: “Don’t get mad, get Eva.” But I knew it would all come down to the Times endorsement and on August 28, 2005, they announced their pick. I was “smart and driven,” they said, but “abrasive.” They preferred Stringer, whom they said had “a sterling reputation as a catalyst for reform.”

  I cried when I read the endorsement. I felt defeated not just personally but in all that I had worked for civically and educationally. I had tried so hard to be a model public servant: to be ethical and independent, to be principled, to vote my conscience, to tackle issues that really mattered. I’d known this would put me at odds with the political machine and the unions, but I’d hoped I’d at least have the papers in my corner. Instead, the Times had gone with the machine candidate.

  I refused to give up. I doubled down, as did all of the people who believed in what our campaign was about: Eric, my parents, and our campaign’s band of idealistic staffers and volunteers. We worked like maniacs, making tens of thousands of phone calls, campaigning on the street, leaving no stone unturned.

  A few days later, just as we were feeling that maybe we could win after all, a mailing went out to voters that pictured a mother with her child saying: “It’s hard enough for families like us to get by. And Eva Moskowitz is just making it harder.” More negative mailings followed, including one attacking my vote against the building maintenance workers’ law. These mailings were sent out by the Working Families Party (WFP), which received $171,000 from the UFT in the two months before election day.

  By not counting these expenditures, Stringer was circumventing the limitation on campaign expenditures to which we were both subject. They were also improper because one political party, the WFP, was trying to influence the primary of another party. The Democratic Party’s lawyer asked, “What are these guys doing getting involved in our primary race?” He added, however, “It’s not this particular race we’re interested in.”4 Translation: we hate Eva Moskowitz just as much as the WFP, but it’s the principle of the thing!

  It was upsetting to see myself being relentlessly vilified, but what bothered me even more was that the Times had enabled Stringer to boast of being a “catalyst for reform” while he was doing an end run around the campaign finance laws. I asked the Times to withdraw its endorsement but they refused, so I was now up against the Democratic machine, the unions, the WFP, and the Times. We fought on, but I knew in my heart our efforts were doomed. On Election Day, Stringer bested us by 9 percentage points.

  Bizarrely, a few weeks later, a Times editorial called Stringer’s abuse of the campaign finance program “pure hypocrisy” and said that if he “wants to make a name for himself as a reformer, he should stand up to fake parties like the one accused of helping him unfairly in his own party primary.” But when voters had gone to the polls, the Times had told them Stringer had a “sterling reputation” for “reform.” Talk about closing the barn door after the horse has bolted.

  During the campaign, the UFT had kept quiet about its efforts to defeat me but UFT president Randi Weingarten now publicly boasted that she’d done “everything in [her] personal power, fought day and night” to help Stringer win.5 Her boasts were effective—from that point on, according to Chancellor Klein, elected officials whom he asked to support his reform efforts would respond, “I agree with you, but I ain’t gonna get Eva’d.”6

  Moreover, the next chair of the Education Committee would undoubtedly be in league with the UFT. With me gone, one Post columnist asked, “who will be left to ask the questions she’s been asking—to spot the accountability-dodging and blame-shifting and simple incompetence that defined the fights over education policy in New York City?”

  A month after my defeat, the UFT signed a new contract with the city. While it contained a few modest reforms, such as expediting the firing of teachers who’d engaged in sexual abuse, it preserved the “handcuffs” of “lockstep pay, seniority, and life tenure” that both Klein and I believed were profoundly harmful to the public school system.

  For a while, I’d felt like I was having a real impact on politics and public education in New York City, but now it had all come to a crashing halt: I was out, the UFT candidate was in, and the UFT had gotten a new contract with virtually none of the reforms for which I’d advocated. It felt like all of my hard work had been for nothing.

  There was, however, one last important service I could render to the city before leaving office: endorsing Bloomberg for reelection. While I was disappointed that he hadn’t taken a firm line on the UFT contract, I nonetheless believed he was by far the best candidate. We arranged a joint press conference at which I praised Bloomberg for putting “educational reform front and center” and he said he was “thrilled to have [my] endorsement.” When it ended, he kissed me on the cheek. It was strange given all the barbs he’d sent my way over the years, but we had developed a mutual respect. We both cared deeply about public policy, particularly education, and gave as good as we got when fighting for what we believed in. In covering my endorsement, the Times noted that I was “widely regarded as the Council’s most outspoken advocate for education reform” and that “when a reporter pointed out . . . that [I] had engaged in ‘spats’ with the mayor over school policies, [I] responded that ‘spat might not be strong enough’ a term.” I hoped this meant the endorsement would carry weight.

  Bloomberg won t
he election and I took comfort in knowing that, as I exited stage left, he’d continue to fight the good fight. I began thinking about what I should do next. While I hoped that I might serve the city as an elected official again someday, I felt it was important to get out of politics for a while, to do something else.

  But what?

  3

  CHAIM’S CHILDREN

  1896–1957

  My grandfather Chaim Fiderer-Margolis was born in a tiny Polish village named Tluste, where he lived till his family sent him to Vienna at age thirteen in search of used clothing they might resell. He stayed, became a sweater maker, and married a woman who bore him a daughter named Sonia. When that marriage ended in divorce, my grandfather married Sascha Just who, on October 14, 1937, bore him another daughter, my mother, Anita.

  During the following years, Germany annexed Austria. “The Hitler Youth spared no effort in molesting me,” my grandfather later wrote, “[so] I slept in a different place each night [and] during the daylight hours rode on the trolley cars.” Chaim made a vow that if he survived, he would “tell the world of the pain suffered by the Jewish victims,” by publishing an account he was keeping in the form of Yiddish poetry. He wrote:

  We don’t have the visas that the law decrees.

  Our road forward is blocked, in vain are our pleas.

  So, forsaken and woeful, we languish in prison.

  The sentence is harsh; Nazi persecution relentless.

  At this time, the future war criminal Adolf Eichmann opened the Central Office for Jewish Emigration, which a contemporaneous observer described as being like “an automatic factory”: “you put in a Jew who still has some property, a factory, or a shop, or a bank account” who goes “from counter to counter” and “comes out at the other end without any money, without any rights, with only a passport on which it says: ‘You must leave the country within a fortnight. Otherwise you will go to a concentration camp.’”7 But ironically, however rapacious Eichmann’s intent, his Nazi efficiency enabled my grandfather to finally obtain a travel permit which my mother’s family used to emigrate to Switzerland in the summer of 1938. There, they stayed in a refugee camp for several years while seeking permission to immigrate to America.

  In 1941, they finally got such permission and, on August 6, they boarded the SS Navemar, a boat chartered by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. It had begun its voyage in Seville ten days earlier and by the time it reached Lisbon, where my mother’s family boarded, thirty-six passengers had contracted typhoid fever and two had died of it. The ventilation was so poor on the Navemar, a former cargo ship that had been outfitted with bunks, that most of the passengers had taken to sleeping on deck in the open air.

  As the Navemar crossed the wide expanse of the Atlantic, conditions worsened. Fresh water was in such short supply that it was rationed and passengers had to bathe with ocean water. Fearing that the food was contaminated, my grandmother didn’t let my mother eat much, which proved prescient as it was later discovered that one of the ship’s food servers was a typhus carrier. My grandfather wrote:

  Filth in every corner,

  germs thrive everywhere.

  Seven die, are thrown overboard

  into the briny deep.

  The Navemar sails on

  with its cargo of evicted Jews

  who hope to reach America

  to have freedom and peace at last.

  On September 12, the Navemar finally reached New York Harbor where it was inspected by a team of doctors and sanitary inspectors led by Medical Director H. F. White, who wrote that he’d “never observed a vessel arrive under conditions so insanitary and so fraught with potential danger.” Had it been necessary to batten down the boat’s hatches due to bad weather, he observed, many passengers would have suffocated due to inadequate ventilation; had the boat sunk, most of its lifeboats could not have been launched.

  But fortunately, neither event had transpired and when my mother’s family stepped off the Navemar, they were confronted with a skyline like none other. New York City could boast of not only the world’s tallest building, the Empire State Building, but also an astonishing thirty-one skyscrapers that had been completed that same year. Although my mother was just three years old, she vividly recalls standing with her family at the bustling wharf, surrounded by all of their worldly belongings, as her father cried out the last name of the relative who was supposed to meet them: “Feederer . . . ! Feeee-der-er!” Eventually, his sister Minna appeared and took them to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.

  While New York was a foreign land, it was also a city of immigrants just like my mother’s family: Irish who’d fled the great potato famine, Italians who’d fled poverty, Armenians who’d fled genocide, and Jews who’d fled pogroms and now Nazis. Two million of the city’s residents were of Jewish heritage including the city’s mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, who, like my grandparents, spoke German and Yiddish.

  After living briefly on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, my mother’s family moved to Washington Heights where my mother remembers playing in the playground and riding on a pony in Fort Tryon Park. Around this time, in July 1943, my grandmother went to a doctor because she’d noticed she was losing weight. My grandfather recorded what followed:

  On this beautiful summer’s day, Sascha came back home, sent Anita out to play, and with a restrained but tearful voice said: “Mo, I have a tumor in my stomach.”

  On August 29, I told Anita she has to go to a home since Mama has to go to a hospital. She asked, “How long will I stay there?” I said “Only for two weeks.” She took this at face value. “Alright, I will go to the children’s home so I will have a healthy mommy.”

  [After an operation] Dr. Steinhardt told me: “Herr Fiderer. We took out two tumors and both ovaries. We could not remove anything on the bladder because without a bladder one cannot live. We will try to treat her with radiology.” I asked: “Frau Doctor. Does my wife have cancer?” She answered, “Yes, Herr Fiderer. We have done everything possible. You have to pray to God. God can still help.”

  Sascha opened her eyes and asked, “what did they do to me?” I told her that both tumors had been removed and now she will get better. She took my hand and kissed it.

  On this tragic evening, I went home full of despair. I was not prepared for this blow of destiny.

  September 5. For the first time since Anita was in the home, I visited her. She asked, “Papa, how long is two weeks? You told me I will go home in two weeks.” She sent for Mommy a thousand kisses.

  December 5, 1943. Dr. Steinhardt reported “Unfortunately, the radiology was not effective.”

  January 25, 1944. When I visited Sascha today, she surprised me with a fountain pen and sang Happy Birthday to me. The urge to live is so great. All the doctors gave up on her, but Sascha hasn’t. She wants to live in spite of weighing 76 lbs. down from 137 lbs.

  February 8. [Sascha] urged me to take her home as she couldn’t stand the hospital any longer. That evening I packed Sascha’s clothes. Two Saschas could fit in these clothes, I thought.

  March 26. Eight months ago, how blooming she looked, full of hope, animated. The newly furnished home, every corner clean, the child nicely dressed, and she only thought for the well-being of the family. The dear child with strange people. When I call her, her first question is, “How is Mommy? Every day I ask God that Mommy shall be healthy.” Oh Destiny, how merciless you are.

  A month later, Sascha died. My grandfather wrote:

  The earth covers only the body;

  It can never cover what is deep in one’s heart.

  The well of tears will someday dry up

  But nothing can heal the pain in my soul.

  Since it was unthinkable in those days for a man to raise a daughter alone, my grandfather took a third wife, Henriette Strassman. My grandfather had quit a job he’d held at a clothes factory and gone into business for himself, making sweaters that he’d sell at the Essex Street Market, an indoor market created by M
ayor La Guardia to replace the pushcarts that had previously clogged the streets of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. My mother contributed by manning my grandfather’s stall on weekends and sewing buttons on sweaters, earning a penny a button. As my grandfather’s earnings were meager, Henriette took a job as a bookkeeper at a local Singer sewing machine store.

  My mother, nicknamed Rusty because of her red hair, attended both public school and Hebrew school and spent her summers at Ein Harod, a Zionist camp that prepared children to immigrate to Palestine by teaching them how to set up tents and make wood fires. She went on to attend Music and Art High School and then studied art at Cooper Union, a free college from which she graduated in 1957.

  After graduating, my mother worked as a waitress at a resort in the Catskills, an area in upstate New York that was so popular with Jews it was dubbed the “borscht belt” after the beet soup that is popular with European Jews. Uncertain what to do with her life and hearing that a classmate had applied to the University of California, Berkeley, my mother decided to do the same and was accepted.

  4

  THE ULTIMATE CHARTER SCHOOL BAKE-OFF

  2005–2006

  Shortly after losing the borough president race, I received two job offers: running the charter school that Joel Greenblatt and John Petry were starting and leading a DOE teacher training program for which Chancellor Klein had raised $20 million. While Klein’s offer was appealing because it would have a broad impact on the public school system, it would be run out of the City University of New York, and it soon became clear they had me pegged for the role of figurehead in chief. They wanted to bolster their budget by using Klein’s money to pay the staff they already employed to teach the courses they already taught.