The Battle for New York Schools: Eva Moskowitz vs. Mayor Bill de Blasio
One afternoon this summer, Eva Moskowitz, who runs Success Academy Charter Schools, showed me her senior yearbook. “I was the editor,” she said. We sat in a half-furnished office at the construction site of her charter network’s first high school. A buzz saw shrieked in the background. She graduated in 1982 from Stuyvesant, the most selective of New York City’s public high schools. “I got completely engaged in how to take this sentimental book and make it a much bigger project.” She fought to publish photographs capturing the political protests of that time — against nuclear weapons, against American aid to the government in El Salvador. To go with the pictures, she wrote a manifesto, concluding: “We do not live in a vacuum.”
“It took will,” she said about her yearbook triumph, in a tone that was only somewhat self-mocking. Moskowitz recalled, as well, Stuyvesant’s intractable failings. With an outrage that seemed barely abated by time, she described an alcoholic physics teacher who dozed through class, ceding instruction to an especially talented student, and endemic cheating on exams, caught by the cameras of her yearbook staff. “I thought it was my moral duty to show” the evidence “to the administration,” she said. “They were very adamant that they would investigate. They didn’t.”
At 50, Moskowitz is petite and favors tailored suits and spiked heels. She founded her first Success Academy, a kindergarten and first grade in Harlem, in 2006 and has swiftly created the largest charter group in the city. It stretches from the South Bronx to Bedford-Stuyvesant, with nearly 9,500 students in 24 elementary schools, seven middle schools and the new high school, which opened in late August. Most students are black and Latino and poor enough to qualify for federally subsidized lunch — the kinds of children the city’s regular public-school system seems all but incapable of educating. Fewer than one-fifth of black students in the city can read or do math at grade level, to take just one grim statistic.
Stepping out of the high-school office, we stood on the freshly laid linoleum in a common area. The tiles, picked by Moskowitz, have a grassy motif. In her eyes, the painted lawn hints at a college quad. There, as she envisions it, her students will soon be lingering to chat about “Hamlet” and “King Lear.”
The granddaughter of a public-school typing instructor and the daughter of two university professors, Moskowitz grew up and lives in Harlem. Early on she was drawn to teaching — she recounted lecturing her stuffed animals on geography. After Stuyvesant, she went to the University of Pennsylvania and then earned a Ph.D. in history from Johns Hopkins. By 1997 she was teaching at Prep for Prep, a program in New York City for gifted minority students. She assigned her 11th graders to document the disparities between the city’s cleaning of parks on the wealthy Upper East Side and its non-upkeep of a park in the Harlem neighborhood where some of them lived. She told the students to take photos and complain to the sanitation and parks departments. “We created a little bit of a ruckus,” she said. “I think Prep for Prep was nervous about it. I was asked why I couldn’t just do simulations.” The park, she continued, got a cleaning.
During that period, Moskowitz grew consumed with the dismal performance of the city’s vast Department of Education, which is responsible for schooling 1.1 million children — and with the union-guarded contracts that continue to make it nearly impossible to fire teachers for incompetence or give raises for merit. “I remember reading,” she told me, turning to the protections for administrators, “that a principal had to demonstrate ‘persistent educational failure’ to be in jeopardy of losing his job. I remember thinking, that’s crazy! Persistent. Like a driver would have to persistently kill people before being taken off the road!”
Moskowitz’s zeal persists to this day. My first exposure to her was at an The Battle for New York Schools: Eva Moskowitz vs. Mayor Bill de Blasio - NYTimes.com: