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Miller, L. (2017, December 08). She Breaks Rules While Expecting Students to Follow Them. Retrieved January 30, 2018, from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/08/books/review/education-of-eva-moskowitz-memoir.html

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THE EDUCATION OF EVA MOSKOWITZ
A Memoir
By Eva Moskowitz
381 pp. Harper/ HarperCollins Publishers. $27.99.

How would Eva Moskowitz have fared as an impudent young girl in one of her own charter schools? This is just one of the many unplumbed questions prompted by her new memoir. Founder of the extensive Success Academy charter-school chain, former New York City councilwoman, mother of three, Moskowitz has famously made a virtue - one might even say a brand - of her defiance. New York City's public-school system has been her proving ground, and she has devoted herself to reforming what she sees as its bureaucratic idiocies and its codified inefficiencies, refusing to submit to any authority that she deems insufficiently worthy (except in those instances it serves her to do so). She is the woman who took a call from Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg during her nephew's bar mitzvah to threaten him with a negative press campaign. As a child, she was so outraged at a teacher who accused her of lying - and who also, she takes care to note, consumed milk and cookies at her desk - that she handed the teacher a note, written by her father, that said, "Ms. ____, screw you."

The note was never intended for delivery, but no matter. Such an impulsive display of hostility would not, presumably, be tolerated at any of her Success Academy schools, where discipline and conformity are values of the highest order. Children, called "scholars," are expected to understand that "following the rules is a condition of being in school." Every teacher is required to follow Success's pedagogical formula and "not create chaos by marching to the beat of her own drum." And yet this double standard - in which Moskowitz celebrates her own feisty disobedience while attributing the success of the students in her schools to their dutiful compliance - is never explored, leaving a reader to puzzle over whether Moskowitz has noticed it at all. The question of who in this tinderbox of a society is valued for their anti-authoritarian moxie and who for their obeisance is difficult, and charged, but it is one that the founder of a chain of 46 schools, which educate mostly poor children of color, might be expected to consider.

"The Education of Eva Moskowitz" advertises itself as memoir, but it does not deliver on what memoirs promise, which is to say, self-revelation. Indeed, it hardly offers any kind of revelation at all. This is a shame, because the super-politicized world of education policy could use a sympathetic interpreter right now. Are charter schools the ultimate evil or the optimal solution? Do teachers' unions protect kids or preserve entitlements? Are standardized tests useful, or are they racist, classist and corrosive to morale? There are no right (or single) answers to these questions, but a smart memoir from a passionate and iconoclastic advocate for children might serve as one insightful guide through the morass.

Moskowitz is not the person for this job. Her instinct is to be adamant (and the inverse, thin-skinned). She is adamantly in favor of standardized tests. She is adamantly against teachers' unions. She believes that a recent movement toward "community schools," in which poor kids can get medical, nutritional and other services at school, is "nonsense," and she rebuts the whole concept with an example of a Success student who was "hospitalized with a stroke but able to do her homework."

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the education of eva moskowitz: a memoir (book)

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She Breaks Rules While Expecting Students to Follow Them

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THE EDUCATION OF EVA MOSKOWITZ A Memoir By Eva Moskowitz 381 pp. Harper/ HarperCollins Publishers. $27.99. How would Eva Moskowitz have fared as an impudent young girl in one of her own charter schools? This is just one of the many unplumbed questions prompted by her new memoir.

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"Eva Moskowitz founded Success Academy Charter Schools in 2006. Eva’s experience as a teacher, college professor, elected official, Chair of the New York City Council’s Education Committee and public school parent make her uniquely qualified to effectively lead the organization in establishing high-performing schools and pioneering for educational excellence. She holds a bachelor’s degree from University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. in American history from Johns Hopkins University."

About. (n.d.). Retrieved January 30, 2018, from https://www.successacademies.org/about/

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Green, E. (2017, December 08). The Charter-School Crusader. Retrieved January 30, 2018, from https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/01/success-academy-charter-schools-eva-moskowitz/546554/

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The combative Eva Moskowitz has created the nation's most impressive school system-and made lots of enemies in the process.

Nuria Riaza Rovira

In the spring of 2007, I moved to New York City to cover what I was sure was the most important story in the country. One of those annoying people who had settled on a career before I knew how to drive, I was a young and enthusiastic reporter on the education beat. In New York, I could cover the biggest education revolution ever attempted: a total overhaul of the way public schools worked, in the country's largest school system.

The drivers of this transformation were the city's billionaire mayor, Michael Bloomberg, and his handpicked schools chancellor, Joel Klein, a prosecutor who had previously taken on Microsoft and had now set his sights on toppling his hometown's education status quo. "BloomKlein," as their enemies called them, radiated a crusading moral confidence. Both liked to say that their work, begun in 2003, was the next phase of the civil-rights movement. And they wielded unprecedented authority to actually follow through on their enlightened mission to tackle inequities and eradicate dysfunction; in 2002, state lawmakers had dissolved New York City's elected school board and handed total control to the mayor. Supporters and opponents alike shared the BloomKlein conviction that their "disruptions" would soon spread to cities all across the country.

A decade later, I can say that I did indeed land in New York City just as a sweeping remake of public education got under way not only for New Yorkers but for families all across America. Except I got the architects of the transformation wrong. Bloomberg and Klein played their part, but the real revolutionary was another person I met early on in my reporting: a 5-foot-2-inch redhead from Harlem named Eva Moskowitz.

It was June 2007, and I was following the mayor around as he took a victory lap celebrating record-high test scores. "Who's excited about summer?," Bloomberg asked a group of 5-, 6-, and 7-year-olds seated in front of him at their new Harlem elementary school, which had opened the previous August. He ticked off the fun things they might do once school let out, like go to the pool. The school's principal, Eva Moskowitz, spoke next. She didn't "want to contradict the mayor," she said solemnly, "but there's going to be some swimming, but there's also going to be some reading." Later, the mom of a kindergartner told me just how serious the principal was. To keep up with the school's reading requirements, she and her son regularly hauled 50 books home from the library. What were you doing in kindergarten?

I had visited impressive schools before, but none quite like this one. The kids, who congregated in a corner of a large public-school building on West 118th Street, were a sight with their orange-and-blue uniforms and blue backpacks. But the person who made the biggest impression was Moskowitz herself. She stalked the school corridors more like a rear admiral than a pedagogue, rattling off to whomever would listen the obstacles she was up against: union rules governing sink repair, school bells ringing on a cryptic schedule, doors requiring custom fixes. She was either paranoid or plagued, probably some of both. Feeling under siege, she could either defend or attack. She picked the Napoleon option.

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Like other charter schools-which operate independently of a school district's control but are still publicly regulated and funded-Harlem Success Academy, as the school had been named, was starting up slowly, serving 165 kindergartners and first-graders in its inaugural year. But already Moskowitz had set herself apart. While other charter-school leaders ran only a handful of schools in a given state, she planned to open 40 more schools like this one. All in New York City, and all in a single decade.

I underlined the number in my reporter's notebook. By some measures, 40 wasn't unprecedented. The country's best-known charter network, kipp, had grown to 46 schools by 2006. It was part of an expansion funded by the founders of the Gap, Doris and Don Fisher, after the charter movement took off in the 1990s. But kipp schools were spread across 15 states, with just a few schools per city. New York City had four. Like the Gap, which had made its name targeting young people, the point was to serve not an entire market, but a niche-in kipp's case, the poorest students.

kipp and other charter-school operators had a pragmatic take on how big school networks could or should get. As of 2006, laws in 25 states and Washington, D.C., limited the number of new charters that could open; 10 states did not have charters at all. And while the idea was to improve on traditional public schools, the first comprehensive report on outcomes revealed that many charter schools performed no better, and sometimes worse, than comparable district schools. Serving just 1 percent of all New York City students and about 2.5 percent of students nationwide, charter schools were, at best, "a proof point," as one kipp board member put it: not a new model to follow, but experiments to inspire, and goad, the government-run public-school system.

Forty Success Academy schools in a single city in a decade, on the other hand-that was two-thirds the number of charter schools in all of New York City at that point. What Moskowitz had in mind was not a proof point but a blueprint, not a Gap but a kind of educational superstore. A whole new school system, run by her instead of the government. "Hopefully this will be the first prototype," the chair of Harlem Success Academy's board told me that day in 2007. "This is meant to be replicable." I tried to picture 15,000 students across New York City, all carrying matching blue backpacks. Moskowitz couldn't have stunned me more had she said that she intended to one day run for mayor (a goal she announced a few months later). Her charter plan was audacious, but it probably wouldn't happen.

It happened, and then some. One school became 46. One hundred sixty-five students became 15,500. A tiny outpost in Harlem spawned brethren all across Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens; Harlem Success Academy is now part of the Success Academy Charter Schools network, of which Moskowitz-the author of a lively new memoir, The Education of Eva Moskowitz -is CEO. From that position, she has become one of the country's most influential crusaders at a turning point for charter schooling.

Empire has not killed quality. On the contrary, students at Success-where intensive test prep in math and reading goes hand in hand with a strong emphasis on science, art, and chess-regularly trounce their peers all across New York on state tests. Unlike other high-scoring charter schools, such as kipp, Success saw no dip in performance after the state adopted the tougher Common Core academic standards. The stellar scores helped Moskowitz open more schools, faster, than any other charter-school leader in New York.

In her march forward, Moskowitz has added considerably to the ranks of her foes. Teachers who oppose charter schools carry signs denouncing evil moskowitz. In 2013, Mayor Bill de Blasio campaigned on an education platform of ending Moskowitz's "run of the place." Even many supporters hold Moskowitz at what can generously be called a careful distance, and I get it. Her acid tirades are legendary and can get scathingly personal more quickly than I might have believed had she not once dressed me down after I wrote a story she didn't like.

Harper

The Education of Eva Moskowitz is plainly positioned to soften and humanize, yet even here, she often swerves into score-settling eviscerations of her perceived enemies. She devotes two chapters to decrying the media, in particular a New York Times reporter's coverage of Success's disciplinary practices; Moskowitz accuses her of a biased "abuse" of journalistic privilege. Lazy, meanwhile, is a tag she affixes to students and bureaucrats alike. She has no patience for critics who question Success's high-stress test prep (as some of her own teachers do). Nor can she resist deriding fellow charter-school leaders as "political pacifists."

Personally, I draw the line at evil, but Moskowitz is undeniably scary. Cross her, and you've also crossed her students, her schools, and justice itself. Entrusting a person who has such an exceptional capacity for venom with the care of children can seem unwise. Which is just one reason I am more than a little terrified by the conclusion I've reached: Moskowitz has created the most impressive education system I've ever seen. And as she announces in her memoir, 46 schools is just the beginning. "We need to reach more students," she writes.

How big should Success get? She doesn't specify, but says that "maybe a public school system consisting principally of charter schools would be an improvement." A proud product of public schools herself, Moskowitz did not reach this conclusion lightly. Imagining the end of public education as we know it-or at least its significant diminution-at first felt "almost disloyal," she writes. But that was before she lost faith in schools run by the government. In her memoir she describes how she finally decided against a mayoral run-swayed not by a lack of ambition but by a surplus of it. The point is worth pausing over: Moskowitz has realized that she can do more to change public schools as a private citizen than as mayor-by operating outside of democracy rather than within it. I agree with her, and that unsettles me.

Moskowitz came by her disillusion firsthand. In 1999, then in her 30s, she ran for New York's city council, spurred in part by a desire to improve the city's schools. She'd lived through hapless management (in high school, she never used the bathroom, because the stalls had no doors) and wildly uneven teaching quality (one teacher at her high school slept through class drunk, she reports). She won the race and, investigating what held back the schools, found a chief culprit: constrictive union contracts fortified by labor's monopoly over local politics. She set out to use her city-council seat to publicize the unions' power and create living proof of an elected official who flouted the unions and lived to tell the tale.

In a dramatic series of hearings she held in 2003, one set of witnesses described the rules governing how school custodians were paid-not according to how well they maintained the building, but according to how little of the school's custodial budget they spent doing so. Leftover funds became bonuses, arguably disincentivizing the provision of, say, doors on bathroom stalls. "As political theater, it doesn't get much more dramatic than this," the New York Observer wrote.

As actual politics, Moskowitz's attempt to prove that a politician could survive taking on organized labor backfired. In 2005, she lost a close race for the next rung of office, Manhattan borough president. In the months that followed, Joel Klein approached elected officials for support of his reforms, which had also earned the ire of the teachers' union. Over and over, he received the same rueful rebuff: "I agree with you, but I ain't gonna get Eva'd." When the time came to negotiate a new contract with the teachers, just before Bloomberg's 2005 reelection campaign, even the mayor-seemingly protected from politics as usual by his personal fortune-succumbed to union pressure, according to Moskowitz and others. Klein ended up having to accept a contract he didn't like. By then, plans for Moskowitz's first charter school were under way. She was ready to test the viability of working outside the government.

I became disillusioned with the status quo too-but later, and with more trepidation. At the news organization I co-founded in 2008, now called Chalkbeat, reporters began covering reformers whose aggressive plans to close district schools and replace them with charters seemed to inflame the very parents whom the reformers said they aimed to serve. And the district-hating almost always came with a thuggish brand of teacher-bashing. I knew bad teachers existed, and I knew many of them were unfairly protected. But the idea that merely pruning the bad apples would save schools was unsupported by evidence or reason. Fire the rotten 10 percent, and who exactly did these reformers think would fill out a 3.8-million-person workforce? Vilifying teachers and their unions was surely counterproductive because it alienated the same overloaded foot soldiers who would ultimately be responsible for turning around poor-performing schools.

I also knew that we Americans have good reasons for subjecting our public schools to the direction of elected government. We like democracy, especially when it gives us a say in what and how our children are taught. Unwieldy though school districts may be when they're run by a school board or a mayor-and guided by the dictates of governors, state lawmakers, Congress, and the president-they give citizens a chance to weigh in. They are without a doubt public.

And yet, as I began work in 2010 on a book about teaching, I started to see why blowing up school districts might not be as crazy an idea as I initially thought. What struck me most is how impossible teaching is, especially in traditional public schools. While those who pursue the profession in other countries are provided with the infrastructure crucial to educating kids effectively-a clear sense of what students need to learn, the basic materials necessary to help them learn it (such as a curriculum), and a decent training system-teachers in the U.S. are left stranded.

The reason isn't terrible union contracts or awful management decisions. The fault, I came to see, lies in the (often competing) edicts issued by municipal, state, and federal authorities, which add up to chaos for the teachers who actually have to implement them. It's not uncommon for a teacher to start the year focused on one goal-say, improving students' writing-only to be told mid-year that writing is no longer a priority, as happened just the other day at a Boston school I know of. We could hardly have designed a worse system for supporting good teaching had we tried.

Of all the reforms that have set out to free schools from this trap, to date I've seen only one that works: the implementation of charter-school networks. Large enough to provide shared resources for teachers, yet insulated from bureaucratic and political crosscurrents by their independent status, these networks are creating the closest thing our country has ever seen to a rational, high-functioning school system. They have strengthened public education by extracting it from democracy as we know it-and we shouldn't be surprised, because democracy as we know it is the problem.

The network approach is gaining traction. Although charter schools are still boutique side offerings in most parts of the country, a growing number of cities have turned them into a centerpiece, which makes The Education of Eva Moskowitz especially timely and important reading. (Last November, the president-elect paraded Moskowitz into Trump Tower during his auditions for secretary of education; after she took herself out of the running, he selected Betsy DeVos.) Today, charter schools educate 94 percent of students in one city, New Orleans, and more than 30 percent of students in 19 other cities. If a determined group of philanthropists have their way, charters will take a leading role in more cities soon. Many of these schools are part of ambitious and fast-growing networks like Success.

In New York City, for instance, nearly 2 percent of all public-school students currently attend Success Academies, a percentage bound to climb. When I spoke with her recently, Moskowitz told me that she expects her network to expand to 100 schools in the next decade. That means Success would serve more than 50,000 students, making the network roughly the same size as Syracuse's and Buffalo's school districts combined. In Denver, meanwhile, a charter-school network called DSST Public Schools-which, like Success, has regularly posted academic results well above average public-school scores-will educate nearly a quarter of all middle- and high-school students in the city in the next decade. In New Orleans, four large charter networks together enroll one-third of all students who attend public school.

If the trend continues, parents across the income spectrum won't face a tapestry of alternatives to the mainstream school district, each one with its own name and unique approach. Instead, they will get to choose from a handful of charter-school networks that are likely to make the original district-the one governed by an elected school board or the mayor, depending on the city-more peripheral.

Bloomsbury

Another new book, Reinventing America's Schools, by David Osborne of the Progressive Policy Institute, describes the spread of charter schools as the shedding of an antiquated bureaucratic skin. He uses a nautical metaphor to illustrate the distinctive way charter schools work. At traditional public schools, the various layers of government are responsible for both steering and rowing. They steer by supplying funding and deciding what schools should broadly aim for: what kids should learn, and by when. The government also rows, hiring the bureaucrats and superintendents and teachers charged with meeting those goals. In the charter-school model, government responsibility ends at steering-providing funding, deciding which measures of success matter, and holding schools accountable for results. Choosing whom to hire (and fire), what to pay them, what else to spend money on, how to design curricula-all those decisions are contracted out to private, mostly nonprofit organizations. Those are in turn governed by boards usually-in the case of larger networks like Success-made up of wealthy donors.

Critics of charter schools, a large and vocal group, call this privatization, a word Moskowitz considers an inaccurate smear. True believers like Osborne, whose book and project at the Progressive Policy Institute are both sponsored by some of the same philanthropists promoting the Success model, call it "a 21st century system." Whatever you label it, the model differs from the public schools you grew up with in another big way: Kids aren't zoned into schools by neighborhood. Families enter a lottery system, applying to the school or schools they like best and seeing where their child gets in.

Almost everything you've heard that's great or terrible about charter schools flows from these two big changes. Because of the difference in governance, charter-school teachers are less likely to be represented by unions. Thus, depending on whom you talk to, charters are either union-busters or mercifully free from union strictures that put teachers before students. Disciplinary policies also reflect charter schools' monopoly on rowing. Traditional public schools must follow suspension and expulsion policies written by the school district; charter schools write their own rules, and many have a no-excuses style that mandates good posture, precisely folded arms and legs, and silent hallways-injunctions some hail as essential to a strong school culture and others skewer as paternalistic and inhumane.

The lottery innovation-also known as "school choice"-invites perhaps the most-polarized interpretations. A district can allow one of its schools to expel a student, but it still bears responsibility for making sure he is educated somewhere else. Similarly, a district has to educate every child in its purview, whether she started in kindergarten or arrived yesterday from Jamaica, and no matter how far behind she may be academically. Many charter schools, by contrast, admit students only during the once-a-year lottery, and sometimes only in certain grades. But while critics see the lottery approach as an abdication of responsibility, Moskowitz and Osborne champion it as a tool for social justice. Neighborhood schools, they argue, institutionalize housing segregation, making a child's zip code his educational destiny. Charter schools, by contrast, hand the power of choice to parents who can't afford to exercise it through real estate.

What do we lose if and when public education takes this new shape? Supporters of a charterized public-school system argue that we'll be giving up only on a fantasy, a "theoretical ideal," in Moskowitz's words. We like to think that our current public-school system is democratic. In reality, voter turnout for school-board elections-the main mechanism for holding schools accountable to local communities-averages between 5 and 10 percent. We dream that public schools serve all children equally well, whatever their background, race, or level of need. The reality is not even close. Many of the policies that charter schools get criticized for, moreover, are rampant in traditional public-school systems. School districts adopted "zero tolerance" discipline before charters embraced the no-excuses approach. School districts, not charters, were the original architects of a system that divides students by race, class, and special needs and abilities. And the zones that create the beloved institution of the neighborhood school are notoriously impermeable to integration.

In Moskowitz's view, a charter-school system isn't just the best available compromise. It's our best shot at delivering the public-school system we wish we had. Take integration: While a majority of Success schools serve homogenous populations (mostly black and Latino students, most of them poor or low-income), the network has opened a new crop of schools in neighborhoods like the Upper West Side and Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, that are more integrated than most traditional New York City public schools. DSST, the Denver charter-school network, also embraces integration as part of its mission, and even boasts one school with a 50-50 split between white students and students of color. As a tool for bridging divides without posing a direct threat to anyone's property values, charter schools hold real promise.

Moskowitz, meanwhile, has been advocating weighted lotteries that give preference to students from particular disadvantaged backgrounds, such as students whose first language isn't English. And in Denver and Washington, D.C., the dizzying, M. C. Escher-esque system of a different lottery for every individual charter school-so complicated that only the savviest families with plenty of time on their hands could be expected to successfully navigate it-has been replaced by a more accessible single lottery. Worries about a lack of democracy could similarly be quieted by giving locally elected leaders more oversight of charters, an approach that reformers have adopted in Indianapolis and will try in New Orleans next year.

I want to believe in such an evolution. It would be the best of all worlds if the most efficient way to run great schools was also the most equitable, accountable, and parent-friendly. But I worry that's hard to pull off. One problem is the lottery. Charter-school supporters say that nothing could be more liberating for parents than to grant them a direct say in which schools their children attend. But existing systems of parent choice compel a more skeptical view of the path to inclusion. A recent study of New York City's public-high-school system-in which students have applied to schools outside their neighborhood for years-found that parents seem to care less about the quality of the school than about the academic ability of the other students there. Left to their own choices, parents could very well resegregate schools as effectively as zip-code-based systems of assigning schools have done.

Another problem is incentives. As Moskowitz built Success, she enforced what she calls a "dual mission": first, to build schools "to which any parent would want to send their children," and second, to enlist staff, students, and families in the fight for laws and policies that let Success build such schools. Her contention is that one mission reinforces the other. But does she wishfully overlook deeper tensions? For all Moskowitz's eloquence about the importance of rigorous academics and extracurricular activities, teacher after teacher has reported that at Success, test prep always comes first, narrowing the kind of work students do. Similarly, however much Moskowitz aspires to make Success Academy inclusive, in practice she and her staff sometimes tell families to look elsewhere for a school, because Success just isn't the right fit.

And while Moskowitz has fought to favor disadvantaged groups of students in the lottery, she has declined to fully adopt another policy that would open the schools' doors wider, a practice known in the charter world as "backfilling": When students leave partway through their schooling, other charters fill their spots with kids from the lottery's waiting list. Success backfills only in kindergarten through fourth grade. Any older than that, Moskowitz argues, and the students won't be sufficiently prepared for the school's rigorous academics.

According to Moskowitz, the choices she's made have been pedagogically driven. Opting out of backfilling ensures that her students aren't distracted by peers who lag behind; test prep arms her students for the meritocratic ordeal ahead. At the same time, these policies clearly advance Success's reputation and help cement its political power. If those imperatives sometimes entail putting the network's organizational interests ahead of the broader well-being of students-both those inside Success schools and those who are kept out-the pragmatic trade-offs shouldn't be glossed over.

Who gets to make these trade-offs? In large part, the decisions belong to Moskowitz-or, more accurately, to the Success board. Charter boards, designed to sidestep the unwieldy directives of democratic school governance and focus ruthlessly on leading good schools, are the main reason charter networks operate so well-and also the main reason I worry as the networks grow. Back in 2007, when I visited Harlem Success Academy, two men were also in the room with Moskowitz, the mayor, the kindergartners and first-graders, and their parents. In dark-gray suits, they stood silently at the back of the auditorium, arms crossed-present, but not intrusive.

Their names, I learned, were Joel Greenblatt and John Petry, and they were the hedge-fund managers who, as founders and board members of Harlem Success Academy, had recruited Moskowitz as their CEO. They were, I also learned, very nice gazillionaires. Petry, who graduated from the same Maryland public-school district I did, helped throw me a book party in 2014. To this day, he and his wife send their own children to Success schools. In the decade after my Harlem visit, he always cheerfully took my calls, though "Ask Eva" was the refrain when it came to on-the-record comments.

Yet Petry and Greenblatt aren't just nice. They are in charge, and nobody elected them. Like Moskowitz, the two men who founded her school really want, I think, better schools for all kids, and I believe they want to achieve this by the most-ethical means possible. But as the three of them have worked at revamping and expanding the network's slice of public education, they have added new members to its board, and predictably, they have picked some of the wealthiest and most politically connected people.

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Dip into the acknowledgments section of The Education of Eva Moskowitz and you'll find a who's who of energetic New York billionaires. She reserves the most gratitude for Daniel Loeb, the hedge-fund manager who is now the chair of Success's board. If Petry and Greenblatt are Moskowitz's Jekyll, Loeb is her unfettered Hyde. The vitriolic letters he sends to CEOs led Vanity Fair to rank his tactics among "the nastiest and most florid" deployed by activist investors. The pleasure he takes in his role as provocateur extends to his involvement in education-Moskowitz calls him her "Chief Advocacy Officer." Like Moskowitz, he seems completely confident that his ends more than justify his often hair-raising means. (He recently apologized for likening an African American elected official to a Ku Klux Klan member.) And as the number of schools under Success's direction grows, so does Loeb's power.

I don't mean to suggest that Loeb and his counterparts in Denver, New Orleans, and beyond have nefarious motives. Unscrupulous school impresarios do of course exist, but they gravitate to the minority of charters that are for-profit, rather than to nonprofits like Success. But I do think that bequeathing power over the education of America's children to a tiny group of ever more influential plutocrats means that the rest of us will have much less say in the direction of public schools than we do today.

As these networks grow, overseeing them will become both more important and more difficult. Already networks in several states have rejected requests for documents, saying that public-records laws don't apply to them. Once the Success empire includes 100, 200, or even 300 schools, will regulators feel comfortable exerting their ultimate authority to shut a school down? Or will charter networks become, like banks, too big to change?

We can't know for sure. We can speculate, though, and when I do, I worry. The best-case scenario is that the bigger Moskowitz's network becomes, the more responsibility she and her board take-not just for their students and for their network's growth, but for all students and the civic community, too. But what if well-heeled activists like Loeb decide to push for state laws that weaken regulators' power and strengthen the power of wealthy board members (and why wouldn't they)? The best we can do is hope that the same dogmatic confidence that has fueled the most promising model we have for public education won't also destroy it.
This article was published in partnership with Chalkbeat, a nonprofit news organization covering education. It appears in the January/February 2018 print edition with the headline "The Charter-School Revolutionary."

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The combative Eva Moskowitz has created the nation's most impressive school system-and made lots of enemies in the process. In the spring of 2007, I moved to New York City to cover what I was sure was the most important story in the country.

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Eva is the founder and CEO of the Success Academy Charter Schools. Within this article it tells you that Eva turned 50 in 2014, and also gives you a general idea of who she is. She is the 16th option of the 5O options.

Wallace, K. (2014, January 17). Michelle Obama turns 50: Has the big birthday changed? Retrieved January 30, 2018, from http://edition.cnn.com/2014/01/16/living/michelle-obama-turns-50-parents/

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Michelle Obama's not just embracing her half-century milestone, she's relishing it.

Describing herself as "50 and fabulous," the "Let's Move" creator is getting ready to move herself on Saturday -- as in show off some dance moves -- with a big birthday celebration at the White House.

"I have never felt more confident in myself, more clear on who I am as a woman," the first lady told Parade magazine last summer when asked about approaching the big 5-0.

That confidence was on full display when she recently took on the topic of aging and whether she'd ever consider plastic surgery.

"Women should have the freedom to do whatever they need to do to feel good about themselves," Obama said in an interview with People magazine set to release on Friday, her birthday. "Right now, I don't imagine that I would go that route, but I've also learned to never say never."

And when asked if she has peaked at 50, she joked that first lady is "pretty high up," but said she's always felt her life is "ever-evolving."

"I've got to keep figuring out ways to have an impact, whether as a mother or as a professional or as a mentor to other kids," said Obama, who has made talking with teens and increasing the college graduation rate among her major issues during her husband's second term as president.

Michelle Obama has plenty of fabulous company when it comes to celebrating a milestone birthday in 2014, with a host of amazing women including Sandra Bullock, Elle Macpherson, philanthropist Melinda Gates, California Attorney General Kamala Harris and Susan Rice, President Obama's national security adviser, all turning 50 this year. (Check out the gallery above showcasing 50 women celebrating 50 in 2014!)

Some, like Macpherson, are welcoming middle age. "I rather like the idea of flowing on with life. I have had amazing life experiences and hopefully another 50 years of experiences ahead of me," she told Contact Music in May 2012.

Others, like Courteney Cox, aren't so psyched.

"That's gonna be brutal," Cox told New You Magazine back in 2012, referring to her 50th birthday in June. "I'm not that interested in that! That sounds different. It feels different."

So how does 50 feel? Is 50 today a whole lot different than the age 50 of 20 or 30 years ago? We asked women across the country who have already reached the half-century milestone to weigh in, and most agreed with Obama: 50 really is fabulous.

Sharon Greenthal, managing partner and editor-in-chief for MidLife Boulevard, an online magazine focusing on the lives of women older than 40, wrote a widely read post back in 2012 titled "How to turn 50."

"The way to turn 50 is to embrace it," she wrote as she turned 50 that year.

In an interview, Greenthal, a former stay-at-home mom with two grown children in Los Angeles who became an editor after turning 50, said 50 today is dramatically different than 50 of a few decades ago.

"I think 30 years ago or so, you were moving into the phase of your life where things were really slowing down," she said. "I feel like my life is just really speeding up now ... because I don't have the responsibilities of caring for other people anymore. I can really take care of myself and my husband and we can enjoy being 50-plus. I don't think there's anything old about 50 at all."

Louise Sattler, a mom of two grown children in southern California who hit the big 5-0 in 2009, agrees.

"50 is like the new 40," Sattler said. "I think because we now know octogenarians and we know people well on the cusp of 100 that 50 seems kind of like your second act. It does not seem like a two-thirds point."

For her 50th, Sattler wrote a list of 50 fabulous things she would do in her 50th year, which included eating spicy Indian food for the first time, wearing the "crazy beaded necklace and earrings" she bought on Venice Beach and buying new dishes "just because."

Also on that list, she said, was making an impact.

After battling thyroid cancer when she was 51, the psychologist decided to do something new. Already the owner of Signing Families, an organization that specializes in sign language education, she decided to focus her efforts on training first responders to communicate with special needs populations. She now travels the country working with first responders.

"50 was a wake-up call to do something for me that was kind of how I want my legacy to be," she said. "That was one of the things that I said: You've got to start doing things that are important versus just to make a dollar."

'As cantankerous as I want to be!'

But for many, turning 50 is about as welcome as cleaning the bathroom, doing taxes or having a tooth pulled.

"50 sucks ... Everything either hurts or doesn't work," said Nancy Rudy, in response to a post on CNN's Facebook page.

Sue Scheff, a parenting author and advocate in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, just turned 52. Fifty is "only a number" but the experience can be different "depending on where you are in life," she said on Facebook.

"If you are single, finding a date is difficult. Men want women in their 30s," Scheff said. "If you are job hunting, employers want people out of college.

"50 is an age you 'learn' to embrace or it can get you really down since you think, 'Heck, I am halfway through my life. What do I want to do when I grow up?'"

Said Jeanne Rog on CNN's Facebook page,"The only good thing about hitting my 50s is that I can be as cantankerous as I want to be!"

Whether they're embracing 50 or wishing it would go away, people seem to agree on one thing -- 50 means letting go of caring about what others think.

"I don't question how others are perceiving me," said Greenthal, author of the "How to Turn 50" blog post. "I know that I am the best person I can be and that's really the gift of being older is being comfortable with who you are."

And that comfort in your own skin gets even stronger after 50, says Tish Howard, a retired school principal.

"Fifty means testing your wings of independence and some selfish, long-earned indulgence. But at 60, you learn to soar unshackled of anyone else's opinion of what is you but yours," said Howard of Fredericksburg, Virginia.

The big 5-0 is just a few years away for me, but I'm fully in the "embrace it" camp. I'm already telling friends to keep their calendars open for my dance-all-night disco party and not caring what anyone thinks of the idea!

How do you feel about turning 50? Share your thoughts in the comments, or with Kelly Wallace on Twitter or CNN Living on Facebook.

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michelle obama turns 50: has the big birthday changed? - cnn

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Michelle Obama turns 50: Has the big birthday changed? - CNN

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Michelle Obama's not just embracing her half-century milestone, she's relishing it. Describing herself as "50 and fabulous," the "Let's Move" creator is getting ready to move herself on Saturday -- as in show off some dance moves -- with a big birthday celebration at the White House.

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Erickson, M. (2017, November 01). The Miseducation of Eva Moskowitz. Retrieved January 30, 2018, from https://www.thenation.com/article/the-miseducation-of-eva-moskowitz/

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Moskowitz can be sentimental, but she reserves such moods for pro-charter-school business titans like Michael Bloomberg, who, in her description, descended "like Plato's philosopher king" from "fathomless wealth and privilege to become 'Mayor Mike' and govern over the shadowy affairs of municipal government." Even here, though, one suspects there may be more mercenary reasons for her admiration: Back in 2002, Bloomberg made the case for mayoral control over the city's schools at widely covered hearings that Moskowitz initiated in her early role as a member of New York's City Council. The council lacked the authority to change the law, but it was the first of many shrewd public-relations events that she arranged with the intent of informing the public about the flaws of the education system, and it captured Moskowitz at her best: orchestrating a one-woman performance of "accountability" that would ultimately destroy local control over education-a decades-old victory that had been won by the working-class black families of New York's Ocean Hill-Brownsville neighborhood.

In 2005, after six years on the City Council, Moskowitz set her sights on the office of Manhattan borough president. She hoped it would serve as the "perfect test case for whether it was possible to stand up to the teachers' union and live to tell the tale." Moskowitz lost that race, but she wound up with two job offers, one from the New York chancellor of schools, Joel Klein, and the other from hedge-fund managers John Petry and Joel Greenblatt, who asked her to oversee what would become the first Success Academy, in Harlem.

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Though she respected Klein, Moskowitz took the job with Petry and Greenblatt. She was drawn to their wider ambitions and access to money: Petry and Greenblatt spent their downtime holding fund-raising parties for Success Academy at the swank W hotel. At the same time that he was recruiting Moskowitz, Petry was also in the midst of founding Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), a charter-school advocacy group that would go on to successfully push President Obama to appoint Arne Duncan as the US secretary of education.

Their longer-term vision was even bolder: They wanted to figure out how to set up a school that cost no more to run than district schools but achieved far better results, and then replicate that model throughout the country. Cracking that nut, Petry and Greenblatt were convinced, could revolutionize American education.

The first decade of the new millennium proved to be a heady time for anyone with a few million dollars to spare and a burning desire to transform public schools. While most Americans were satisfied with the education that their children were receiving, years of behind-the-scenes advocacy had created a bipartisan consensus among policy-makers that the system was broken and in need of fixing. Extensive research pointed to the deleterious effects of rising child poverty and class segregation on academic achievement. But a new generation of meritocratic elites searched for other causes-ones linked to opportunity, not economic or social inequality, and that might be remedied by innovative solutions honed in the marketplace.

Charter schools, which receive government funding but operate outside the school system and can be publicly or privately owned, were promoted as one of those solutions. It's a stretch to equate charter schools with tech start-ups, but they borrow from the start-ups' vocabulary of boldness, efficiency, and passion, and they rely on a similar set of policies: relaxing regulations and injecting competition and consumer choice into the system in order to break the "monopoly" of the public sector and lift the quality of services for all.

As with most start-ups, fund-raising and networking with business leaders have been key to the survival and growth of charter schools-in particular, Moskowitz's Success Academy network. One of the first items on her agenda after taking the job was to meet with Don Fisher, founder of the Gap, who'd called to congratulate her when she challenged the UFT during contract hearings as a City Council member, and who offered her $1 million on the spot. (In that first school year, Moskowitz made $371,000.)

Years later, when Success Academy board members expressed concern that she was running her employees into the ground, Moskowitz met with Mickey Drexler, of the Gap and J. Crew, and Chuck Strauch, a South Carolina businessman, who helped her "adopt private sector best practices and deal with scaling issues." In 2011, as Success Academy added schools in Brooklyn, hedge-fund billionaire Dan Loeb donated $3 million to the cause. Along the way, the network also received donations from the Walton Family and Broad foundations, generosity that Moskowitz chalks up to being lucky (the title of her book's penultimate chapter).

But luck has very little to do with Success Academy's growth. From the beginning, it was intended as a new, private-sector-inspired model for the American public school. "The underlying drive is to build something that can spread, can be recreated in different cities," Petry told The New York Times; "otherwise it's not as meaningful to us."

As Moskowitz describes it, this model requires "trusting" families to be "critical educational consumers." And, of course, they are, when they can be-and the more time and money a parent has, the more critical he or she can afford to be. The question is: What does it mean for parents and their children to be "consumers" of education, selecting from an array of options subsidized by billionaire benefactors? Some Success families would find out the hard way.

Unlike in district schools, students at Success Academy are required to keep logs of the hours that their parents have read to them at home. Poor parents, Moskowitz insists, "can support their kids in school, if it is demanded of them." And if the demands don't work, shame will. She recalls getting one parent to cooperate by inviting the woman's mother, who "seemed...more responsible," to a meeting about her son's progress. Forget the paternalism of this scene for a second-Moskowitz's belief that achievement is more about morals than material circumstances hinders her ability to serve families who, regardless of their intentions, simply can't meet these requirements. Take, for example, the more than 7 million American workers who hold down multiple jobs to make ends meet. When these parents are forced to disenroll their children because they can't meet the school's demands for reading time at home, is it really a choice?

And when students with special needs leave because they weren't given appropriate accommodations by the school, or were suspended for minor infractions-as 13 Success families recently alleged in a federal civil-rights lawsuit-is that a choice? (Moskowitz had also publicly released one child's school records using the alias "John Doe," an action that she inexplicably repeats here. If you're wondering how many times the New York City Department of Education has released a child's record to the public, the answer is zero.)

Public-school suspensions are not "a useful disciplinary tool" or "really just the equivalent of what at home is called a timeout," as Moskowitz argues in a chapter called "Extra Credit." In fact, numerous studies have shown that while suspensions are effective at removing a child from school and relieving frustration among teachers and administrators, they do not improve school safety-and they alienate students. At the state level, children have a constitutionally guaranteed right to a free education. Repeated suspensions, or suspensions lasting 45 days-as yet another Success Academy student with special needs received this past spring-are a violation of that right. They're also discriminatory: Black kids are far more likely to be suspended than white kids, which is why Martin Luther King Jr. opposed measures giving teachers the right to remove disruptive students from their classrooms.

Sadly, Moskowitz's reflections on Success Academy's draconian behavior policies are limited to an ad hominem attack on New York Times reporter Kate Taylor. Instead of engaging with the critical ethical questions raised by Taylor's reporting-which suggests that there's a network-wide pattern of shaming and punishing children for underachieving-Moskowitz depicts the Times reporter as a clueless private-school-educated suburbanite who just doesn't get how urgently poor kids need a world-class education. It's not that students are systematically being singled out, Moskowitz writes; it's that "Success isn't ideal for every child. If we think a child would do better in a different school, whether it's a specialized program or just a school with a different approach, we'll tell a parent that, as we should."

District schools run by the New York City Department of Education do not have the option of sending children with behavioral issues or special needs elsewhere-nor should they, since the United States has consistently affirmed by law that it is the responsibility of public schools to educate all students in the least restrictive environment possible. Because the students at Success Academy are chosen by lottery, and thus their selection appears to be egalitarian, the network advances the idea that district schools could achieve the same high test scores if they'd only adopt practices borrowed from private enterprise. But even charter schools with a lottery system "choose" students indirectly by limiting the services they provide or by instituting demanding requirements for parental involvement. This is an important part of Success Academy's seeming success, since social and economic disadvantages have more bearing on student performance than do in-school factors. To use the word much loved by the business community, Success's results simply aren't "scalable."

More importantly, the hard truth of "school choice" is that it leaves families with a multitude of options but few rights. Vouchers make private schools more accessible to poor students, and charters make independently run schools accessible to students whose parents have the resources and knowledge required to enroll them. But the only "choice" on offer here is freedom from government oversight and the elimination of democratic control of schools. In fact, while charter schools don't show better academic outcomes, on average, than traditional public schools, they do have an increased risk of segregation. (In the United States, parental "choice" was mainly invoked by Catholics enrolling their children in parochial schools until the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision, when "freedom of choice" programs left segregation intact in the South and resegregated schools in the North.)

Barack Obama, Arne Duncan, and now Donald Trump have all said it: Education "is the civil-rights issue of our time." But the civil-rights movement was not just a fight over space at a lunch counter, and it certainly wasn't a struggle for more educational opportunity. Civil-rights activists fought for educational equality as part of a general struggle for social and economic equality. They also believed that educational equality wasn't possible while other forms of inequality were still rampant. So while Moskowitz's staff "thought [she] was nuts" for protesting the NAACP when it joined the United Federation of Teachers in a lawsuit that challenged the controversial practice of "co-location"-allowing charter schools like Success to take over space in the facilities of district schools, as happened in Harlem-it's not surprising that the two organizations would wind up opposing her. And it wasn't because the NAACP lent its credibility to the UFT, as Moskowitz charges, but because the needs of teachers and students are not intrinsically at odds with each other-in fact, they are usually interconnected. Related Article

For reformers like Moskowitz, children from low-income families only need the "opportunity" to attend schools like hers. The extent to which this worldview has become the conventional wisdom among policy-makers is evinced by the fact that Moskowitz, a proud lifelong Democrat, made President Trump's short list for education secretary. But working parents don't need someone to save their children from public schools; they need higher wages. They also need job protections-the same protections that Moskowitz has spent her career trying to end for teachers. And they need well-funded public schools, which charter programs help to defund.

Meritocratic education reformers believe that leaders have a right to lead because they are the most talented among us, and that schools-not workplaces-are the appropriate focus of reform efforts, because schools are the natural instrument with which to select a gifted and committed minority from the largest possible pool of future productive adults. They insist that we are all equally entitled to toil and sweat in the pursuit of excellence-and so we do, dutifully checking off standards and filling in the bubbles on Scantron tests from preschool on up. For these reformers, the real enemy isn't poverty but mediocrity. That's why it's wrong, in Moskowitz's view, for educators to "use poor children's circumstances as an excuse for failing to teach them."

But it's also wrong to peddle the myth that opportunity is out there for the taking, if only students, teachers, and schools are willing to work harder for it. To say that hundreds of children who are educated in district schools "won't have a fair chance in life because of the inadequate education they are receiving" is to imply that charter-school students will. But the students who graduate from Success Academy face the same economic reality we all do: an economy dominated by low-wage jobs with few protections and devised to benefit many of the same businesses that have donated to and advised Success.

The Education of Eva Moskowitz tells one story about education and inequality: that poor children are suffering in bureaucratic and inadequate public schools and need both demanding educators to toughen them up and wealthy philanthropists to fund those efforts. But there's another, more compelling story in which corporations and the wealthy contribute to public schools not through the beneficence of their donations, but by paying their fair share in taxes. Because it is businesses that are indebted to schools, not the other way around. That's not a story you'll hear from Moskowitz, but it's the one worth telling.

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Moskowitz can be sentimental, but she reserves such moods for pro-charter-school business titans like Michael Bloomberg, who, in her description, descended "like Plato's philosopher king" from "fathomless wealth and privilege to become 'Mayor Mike' and govern over the shadowy affairs of municipal government."