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Eva thinks charter schools are the only hope for high quality education

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Eva thinks charter schools are the only hope for high quality education

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That's why at Success Academy schools, we teach not only math and English language arts at a very high level, but also science and chess and art and sports. It's why our teachers undergo rigorous training, work closely with their peers, get constant feedback and receive regular, in-depth professional development. It's why our schools are extremely responsive to parents and why our teachers return all parent phone calls within 24 hours.

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Eva Moskowitz: Charter schools are the only hope for high-quality education in New York City - NY Daily News

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That's why at Success Academy schools, we teach not only math and English language arts at a very high level, but also science and chess and art and sports. It's why our teachers undergo rigorous training, work closely with their peers, get constant feedback and receive regular, in-depth professional development.

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She talks about when she got elected and talks about funds, etc

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Will Charter Schools Change New York Education

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Pioneer Institute Lovett C. Peters Lecture

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Bill de blasio and Maskowitz feud: kids make good media

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Bill de blasio and Maskowitz feud: kids make good media

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There are a lot of points on which charter school advocates and district school supporters don't agree, but on one particular point they converge: kids make good media.

Twice last month, Families for Excellent Schools, the private-equity backed charter advocacy group, convinced New York City charters to flip their class schedules and send students and teachers to do their lobbying on a school day.

First was October 7, where nearly 18,000 children, parents and teachers gathered in Cadman Plaza, then marched over the Brooklyn Bridge to take FES's pro-charter message to City Hall. #DontStealPossible tweeters exhorted one another as photos of the young marchers were featured in Internet posts from charter-school operators to a former DOE schools chancellor turned charter-school advocate.

Then came October 21, where more than 1,000 charter school teachers rallied at Foley Square in Manhattan. The downtown location was no accident-the federal and state courthouses in the background were a potent reminder of the charter world's efforts to roll back teacher tenure and last-in-first-out termination rules.

Both rallies were held on a Wednesday, a half-day for New York City's largest charter chain, Success Academy, run by the mayor's former City Council colleague Eva Moskowitz. The network upended its school day, sent students to the march in the morning and then told them to come to class in the afternoon. Achievement First, with 17 charter schools in New York City to Success' 34, sent a considerably smaller but no less visible cohort to the events, lining up parents to speak at the Oct. 7 rally, and freeing up teacher class time to get them to the gathering on Oct. 21.

If the focus of these rallies was to display the political might of the charters, as well as the depth of the wallet of their supporters, then their target was no secret: In the education narrative where charter schools are heroes, Mayor Bill de Blasio is the bad guy-at best an enabler of an unequal, failing system, at worst one of the biggest roadblocks to the multiplying of charters across the city.
Anatomy of an argument
When the first charter school opened in Harlem in 1999, few people then could have foreseen the fight over the scope of charter schools around the city today. According to the New York City Charter Center there are now 205 charter schools in New York City serving 95,000 children, with 43,000 families on the waiting list. Success Academy is the largest of those charter groups, with a network of 34 schools across Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Manhattan, serving 11,000 students and with an estimated wait list of 23,000.

While the first charter school opened during former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's second term, their expansion spread rapidly during the 12 years of Michael Bloomberg's mayoralty. With the increase in the charters came a marked uptick in the political rhetoric around them: Critics accused the back-to-back Republican mayors of ignoring troubled or failing schools in favor of politically connected charters, while charter advocates maintained they were helping students whom the DOE had consistently and persistently ignored.

By the time de Blasio took control of the 2013 mayoral race, the clash of wills between the mayor and charter advocates was all but inevitable. Both sides fed the fire. During that campaign, de Blasio repeatedly tweaked his former Council colleague, pledging to stop Moskowitz's spread of Success Academy. "Starting January, Eva Moskowitz cannot continue to have the run of the place," de Blasio told a packed political forum at one point in the contest. "Just because someone is politically connected and has a lot of money behind them, they don't tell the public school system what to do."

Not one to leave things to chance, Moskowitz, backed by Families for Excellent Schools, was able to pivot quickly and turn the political heat back on the mayor.

Case in point, the FES hosted rally in support of charter schools in October of 2013, a month before de Blasio was elected. Indeed, the ascension of de Blasio, a declared charter skeptic, to City Hall coincided with the charter-school movement reaching political maturity: While once the city and state teachers union were powerful enough to dominate the public education agenda, FES-backed by Wall Streeters such as Bryan Lawrence, who runs an investment firm, and Paul Appelbaum, principal of Rock Ventures, LLC-has been able to pour millions into lobbying efforts. According to the Joint Commission on Ethics, FES spent more than $9.6 million on lobbying efforts in 2014, nearly double the amount spent by the UFT and New York State United Teachers in the same year.

In an email statement, Jeremiah Kittredge, the CEO of Families for Excellent Schools, defended his organization's media campaign and, using internal reports, argued that nearly half a million of the city's 1.1 million children were in failing schools. "If the debate is loud, it's because there are 478,000 children in a separate and unequal system of failing schools," said Kittredge. "Demonstrating the urgency of giving every child immediate access to a quality education has never been more important, and last month's rallies were an opportunity for thousands of parents and educators to do just that."
Rhetoric to realpolitik
Initially, other charter organizations like Achievement First and Green Dot Charter Schools were reluctant to take on the new mayor in such an aggressive fashion. Capital New York reported that they stayed away from FES and Success Academy's March 4, 2014, Lobby Day rally in Albany-where Gov. Andrew Cuomo came to stand with Moskowitz and declare his support for charter schools.

But that was then. More recently, Achievement First and KIPP charter schools joined in the rallies at Cadman Plaza and Foley Square, happily tweeting photos of parents and students supporting charter-school expansion.

Most of the fights between the charter schools and the administration have centered around some charter networks desire to co-locate in district schools, and accusations and counter accusations over who has the best interests of New York City's students, and particularly students of color, at heart.

While the mayor's rhetoric of "a tale of two cities, one rich, one poor" resonated strongly within the city's minority community during his campaign, many of those same supporters see charter schools as a viable and necessary option to the dismal performance of some of the city's district schools. These same supporters were first confused and then frustrated with the mayor for not articulating a stronger policy on how to improve the city's schools.

To Moskowitz's claim that longer schools days and a tougher discipline policy have generated impressive results - proficiency levels at Success Academy schools on state tests were more than double the citywide average last year - critics respond that high suspension rates, fewer students with special needs and a refusal to fill empty seats above the third grade with students who haven't come up through the network's ranks mean the chain's success less exemplary than it looks.

The level of mutual disdain between the current mayor and the charter school movement, specifically Moskowitz, has become so poisonous that real achievement in schools on both sides of the divide is being buried in the political ash. She has gone out of her way to belittle and blame the mayor. He has gambled and lost valuable political capital on fights over charters and failed to articulate a coherent policy for dealing with them.

"The actual facts on the ground don't even matter any more," said one charter-school advisor, who categorized the fighting as "toxic." Even talking about charters and districts schools "in the same sentence is all that is needed to create fire," added the advisor.
How to make enemies and influence policy
There is blame enough to go around. Apart from the mayor and Schools Chancellor Carmen Farina's most glaring missteps (e.g., their recent suggestions that children of different backgrounds become "pen pals" as a way to ease racial and economic segregation in city schools - a remark that would be risible even if it wasn't coming from the two people specifically tasked with effecting policy in New York City schools) the mayor has spent much of his tenure in a tit-for-tat standoff with charter schools, most notably Success Academy.

Not two months into his tenure, de Blasio drew fire when the city rejected three out of 17 charter schools from co-locating in public schools, schools that had been approved by the Bloomberg Administration. All three charters were Success Academy schools.

At the same time, charter groups note, the mayor's office deleted $210 million from charter schools in the fiscal year 2015 budget. The state added $26.9 million back to charter schools in the final budget.

(That episode aside, charter schools in many ways have little real ground for complaint, at least when it comes to funding. Overall, charter school spending allocated by the city for fiscal year 2015 was $1.5 billion, about 13 percent of the overall budget-hardly chump change for schools that educate 9 percent of all New York City public school children, many of which-like Success, Bryan Lawrence's Public Prep and investor Carl Icahn's seven charter schools-are also supported by donors with deep pockets. )

While Moskowitz herself has been no slouch in the rhetoric - she once likened her push to expand charter schools to a "Middle East war," the mayor was forced to tone down his after the state legislature passed a law on April 1, 2014, mandating that the city find co-locations in district schools for charters, or pay upwards of $40 million a year in rent for those schools that could not share district school space.

It was a resounding success for charter schools. And a hard slap to the mayor from a legislature and governor eager to give charters free reign.

Since then, the mayor and the charter organizations, most notably Success Academy, have been engaged in a visible tug of war over space, with each side using proxies to accuse the other of bad faith and lacking commitment to turning around the toughest failing schools.

The day before the October 7 rally in Brooklyn, Success Academy put out a press release accusing the mayor of "foot dragging" in finding co-locations for seven schools, pointing out that the city's Panel on Educational Policy, which approves co-locations, voted against locating a Success Academy school in a Midwood middle school that had 653 empty seats and was operating at 57 percent capacity, according to city tallies.

Twice, says Ann Powell, communications director for Success Academy, the DOE has missed its own deadline in announcing co-locations for approved charter schools, and to date has only announced two co-locations, at an elementary school in Far Rockaway and in an elementary school in Bedford Stuyvesant. Since Success Academy opened its application process in October, "we have tremendous demand," says Powell, who says that this year, there were 22,000 applications for 2,300 seats. "So we are eager to open new schools. We have to think that the foot dragging on the part of the mayor is deliberate."

In an email, Devora Kaye, a spokeswoman for the DOE said: "These schools will be sited and will open as planned. We are in ongoing communication with this charter network, as well as other charter schools where we'll be providing space. Finding school space is not a simple task. And it's a process that takes a school community working together-no co-location can succeed if it's based on one school taking from another. We remain fully committed to finding these schools a high quality location that meets their needs in time for them to open next year as planned."

In fact, despite the dire picture painted Success Academy in press releases, and the constant media drumbeat by FES, since de Blasio took office in 2014, 71 of 77 new charter schools have been either co-located or given rental assistance in non-district school space. Right now, the city is assessing 15 ongoing requests for new charter locations.
Where are the seats?
Part of what makes the process of assigning space so fundamentally complicated is the lack of solid information on which schools have space and which are truly full.

Every year, the School Construction Authority releases its Enrollment, Capacity and Utilization report on the city's 1,800 schools. Called "the blue book" for its blue ink, the report assesses capacity in every school. Education advocates like Sarah Morgridge, former chief of staff to one-time Council Education Committee chairman Robert Jackson, say the blue book vastly underestimates the amount of overcrowding, feeding the charter-school argument that there is room in schools for co-locations, when in reality, children have lost art classes, gym, cluster rooms, cafeteria and auditorium space.

"The School Construction Authority is concerned with the most efficient use of space. They are not so much concerned with optimal educational environment," says Morgridge. " If you are looking at numbers in the blue book, unless you are walking the halls, you can't tell what the capacity [of a school] really is. You can't tell looking at the blue book whether there is a gym, cafeteria, library or specialty or cluster rooms."

Morgridge worked closely with Jackson on the 1990s Campaign for Fiscal Equity, a lawsuit by city parents to force the state to more equitably distribute education dollars. While the lawsuit was ultimately successful, the dollars have never fully materialized. And the city's districts schools are still reeling from years of underfunding. All of which helps fuel the continued fight between charters and the city. The under reporting of school overcrowding, coupled with the under funding of the schools, has made a mess of the system.
Finding their place
The arguments over co-locations-whether schools can absorb them, whether de Blasio is slow-walking them-graze a deeper problem with how charter schools fit inside the public-school universe. The debate in New York City today is about where new charters can find seats, not where they are most needed.

Dr. Pedro Noguera, a nationally recognized expert on the education of black students, resigned from the SUNY Board of Trustees in 2011, three years after his appointment, deeply and publicly frustrated about the political tensions behind the placement of charter schools.

The SUNY trustees "wanted us to authorize on the merit of the proposal and without any consideration of where [the schools] would be placed. And it became clear to me that it was a political issue," says Noguera, who this fall left New York University to take a position as distinguished professor of education at UCLA's Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. Apart from a few charter schools, like ROADS charter schools, that work with over-age, under credited students, there are few charters that are willing to take on the most challenging schools and student populations, says Noguera. (He notes, however, that many districts schools are also failing to help the most struggling students.)

It's not just that some charters don't locate where education need is greatest (although some clearly do). It's also that, despite charters' freedom to innovate and serve as labs for new ways of teaching, neither charters nor district schools have achieved any real level of collaboration.

Billy Easton, executive director of Alliance for Quality Education, a teachers-union backed lobbying group, says his group didn't like the phrase 'failing schools.' "There are schools where students need a lot more resources and support and schools that could be run better," he says. "I think the initiatives the mayor has - creating community schools and improving quality of the curriculum, are incredibly important initiatives. Those programs deserve a chance to succeed and they need support to succeed."

Says Easton, "The expansion of Success Academy is not going to do anything at all to help struggling schools. That is not part of their agenda."
Don't steal possible
The very public fight between Moskowitz and the mayor has left other, smaller charter networks worried for their own future. Rafiq Kalam Id-Din, a founder of Teaching Firms of America Professional Preparatory Charter School, a four-year-old charter school in Bedford-Stuyvesant, is nervous. The school invited the DOE to come and hear its proposal to expand its charter from K- fifth grade to K - 12th grade. DOE officials came and visited, but there's been no word yet on the expansion.

In four years, says Kalam Id-Din, his school has made tremendous progress.

Last year, 40 percent of the fourth graders scored fours on the state science exam, 46.9 percent scored a 3 or 4 on the ELA and in math, 22.5 percent scored a 3 or a 4. This was all done, says Kalam Id-Din, with no test prep: "This is with a student body where 94 percent of the students receive a free or reduced price lunch, 14 percent are special education, 11 percent are English Language Learners and 35 percent of the parents were born in an another country."

Amid the caustic back-and-forth between the mayor's office and charter schools, it's been hard to get the DOE to commit to their continued growth, says Kalam Id-Din. "We have been hopeful that this mayor who has been called progressive will lead us in our progression, but we haven't seen it yet. But we are still hopeful."

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What's Behind the Bill de Blasio-Eva Moskowitz Feud Over Charters

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There are a lot of points on which charter school advocates and district school supporters don't agree, but on one particular point they converge: kids make good media. Twice last month, Families for Excellent Schools, the private-equity backed charter advocacy group, convinced New York City charters to flip their class schedules and send students and teachers to do their lobbying on a school day.

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This school year, students will spend about 1,000 hours in school -making their classrooms a huge part of their learning experience.

We're recognizing educators who've poured on the pizazz to make students feel welcome. From a 9th-grade "forensics lab" decked out in caution tape to a classroom stage complete with lights to get first graders pumped about public speaking, these crafty teachers have gone above and beyond to create great spaces.

Got a classroom of your own to show off? Know someone that should be on this list? Let us know!

Jaclyn Flores, First Grade Dual Language, Rochester, New York
"Having a classroom that is bright, cheerful, organized and inviting allows my students to feel pride in their classroom as well as feel welcome. My students look forward to standing on the stage to share or sitting on special chairs to dive into their learning. This space is a safe place for my students and we take pride in what it has become."

Jasmine, Pre-K, Las Vegas, Nevada
"My classroom environment helps my students because providing calming colors and a home-like space makes them feel more comfortable in the classroom and ready to learn as first-time students!"

Oneika Osborne, 10th Grade Reading, Miami Southridge Senior High School, Miami, Florida
"My classroom environment invites all of my students to constantly be in a state of celebration and self-empowerment at all points of the learning process. With inspirational quotes, culturally relevant images, and an explosion of color, my classroom sets the tone for the day every single day as soon as we walk in. It is one of optimism, power, and of course glitter."

Kristen Poindexter, Kindergarten, Spring Mill Elementary School, Indianapolis, Indiana
"I try very hard to make my classroom a place where memorable experiences happen. I use songs, finger plays, movement, and interactive activities to help cement concepts in their minds. It makes my teacher heart so happy when past students walk by my classroom and start their sentence with, "Remember when we...?". We recently transformed our classroom into a Mad Science Lab where we investigated more about our 5 Senses."

Brittany, 9th Grade Biology, Dallas, Texas
"I love my classroom environment because I teach Biology, it's easy to relate every topic back to Forensics and real-life investigations! Mystery always gets the students going!"

Ms. Heaton, First Grade, Westampton, New Jersey
"As an educator, it is my goal to create a classroom environment that is positive and welcoming for students. I wanted to create a learning environment where students feel comfortable and in return stimulates student learning. A classroom is a second home for students so I wanted to ensure that the space was bright, friendly, and organized for the students to be able to use each and every day."

D'Essence Grant, 8th Grade ELA, KIPP Houston, Houston, Texas
"Intentionally decorating my classroom was my first act of showing my students I care about them. I pride myself on building relationships with my students and them knowing I care about them inside and outside of the classroom. Taking the time to make the classroom meaningful and creative as well building a safe place for our community helps establish an effective classroom setting."

Jayme Wiertzema, Elementary Art, Worthington, Minnesota
"I'm looking forward to having a CLASSROOM this year. The past two years I have taught from a cart and this year my amazing school district allowed me to have a classroom in our school that is busting at the seams! I'm so excited to use my classroom environment to inspire creativity in my students, get to know them and learn from their amazing imaginations in art class!"

Melissa Vecchio, 4th Grade, Queens, New York
"Since so much of a student's time is spent inside their classroom, the environment should be neat, organized, easy to move around in but most of all positive. I love to use a theme to reinforce great behavior. I always give the students a choice in helping to design bulletin boards and desk arrangements. When they are involved they take pride in the classroom, and enjoy being there."

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What is it about Eva Moskowitz that attracts so many enemies?

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Daily News columnist Juan Gonzalez, who has done some seriously good work in the past, this week took his pistol-like investigative skills to the skull of charter school operator and eternal politician Eva Moskowitz - first in a story on the erosion of parent voices in the city schools, and then in a story on ...

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Eva not taking the secretary of education role in the Trump administration?

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Eva not taking the secretary of education role in the Trump administration?

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Eva Moskowitz, the polarizing founder of the Success Academy charter school chain, told reporters today she would “not be entertaining” a rumored role as secretary of the Department of Education in the Trump administration.

Addressing the press at an unrelated rally at City Hall against her old foe Mayor Bill de Blasio, Moskowitz insisted she had no interest at present in ascending into the federal government. A former Democratic New York City councilwoman, Moskowitz insisted she voted for Hillary Clinton and was “disappointed” at Donald Trump’s shock victory.

“At this time I will not be entertaining any prospective opportunities,” she said.

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Gonzalez: Eva Moskowitz isn't just backed by Wall Street, she moved there

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Gonzalez: Eva Moskowitz isn't just backed by Wall Street, she moved there

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Moskowitz is a strong believer in Charter Schools and claims they are at greater gains in education than Public Schools. 

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Moskowitz is a strong believer in Charter Schools and claims they are at greater gains in education than Public Schools. 

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Moskowitz states in a interview, "The benefits to minority students of receiving a charter-school education are particularly remarkable. An African-American student is more than twice as likely to be proficient in math if he attends a charter school rather than a district school (48.8% vs. 20%), and a Hispanic student is nearly twice as likely (46.9% vs. 24.4%).

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News report about the fight Moskowitz vs. Blasio

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News report about the fight Moskowitz vs. Blasio

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Charter School Parents Filing Lawsuits Against De Blasio

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State Board Of Regents Chancellor Slams de Blasio Charter School Agenda

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NYC Mayor De Blasio's Charter School Fight Getting Ugly

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The director of some of those charter schools has been at the center of the controversy. As CBS 2's Jessica Schneider reported on Tuesday night, the Schools Chancellor fought back. Subscribe Here: http://www.youtube.com/user/cbsnewyork Official Site: http://newyork.cbslocal.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/CBSnewyork Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CBSNewYork

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Moskowitz and NYC Major Bill de Blasio not on the same page.

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Moskowitz and NYC Major Bill de Blasio not on the same page.

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The Education Issue

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 informational gathering two years ago; my girlfriend was about to enroll her daughter in a first-grade class at a Success Academy school. I caught a glimpse of an educator who can be dismissive of anyone whose opinions differ from her own, and over the past four months, as I met with Moskowitz or watched her at work, that impatience with dissent emerged as one part of a furious and almost crazed passion. She has devoted herself to training a legion of young teachers and principals in how to conjure "world-class schools" or even, as she puts it, "educational nirvana." Two of her own three kids attend her schools. She claims that her academies can stand up to any private school - she calls much of the teaching there "lazy."

Her students have been performing phenomenally. In 2013, on the state exams that gauge proficiency in math and English, Success Academy schools far outscored not only the city's regular public schools but also its most highly regarded charters, networks like Achievement First, KIPP (the Knowledge Is Power Program) and Uncommon Schools. At one of Moskowitz's Harlem academies, the fifth graders surpassed all other public schools in the state in math, even their counterparts in the whitest and richest suburbs, Scarsdale and Briarcliff Manor. That year was no fluke. The 2014 results, released last month, put the network in the top 1 percent of all the state's public schools in math and in the top 3 percent in English. At one Bedford-Stuyvesant academy, where 95 percent of students are black or Latino, 98 percent scored at or above grade level in math, with 80 percent receiving the highest of four ratings.

It might seem as if any New York mayor would be thrilled to have thousands of the city's most underprivileged children educated so well. But during Bill de Blasio's campaign last year and then as he claimed City Hall, he and Moskowitz took each other on in a ferocious political battle. They are two liberal crusaders with profoundly divergent ideas about how the mission of aiding the disempowered should be carried out. De Blasio is essentially a populist; Moskowitz, whose network's board is filled with Wall Street one-percenters, is hardly a woman of the people. The political differences have stoked personal enmity, with de Blasio moving to block the expansion of Moskowitz's network and Moskowitz mustering her own political resources to move him out of her way. The ultimate outcome of their clash may determine the city's educational future.

Revamping public education and waging political warfare have long been intertwined in Moskowitz's life. Around the time she was at Prep for Prep, she entered a race for City Council. Two years earlier, in 1995, she volunteered on the winning Council campaign of Gifford Miller; now, as a candidate herself, she campaigned on the lamentable state of public schools. She personally made, she said, 15,000 fund-raising calls. "It was miserable." But she felt impelled. "It was a sense of fairness. I was running against a billionaire" - and an incumbent. "If I was going to lose, it was not going to be because of money."

She did lose, but in 1999, after the seat opened up, Moskowitz, a Democrat, ran again, denouncing the stranglehold that unions maintained on city schools. She prevailed despite vigorous opposition from the United Federation of Teachers, probably the most powerful organization in local Democratic politics. She was by then an outspoken advocate of charter schools - which are government-funded but independently run by nonprofit groups and accept all applicants or resort to lotteries to handle demand - and most of them do not have to employ union teachers and administrators. They operate largely outside the country's education bureaucracy.

In 2002, Miller, who was by then the Council speaker, put Moskowitz in charge of the Education Committee (a post de Blasio had also reportedly been vying for), and she convened hearings on the school system. Grilling labor leaders who called her "McCarthy-like" and city officials who at first refused to appear, she strained to get to the bottom of everything from the schools' dim reading scores to their dismal bathroom conditions.

"I thought that as chairwoman of the Education Committee, I could make a difference," she said. But labor was too intransigent, the government bureaucracy too cumbersome and entrenched. "I kept getting more and more narrow: Well, if you can't bring better science or better arts - I held a hearing on toilet paper. I thought, That's going to be a winner, everyone's for toilet paper, surely we can come together. But you couldn't, because the administration denied" that there was a problem. "I had to go around photographing bathrooms where there wasn't toilet paper. . . . I thought, This is not a system that delivers for children. Kids can't wait till all the policies change. That's going to be another two centuries."

In 2005, Moskowitz ran for Manhattan borough president; after U.F.T. money and manpower helped defeat her, Joel Greenblatt and John Petry, philanthropists and partners in the hedge fund Gotham Capital, hired her as the chief executive of the charter network they wanted to start. The chief executive title, typical for charter heads, is a way to advertise accountability, to talk the language of business philanthropists who provide money, which helps the networks get going before they can rely wholly on per-pupil government financing. The title is a way to embrace the bottom line: Just as businesses need to show that they turn a profit, charter schools need to educate children in measurable ways.

To deliver, Moskowitz has implemented a range of strategies. The most recognizable are the ones Success Academy shares with plenty of other charter networks: uniforms for all students, long days, a no-excuses policy on homework and behavior, immediate discipline and an atmosphere of strict order. But other elements are more idiosyncratic - and more crucial. There's her fierce engagement with literature, starting with picture books in her kindergarten curriculum. She told me she was determined to avoid the torpid sentences that flood the children's-book market ("Scholastic should be shut down!" is her position on the publishing giant). There's her belief that classroom discussion, whether it's about math methods or paragraph structures and whether it's with 7-year-olds or 16-year-olds, should consist of student voices 80 percent of the time. The best teachers talk least.

Above all, there are her exacting standards for the network's adults - the teachers she hires straight from certification programs or after stints with public schools or Teach for America and the administrators who have been promoted from her faculty. It's their intellectual capacity that is her main concern; the training sessions I sat in on this summer were less about teaching teachers to teach than about teaching them to think. I watched Jessica Sie, the associate director of literacy, lead an auditorium full of elementary- and middle-school faculty members in a discussion of the nuances in a short essay from The New Yorker. They wouldn't be using the essay with their students. But Moskowitz wants her faculty to know how to read in the deepest way, so they can model this for their pupils right from the youngest grades, when everyone is discussing "The Tortoise and the Hare."

During another training session, a principal, Abigail Johnson, coaxed new faculty members through a conversation about a Christina Rossetti poem. She later told me about her dread, a few years back, when Moskowitz subjected her and other school leaders to a written exercise on literary passages. After they turned in their assignments, Moskowitz led them in a training session. Two former teachers complained to me that Moskowitz was downright imperious. But the stringent instruction fit with one of Moskowitz's favorite themes: The failure that pervades so much of public education has little to do with the blighted backgrounds of the children and everything to do with the adults who sit at the front of their classrooms.

From the network's earliest years, Moskowitz's methods have brought quantifiable accomplishments. But it's on the new set of more challenging state exams - introduced in 2013 to align with New York's Common Core educational goals, benchmarks meant to push schools to teach analytic thinking and better prepare kids for college - that her students have truly stood out. Last year, 82 percent of Success Academy students tested at or above grade level in math and 58 percent in English, while the network's closest competitor, Icahn Charter Schools, had fewer than 60 percent passing in math and just over 40 percent in English. The other top networks fell much further below.

"The results are truly incredible," Brett Peiser, the chief executive of Uncommon Schools, says about the scores of Moskowitz's students. "I continue to be surprised that people" - and here Peiser, who taught in a city school for five years and whose parents were 30-year veterans of the system, meant people in that system - "aren't banging down Success's door to find out how she's doing it."

Like Peiser and other charter leaders, David Levin, the chief executive of KIPP, has been visiting Moskowitz's schools to understand the instruction. "I'm blown away by the quality of the teaching and learning," he says. "What is inspiring is the intentionality of what the teacher is doing. And even more impressive is the intentionality of the kids during discussion about books or during problem-solving in math."

Outside the realm of charter schools, though, the talk about Moskowitz isn't so reverent. Her critics, like Diane Ravitch, a New York University professor and education historian, view her as a troubling general of the charter-school movement, which gained momentum around the country in the late 1990s and now numbers over 6,000 schools. Charters haven't proved to be a panacea for the ills of public education. They're hatched with all sorts of pedagogical notions, and there's little sign that over all they're better than regular public schools. Some nationwide studies put charter scores slightly above those of conventional schools, some below. But for many critics, performance is almost beside the point. To Ravitch, the movement itself is destructive; "it undermines the public's commitment to public education."

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Moskowitz with Success Academy students in Harlem. Credit Benjamin Lowy/Reportage, for The New York Times

When I talked with her, Ravitch indicted the hedge-fund titans and business moguls - including Kenneth Langone, a founder of Home Depot, and the Walton family of Walmart - who put their weight behind promising charter schools, leading their boards and lending political clout. "When they call themselves reformers," she says, "it's something I gag on." What these philanthropists are all about, Ravitch says, is making themselves feel good while using charters as a halfway step in a covert effort to pull the country toward the privatization of education. For charter opponents, liberalism is in jeopardy. And from this perspective, Moskowitz, with her results and her readiness to trumpet them, poses the greatest risk.

This threat lies near the heart of de Blasio's aversion to charters and his attack on Moskowitz's schools. He talks about how all of New York's children must be saved. He has said that the more than 170 charters in the city take resources needed for the overarching mission, robbing the many to teach the few. This moral and economic drama, pitting charter schools against conventional ones, carries extra charge in New York City because of an arrangement known as co-location. Under Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, charter schools were readily granted free space alongside regular ones in cavernous school buildings. In this way, Bloomberg fostered Success Academy's spread. The public schools - with the United Federation of Teachers spurring the fight - have protested that sharing space causes overcrowding, though in theory charters have moved in only where enough rooms were available.

The truth about overcrowding may vary from building to building, but almost always the proposed arrival of a Success Academy has met with hostility: union members bused in by the U.F.T. to pack community meetings, people heckling and spitting at Moskowitz, U.F.T. lawsuits to stop the moves. Resistance to other charter networks has been much more tepid. The U.F.T. may harbor a vindictiveness toward Moskowitz that goes back to her Council hearings. I asked Michael Mulgrew, the president of the union, why Moskowitz stirred such anger in him and his membership. "It's her conflictual way of approaching everything," he says. "It's, 'I'm going to show we're better than public schools.' " That attitude infuriates many teachers at regular schools. When I spoke with a handful, they used words like "metastasize" and "venal" to describe Success Academy's proliferation. That Moskowitz's wealthy board members choose to highly reward her track record - her salary and bonus for the 2012-13 school year totaled $567,500 - only adds to the union's fury.

Moskowitz isn't the type to defuse the tension with the U.F.T. She isn't given to finding common ground. She doesn't seem to see any reason to. Consistently, there is desperate neighborhood desire for her academies. Applications for Success Academy schools outstrip seats by five to one. On the state exams, the schools that share space with the network have passing rates as low as 4 and 5 percent.

On the topic of scores, the U.F.T. and Ravitch insist that Moskowitz's numbers don't hold up under scrutiny. Success Academy (like all charters), they say, possesses a demographic advantage over regular public schools, by serving somewhat fewer students with special needs, by teaching fewer students from the city's most severely dysfunctional families and by using suspensions to push out underperforming students (an accusation that Success Academy vehemently denies). These are a few of the myriad factors that Mulgrew and Ravitch stress. But even taking these differences into account probably doesn't come close to explaining away Success Academy's results.

In talking to dozens of current and former Success Academy employees and parents, the critique with the most staying power involved the schools' overly heated preparation for the state exams. A former fourth-grade teacher recounted that network employees made a minivan run to Toys "R" Us and returned to unload a mound of assorted treasures in the back of her classroom. "It was a huge pile," she says. "We called it Prize Mountain." She would remind the pupils that a good score on a practice test meant a gift from the mountain.

Teachers also chart students' results on the practice tests, posting their names and scores on classroom walls. Yet I heard from parents like Natasha Shannon, an African-American mother of three girls in Success Academy schools, that although the public posting could be painful for the children, it was important nonetheless. Shannon was the valedictorian when she graduated from a city school, only to find out when she enrolled in a community college that her education was so slipshod that she needed remedial classes. (Only 58 percent of the city's black high-schoolers graduate within four years; of those, 13 percent are prepared for college, according to the New York State Education Department.) The experience shapes her thinking now. "Yes, she has test anxiety," Shannon said about one of her daughters. "Yes, she has cried" after assessment results were posted. "But when I hear 'test prep,' I'm thinking, This is reality. People prep for the SATs, people prep to get jobs. When her name goes up on the wall in the lower group, I try to talk to her about how we use that to get better. I can't let my kids fall into poverty. I comfort her, but I tell her: 'I make $14.42 an hour. What are you going to do to have a better life?' "

For her part, Moskowitz asserts that the public charting is one aspect of the network's emphasis on feedback, not only for the students but also for the faculty. Throughout the year, whether or not test prep is underway, scores on quizzes and writing assignments are analyzed at network headquarters. Each teacher's outcome is tabulated, and bar graphs are instantly available to all faculty members. The teachers whose classes lag are responsible for seeking out advice from those who top the graphs, just as the students with red or yellow stickers by their names are guided to emulate the topic sentences of those whose stickers are green or blue.

Rancor between Bill de Blasio and Moskowitz grew intense as he campaigned for mayor. "Time for Eva Moskowitz to stop having the run of the place," de Blasio told a United Federation of Teachers crowd in May 2013. Union banners hung behind him as he spoke into the microphone. "She has to stop being tolerated, enabled, supported."

What precisely he had in mind wasn't yet clear. Plainly, though, he was pledging to rescind the blessing Moskowitz enjoyed under Bloomberg. Success Academy's spread "wouldn't happen," he said at the event, "if she didn't have a lot of money and power and political privilege behind her" and if Bloomberg's administration "didn't 'Yes, ma'am' every single time, and that's going to end when I'm mayor."

Coming from behind in the primary and riding on a vow to end "a tale of two cities" - to diminish the divide between the rich and empowered and the poor and disenfranchised - de Blasio won the Democratic nomination last September. His victory in the general election was a foregone conclusion, and Moskowitz felt herself fixed in his sights. Never one to be intimidated, she put him on notice: A month before Election Day, she shut her schools for a morning and gathered Success Academy families for a march. She marshaled other charter networks whose leaders worried that de Blasio would try to cap their numbers and charge rent at city-owned school buildings. Moskowitz and her army of 17,000 strode across the Brooklyn Bridge with placards imploring "Let My Children Learn."

She was effectively saying, These underprivileged families may be your voters in November, but they're not going to like you for long if you make the wrong moves in office. De Blasio didn't heed the warning. Bloomberg, in the waning months of his administration, approved a host of charter co-locations for the 2014-15 school year. Weeks after taking office at the start of this year, de Blasio indicated that he would honor most of them. But, he announced, three would have their space revoked. All were Success Academy institutions, including, inexplicably, the Harlem school with the math-whiz fifth graders, the one that beat Scarsdale and Briarcliff Manor. Now it looked as if the pupils and their schoolmates would have no space for the coming academic year.

Moskowitz was ready. Since Success Academy's early phases, she'd recognized the need for political muscle behind her network, and for the past two years she'd been collaborating with Families for Excellent Schools, a pro-charter advocacy group funded in part by the Walton Family Foundation, which also donates to Moskowitz's network. The group provided her with something akin to what the U.F.T. deployed, a platoon of organizers. It pays a team, including charter parents, to lobby politicians, raise the political consciousness of charter families and muster them for demonstrations. In addition, when de Blasio emerged as the inevitable mayor, Families for Excellent Schools convened focus groups and conducted polls. The results were enlightening. "What we learned," Jeremiah Kittredge, the organization's chief executive, told me, "is that data doesn't resonate." Superior test scores should play only a secondary role in rousing public sentiment. The group would be poised to fight de Blasio with the right media campaign.

The charter movement worked on several fronts. When the mayor nixed the three co-locations in February, a charter delegation met with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and his aides, and soon a separate delegation, including a Success Academy lawyer, met with Cuomo's team, according to a charter advocate who was present for one of the discussions and was closely involved with the other. The movement's financial backers had been among Cuomo's major campaign contributors for several years. At a breakfast at the Regency Hotel in Manhattan in 2010, when Cuomo was the state attorney general and running for governor, he sat down with some of these financiers, including Petry, one of the hedge-fund partners behind Moskowitz's network. They prodded him gently on their educational cause. At that point and into last winter, Cuomo favored charter schools without being outspoken on the issue. But by February, something had shifted as he huddled with the charter representatives.

Cuomo - a Democrat who clings to the political center, a long way from de Blasio's populism - was disgruntled with the mayor. De Blasio was pressing the governor to raise taxes on wealthy New Yorkers to pay for a citywide prekindergarten program. The governor was all for prekindergarten but most likely didn't want his presidential aspirations weighed down because he had supported a tax increase. Cuomo presumably also wanted to keep his major donors happy. Surely he would rely on them down the line if he made a bid for the White House.

Though Moskowitz wouldn't acknowledge to me that she knew anything about the meetings, the charter advocate who was present recounted that Cuomo's aides suggested that the delegates arrange a show of force: a loud media campaign, an Albany rally. The delegates hoped Cuomo would then answer the popular cry. The advocates and aides also discussed potential legislation, which Cuomo would support at the state level to shield charter schools from a mayoral assault.

Moskowitz and Families for Excellent Schools went instantly into overdrive. The advocacy group produced a television and newspaper ad blitz that appealed to the heart, not the head, telling of kids robbed of their "dreams and their hopes." While the ads saturated the city, Moskowitz again shut her academies, this time for an entire day in early March. In a bombardment of emails, she instructed parents that they and their children should board buses, rented by Families for Excellent Schools, that would take them to Albany to rescue the network and defend educational excellence. If the parents couldn't or didn't want to take part, the emails stated, no alternate arrangements would be made for their kids; the parents would have to find child care. The advocacy group mobilized families from various charter networks, its organizers calling and calling their contacts to make sure that the buses would be filled despite frigid temperatures and high snowbanks from a recent storm.

Over 10,000 families came together at the base of the State Capitol's steps. They wore bright yellow T-shirts demanding "Save Our Schools." They chanted, "Eva! Eva! Eva!"

Rally organizers gathered the day de Blasio was leading his own demonstration nearby on behalf of his prekindergarten tax. Moskowitz's crowd dwarfed the mayor's. Suddenly the governor was bounding down the Capitol steps, bellowing to the parents and TV cameras: "You are not alone! We will save charter schools!"

The next day, Moskowitz appeared on "Morning Joe" on MSNBC, saying, "We have a mayor in the city of New York who says he's a progressive on the one hand but wants to deny poor kids in Harlem an opportunity, a shot at life." After this emotional plea, she proceeded to the scores of those fifth graders. "This is outrageous!" exclaimed the host, Joe Scarborough, about de Blasio's decision. "It's immoral."

The governor soon negotiated a deal with legislators that guaranteed free space for most charters. Even so, Families for Excellent Schools continued the barrage of advertising: "You're not thinking about the people that you're hurting," a tearful charter mother said, addressing de Blasio. Eventually, the mayor's office called charter allies and donors, including Success Academy's board chairman, Daniel Loeb, according to an article in The Times, asking for a truce and assuring that de Blasio wouldn't stand in their path. When I reached out repeatedly to the mayor, to his schools chancellor, Carmen Fariña, and to a senior adviser, none would talk with me. It was as if they had been beaten into silence.

Moskowitz, though, feels no calmer. If the state board that oversees charters grants her proposal for 14 new schools, she'll be in charge of 46 academies with 15,000 students by 2016. Part of her ambition is to expand beyond the city's struggling neighborhoods; in the last few years, she has opened schools - with racially integrated classrooms - on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and in Cobble Hill and Bensonhurst in Brooklyn. Park Slope and the Upper East Side are on the list for the next phase. "We want to grow as fast as we can while creating extraordinary quality," she said. But the City Council's Education Committee wrote to the state charter board this summer demanding a halt to new approvals. Four lawsuits trying to stop Success Academy continue. As Moskowitz perceives it, she remains in a state of siege, and at times she seems to believe she's almost powerless. "The experience," she told me at the end of August, "is of having to wake up every day and beg" for the space and support to carry out her mission.

That mission, she says, may eventually extend to running for mayor. She doesn't rule out a bid in 2017, an effort that would undoubtedly mean a climactic collision with de Blasio. When I asked about her plans for public education should she claim the mayor's office in the near or more distant future, she wouldn't address specifics. But as she spoke, it was easy to imagine her campaigning: "We have to face our educational crisis. Incredibly large numbers of schools are not working. There's an endless need." Moskowitz, in her mind, holds the answers.

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The Battle for New York Schools: Eva Moskowitz vs. Mayor Bill de Blasio

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The Education Issue 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.

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Moskowitz believes Devos is what the education world needs because she is originally an outsider. 

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Moskowitz believes Devos is what the education world needs because she is originally an outsider. 

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Some people complain that President Trump's nominee for secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, would be quite unlike her predecessors.

That's true, but it's a good thing when you consider the status quo of American education.

We live in an increasingly complex and competitive world, but across New York City and much of the rest of the country, most public schools are failing our kids. Two-thirds of all eighth-graders in the United States can't read or do math at grade level. Poor inner-city kids who are warehoused in failure factories with no other options, and even students in affluent suburban schools, are falling behind their peers in other countries.

Generations of children are growing up without the knowledge or training to succeed in college or the workplace.

In short, our public education system is in deep crisis. And that crisis keeps deepening. Thus, we need an outsider: someone who isn't part of, or beholden to, the education establishment. Someone who will shake it up.

Betsy DeVos not only will do that, she has already. She has been a strong supporter of parent choice as the most effective way to improve opportunities for children trapped in decades-old failing schools. Giving parents the power to decide where to send their kids, whether parochial, charter or district, has been the major driver of true education reform in this country.

DeVos isn't the only person to recognize the value of parent choice. Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren noted in her book "The Two-Income Trap" that "an all-voucher or all-school choice system would be a shock to the educational system, but the shake out might be just what the system needs."

Sadly, many Democratic senators (including Warren) now say they'll vote against DeVos' confirmation. While no doubt they have students' best interests at heart, it's yet another indication that the establishment needs an outsider like DeVos.

Many political leaders, including lawmakers who oppose DeVos' appointment, have themselves personally benefited from a non-public-school education. Indeed, six of the 10 Democrats who serve on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee either attended private or parochial schools themselves or have children or grandchildren who do so.

The reason so many elected officials who value school choice for themselves and their family members oppose it for others is politics. DeVos, by contrast, isn't a politician and thus she's not constrained by the orthodoxy of the educational establishment.

Rather, she is somebody who has spent tens of millions of dollars of her own money to give ordinary families the same opportunities that many of the wealthy politicians opposing her nomination have.

For too long, special interests have dominated the education policymaking system to win better contracts and greater benefits for adults - and children have paid the price.

Here in New York City, the teachers union recently lobbied policymakers to eliminate independent teacher evaluations, and two years ago convinced Mayor Bill de Blasio to reduce the time teachers spend tutoring struggling students.

Unions support a system that rewards seniority over talent or teacher effectiveness - and kids lose.

Instead of working to empower great teachers and keep talented educators in every classroom, unions have fought to preserve "rubber rooms" in order to keep persistently underperforming teachers on the city payroll, even when those teachers don't belong in the classroom.

To end our educational crisis, we need someone who's willing to stand up to special interests and enact bold reform. DeVos believes in delivering excellence and accountability at every level and across all forms of K-12 education - whether it be district or charter.

For the past two decades, she has worked passionately to expand access to great schools for families across the country regardless of ZIP code or background, often in the country's poorest neighborhoods.

Future generations have much to lose - but plenty to gain - in the next four years, and they will have a strong ally fighting for them in Washington, DC, when Betsy DeVos is confirmed.

Eva Moskowitz is the founder and CEO of Success Academy Charter Schools.

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Why we need an outsider like Betsy DeVos as education secretary

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Some people complain that President Trump's nominee for secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, would be quite unlike her predecessors. That's true, but it's a good thing when you consider the status quo of American education. We live in an increasingly complex and competitive world, but across New York City and much of the rest of the country, most public schools are failing our kids.

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Eva Moskowitz talking about how the country's education is failing in certain areas. 

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Eva Moskowitz talking about how the country's education is failing in certain areas. 

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https://youtu.be/bqOFCfEOPYE

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Eva Moskowitz: We Have a National Education Crisis

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July 9 -- Eva Moskowitz, founder and CEO of Success Academy Charter Schools, talks with Bloomberg's Olivia Sterns at the Allen & Company Conference in Sun Valley about the prospects for education reform and the 2016 presidential campaign. -- Subscribe to Bloomberg on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/Bloomberg Bloomberg Television offers extensive coverage and analysis of international business news and stories of global importance.

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Moskowitz: Founder and CEO of Success Academy charter schools.

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Moskowitz: Founder and CEO of Success Academy charter schools.

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Founded in 2006, Success Academy Charter Schools is the largest and highest-performing free, public charter school network in New York City. Admission is open to all New York State children, including those with special needs and English language learners. Students are admitted by a random lottery held each April. Success Academy operates 46 schools serving 15,500 students in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx. Across the network, 76% of students are from low-income households; 8.5% are current and former English Language Learners, and 15% are current and former special needs students. About 93% of students are children of color.

Authorized by the State University of New York's Charter School Institute, Success Academy schools are able to operate with greater independence than zoned schools, but are held strictly accountable to the state for student performance. Every five years, charter schools are subject to reviews that determine if a school continues to operate.

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Founded in 2006, Success Academy Charter Schools is the largest and highest-performing free, public charter school network in New York City. Admission is open to all New York State children, including those with special needs and English language learners. Students are admitted by a random lottery held each April.

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Moskowitz believes in Donald Trump's pick for Secretary of Education. 

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Moskowitz believes in Donald Trump's pick for Secretary of Education. 

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http://nyp.st/2ixzkZP