The Education of Eva Moskowitz: A Memoir

1

LE BILBOQUET

2004–2005

Trouble was brewing. Ron Perelman, a financial titan, prominent philanthropist, alumnus of several messy public divorces, and champion of a referendum that had imposed term limits in New York City, was opposing a sidewalk café permit application by Le Bilboquet, a chic restaurant in the district I represented on the New York City Council. This dispute had all the makings of a juicy press story and I wanted no part of it. I’d be charged with doing favors for a wealthy constituent if I opposed the application, and, if I supported it, I’d be charged with ignoring my constituents’ concerns. But alas, neutrality wasn’t an option since I was legally part of the approval process, which went like this: the community board held hearings and made a recommendation to the local council member (me), who made a recommendation to the council’s zoning and franchising subcommittee, which held more hearings and made a recommendation to the Land Use Committee, which made a recommendation to the council, which then voted yea or nay. It took, on average, 465 days. Yes, all for a sidewalk café permit. Welcome to my world.

Now, to some, sidewalk cafés are a charming feature of city life that enliven the streets and provide opportunities to dine alfresco in the urban landscape. To others, however, they are an appropriation of public space by rapacious businessmen who obstruct already congested sidewalks and inflict noisy late-night revelry on residential neighborhoods. My constituents tended toward the latter view and could afford to care about things like this since they were a virtual who’s who in the worlds of business (Michael Bloomberg, Jamie Dimon), movies (Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Spike Lee, Bill Murray), music (Mariah Carey), politics (Rudy Giuliani, Eliot Spitzer), art (Jeff Koons), and comedy (Joan Rivers). I represented Manhattan’s famous Silk Stocking District, which included the most expensive real estate per foot in the country, world-famous museums, and startlingly expensive private schools with names like Spence, Chapin, and Nightingale-Bamford.

My view on sidewalk cafés was simple: I did whatever my community board told me to. They held hearings at which they heard directly from neighborhood residents—why second-guess them? Besides, I had my hands full running the committee that oversaw the city’s enormous public school system. So if anybody came to see me about a sidewalk café permit, I told ‘em: talk to the community board; I do whatever they tell me. And boy was I glad to have this policy now.

But one other thing worried me. Not being born yesterday, I knew my campaign staff would soon receive one of those oh-so-rare but gratifying unsolicited contributions from some good-hearted citizen who had spontaneously recognized my merits as a public servant. Then, only after depositing the check, would we learn the contributor was a lobbyist for Perelman. We could refund the contribution, but if the press had gotten wind of this story by that point, it would look like I’d done so only because I’d been caught with my hand in the cookie jar. I therefore directed my staff to scrutinize every unsolicited contribution we received and, if it was in any way associated with Perelman—even if it was from Perelman’s second cousin’s lawyer’s podiatrist’s stepbrother’s mistress—to return it immediately. Sure enough, we soon got a nice fat check from a lawyer who, when we asked what had inspired his newfound generosity, disclosed that he worked for Perelman. We immediately returned the check, and when I got a phone call from Perelman I said—oh how I loved saying!—talk to the community board, I just work here.

So he did. In fact, he provided a video showing that Le Bilboquet was already serving drinks outside, which people would imbibe while sitting on the steps of his town house, leaving behind a trail of cigarette butts. This was a huge no-no, so the community board turned down the application. Made sense to me—but again, not my department. I passed the recommendation along to the Zoning and Franchising Subcommittee.

Just as I’d feared, the press took an interest. Not even the New York Times, which usually turned up its nose at boldface names’ stories, could resist. Ron Perelman! A chic Upper East Side café! Yes, it was gossip, but it was the caviar of gossip. I told the Times reporter exactly what had happened: how I’d supported my community board’s recommendation, which was always my practice, how I’d instructed my staff from the outset to return any checks they received from Perelman, and how they’d done so. I’d predicted exactly what would happen and had acted scrupulously and consistently. There was no way I could be criticized.

Oh, how naive I was.

Here’s an excerpt from the article the Times published titled Steak Frites and Stardom vs. Power and Politics:

This is a story about four tables and eight chairs, the billionaire cosmetics executive who would not brook them, and an ambitious councilwoman who took a phone call. It will not end prettily . . .

Mr. Perelman’s lawyer . . . made a campaign contribution to Ms. Moskowitz, who wants to run for Manhattan borough president. On Tuesday, the councilwoman instructed her staff to return the check.

Ms. Moskowitz said . . . she simply wanted to go along with the recommendation of the community board . . . and was too busy with issues like teachers’ contracts and school construction budgets to look into the matter more deeply . . .

Philippe Delgrange, the owner of Le Bilboquet . . . who is of French and Belgian descent, said the dispute feels personal . . . Maybe he doesn’t like the Belgians or French.

By saying we’d returned the check on Tuesday, rather than immediately, the reporter implied we’d delayed doing so until she’d come sniffing around. Moreover, she didn’t mention that I always deferred to the community board or that I did so because the board heard directly from the community, so it just sounded like I was making this up or was too busy to do my job. It was a textbook example of writing the lead on the way to the ballpark.

Rule number one of journalism, I was learning, is that trying to get in between a journalist and a story he wants to tell is like trying to stop a herd of stampeding cattle. Stories headlined Council Member Acts Ethically, Follows Policies Consistently don’t sell newspapers. So while this journalist didn’t lie, she left out critical facts and spun those she did report to conform to the story she’d wanted to tell from the outset. For example, since Perelman had been cast as the story’s antagonist, he couldn’t just be some ordinary home owner who wanted peace and quiet; he had to have some ulterior motive such as being prejudiced against . . . Belgians, because, of course, everybody has it in for those Belgians.¹

A late-nineteenth-century Tammany Hall politician named Big Tim Sullivan once said, I don’t care what the newspapers say about me as long as they spell my name right. Maybe I should be like Big Tim, but I’m not. I try to be ethical and it pains me when people think I’m not. As a council member, I’d worked hard to be squeaky-clean, even turning down a stipend to which I was entitled for chairing the Education Committee, which God knows I could have used since my husband, three children, and I were living in a one-bedroom apartment.

Besides, my reputation was one of the few things I had going for me. I was quite unpopular with the city’s unions and the Democratic political machine because I wouldn’t toe the party line. For example, I was the sole council member to vote against a law requiring the buyer of an office building to continue employing the prior owner’s maintenance workers. I had nothing against maintenance workers, but I didn’t see why we should have special employment laws for commercial buildings that didn’t apply to other businesses like movie theaters, supermarkets, and apartment buildings. Doing this was a recipe for creating a crazy patchwork of laws.

I was also one of only three council members to vote against a law introduced by my colleague Bill de Blasio, a bright and ambitious council member whom I’d gotten to know when he ran Hillary Clinton’s first Senate campaign. His proposed law would allow unions to circumvent the limits on campaign contributions by making them through multiple affiliated entities (such as a local union and its parent). For de Blasio, increasing the power of unions, which would advance his progressive political agenda, trumped the goal of limiting the influence of money in politics. De Blasio’s bill would also advance his own career since he’d been fined for receiving more than $20,000 in contributions from the New York Hotel and Motel Trades Council and its Local 6, both of which listed the exact same person as having the authority to decide who received their contributions.

In addition to voting against their bills, I also endeared myself to my colleagues by introducing some of my own. For example, I proposed a law to ban politicians from putting their names on big signs at capital construction projects, since I didn’t think politicians should get free advertising on projects for which taxpayers were paying. My bill was about as popular with my colleagues as a ham sandwich at a bar mitzvah.

Fortunately, I was more popular with my constituents since I was attentive to their quality of life concerns. For example, they hated the plastic newspaper racks that littered the streets, so I asked Karim Rashid, a top designer whose clients included Prada and Giorgio Armani, to design new ones. He came up with a version made of silver fiberglass that stood atop mushroomlike bulbous pedestals so it looked like a growth from the ground and tilted gracefully backward so that the papers were easier to remove. Yet another pair of words you’re likely to find only in New York: stylish newsracks, commented one paper.

Another big issue was pets. In the summer of 2004, I learned that an angry crowd of dog owners was demanding that something be done about a pit bull that had attacked an eight-pound Chihuahua named Frank. A legal loophole prevented the police from doing anything about dog-on-dog violence, so I proposed legislation to fix it.

But the part of my job that I cared about most was chairing the council’s Education Committee. I’d previously been a professor of history and had gotten into politics primarily to improve public education. I’d held dozens of hearings about problems with the public school system. Many newspapers had editorialized in favor of the reforms I’d advocated but the Times hadn’t, so I was elated when I finally got a call from a member of its editorial board. I returned the call immediately, prepared to wax eloquently about everything I’d learned from my many hearings and school visits. Instead, I was asked about my dog legislation. Oh well.

Of the educational issues on which I’d been prepared to wax eloquently, the most important was overhauling the work rules and job protections for school employees. As schools chancellor Joel Klein observed, lockstep pay, seniority and life tenure . . . act as handcuffs and prevent us from making the changes that will encourage and support excellence in our system.² Klein had proposed removing these handcuffs by adopting an eight-page thin contract for teachers. Conditions for reform seemed ideal since the teachers’ contract had just expired, I’d just held hearings on reforming them, and we had a mayor, Michael Bloomberg, whose wealth had enabled him to get elected without union support. As one columnist aptly observed, If not now, when? If not Bloomberg, who?³

On October 20, however, the New York Post reported that the city was close to reaching a deal that would allow the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) to keep the vast majority of the privileges enshrined in past contracts. I was deeply troubled by this as I believed that reforming this contract was critical to improving the school system. I publicly called on Bloomberg to stand strong. Bloomberg, however, accused me of grandstanding and the city council’s speaker called my letter destructive to the process. Ouch. Eva found out last week what it is like to play in the big leagues, observed a political consultant, the mayor and the speaker are jockeying for position on education, and Eva got in the way. This wasn’t the first time I’d annoyed Bloomberg. He’d called hearings I’d held on shortages of basic supplies like toilet paper a tempest in a toilet bowl.

Notwithstanding these rebuffs, I felt I’d accomplished a lot on the council. Not only had I passed more laws than any other sitting council member, but I’d also held eighty-eight Education Committee hearings that delved into important issues. Those on the union contracts had drawn national attention and had advanced public understanding of the impact these contracts had on teaching and learning. But those hearings had served an additional purpose. While I appreciated that teachers needed to unionize to level the playing field when negotiating with their monopoly employer, the government, I felt that the UFT had become too powerful, that its ability to give marching orders to nearly every elected official in the city was undermining the quality of education the city’s children were receiving. I hoped that by challenging the UFT’s hegemony, I could embolden other elected officials to undertake some of the critical reforms that were necessary to fix the public school system.

But to really make the point that opposing the UFT wasn’t political suicide, I needed a second act: getting elected to higher office. I’d set my sights on Manhattan borough president and I liked my chances. I’d already gotten elected without the UFT’s endorsement—the only Democratic official in all of New York City to do so—and I had a long list of supporters, a willingness to campaign hard, and an appealing résumé as an educator and good-government advocate. Precisely because I had everything going for me except the UFT’s support, the race was the perfect test case for whether it was possible to stand up to the teachers’ union and live to tell the tale. I’d soon find out.

2

I AIN’T GONNA GET EVA’D

2005

On February 14, 2005, standing on the steps of city hall surrounded by more than two hundred supporters, I announced my campaign for borough president. I’d arrived at the council in 1999, I observed, with a baby in one arm and a copy of the city charter in the other and six years, eighty Education Committee hearings, ten laws, and two more kids later, I am ready to do more.

While I had the advantage of being the most well-known of the nine candidates in the race, I was a persona non grata with the Democratic machine. It hadn’t always been this way. During most of my time on the council, I’d had fairly collegial relationships with my colleagues. All that had changed, however, when I’d held hearings on the labor contracts and become the UFT’s public enemy number one.

These tensions bubbled to the surface in a Times article with the headline Mayoral Ambitions and Sharp Elbows; Councilwoman Spars Way into a Position of Influence:

[E]ven as her aggressive, confrontational style has set her apart on a legislative body known less for fomenting change than for renaming streets, it has also alienated many of her colleagues. [A] common refrain is that the councilwoman’s ambitions exceed her political skills [and she] fails to . . . build coalitions with other council members.

In fact, my ability to build coalitions was precisely what had allowed me to pass so many laws. My views on the labor contracts, however, were diametrically opposed to those of my colleagues so I’d inevitably alienated them when I’d taken on this issue.

Assemblyman Scott Stringer soon emerged as my leading opponent, racking up the endorsements of many elected officials and of several unions, including the UFT. While none of this was surprising, it meant that I’d need to sweep the newspaper endorsements to win the election. The Times endorsement alone was worth about 10 percent of the vote.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bloomberg won the election and I took comfort in knowing that, as I exited stage left, he’d continue to fight the good fight. I began thinking about what I should do next. While I hoped that I might serve the city as an elected official again someday, I felt it was important to get out of politics for a while, to do something else.

But what?

3

CHAIM’S CHILDREN

1896–1957

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

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

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

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

So, forsaken and woeful, we languish in prison.

The sentence is harsh; Nazi persecution relentless.

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

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

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

Filth in every corner,

germs thrive everywhere.

Seven die, are thrown overboard

into the briny deep.

The Navemar sails on

with its cargo of evicted Jews

who hope to reach America

to have freedom and peace at last.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A month later, Sascha died. My grandfather wrote:

The earth covers only the body;

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

The well of tears will someday dry up

But nothing can heal the pain in my soul.

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

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

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

4

THE ULTIMATE CHARTER SCHOOL BAKE-OFF

2005–2006

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

If I ran a charter school, I’d have real control that would enable me to strive for true excellence. I also liked the idea of working with Joel and John; they were razor-sharp and really wanted to help kids. Moreover, their longer-term vision was bold: figuring out how to run a school that cost no more than the district schools but got far better results, and then replicating that model over and over dozens of times. Cracking that nut could revolutionize American education.

I also liked the idea of getting back into education. I’d always loved the thrill of exposing students to new ideas, and visiting hundreds of schools as chair of the Education Committee had sparked my interest in returning to the classroom. I’d spent years thinking, writing, and talking about K–12 education; now I’d have a chance to apply what I’d learned.

I’d also become increasingly comfortable with the charter school concept. Charter schools were just another kind of public school: they were paid for with government funds, were approved and overseen by government entities, and in some respects were actually more egalitarian than district schools, which had zoning and admissions policies that made them highly stratified by race and socioeconomic status. By contrast, charter schools admitted students by random lottery.

So, I accepted Joel and John’s offer to lead