What New York City’s Biggest School Reformer Sees in Donald Trump

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Eva Moskowitz met with Donald Trump after the election. “Look, I’m an optimistic person. I wouldn’t be educating children if I did not believe in human potential,” she said recently.Eva Moskowitz met with Donald Trump after the election. “Look, I’m an optimistic person. I wouldn’t be educating children if I did not believe in human potential,” she said recently. Credit Photograph by Benjamin Lowy / Getty

Last Wednesday, Eva Moskowitz, the founder of the Success Academy charter-school network, met with President-elect Donald Trump at Trump Tower, in Manhattan. Moskowitz’s schools are known for their stratospheric test scores and strict discipline. Trump was said to be considering her for the job of Secretary of Education.

The next day, Moskowitz held a press conference, where she announced that she would not be joining Trump’s Administration but that she nevertheless felt hopeful about his Presidency. “I’m troubled by what I see as a sort of rooting for Trump’s failure, because that is rooting for our own failure,” she told reporters assembled in front of New York’s City Hall. “There are many positive signs that President Trump will be different from candidate Trump.”

What does a leader in the self-described progressive, anti-racist education-reform movement see in Trump to feel positive about? Success Academy schools serve fourteen thousand children in New York City, the majority of whom are black, Latino, or low income. Moskowitz herself voted for Hillary Clinton. After Election Day, Moskowitz sent a letter to her staff acknowledging that many of the families of students in their schools “will feel very deeply and very directly that they are the target of the hatred that drove Trump’s campaign.”

I called Moskowitz on Sunday morning to ask her how she thought Trump could help the charter-school movement, and what she had heard from the President-elect that led her to believe he would change. (The conversation took place before Wednesday’s announcement that Trump had picked Betsy DeVos, a Republican school-choice philanthropist, to be his Secretary of Education.)

“I’m an American historian by training, and I’ve cited this example: Lyndon Johnson spent thirty years fighting against civil rights, and then became the President who passed the most sweeping civil-rights legislation this country has ever seen,” she said. “Often, governing is different from running. Look, I’m an optimistic person. I wouldn’t be educating children if I did not believe in human potential.”

Not all education reformers share Moskowitz’s optimism. On the day of her press conference, Democrats For Education Reform, another central player in the national charter-school movement, released a statement urging its allies not to work for Trump. “A child who is homeless; a child without access to food or healthcare; a child whose parent cannot find steady work; a child whose dad is locked up for years on low-level drug offenses—each of these situations dramatically compromise the life chances of our children,” D.F.E.R.’s president, Shavar Jeffries, said. “The policies and rhetoric of President-elect Trump run contrary to the most fundamental values of what it means to be a progressive committed to educating our kids and strengthening our families and communities.”

Moskowitz told me that she disagreed with Jeffries. “I believe in bipartisanship,” she said. She and Trump share a commitment to school choice and an antipathy toward teachers’ unions. I asked her if she had spoken to Trump about how the mass deportations he’s called for could affect her students from immigrant families. She declined to share details of their conversation, but replied, “There are so many issues that I would need a month-long meeting. There are issues having to do with mental health for adolescents, which is inadequate. Many of our parents are victims of domestic violence. There are housing issues, immigration issues. The list of problems goes on and on and on.”

She continued, “On the admittedly narrow but incredibly vital issue of public education, we have to work with the future President of the United States.”

Moskowitz is a former teacher and New York City Council member who took on the city’s teachers’ union over seniority rights. She launched Success Academy in 2006, and it has since become one of the nation’s highest-profile, non-unionized public charter-school networks, with forty-one schools. The network has posted enviable—even unprecedented—standardized-test scores, while also emphasizing writing, science, chess, and debate.

But Moskowitz and her schools have recently had to weather a series of controversies. Success Academy students wear Catholic-school-like uniforms, and teachers are trained to emphasize high expectations, orderliness, and routine. The network has been accused of encouraging children with behavioral problems to leave its schools. Earlier this year, the Times obtained a video in which a teacher at Success Academy Cobble Hill, in Brooklyn, could be seen harshly chastising a first-grade girl who could not answer a math problem correctly, ripping the child’s worksheet into pieces. Moskowitz responded to the ensuing uproar by saying that, while the teacher’s behavior was inappropriate, it was an isolated incident. She and Trump may have been able to commiserate about their troubles with the Times.

Politically, Moskowitz is a brawler. Success Academy is funded through a combination of public and philanthropic dollars. Moskowitz has often sought autonomy from New York City education regulations, while at other times she’s lobbied for the city’s support, as in her quest for space in public school buildings. What ties her positions together is her missionary-like zeal for expanding her network and promoting it as a national model for school reform. She prizes flexibility in how Success Academy spends taxpayer money, and here is where Trump’s education platform—which is about allowing states, schools, and parents to spend federal education dollars as they see fit—might hold some appeal for her.

Trump’s major education proposal is a twenty-billion-dollar school-choice plan, which would provide vouchers that low-income parents could use to enroll their child in any public, charter, parochial, or private school. With about eleven million schoolchildren living below the poverty line in the U.S., this would amount to just eighteen hundred dollars per student each year. The idea is that states could then supplement the federal voucher with local money. Trump has said that, under his plan, each poor child could end up with a voucher worth twelve thousand dollars. But that amount is significantly less than the twenty-two-thousand-dollar average annual tuition at a nonsectarian private school, and it’s also less than the current annual per-pupil public-school funding in states like New York, Massachusetts, and New Jersey. At Success Academy, per-pupil funding is about fourteen thousand dollars per year.

Moskowitz, unlike many Democrats, is open to the idea of voucherizing the public education system, which would lead to significant reductions in funding for the traditional school districts that currently serve the neediest kids. In an interview earlier this year with Philanthropy Roundtable, a conservative-leaning network of charitable donors, she said, “I am from an F.D.R. liberal-Democratic family. With proximity to government, I have become more libertarian.” On Sunday, she told me, “I’m not as afraid of change as I’m afraid of not changing. . . . I want kids to be able to escape failing schools that trap them. And it’s an unequal trapping of children. The most affluent find a way to escape. They move to a great suburban district or send their kid to a private school. The people who are trapped in the worst schools that have been terrible often for half a century? Those are the poorest kids. They have no other options right now.”

Last Friday, Moskowitz led Ivanka Trump on a tour of a Success Academy school in Harlem. She said that this was the first time Ivanka had expressed interest in the schools, but that, about three years ago, Ivanka’s husband, Jared Kushner, had visited another Success Academy school. Moskowitz has other ties to Team Trump. One of Success Academy’s big donors, the hedge-fund manager John Paulson, was a Trump supporter and served on his economic-policy team during the campaign.

Meanwhile, at least one other prominent Democratic education reformer, the former Washington, D.C., schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, met with Trump recently about the Secretary of Education job. Like Moskowitz, Rhee is a critic of teachers’ unions. She is best known for instituting a divisive plan in Washington that asked teachers to trade their tenure protections in exchange for performance pay. On Tuesday, Rhee tweeted, “I am not pursuing a position with the administration but I have appreciated the opportunity to share my thoughts on education with the PEOTUS. Interestingly many colleagues warned me against doing so. They are wrong. Mr. Trump won the election.” On Wednesday came the news that Betsy DeVos had accepted the job. She and her husband have funded efforts to create private-school vouchers and protect charter schools from government oversight and regulation.

The beginning of the Trump Administration comes at a time of increased tension between the Democratic base and free-market school reformers like Rhee and Moskowitz. On Election Day, Massachusetts voters overwhelmingly rejected a ballot initiative that would have increased the number of charter schools in the state. The N.A.A.C.P. has called for a moratorium on the expansion of the charter sector, saying that charters are less accountable than traditional public schools, practice harsher student discipline, and contribute to the segregation of low-income children of color in separate schools. Teachers’ unions have supported parent activists who have chosen to opt their children out of a new generation of high-stakes standardized tests—the same tests that Democratic school reformers, including President Obama, fought to roll out.

If the education-reform movement hopes to win the affection of progressive parents and civil-rights groups, they may need to come up with a coherent approach to President Trump. Get too close, and they risk becoming associated with his offensive statements and supporters. But stay too far away, and they may lose the chance to shape what could be the biggest school-choice reform ever proposed.

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