On the same day last week, two Democratic women published political memoirs. One was a frank and engaging tale of butting heads with the media and doing battle with an upstart populist progressive. The other was written by Hillary Clinton.
Hillary Clinton’s What Happened is a litany of excuses and little else and so, of course, it garnered all of the attention. But Eva Moskowitz’s account of founding New York’s Success Academy Charter Schools, known for their rapid growth, high-stakes lottery admissions, and “no-excuses” recipe for excellence, is a worthier read.
The shared pub date was unintentional, so far as Moskowitz knows. (She does intend to read What Happened: “I voted for Hillary,” she told me, “And who doesn’t wonder what happened? She should know better than anyone.”) Sept.12, 1941 was also the day Moskowitz’s maternal grandparents, Jewish refugees, docked in New York Harbor—an anniversary more meaningful than the day her sister Democrat’s moribund defeat explainer hits the stands.
The two women, with their cursory commonalities and “nasty woman” narratives, certainly make uncanny foils. Both cut their teeth in New York politics, though on different scales: a former first lady running for Senate, a former college professor running for city council. They even have in common their duels with lefty populists—Bernie Sanders for Clinton and Bill de Blasio for Moskowitz. Both books devote serious yardage the big mean media machine too, and neither spares mention of President Trump.
Moskowitz, a Democrat, still holds the “very unpopular opinion” that elections are meant to be moved on from. She greeted Trump’s win with “cautious optimism”—which she tells me has dissolved in recent months—and, at the time, declined to serve as his education secretary but chastised those who rooted for his failure.
Readers get the sense that Moskowitz, fiercely independent and confrontational, likes the fight: She knows she’s in it for the right reasons—building better schools—and isn’t giving up. She compared her two decades’ defense and stewardship of the always-growing network of Success Academy charter schools, consistently ranked among New York’s very best, to spectacular feats of escapism. “Doing this work feels like you’re Houdini at the bottom of the ocean in a lead box with your feet tied together and your hands handcuffed,” she told me. “And you’ve got to figure it out.” She has, time and again—and, as with Houdini, we follow along wondering how.
Even Moskowitz’s peeves with the press aren’t unamusing. As she relitigates unsettled clashes with the media—biased as they can be toward the unions whose absurd excesses she exposed as a councilwoman and fought against in founding her schools—she evinces a fair but stern attitude typical of educators. (Just about my favorite thing in writing about schools, teachers, and education reformers is how often their teacherly habits show through.) A lengthy passage will detail how a particular reporter has warped the facts and failed readers—and the common good—with critical and, Moskowitz argues, unethical reporting on the Success Academies. But she’ll still find a way to praise the reporter in question and reserve more profound blame for his or her editors, because they were the ones in charge after all. “What a sad waste of his talents,” she scolds former New York Daily News columnist Juan Gonzalez. And of Kate Taylor—whose series on Success for the New York Times portrayed a cruel and exacting culture but, Moskowitz says, neglected essential context—she writes, “Taylor is an intelligent, hardworking reporter but, as Carl Bernstein once observed, ‘Reporters need good editors.’”
Expecting more from Times editors reflects the institutional philosophy her schools follow: a carefully wrought culture that lays heavy responsibility on the adults in authority. “Many schools blame the students when they don’t learn but it’s the adults who are responsible for ensuring that students learn,” she writes in the final pages, where she lists the schools’ guiding principles. They’re reflections of her own character and values, too, as a woman who takes charge and readily accepts the burdens of leadership.
I asked Moskowitz what higher office she’ll be running for. She’d answered my question in the book, sort of: Not mayor, no matter how she’d like to, not yet anyway—because building more schools, and necessarily sweating the small stuff, is just too important for the time being. And she told me pretty much the same thing, in a New Yorker’s terms: “You can be born in a neighborhood basically guaranteed to go to a failing school when someone else’s children can be born lucky enough to be able to rent or buy in a place with better schools. That’s the opposite of the American Dream. I’m interested in solving that problem as quickly as humanly possible.” (Toward this end, Success’s curricula are now available for free download online—pushing their reach beyond the four boroughs where they’ve founded schools so far.)
As the chapters alternate, Henry Adams-style, between a more current professional timeline and an historical one that delves into her family’s background and her childhood in Harlem, her devotion to New York City seems to deepen. An historian by training, she links her nativity, in historical terms anyway, to the fear and chaos that the serial killer “Son of Sam” preyed on and the salvational chutzpah of a man like Ed Koch. Moskowitz is no less a product of the city she lives to serve. She relishes her reputation for “New York values.” Just like Clinton, she notes the generic journalist’s go-to descriptor “divisive”—but unlike Clinton, she doesn’t bother to unpack its implicit sexism. She lets it stand at the end of a paragraph, winks at the euphemism and moves on.
Mostly because, as readers will realize, she’s got better things to do. She draws us in to see how she’s done it all, and why—“I felt it was important to offer people a front row seat at the slugfest, so that they could really understand what’s at stake,” Moskowitz tells me. While Clinton makes known she’s got nothing but time, and we should wonder with her at the cruelty of a world that let her lose, Moskowitz’s sympathetic reader closes the book wondering how she found the time to write it and mostly just wanting her to get back to work.
