Success has its privileges. This is certainly true when it comes to Eva Moskowitz’s charter chain Success Academy.
Juan Gonzalez of the Néw York Daily News reports that Moskowitz has moved her corporate headquarters from Central Harlem to Wall Street.
In addition, he reports:
“The new offices will cost her organization $31 million over 15 years, according to its most recent financial report.
“The same report shows Moskowitz received an eye-popping $567,000 during the 2012-2013 school year. That’s a raise of $92,000 from the previous year, and more than double the $212,000 paid to Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña.
“That made Moskowitz the city’s highest-paid charter school executive last year. Her spokeswoman said Moskowitz’s current pay is a less lofty $305,000, with her bonus to be determined at year’s end.”
According to the SA website, during the “ 2013-2014 school year, we are serving 6,700 scholars at 22 schools.”
Earlier this year, Moskowitz humbled Mayor De Blasio when he tried to deny part of her request for new schools, offering her only five of the eight schools she sought. Her hedge funds backers unleashed a $5 million TV blast against the Mayor. With the support of Governor Cuomo, the Legislature required the city to pay the rent of all charter schools and required him to approve all those charters that had been authorized by Mayor Bloomberg’s board in its last days. Eva got what she wanted, and the Mayor retreated.
Writes Gonzalez:
“As a result, the school system is spending $5.3 million this year to house the three new Success Academy schools in buildings owned by the Catholic Archdiocese.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Thanks for helping my diet, Diane. I was just about to go out for lunch, but now I think I’m too sick.
How is it that she can afford $31 million for office space but can’t afford to pay rent for her damn schools? And why does anyone put up with this sh–? (And sorry for the language, but it’s getting hard not to swear these days.)
They put up with it because below a certain point of loss, most people would rather continue being wronged than put in the effort to fight back. Understand that the first step towards fighting back is perceiving that you are being wronged.
“Success” for some, indeed. How long do the profiteers think they can keep these arrangements secret from the communities they “serve”, excuse me, prey on.
OK Eva is smart. Just like NEA & Major Lobbying Groups in DC are on K Street or close to it. Sorry that she is smart. But this tells how she views education as a business venture. Educators should be true to themselves just as people should, But educators also have to be savvy and play their own cards smartly as well.
What can one say with such a travesty? AND it was assumed that there was something called separation of church and state. In the last issue of “Foreign Affairs” Francis Fukuyama’s article “America in Decay” elaborates on what is happening. Tragic. It does not have to be this way.
“It does not have to be this way.”
Words to cling to, those.
“. . . we are serving 6,700 scholars at 22 schools.”
Oh, those precious little “scholars”!! Isn’t that special?
What is infuriating is that most people see her as a liberator of the poor – she is the reverse, totally corrupt hiding in plain sight.
With all due respect to the opera, is De Blasio now a castrato? Moskowitz is running rough-shod over the NYC Public Schools and like a cancer she is metastasizing, with no opposition. are people waiting for a defeat like the Nazis at Stalingrad or Napoleon post Moscow?There must be a opponents to Moskowitz who are willing and capable of resising her territorial grabs. She is not Super Women. She really is mortal and vulnerable to counter attack.
Her hubris, reflected and aided by the hatred felt toward her even by fellow privatizers, will be her undoing.
Hopefully, Juan Gonzalez will also develop sources among former SA teachers or administrators that would explain why, despite her school’s vaunted test results on the state exams, not a single Success Academy 8th grader passed the test for acceptance to the specialized high schools.
If the SUNY Charter Institute, which is charged with regulating SA, had any integrity, it would answer that question before granting any more of Moskowitz’s power and resource grabs. Since that’s a fantasy, we’ll have to wait for the leaks to become a flood.
MF
I am a new yorker, public school kid, who has survived a boston based work life. my connection to nyc runs deep. what eva moskowitz is doing makes me sick at heart. I await, i hope not futilely her destruction ( yes, I mean what i write re e.m.). perhaps, she will play the lead in her own greek tragedy, and fall victim to her own hubris. I wouldn’t mind a little push).
By the by, is Juan Gonzalez, the writer, the same person who was in The Young Lords Party, and played a part in the 1968 Columbia uprising? Just attempting to get some context.
John A, Juan Gonzalez is a great journalist. He is all over the machinations of the powerful like butter on a hot pancake. You just taught me something I did not know about him: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Gonzalez_(journalist)
Michael, I patiently await her ‘tragic’ downfall. I do hope your optimism is well,founded.
john a,
I too am a lifelong New Yorker, public school teacher and alumnus, and father of two children who attended NYC public schools, K-12. I too am horrified by what has been happening to the public schools and neighborhoods of the city by its transformation into a playground for the rich and an investment locus for global hot money. In service of that, the NYPD has been turned into a militarized repression machine, charged with making sure “dangerous” populations are kept under heel while being forced out of the city into local suburban Bantustans and Fergusons.
Unfortunately, it’s not optimism that makes me predict Moskowitz’s downfall. If I was optimistic, I’d predict it based on the efforts of the UFT and elected officials to expose and defund her, which doesn’t seem to be in the cards right now.
I only think she’ll fall because evil always destroys itself.
Michael, History demonstrates that “evil does not destroy itself”, if that were only so. As I wrote, above, the Moskowitz empire is symptomatic of state (ultimately national) systemic issues. I fervently hope that the public unions, the remnants of NYC and NYS middle class and a rising consciousness and action of poor and working class people can summon the coherence required to topple the hegemoney of the 1% in both NYC and in Albany. This ain’t a good time for public education.
It might be worth noting that Eva’s offices are all of two blocks away from the UFT’s headquarters, which are a stone’s throw from Wall Street and which, if memory serves, the union does not have to bother to lease as it owns the two buildings outright.
James Merriman, the UFT bought a building in lower Manhattan after the tragedy of 9/11, to show support for a wounded city, not to be closer to hedge funders
Wow, that was a really weak effort at misdirection, Mr. Merriman, ably and succinctly disposed of Diane.
With all the funding you receive from Wall Street, surely you could serve your patrons better in trying to smear the UFT.
Rating: Highly Ineffective.
Diane,
I thought you were teaching at TC ‘back’ in the day. There is so little in the education world these days that evokes a smile, despite the growing resistance to the ‘deformers’ attempts to over ruin education and destroy public schools. Knowing that we have a journalist such as Juan Gonzalez on our side does make me smile, as it should do the same for you.
Bon chance with your ongoing medical travailles. You are fighting the “good fight”; and you have been around sufficiently long to understand my double meaning.
“Our salaries are consistent with those of other similarly sized nonprofits in New York City,” Success Academy spokesperson Kerri Lyon said.
I’d love to know what other “CEO” of a “non-profit” made “$567,000 during the 2012-2013 school year” or got “a raise of $92,000 from the previous year.”
How many other “non-profit” organizations are so profitable for the people at the top –who also happen to be working out of field, as the non-educator politician Moskowitz who has no training or experience teaching in K12 education?
Focus on the 5.3 million dollars of tax payer money that is going for rentals. NYC is liable for up to $40 million each year for charter rentals but this amount is not really a cap. The new NYS Education Law allows for an “apportionment” of 60% above the $40 milllion mark should too many charters seek and obtain rental fees because the city cannot find space in the public schools. Most new co-located charters start up in public schools with a few first and second grade classes but then each succeeding year, they add a grade and require more school classrooms. At some point, all of these co-located charters will not be able to squeeze any more space from the public school and then will presumably be eligible for rentals in private spaces, at tax-payer expense!!!
Read the fine print in the NYS Educaation law passed last spring. Scroll down to the very end-around line 72.
spw,
Thanks – I guess that is the word -f or the budget impact info: it has disastrous ramifications for the nyc public schools. essentially, nys government is forcing nyc ito fund two parallel, competing school systems; in support of the disastrous CCSD and in the name of a false notion of parent choice. The galloping growth of the Eva Moscowitz empire, her salary, her rental of new head quarters space, is, while revolting, only a symptom of a much larger educational and political-economic disease: the destruction of the NYC and by extension the NYS public schools. What is affecting NYC is surely reproducing throughout the state..
Essentially, NYC is competing against itself for students and resources. This a disastrous self devouring situation from pedagogical, infrastructure, instructional and educational staffing perspectives.
As charter schools continue to metastasize, public school programs will continue to be pushed out of their own buildings and at a certain point, additional funds will flow directly to charter school rentals and away from public schools. The NYC public schools will devolve and constrict to a point where it will no longer be recognizable.
What we are seeing is an expedited shedding of the NYS commitment to public schools. It is obvious that Cuomo is driven by political and economic imperatives that are cloaked in pedagogical arguments. All this is occurring in the service of Cuomo’s political ambitions. Keep your eyes on Cuomo, work to divulge Moskowitz”s financial, poltical and real estate machinations, but don’t get diverted by Moskowitz: she is manifestation of Cuomo’s political ambitions.
The fight to sustain NYC and NYS public education must first focus on throwing out Cuomo and his factotums, then working from the executive branch and to that extent possible through legislative action to repeal executive actions and legislation that is destroying the public schools.
These political changes can only occur through state wide political organizing by parent, community and labor groupa. Unless a potent political alliance forms to offer an alternative to Cuomo’s vision, then, to the detriment of the 99%, public school education will go down the drain.