Eva Moskowitz
Eva Moskowitz is the founder and CEO of Success Academy Charter Schools, a flourishing network of charter schools in New York City that teaches nearly 9,500 mostly low-income black and Latino students. By skirting the control of the teachers union and creating highly disciplined, serious environments for students, Moskowitz’s schools have managed to outscore on standardized tests not only the city’s public schools but also its most highly regarded charters.
In the past year, Moskowitz, 50, with her hard-driving style, has also made a powerful enemy of New York City’s progressive new mayor, Bill de Blasio. While she points to the success of her network — including its first high school that opened in September — the mayor and other critics have continued to slam Moskowitz for taking public funds and space from the many in order to educate the few or, as Diane Ravitch, the educational policy analyst, recently put it, for “undermining the public’s commitment to public education.”
Growing up in Harlem, Moskowitz went to New York public schools and graduated from Stuyvesant High School. It was an educational experience she would later claim was riddled with teaching incompetence and spurred her to provide students with more opportunity.
Agree with her charter school philosophy or despise it, one has to acknowledge that Moskowitz raises legitimate questions about our children’s education: Can teachers be trained to be better? Are poor children capable of improving their learning skills? What environment should a school provide? We may not always like Moskowitz’s answers, but there’s no doubt she is pushing the conversation forward.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
