Former New York City council member Eva Moskowitz is notorious for calling off classes at her chain of charter schools to load students and teachers into buses to rallies for charter school funding and to lobby the state government. But when it comes to Donald Trump’s immigration order, Moskowitz—whose schools have many immigrant students—says she won’t get political.
A group of Success faculty members recently wrote Moskowitz a letter outlining their concerns about her ties to DeVos and Trump, and her silence on Trump policies that impact Success students, particularly the executive order on immigration and new deportation guidelines.
Moskowitz responded in a lengthy letter this week, writing, “I … need to consider whether it is appropriate for me to use my position as the leader of a collection of public schools paid for with government funds to advocate politically.”
That is hilariously dishonest considering Moskowitz’s constant political advocacy for her schools to get better funding and preferential treatment, including pushing public schools out of classroom space she wants. She’s a major political force in New York—she just doesn’t want to condemn Trump, who considered her as education secretary, or DeVos, who she supports.
“We, as a school system, need you to stand up for all of us and decry these actions on our behalf,” the faculty letter reads.
Moskowitz replied that she found that request unreasonable. “What proportion of our community has to agree with a particular position for me to purport to ‘speak for us?,'" she asked in the letter, “90%? 80%? 51%?”
Moskowitz has refused on several occasions to answer questions about protections for undocumented students in her schools. She ignored repeated questions about how Success would handle the threat of student deportations at a press conference in November when she announced she would not serve as Education secretary, and again declined to comment in a New Yorker article several days later.
That’s about the response you’d expect from someone whose schools have been repeatedly caught pushing special needs kids out, including lists of kids labeled “got to go.” Eva Moskowitz doesn’t care about students. She cares about money and power, and she’s not alienating Trump if he might help her get it.