The Education of Eva Moskowitz by Eva Moskowitz

Author:Eva Moskowitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-08-05T04:00:00+00:00

27

GIVING AN HONEST DEFINITION TO THE WORD “PUBLIC”

2011–2012

I have to admit it: I’ve got a soft spot for Matt Damon. Good Will Hunting, Ocean’s Eleven, and those Bourne films . . . Sigh. But, alas, Damon doesn’t have a soft spot for me. At a rally in DC in the summer of 2011, he criticized me by name. It’s a strange experience watching a guy you’re used to rooting for in the movies make clear he isn’t rooting for you, but at least I was in good company. Obama had lamented: “I love Matt Damon, love the guy. Matt Damon said he was disappointed in my performance. Well, Matt, I just saw The Adjustment Bureau [Damon’s latest film], so right back at you, buddy.” In my case, Damon didn’t like the fact that we sent mailings to parents about our schools. I confess I found it curious he would begrudge my spending money telling disadvantaged families about their educational opportunities when far greater funds were spent on promoting the films in which he appeared. (Right back at you, buddy.)

Notwithstanding Damon’s opposition, we decided in the fall of 2011 to open three new schools in Brooklyn. Many people warned me that continuing to expand so quickly could hurt the quality of our schools. I was conscious of that danger, but also of the fact that there were more than one million school-age children in New York City who desperately needed better educational options. We’d received nine thousand applicants for just nine hundred seats. We had a moral responsibility, I believed, to haul as many children into our lifeboat as we could without sinking it.

One obstacle we faced was raising enough money to fund this rapid expansion, but a strong prospect soon emerged: a blunt and brilliant investor by the name of Daniel Loeb. He’d started his business career at twelve, making skateboards and investing the profits in the stock market, earning him the sobriquet Milo Minderbinder. By the end of college, he’d amassed $120,000, which he then proceeded to lose in one disastrous trade. Nonetheless, he went into finance and, in 1995, founded a hedge fund. Two years later, it earned an astonishing 98.3 percent annual return. By the time I met Daniel, he was managing billions of dollars.

Daniel and his wife, Margaret, were also deeply committed to the causes in which they believed. They had played a major role in passing gay marriage legislation and were generous supporters of Prep for Prep, an organization for which I’d worked that helped gifted minority children. Daniel was looking around for a charter school to support and was going about it with the same thoroughness with which he chose his investments. He eventually concluded that Success Academy was the equivalent of an undervalued company: we were getting great results for kids, but we weren’t as popular with some funders as other charter schools because I was controversial. Since Daniel and Margaret cared about helping kids more than winning popularity contests, they generously agreed to give us $3 million, enough money to open all three of our Brooklyn schools.

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