This time of year, New York’s social calendar is filled with worthy, if predictable, events that celebrate nonprofit institutions and the donors who fund them.
Monday’s dinner to support charter schools followed the pattern and featured big-name financiers, but it didn’t end with happy talk about spring flowers and garden parties. This was no ordinary celebration — it was a stirring call to arms to fix education. And it marked a coming-out party for Campbell Brown, the former TV journalist who now calls herself an “activist in the fight.”
“This is right versus wrong,” Brown said in a rousing speech aimed aim at Gotham’s political establishment. “There is no middle ground.”
She cited Mayor de Blasio for echoing the teachers union’s anti-charter stance, warning he must “choose between making a comfortable interest group more comfortable, or being a true force for good in the lives of children. He can protect the status quo, or he can protect the public interest, but he can’t do both.”
Jeb Bush, former Florida governor and likely 2016 Republican presidential candidate, gave the keynote address but, truth be told, was upstaged more than once. He had to contend with a parade of articulate and confident children — “scholars,” to their teachers — who danced and talked their way into the audience’s hearts.
Bush also had to share the limelight with Eva Moskowitz, founder and CEO of the Success Academy Charter Network, the city’s most successful system.
The event raised nearly $8 million for her schools, and Moskowitz, fresh off her victory over de Blasio’s attempt to stop her expansion, was like a coiled spring in calmly promising that the best was yet to come.
She will open 10 new schools this summer, including her first high school, making a total of 32 schools holding 9,000 students. She led a parent march across the Brooklyn Bridge last fall and a rally in Albany in March that drew support from Gov. Cuomo and legislative leaders. The result was a series of protections written into state law that she rightly called “game-changing” events for charters.
But it is student achievement that makes the Moskowitz system remarkable. Success Academy students ranked in the top 1 percent of all state schools in math, and the top 7 percent in English.
By comparison, some 67 percent of third-graders in traditional city public schools read below grade level.
With only 3 percent of Moskowitz’s students being white, the network is proving that the racial achievement gap can be closed. Or, as she put it Monday, she aims to show that “demography is not destiny.”
That was a theme of Campbell Brown’s speech, too, but hers carried a more forceful political edge. Describing herself as a “soldier in Eva’s army,” she said her career at NBC and CNN made her a referee in public disputes, but that balance is no virtue when children’s lives are at stake. She said the attempt to kill charters means “no compromise is possible.”
“No one is saying that every public-school student should be moved into a charter,” she added. “All we say is that the excellence of our charters should be moved into every public school.”
She didn’t spare the rod, saying pols like de Blasio resist charters because, “By saving children and giving them a chance, these schools only remind everyone what those kids are being saved from — an education system that lost its way.”
Former Chancellor Joel Klein, who helped charters get a foothold, was among those suggesting a political future for Brown, but she insists that’s not happening.
“NO WAY!!!,” she wrote in an e-mail yesterday. “I’m a mom and recovering TV journo (which means I am an independent). I am entirely focused on raising 2 kid s— and trying to help other children get the same educational opportunities my own children have.”
Mmmm — that sounds like a winning campaign platform!
Bam’s bawls & strikes
Say this for President Obama: He rarely misses an opportunity to take the low road.
Asked during his trip to Asia about ballooning failures of his foreign policies, the president lapsed into his straw-man routine, where he charges critics with taking a position they don’t hold, then demolishes the position.
He accused unnamed critics of wanting war in Ukraine, asking reporters, “Why is that everybody is so eager to use military force after we’ve just gone through a decade of war?”
Of course, there is not a single credible critic, Republican or Democrat, calling for war in Ukraine, but what’s a little lie to a president who tells so many big ones?
He recently accused Senate Dems of wanting war with Iran by proposing additional sanctions. And he accuses critics of his Syrian policy of urging war when he was the one pushing for military strikes — until he got cold feet.
His arguments depend on a false choice between his feckless failures and military power. In reality, there are many options in between he finds inconvenient, so he denies their existence.
The upshot is that his policy, each and every time, is the only one not driven by blood lust or grubby political games. Just ask him.
“That may not always be sexy. That may not always attract a lot of attention, and it doesn’t make for good argument on Sunday morning shows,” Mr. Obama said of his way. “But it avoids errors. You hit singles; you hit doubles. Every once in a while, we may be able to hit a home run.”
He’s so perfect, it’s a wonder Pope Francis didn’t make him a saint. That just shows the pope is fallible.
Kerry hits new diplo low
Caught warning that Israel might become an “apartheid state,” John Kerry tried to backpedal with the kind of double-talk that gives diplomacy a bad name.
“I will not allow my commitment to Israel to be questioned,” he said, while also admitting, “If I could rewind the tape, I would have chosen a different word.”
In other words, I didn’t say apartheid, but if I did, I wouldn’t say it again.
Something simple, like “I’m sorry,” would have been better. Or is that too complicated?
A Gimm’s morality tale
Michael Grimm had a target on his back. Either he is one thoroughly crooked guy, or the Republican congressman from Staten Island is the victim of a witch hunt.
A federal indictment on tax and fraud charges involves a restaurant he ran before being elected in 2010.
But investigators also probed his campaign finances and reported dealings with gangsters.
Grimm says he still wants a third term, and Republicans may be stuck with him on the ballot. The deadline for changing it passed weeks ago, which led to grousing about the feds’ timing.
Still, Grimm played close to the line repeatedly, and may have crossed it. If he did, neither he nor the party deserves a shred of sympathy.