Delicate Dance Between Moskowitz, Klein, Mayor
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

When Council Member Eva Moskowitz sent her now-famous letter to the Bloomberg administration urging a strong stance in the contract talks with the teachers union, she addressed it to the mayor, not the schools chancellor.
Mr. Bloomberg replied caustically: “I guess I am happy to see that the council member has gone back to grandstanding on education rather than doing political favors for Upper East Side residents about sidewalk cafes.”
But the city’s schools chancellor, Joel Klein, has not criticized Ms. Moskowitz for the letter. The letter that so upset Mr. Bloomberg praised Mr. Klein as “a talented man of integrity, with a healthy, can-do attitude.” Mr. Klein publicly supports some of the same stances Ms. Moskowitz does in her letter. In public appearances, the chancellor holds up a copy of a report of The Teaching Commission that speaks of paying more money to successful teachers. The Moskowitz letter calls for eliminating “restrictions against paying teachers more in shortage areas and for talent.”
The situation is rife with potential awkwardness – Mr. Bloomberg is a Republican, while Mr. Klein and Ms. Moskowitz are Democrats, and Ms. Moskowitz has well-known political ambitions. It has prompted speculation of a rift between Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Klein, and denials of the same.
But for those keeping an eye on both the substance and the politics of the contract, which covers 80,000 teachers and thousands more professionals who are paid a total of billions of dollars a year, this is a high-stakes, delicate dance. The next negotiation session between the city and the United Federation of Teachers is scheduled for Thursday.
“There’s no daylight between the mayor and me about where we are going in negotiation,” Mr. Klein told The New York Sun in a telephone interview yesterday, declining to get into the matter of the Moskowitz letter.
Ms. Moskowitz told the Sun that she sent Mr. Klein an e-mail with the contents of the letter the same day last week that she hand-delivered the letter to Mr. Bloomberg. She said she did it “as a courtesy,” not to get feedback or talk about the contents.
She said that usually when she sends letters about education policy, she sends them to Mr. Klein, but that in this case it made more sense to send it directly to the mayor.
“The mayor is the person who is negotiating the contract,” she said. “I thought it was more appropriate in this context to send the letter to the mayor. The mayor is the elected official.”
Ms. Moskowitz said she didn’t talk about the contents of the letter with the chancellor when she sent him a copy of it. She said he didn’t encourage her to send it to the mayor and that she hasn’t talked to Mr. Klein since then.
“I have had many conversations with the chancellor on many, many topics,” she said. “I have not spoken to him since I sent the letter.”
Meanwhile, speculation, accurate or not, about a Klein-Bloomberg rift is festering on the Web.Eduwonk.com, a Web site run by the Democratic Leadership Council’s Progressive Policy Institute, reported, “A lot of buzz about a Klein-Bloomberg split over this issue. All sides denying publicly, but those in the know say this marriage has hit a rough patch.”
AndRHSager.com, another Web site that reports on education issues, also speculated on the Klein-Bloomberg tension. Such reports may be an effort by the union to gain an advantage in negotiations.
An aide said the UFT president, Randi Weingarten, was in Ohio yesterday helping get out the vote for Democrats.