Eva Moskowitz, CEO of Success Charter Network. | Dario Cantatore/Getty Images for Tribeca Film Festival Charter leader Eva Moskowitz in the mix for Trump education secretary

Eva Moskowitz, the CEO of New York City's largest and most controversial charter school network, is in the running to become President-elect Donald Trump's education secretary, a Trump aide confirmed Wednesday morning.

The news puts Moskowitz in the company of other education reform leaders like former D.C. public schools chief Michelle Rhee and Center for Education Reform director Jeanne Allen, among others.


A spokeswoman for Success declined to comment on whether Moskowitz was considering the position.

The very fact that Moskowitz isn't shooting down the rumors could have political implications for the longtime Democrat, who has long had ambitions of running for mayor of New York City.

Moskowitz lives in Manhattan (where Hillary Clinton drew approximately 90 percent of the vote against Trump) and represented the Upper East Side as a Democratic City Councilwoman. She started her network of 41 schools in Harlem in 2006.

Sources close to Moskowitz maintain that she is still interested in running for mayor at some point, even though she announced last year that she would not challenge Mayor Bill de Blasio in the 2017 race.

Her political power in New York has already been tested over the last year, following a spate of negative press about her schools' discipline practices and internal workings, a federal investigation conducted by the Office of Civil Rights, and mounting criticism from local elected officials. It is unclear whether Moskowitz could be confirmed as a cabinet official of an agency that is investigating her schools.

After scoring a number of clean political wins over the de Blasio administration early in the mayor's term, Moskowitz and her pro-charter allies at Families for Excellent Schools have more recently absorbed a series of setbacks, from an attempt to re-negotiate a pre-Kindergarten contract to an ongoing but little-noticed dispute over school space for Success middle schoolers. Moskowitz continued her fight with City Hall over school space this week, even as her name was being floated on national television for education secretary.

Moskowitz will appear at a press conference on the steps of City Hall on Thursday to call on de Blasio to create "permanent school space" for some Success middle school students.

While Moskowitz has found herself on the defensive at home, Success is still seen as a national charter model by many influential reform leaders. That's based in large part on loyal, vocal support for her from the families of her student body, which is overwhelmingly poor, black and Latino — groups among whom opposition to Trump in the election was particularly strong.

(Success staff seemed to be mourning the results last week; the network's social media staff posted a Langston Hughes poem about equality in America on its Twitter feed the morning after the election.)

Politics aside, Moskowitz might chafe at the constraints of the post, which is viewed among education observers largely as a bureaucratic position without all the power the title would suggest. This would be particularly true if a Trump administration set about relinquishing some federal power back to the states.

And while Trump has pledged to "get rid of" the Common Core, Moskowitz is a strong supporter of the set of standards introduced by President Obama. An enormous part of her schools' renown is Success students' high scores on Common Core-aligned exams.

Hedge fund manager John Paulson, a major Trump ally, is also a supporter of Moskowitz, having given Success an $8.5 million donation last year. Paulson, who has also given to de Blasio's computer science initiative, is one of Trump's most prominent supporters in the finance world.

But the federal position would provide Moskowitz a powerful new perch commensurate with the size of her professional ambitions.

She has made no secret of her ultimate ambition to overhaul New York's public school system by significantly expanding the size of the charter sector and making charters a legitimate competitor to district schools. She's said she wants to expand her own network to 100 schools over the next decade.

As education secretary, she could help ensure the enormous growth of charters not only in New York but around the country.