A decade later, I can say that I did indeed land in New York City just as a sweeping remake of public education got under way not only for New Yorkers but for families all across America. Except I got the architects of the transformation wrong. Bloomberg and Klein played their part, but the real revolutionary was another person I met early on in my reporting: a 5-foot-2-inch redhead from Harlem named Eva Moskowitz.

It was June 2007, and I was following the mayor around as he took a victory lap celebrating record-high test scores. “Who’s excited about summer?,” Bloomberg asked a group of 5-, 6-, and 7-year-olds seated in front of him at their new Harlem elementary school, which had opened the previous August. He ticked off the fun things they might do once school let out, like go to the pool. The school’s principal, Eva Moskowitz, spoke next. She didn’t “want to contradict the mayor,” she said solemnly, “but there’s going to be some swimming, but there’s also going to be some reading.” Later, the mom of a kindergartner told me just how serious the principal was. To keep up with the school’s reading requirements, she and her son regularly hauled 50 books home from the library. What were you doing in kindergarten?

I had visited impressive schools before, but none quite like this one. The kids, who congregated in a corner of a large public-school building on West 118th Street, were a sight with their orange-and-blue uniforms and blue backpacks. But the person who made the biggest impression was Moskowitz herself. She stalked the school corridors more like a rear admiral than a pedagogue, rattling off to whomever would listen the obstacles she was up against: union rules governing sink repair, school bells ringing on a cryptic schedule, doors requiring custom fixes. She was either paranoid or plagued, probably some of both. Feeling under siege, she could either defend or attack. She picked the Napoleon option.

Like other charter schools—which operate independently of a school district’s control but are still publicly regulated and funded—Harlem Success Academy, as the school had been named, was starting up slowly, serving 165 kindergartners and first-graders in its inaugural year. But already Moskowitz had set herself apart. While other charter-school leaders ran only a handful of schools in a given state, she planned to open 40 more schools like this one. All in New York City, and all in a single decade.

I underlined the number in my reporter’s notebook. By some measures, 40 wasn’t unprecedented. The country’s best-known charter network, kipp, had grown to 46 schools by 2006. It was part of an expansion funded by the founders of the Gap, Doris and Don Fisher, after the charter movement took off in the 1990s. But kipp schools were spread across 15 states, with just a few schools per city. New York City had four. Like the Gap, which had made its name targeting young people, the point was to serve not an entire market, but a niche—in kipp’s case, the poorest students.