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Howard Wolfson: For our readers who are not familiar with you — tell us a little bit about yourself and your story.
Dianne Morales: So I am the youngest daughter of a working-class, blue-collar, Puerto Rican family. I was born and raised in Bed-Stuy. I’m a first-generation college graduate and also have been a single mom of two now-college students who attended and graduated from the public schools. I’m a former educator myself but have spent the last decade or so as the CEO of an antipoverty organization in the South Bronx, helping others like me overcome barriers to education and economic opportunity.
HW: You also taught in the New York City public schools. And you worked at least for a time in New York City government. Correct?
DM: I did. I spent the first two years of the [Mike] Bloomberg administration working in the New York City Department of Education. I came in as part of Joel Klein’s transition team and then ended up staying on to help establish the Office of Youth Development and School-Community Services.
HW: You’ve seen education up close as a parent, as an educator, as someone who worked in government. What’s the Morales plan for education, were you to be elected mayor?
DM: I’m also the mom of two public-school graduates, both of whom had [an Individualized Educational Program]. And I was also a special education teacher. I’ve had a front-row seat from a couple of different angles to some of the dysfunctions in our system. From a content perspective, our kids don’t see each other; our 1.3 million students, the majority of whom are Black and Brown, don’t really see themselves reflected in the curriculum. They don’t see their history reflected in the curriculum. They don’t see as much of their context. And I think that’s something that we need to address in terms of being culturally responsive.
[There’s also] the need to focus on the three main pillars of education — financial literacy, digital and technological literacy, and civic and democratic literacy. Anything that we think of as nonnegotiable in terms of what our students need to learn could be taught under any one of those pillars.
I also have said our classrooms look a lot like they did — and I’m going to date myself here — in “Little House on the Prairie.” It’s kids lined up in rows and one teacher in the front, and we should actually be incorporating the city as a classroom, getting our kids out into the community, introducing them to all sorts of sectors and careers and industries and businesses and gradually allowing them to explore their own interests. You begin to explore where they want to go with their careers, right? So the idea of “job shadows” and “bring your student to the office” internships that are paid or credit-bearing — those things help students make informed decisions about their future. That’s the direction that we need to move in to claim and maintain a position as the best education system in the country.
HW: You mentioned that you taught special education. My mom was a special education teacher in the South Bronx in the ’70s and ’80s. She was very invested in her kids but it was a very challenging assignment, both in terms of the work in the classroom and the work out of the classroom to stay in touch with parents. I’m wondering, when you left teaching and the Department of Education, what were you thinking at that point? What drove that decision?
DM: I felt like we were just continuing to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic. I was hopeful when I started there that we were going to do something transformative, but I felt like we actually were doing some harm and not really moving forward. [When] I was a doctoral student in the school of education at Harvard, my focus was looking at low-income Black and Brown communities, how people who don’t have access to quality schools actually gained a political activism. Communities that have been failed by educational institutions for so long — how do they manage to acquire an education? Like real education. After the DOE, I wanted to go back to that. Many Black and Brown communities actually get their education through alternative means and alternative mechanisms. I could make the change that I thought was needed through the system by going outside the system.
HW: Some would say that a lot of the energy around activism and political involvement from the education sector is coming in the charter space. I’m wondering how you see the charter movement in the context of the advocacy that you are talking about.
DM: I’m not sure I agree with that premise, quite frankly, coming out of the community-based-organization world for the last decade. I think there’s a lot of movement from the ground that is focused on preserving, protecting and improving our public schools. And that’s where I’ve been aligned most. I recognize and appreciate that for many families, our public schools continue to fail them. They’ve turned to charter schools, and I have total respect for that as a parent. But the movement that I’ve been involved in is largely driven by parents of public-school students who are invested in transforming our public schools.
HW: You’re an activist, you’ve been an educator, a social services provider — you’re somebody who is focused on issues around equity. And at some point, you decide that you’re going to run for mayor. Talk to me a little bit about that decision — knowing obviously that most of our mayors come from a somewhat different background, which doesn’t mean that’s how it has to be. I’m curious, did you have an epiphany or was this something that gradually came upon you?
DM: There was definitely not an epiphany. I would say I came down this path initially kicking and screaming. I had friends who for about a decade had been telling me that I should run for office. And my standard response was like, “Have you met me?” I’m not diplomatic. I can’t be a politician. That’s just not my lane.
Then the 2016 election happened. And some of our worst nightmares come true; although truth be told, I had said I think he’s [Donald Trump] going to win long before. But that kind of makes everybody go, OK, what do I need to do differently? I’ve got lived experience and I’ve got professional experience that could — that should — be brought to bear at a larger scale; what do I do? And then the 2018 elections happen and there were a couple of breakthroughs. There were races — AOC, Ilhan Omar — where you see something different, like a sense of hope and possibility. There’s a crack in the ceiling in terms of what elected officials are supposed to look like or what viability means.
And I still, at that point, wasn’t really thinking about it. It wasn’t until a year later that the conversation came up again and I was like, “Oh, OK.” Let’s just have this exploratory convo. There was something in that conversation when I was like: “Why am I not considering this? Like, why not me?” And that then started to take on a life of its own. And the idea that I had kind of written myself off by virtue of what others defined as viable or right — I’m not going to keep letting other people define what kind of spaces I can be in or how I can be in those spaces.
Now it’s bigger than me. It’s not just about me now. It’s about all others who are like me and what it symbolizes for me to be in this race in terms of claiming space for people that have historically not been given a seat at the table.
HW: We’ve never elected a woman mayor in New York, and it was only fairly recently that we elected our first female senator in New York. There’s often a presumption about what a mayor might look like. I think that there’s a very good reason to try to change that. You’ve obviously been around politics, but you’ve never run for elected office. How are you liking it?
DM: These Zoom forums — I’m going to date myself here — it’s like “Hollywood Squares.” You only see the other candidates. We are becoming familiar in a really interesting kind of way, but those are not the people that I’m trying to speak to. It’s hard to not see the people that I’m trying to reach or talk to. As an organizer, as an advocate, I’m so used to co-creating things with community and co-leading, and co-facilitating; it’s hard to feel like yours is the only voice because it’s totally counterintuitive to what I’m trying to represent with my campaign and what I’m trying to do.
That being said, getting outside with the weather getting nicer, and even just the petitioning that’s happening now for the signatures, it’s been a stark contrast. I love connecting with people and seeing the look on their faces when they hear that I’m running for mayor. There’s an initial kind of shock and then you see the smile and the appreciation, and that’s pretty incredible, but the Zoom thing has kind of worn itself out, I think.
HW: What’s your view of the city at this moment? What’s your state of the city?
DM: I would say right now that we’re down for sure. And also we’ve been stripped to what I consider the core of the city and the strength of the city, which are basically the low-income Black and Brown working class, female-led households, the LGBT community, the folks who are the heart and soul of the city, who keep the city running. What to me has been laid bare is that those people are our greatest strength in so many ways. And I think we[re at an interesting crossroads with a unique opportunity to recognize that and to prioritize those folks in our recovery: bringing them to the center and ensuring that whatever plan we have builds a new New York City that centers those folks in all our policy priorities.
Whether I’m talking about housing — and how we do housing differently so that everybody has access to…