Tom Allon leaned forward, fork hovering over a half-eaten Swiss omelette. “I know my candidacy right now seems like a long shot to some people.”
But Allon, Trinity dad and Upper West Sider, has never been one to take the predictable route. After 25 years as a community newspaper publisher, Allon dove headfirst into politics this July, when he announced his bid for New York City mayor.
“That was a defining moment for me,” said Allon, recalling his disillusionment with the Department of Education (DOE) and subsequent decision to run for office. “I felt like I had unleashed all the military might I had in all my newspapers and all my media, and I couldn’t change this no-brainer of a policy. Then, I thought, ‘I’ve got to run for office. I’ve got to run for mayor.’ I figured I’d change things from the inside, as opposed to being the guy on the outside, criticizing.”
Education is Allon’s favorite subject. A graduate of Stuyvesant High School, Cornell, and the Columbia Journalism School, he has spent almost all his student life in the New York school system. “My parents were immigrants—Holocaust survivors—and they moved here in ’56. My brother and I were the first generation. I went to a public school very briefly and then to a Yeshiva for five years, and then eventually to [the exclusive McBurney School] which competed with Dalton.”
J.D. Salinger also attended the school—years before Allon—but disastrous grades got him expelled. Unlike his predecessor, Allon remembers McBurney fondly: “It was literally a building attached to the 63rd Street Y, so our gym was the 63rd Street Y and our park was the park.”
Allon was a serious athlete, captain of both the baseball and basketball teams. But when he moved to Stuyvesant for high school, “I tried out for the baseball and basketball teams my freshman year and got cut from both, which was devastating. As a result, I decided to join the school newspaper.”
“All of a sudden I found something I loved,” Allon said, smiling as he remembers the days he spent on the Stuyvesant Spectator. He had found his calling. By the end of his sophomore year at Stuyvesant, he was editor-in-chief. “As I’ve said to my kids on a number of occasions, you never know when one door’s going to close and another’s going to open. If I had not been open to being a journalist, and still thought I was going to be an athlete, I would be a failed basketball player today.”
From that moment on, Allon’s story can be told as a series of newspapers. At Cornell, he was sports editor of the Daily Sun before he went on to found his own “lefty newspaper” called The Point. He worked nights and weekends as a copyboy at The New York Times and eventually returned to Stuyvesant as faculty advisor for The Spectator. After working as editor of The West Side Spirit, Allon climbed the ranks of what is now Manhattan Media, the publisher of community newspapers and magazines like New York Family, The Capitol, and AVENUE. Today, he is President and CEO.
Perhaps because of his own involvement in student journalism, Allon was especially enthusiastic about The Daltonian. “I’m delighted to hear there are newspapers still coming out in schools, because I’m worried about your generation not reading papers.” He wants to “try to figure out a way to revive student journalism, because it’s such a dying art. It’s great to have people who still believe in that craft.”
Allon’s own steadfast belief in the craft once cost him his job. Although The Daltonian may have had its mishaps, The Spectator became national news in 1986, while Allon was faculty advisor. As he tells the story, two of the editors of the paper “called me one night and said, ‘Mr. Allon, we hear that kids at Stuyvesant are taking the SATs for kids at other schools. We want to do an exposé about it. We want to show how easy it is to get a fake ID and take the exam.’
“And I said, ‘Whoa, hold on a second, we have to see if that’s legal.’ I called up the New York Civil Liberties Union and spoke to a lawyer. He said, ‘If they get a fake ID and take the exam, as long as they cancel their scores afterward it’s just a journalistic exercise.’ So I gave them the green light.”
The story did not just make the front page of The Spectator. It made WABC Radio and The Today Show. It made Channels 2, 4, and 7. It made The Post’s Page Six under the headline: “Whiz Kids for Hire.”
Reflecting on the ensuing “firestorm,” Allon is wickedly unrepentant. “Principals and administrators think the school newspaper should be a mouthpiece for the school to make it look good. I have a different view of that.”
After being fired, Allon and his convictions moved to The West Side Spirit, where they “exposed corruption in Dinkins’ administration, went after Ed Koch a little bit, went after Giuliani a lot. There was no greater training on how to be a journalist in New York.”
Yet even though no longer officially a teacher or student, Allon has become increasingly concerned with education in the city. He worries that private schools have become so expensive and select that minorities are often not represented (although he does “applaud Dalton” for its increasing minority enrollments). Overemphasis on standardized testing disturbs him: “Not everything is quantifiable. You can’t quantify that teacher in second grade who sparked you into becoming a writer, or that eighth-grade teacher who sparked you into loving history.”
But what unsettles Allon most is the disrespect teachers often face. “I know—because I’ve done it—how difficult it is to be a teacher in the city, how difficult it is to stand up in front of 15 kids in a private school or 35 kids in a public school, and how difficult it is to motivate those kids.” We need a “sea change” in the way our society perceives teachers. We should learn from societies in which “teachers are revered.”
Allon speaks with reverence of Frank McCourt, author of “Angela’s Ashes” and Allon’s mentor and fellow writing teacher at Stuyvesant. “He would say to someone slumped in his seat: ‘you, in the third row, what’d you have for dinner last night?’ ‘I don’t know. Spaghetti.’ ‘What kind of spaghetti? What kind of sauce? What else did you have with it? Who made it?’ He would just keep on probing so the kids would be required to think about the details in their lives, even the quotidian things we ignore. And then write about it. A good friend of mine who took his class, now a pretty famous author, says he saved her life. She was going through a very difficult period when she was a teenager. Every day the 50 minutes of that class were a beacon of hope for her. That’s what education needs to be.”
To honor inspirational teachers in the city like McCourt, Allon leads Manhattan Media in presenting the annual Blackboard Awards. “You hear these stories of teachers, and you watch the parents and the administrators come out and talk about them, and it’s very impressive. They’re doing God’s work. For one night they feel like they won an Oscar. Besides raising three great children and starting two high schools, doing the Blackboard Awards is one of the things I’m most proud of.”
In an enormous campaign for “equal access to education,” Allon helped found the Eleanor Roosevelt High School in 2000. In 2008, Allon was instrumental in founding a literature-oriented public school on the Upper West Side. Allon chose Frank McCourt as the school’s namesake. He recalls with joy, “I spent that whole summer down at the DOE interviewing people for principal of the school, and also learning a lot in the process. It was hard.”
But not all of what Allon learned was good. “I think the DOE forgets sometimes that it is not an ivory tower, a theoretical laboratory. Its constituents, and the people it should report to, are the parents and the students in the city. It’s become more and more removed from the people it serves. You can’t get into the Department downtown. The security there is better than the Vatican.”
When asked what he would do, Allon does not hesitate. “I would put satellite Department of Educational Services in the boroughs so that people don’t have to travel to Chambers Street. It should be a service organization; if a parent wants information—wants to talk to someone—it needs to be responsive.
“If America is going to compete in a global economy, people can’t think their education ends after the age of 22, 24, 25. We’re going to have to retrain people because there are going to be people—whether in media or auto manufacturing—whose professions are left behind because of technology and the disruptive innovations of different sectors. If you, at the age of 12, 14, 16—whatever it is—get turned off to learning and you don’t then want to go back to learn when you’re 30 or 40 and you have to in order to get a new job, then we’re in trouble as a society.”
Allon leans forward again. His voice is low and earnest. “There’s just so much you can do as a publisher. You can’t necessarily change policy. You can advocate for it and you can agitate, and you can put pressure on politicians, but unless you’re really the person who makes decisions and changes policy you can’t really impact things.”
But what if he does not win the election?
“Life is not linear, and if you hit a wall, always be optimistic and realize that you have this power to change what you do. If you do something that makes you excited about waking up every morning, and makes you feel you’re helping society and being productive, then that’s the most important thing.
“My Plan B is better than everyone else’s Plan A. I start an educational foundation and try to implement some of the ideas I have on education. As long as things don’t move in the direction I want them to, I’m open to running for office again.”
He paused. “But I’m going to surprise a lot of people. I’m going to be very competitive. I have a chance to win.”
Isabella Giovannini
Age 17, Grade 11
Writopia Lab
Gold Key