For systemwide efforts, pencil becomes a full partner with donors. The Daily News and NBC have helped pencil run the Resource Bank, an online service linking supplies to schools; a German company called veba recently celebrated its IPO by donating $50,000 in art supplies. As de-Kremlinized as Crew's Board of Ed has become, Belzberg's group is still the only organization that articulates schools' needs to people with resources -- the best way to bring the bull market into the schools.

Of course, pencil will never build thousands of new classrooms. It won't fix every roof and boiler, and it may never tackle any of the other big-ticket issues plaguing the schools. But Belzberg's agenda is, in the end, not just about private investment, but about politics. "I wouldn't have said this to you a year or two years ago, but we're at a point where we're starting to create a constituency for public education -- a group of people who can turn to the mayor, if they know him, or to a community group or editorial writer, and say, 'Look at what's happening at my school' -- and they always say my school, I love that -- 'They were having class in the bathroom. I don't want them to have to do that.' "

Last week, Ted Forstmann, the leveraged-buyout master and friend of Newt Gingrich, awarded the first 40,000 grants from the Children's Scholarship Fund, a $170 million charity that pays private-school tuition for public-school students. Asked about Forstmann's program, Belzberg pauses before saying, "I'm very pro-anything anybody does to get involved in public education. But I'm a huge believer that there are great public schools in this city."

What she doesn't say is that pencil is that program's exact opposite -- that, under the guise of fair competition, Forstmann is abandoning public education. "Ultimately," says United Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten, "if you believe in democracy and want to create equal opportunity for all children, you need to have a public school system. And by having a group like pencil make connections with business people, it's absolutely what we need to create confidence in the system."

A few weeks ago in Morningside Heights, as his daughter-in-law's guest, Bronfman the elder stepped inside a public school for the very first time. It was what the Board of Ed calls a surr school -- on the endangered list because of its subterranean test scores. "It's a tough situation," Belzberg says. "The neighborhood is far below the poverty line. There's not a lot of parental involvement." When they arrived, they talked to the school's new, energetic principal and also some kids. One little girl asked her, "Who are you?" -- which Belzberg translated to mean, Why is somebody from the outside here paying attention to me and making me feel valuable?

For Belzberg, the impact on her father-in-law is just as important as the effect on the girl. "He has not stopped talking about his visit," she says. "He has not stopped talking about the beauty of what he saw."

And now, Edgar Bronfman Sr. is sitting down with Rudy Crew to talk about how best to help the schools.

Related:

• Archive: “Class Action”
• Articles by Robert Kolker
• Table of Contents: May 3, 1999 issue of New York | Subscribe!