Cynthia Nixon. Parent. Activist. Governor?

NEW YORK — It was the fall of 2001 and “Sex and the City” was a hit on HBO, when Cynthia Nixon went to her first education rally. Her oldest child was starting kindergarten at a public school in Manhattan, and she saw how budget cuts were affecting the school. She protested, lobbied legislators in Albany, and went on a statewide bus tour to talk about the need for more money.

“She was the celebrity draw,” said Karen Scharff, the executive director of Citizen Action of New York, which helped organize the protests.

Bertha Lewis, the former chief executive officer of Acorn, the community organizing group, said she bonded with Nixon when the two were arrested in 2002 together during a protest at City Hall. “None of us really knew who she was or anything, but we knew she was fierce,” Lewis said.

Now, Nixon is campaigning for the Democratic nomination for New York governor. She has said that her twin experiences, as a public school parent and an education activist, are what drives her run. Both her supporters and her detractors say there are lessons to be learned from those experiences about how she might approach the job of governing.

While much has been made of Nixon, a television star, choosing to send her children to public school, the schools they attended represent a narrow slice of the system, including some of the city’s most successful and selective schools. Those same schools are part of the current desegregation debate now playing out in the city.

Her activism, on the other hand, has extended beyond this privileged subset. It has been deeply intertwined with one organization, the Alliance for Quality Education, which was founded, in part, by the United Federation of Teachers, the union for New York City’s public schoolteachers.

It is so intertwined that Nixon met her wife, Christine Marinoni, through her work with the group. Marinoni was the alliance’s New York City director.

“My work with A.Q.E. has informed it greatly,” Nixon said of her education platform and her vision for the state in an interview. As an activist, “traveling around the state and meeting the parents in Buffalo and Rochester and Yonkers and Ossining and in a whole host of other places, you really get to hear firsthand the challenges that each school and each school district are facing.”

The alliance’s agenda has focused largely on securing more money for schools through a funding formula called Foundation Aid. The formula grew out of a long-running court battle that ended in 2006, when New York’s highest court found that the state was not spending enough money to provide a “sound basic education.” The state Legislature and Gov. Eliot Spitzer created the Foundation Aid formula in response. But after the 2008 recession, it was frozen and has never been fully implemented. Nixon made funding it the center of her $7.4 billion education platform.

The organization has repeatedly done battle with Gov. Andrew Cuomo, over funding, but also over bread-and-butter issues for the teachers’ union: He has embraced charter schools, which, among other things, are generally not unionized, and he pushed in 2015 to increase the weight of student test scores in teacher evaluations. Cuomo backed off on teacher evaluations after tens of thousands of parents had their children sit out the tests.

On both of those issues, Nixon has a position similar to Alliance for Quality Education’s stance. At an event in Washington, D.C., earlier this year, she said, “We have to stop diverting education funding into privately run charter schools, and put the focus back where it should be, on strengthening our public schools, and keeping them public.” And while she has not opted her children out of the state tests, Nixon has said parents should be able to make that decision for themselves, and has railed against what she describes as a harmful overemphasis on testing.

Billy Easton, the executive director of the alliance, said in an interview that there was nothing about Nixon’s education platform with which his group disagreed.

Nixon’s own campaign advisers have acknowledged that she needs to make inroads into Cuomo’s support among the black community if she is to beat him in the primary. But among some black and Hispanic parents in the state’s struggling districts — including cities like Rochester and Buffalo — charters are seen as welcome alternatives to poorly performing local schools.

Derrell Bradford, a member of the Success Academy Charter Schools board of trustees, said that he respected Nixon’s choices as a parent, but her dismissal of charter schools struck him as hypocritical.

“I get to pick the school that fits my kids, but that is not allowable for everyone else,” Bradford said of her approach. “It’s a two-tiered view on how schools should be.”

Kathryn Marrow is a member of the pro-charter advocacy group StudentsFirstNY and a parent whose son will begin seventh grade this fall at KIPP Infinity Middle School in Harlem. Even though their neighborhood school is about four blocks away, they take three short bus rides to get him to KIPP each day, she said, because the school pays more attention to his social and emotional needs.

“I think choice should truly be on the parent,” she added. “You have to feel secure with the people who are going to have your child anywhere from eight to 10 hours a day.”

In response to their comments, Nixon did not address her choices as a parent, but instead criticized Cuomo’s support of charter schools. The pathways Nixon’s children took through the schools would be familiar to many middle-class families. The family lived on the Upper West Side, in District 3, and her oldest child — who Nixon last month said was a transgender man and now goes by the name Seph — attended the gifted and talented dual language program at Public School 163, the Alfred E. Smith School. Gifted and talented programs in the district were created in part to attract white middle class families who were unhappy with their neighborhood schools. Nixon said she chose the one at Public School 163 “because it was the most diverse one I found.”

Seph, 21, and Nixon’s middle child, Charles, 15, both attended the tiny Center School for middle school, a school with an opaque and unusual admissions process that makes it difficult to navigate. Seph went on to the highly selective Bard High School Early College, and Charles attends another sought-after selective high school. Seph recently graduated from the University of Chicago.

Nixon’s youngest child, Max, 7, lives in a district where parents must choose their elementary school. He goes to a school in the East Village that is almost 70 percent white and Asian — practically the reverse of the city school system, which is about 70 percent black or Latino.

In emailed answers to a set of policy questions, Nixon said that she supported current efforts to desegregate the schools, including getting rid of the single test that determines admission to the city’s elite specialized high schools.

Even in venues more intimate than crowded rallies and campaign speeches, Nixon’s roles as a parent and an activist commingle. In 2008, she was part of a fierce debate over a plan to move the Center School out of the building it shared with an elementary school, Public School 199, to relieve overcrowding. Center School was only going to be moved 15 blocks away, and both it and the elementary school were relatively privileged institutions, but the fight got heated nonetheless.

At one community meeting, Nixon made an impassioned argument about schools and social justice, suggesting that the elementary school was getting preferential treatment because it was “one of the whitest schools in the district.” and that because the Center School was more diverse than the elementary school, moving it would result in “a de facto segregated building.”

But success as an activist, or a parent, does not come easy. She faced down a round of jeers from her neighbors, and the school moved anyway.