Success Academies charter school leader Eva Moskowitz did nothing to dispel rumors that she's considering a run for mayor on WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show today. When asked by Leher asked if that's her plan for 2017, she would only say, "I am very focused on running schools."

The interview scrutinized the way she manages her network of 32 privately-run, publicly-financed charter schools. Moskowitz denied that her schools get high scores because they focus heavily on test prep. Instead, she credited a constructivist math curriculum and 13 weeks of training for teachers. When asked if students with behavioral problems are counseled out, she asserted that her charters have lower attrition rates than the neighborhood district schools.

But Moskowitz acknowledged she does not fill empty seats with neighborhood students in the upper grades, only at the elementary level. Different charter schools have different policies about backfilling empty seats when students leave their schools.

"We are very comfortable with the notion that we accept through elementary and we feel an obligation to the parents in middle and high school, and the kids in middle and high school, that until the district schools do a better job, it's not really fair for the student in seventh grade or a high school student to have to be educated with a child who's reading at a second or third grade level."

When Lehrer pressed whether that means she doesn't think she can have the same level of success with random students in the older grades, she said many district schools have their own criteria about backfilling, and she said her lottery system ensures a wide variety of students have access to her charters as they enter school in the early grades.

Moskowitz was also asked about the role of hedge fund and corporate leaders in helping charters, and about the education historian Diane Ravitch's claim that this poses a risk to public education. She called that a "conspiracy theory" and said, if anything, she's "a front for parents" who want more high-quality schools. This year alone, she said there have been about 19,000 applications for fewer than 2,700 seats.