The Prize (14 page)

Some of the improved performance surely was due to better preparation, but there was no question that some also resulted from persuading students to believe in themselves enough to try. The experience at Central begged the question: How much of the achievement gap was actually a hope gap?

Baraka and his students seemed to live in a different Newark from Booker. The mayor was a born optimist, “a prisoner of hope,” he called himself.

For many students at Central, hope wasn't so easily conjured. A freshman English teacher named David Ganz devised a daily poetry exercise in which he wrote a word on his whiteboard and gave students several minutes to write whatever came to mind. As they composed, he played rap music to pump them up. One day, to the background of Eminem's “Till I Collapse,” Ganz wrote the word “hope.”

Fourteen-year-old Tyler read his poem to the class:

We hope to live
,

Live long enough to have kids

We hope to make it home every day

We hope we're not the next target to get sprayed . . .

We hope never to end up in Newark's dead pool

I hope, you hope, we all hope.

A boy named Mark wrote, “My mother has hope that I won't fall victim to the streets. / I hope that hope finds me.”

Khalif: “I hope to make it to an older age than I am.”

Nick:
“Living in Newark taught me to hope to get home safe.”

Tariq: “Hope—that's one thing I don't have.”

One day, while observing teachers and writing feedback for them, Baraka mentioned that he agreed with some of the more controversial changes Booker and Christie had proposed. In more than twenty years as a teacher and administrator, he said, he often had found tenure a headache, saddling students with weak teachers. He said he was comfortable with a recent Colorado law—celebrated throughout the reform movement—that revoked tenure for teachers with two consecutive years of the lowest ratings. He also thought teachers should receive raises for performance, not longevity, as enshrined in the current union contract—exactly what Zuckerberg was then advocating. He vehemently opposed charter schools, however, calling them an attempt to privatize education, although he later would soften that view as well.

“Quietly, a lot of people agree with a lot of this stuff,” he said one afternoon after school in his conference room, its walls papered with student performance data. “This dictatorial bullying is a surefire way to get people to say ‘No, get out of here.' It becomes my crew versus your crew, and it's disrespectful to the people of Newark. People have a thing about someone coming into our house and saying it's theirs, coming to our town and saying ‘I'm going to fix you.'”

He laughed. “They talk about
Waiting for Superman
. Well, Superman is not real. Did you know that? And neither is his enemy.”

In his other job, as a politician, Baraka, along with other African American city council members, were assembling a slate of candidates to challenge the dominance of the school board by the city's premier power broker, Stephen Adubato Sr., better known as Big Steve. Adubato, nearing eighty, ran the largest and most powerful community organization in Newark, along with highly regarded social service programs, preschools, and a charter school. He oversaw the region's most formidable voter-turnout operations, making him as indispensable to politicians as they were to the effectiveness of his organization, the
North Ward Center, which relied heavily on government contracts. A Democrat, he was close to both Booker and Christie—on the morning after his election, Christie's first stop was at Adubato's Newark charter school, Robert Treat Academy. Adubato was a key player in a Democratic political machine that had delivered crucial legislative votes to pass Christie's budget cuts and pension and benefit reforms. Thus Big Steve played an important, unseen role in the governor's growing national reputation as a Republican who could sell red-state values to a blue state. Adubato also supported Christie and Booker's education agenda. For all these reasons, the board election was shaping up as historic, a unity slate of African Americans seeking to break the grip of an aging Italian American boss on Newark politics. Although the board was advisory and had no real power, the election provided an opportunity for Ras Baraka to begin building a citywide base for an eventual run for mayor.

Despite the comfort Baraka expressed in private with tenure reform and performance-based pay for teachers, the council members' slate vowed to fight everything Booker and Christie had proposed. The teachers' and principals' unions signed on, as did all unions representing school district employees. At a rally of organized labor outside city hall, Councilwoman Crump urged the crowd to elect the slate that was “about labor.” She didn't mention the stakes for Newark children and their education. “We have a clear choice between those who will do nothing for labor and those who will do everything for labor,” she said, chanting along with the crowd, “Jobs, jobs, jobs! Jobs that are safe and secure.” The slate called itself Children First.

City Council President Donald Payne Jr., who also supported Baraka's slate, publicly likened education reform to the so-called Tuskegee Experiment, in which black sharecroppers with syphilis unknowingly were deprived of treatment for forty years while government doctors used them to study the unchecked progress of the disease. Booker called the remark “unconscionable.” Like most elected officials in Newark, Payne had sent his own children to private school (Catholic school, in his case)—a point Booker raised often, asking why the
“connected and the elected” considered the public schools fine for all children except theirs.

The election would be held at the end of April 2011. In the weeks before the vote, the furor over the leaked consultants' report in February had died down, but grassroots suspicions about the overall motive behind the reform effort had not.

In March, Booker delivered a ringing call for radical reform in his State of the City speech. “Bold action and change are difficult and take great sacrifice, but we must move forward for our children,” he said. As the school board election heated up, however, he fell noticeably silent. Endorsing and campaigning for Adubato's slate, he said, would only help the Baraka forces by giving them a bigger target—the mayor—to mobilize against. By his own acknowledgment, the “rock star mayor” of the national stage couldn't mobilize Newark voters for a school board election, except to vote against his slate. Booker apparently didn't even make phone calls on behalf of Adubato's candidates. On election day, one of his district leaders was handing out fliers for Baraka's slate at a polling place. Asked why, she replied, “I didn't hear anything from the mayor about this election, so I can support whoever I want.”

Shavar Jeffries, the school board president who supported Booker's agenda of expanding charter schools and aggressively reforming the district, was furious. “How do we close schools that have been failing for decades, fire people who are terrible teachers, when the mayor can't even get behind a school board slate?” he asked. “At the grassroots level, there doesn't seem to be the structure to actually win the fight.”

The school board elections were held the last Wednesday in April, an unusual day for an election in most cities, and no other races were on the ballot. It was always this way, and turnout was predictably marginal, a situation that favored unions and powerful political organizations that could mobilize thousands of foot soldiers. In a city of 150,000 registered voters, candidates needed fewer than 5,000 votes to win one of the three board seats up for grabs. In a historic upset,
the Baraka slate won two of the three races, one of them by just 48 votes. A jubilant crowd overflowed the Children's First headquarters, spilling out the door and more than a block down Bergen Street until well after midnight. Amid the celebration, Councilman Ron Rice Jr. shared the winning message: “We went door to door telling people, ‘If you're against what Mayor Booker and Governor Christie are doing to our schools, this is your team.'” Sitting behind a desk, Baraka's chief of staff, Amiri Jr., wrote $75 checks to hundreds of men and women who had knocked on doors all day, dragging people out to vote. “Anything that's against Cory Booker and Chris Christie, I'd work for it—for free,” said one man, nonetheless accepting his check.

6

January–May 2011

W
AITING FOR SUPERMAN
had its own social action strategy, in which education reformers around the country hosted showings of the movie to recruit supporters. Mark Zuckerberg cohosted one in October 2010 with four hundred guests at a theater in Palo Alto, a few blocks from what was then Facebook headquarters. His fellow hosts included venture capitalist John Doerr and his wife, Ann, and Sheryl Sandberg and her husband, Dave Goldberg, the chief executive of Survey Monkey. The theater was packed with Silicon Valley's leading venture capitalists and executives of the hottest start-ups and tech companies and private equity investors.
After the movie, the crowd massed around a table where charter school networks and other reform organizations were accepting donations—“a check-writing party,” a participant called it.

A guest congratulated Zuckerberg on the Newark gift and asked who would be the superintendent.

“Anyone we want,” he replied with a smile.

Zuckerberg could be forgiven for believing this. After all, he had
the backing of Christie and Booker, who held all the cards in Newark—or at least appeared to. And they had agreed with him that their first order of business was recruiting a credentialed reformer as superintendent to carry out their ambitious agenda.

But politicians had agendas and timetables that Zuckerberg wasn't prepared for. After John King had turned down the job, Booker had no plan B. When Chris Cerf became New Jersey's education commissioner in January, the superintendent search intensified. In March 2011, with the school board elections looming, Cerf and Booker became enthusiastic about Jean-Claude Brizard, superintendent of schools in Rochester, New York, yet another former deputy to Klein in New York City and a graduate of the Broad Academy. He was smart, passionate, and politically astute, and he had the kind of battle scars that Cerf considered a badge of honor, including a vote of ninety-five percent no confidence from Rochester's teachers' union. He also was a seasoned educator, having risen through the ranks in New York City beginning as a teacher of incarcerated students on Rikers Island.

Cerf and Booker told Brizard in March that the job was his in principle, pending the governor's okay. They were in the process of arranging for him to meet with Zuckerberg in Palo Alto and with a community task force in Newark when Christie suddenly announced on March 17 that there would be no decision on the superintendent until May. This came as a shock to Zuckerberg, who had expected a decision months earlier and had made clear his impatience. He heard the news from Jen Holleran, executive director of his foundation, who learned it from a reporter.

Christie offered no public explanation, but he and Booker privately acknowledged that they were acting at Adubato's behest. The Newark boss was a linchpin of the powerful Essex County political machine, which had helped deliver pivotal Democratic legislative support for Christie's budget cuts and his pension and benefit reforms in the face of stiff union pushback. This made him an essential, if unsung, factor
in Christie's national celebrity as a Republican who could sell a conservative agenda to a liberal state.

The delay had to do with the upcoming school board elections in which Adubato's slate would face Ras Baraka's. Adubato warned Christie and Booker that naming a superintendent before the election could provide a focal point for opponents of reform, increasing turnout for the Baraka slate.

Anyone unfamiliar with the byzantine politics of education in Newark—Zuckerberg, for example—would be understandably puzzled that the take-no-prisoners governor would make this concession to Adubato. Since the state ran the schools, Christie could veto any school board decision that went against his wishes. So why worry? The board exercised huge symbolic power in the racial shadowboxing of Newark politics. The spectacle of a white Republican governor continually overruling the elected representatives of a black and brown school district—and doing so in the name of saving its children—would make it hard for any state-appointed superintendent to win the public's trust. Christie and Booker both were content to let Adubato work his magic, hoping he would deliver them a board that backed their agenda. “It was a good decision,” Christie said later, defending his curtsy to the Democratic boss, even though the strategy failed.

It was becoming clear that Christie's purported omnipotence over the Newark schools was not exactly as advertised. One of the consultants on the ground described how the realization dawned on him: “The mayor seemed indecisive on the superintendent search, so I thought, ‘Why not go straight to the governor, since he's not afraid to pull the trigger?' But then it turns out Adubato pulls the governor's trigger. Maybe we should've just cut the deal with him.”

Cerf explained the delay to Brizard, who agreed to wait. Soon afterward, however, former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel was elected mayor of Chicago and asked Brizard to come for a chat. “I met with him and told him I'm actually heading to Newark,” Briz
ard recalled. “He asked if I had an offer in writing, and I said no. He said, ‘Then you're available.'” Brizard went to Chicago, leaving Newark without a candidate. “It was like a bomb dropping,” said Cerf. (Emanuel would let Brizard go seventeen months later.)