The Prize (23 page)

One challenge was that many reform-oriented philanthropists
viewed school districts as unfixable and, unlike Ackman and Zuckerberg, were willing to donate only to charter schools. John Doerr, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist, gave $10 million to Newark charters through his NewSchools Venture Fund. The Walton, Fisher, and Robertson foundations gave $14.25 million through the Newark Charter School Fund. Both conditioned their gifts on a commitment that Zuckerberg match them. He did, and combined with other donors' gifts to individual schools, about $60 million of the $200 million in philanthropy went toward the expansion and support of charter schools. Indeed, Zuckerberg and matching donors helped put the sector on track to enroll a projected sixteen thousand students by 2016, an increase of more than eleven thousand since 2009.
The city's two top-performing charter networks,
TEAM
and North Star, now had enough money to double in size, ultimately adding ten thousand students. Many reformers saw charter growth as the fastest way to raise the quality of education citywide and considered this the crowning achievement of the Zuckerberg gift, but there was no public announcement of the total contribution to charters. At the time, public resistance to school closings was mounting, and Cami Anderson was wrestling with a $57 million budget gap—largely a result of the exodus of students to charters and the related, swelling cost of her excess teacher pool. In private sessions, the FNF board concluded that it would be the epitome of bad “optics” to announce a $60 million gift to charters as the district struggled to plug a budget hole of almost precisely the same size.

In late July, Booker, Cerf, and Anderson gathered representatives of some of the nation's wealthiest education philanthropists to ask for $27 million to complete the $100 million match, unlock Zuckerberg's full gift, and finance the teachers' contract. To make the sale, they had to argue that Newark's contract would be “transformational” for the country, but as Anderson had acknowledged privately, it wasn't particularly transformational, even for Newark, because of its seniority
protections. For the presentation, William Ackman made available the conference room of his hedge fund, Pershing Square Capital Management, on the forty-second floor of a Manhattan office tower, with windows overlooking Central Park.

“I want to welcome everyone to an extraordinary moment,” Booker said, kicking off the presentation. “We can really seize a victory, not just for the children of Newark, but for the country. This is the one moment in time, the one place in America we can win this opportunity or lose it.” At times, Booker sounded like an auctioneer: “It's a game-changing contract that raises the bar for the nation. We're twenty-seven million dollars away.”

“Winning will set the contract standard and grease the wheels for the rest of the country,” Cerf said.

Representatives of the Walton, Robertson, and Fisher foundations and other leading philanthropists sat around the conference table watching PowerPoint slides on two television screens. Their questions revealed considerable skepticism. Where was the data to show the district could afford to sustain the bonuses when Zuckerberg's money ran out? How could there be transformational change if Anderson couldn't fire the worst teachers unless they were also the most junior ones? What is transformational about paying $31 million—the bulk of the $50 million for the teachers' contract—just to get a union to come to the table? An executive of one of the philanthropies asked this: “I've heard the fear that philanthropy in Newark is creating something that's not replicable because it costs so much. How many cities can raise a hundred million dollars?”

“They could just hire Cory,” Anderson cracked.

No one laughed. Nor did they volunteer to write checks—yet.

“A lot of time was spent telling us this would be transformational versus concretely showing where the funding gap exists that demands this level of investment,” said one of the foundation executives at the table.

In the end, it was Christie who came up with pledges of about $25 million, in the fall of 2012, to finish matching Zuckerberg's gift, tapping some of his political donors, including Home Depot founder Kenneth Langone and hedge fund titans Stanley Druckenmiller and Julian Robertson, who were prominent supporters of education reform causes. Christie's national star was rising rapidly at the time. The previous year, key Republican fundraisers, including Langone, billionaire conservative industrialist David Koch, former Morgan Stanley chairman John Mack, and dozens of other business executives, had privately urged him to run against Barack Obama in 2012, vowing to raise whatever money the plain-talking governor needed, as recounted in the book
Collision 2012
by Dan Balz. Christie demurred, instead becoming a surrogate for Mitt Romney's presidential campaign and delivering the keynote address at the Republican National Convention.

When Christie called to ask for help matching Zuckerberg's gift, Langone said he was eager to pitch in. “It was important for Newark to pull this off. I went to others and got commitments,” he said. Langone said he was particularly impressed by the plan to use philanthropy to buy out the weakest teachers. Julian Robertson mistakenly deemed the plan a
fait accompli
in a Bloomberg TV interview: “We actually bought out the bad teachers and kept the good teachers.”

Booker was enjoying a boom of his own in national attention, touring the country as a prominent Obama surrogate. He cochaired the platform committee for the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, where he dropped well-publicized hints that he might challenge Christie in the governor's race the following year. The idea won enthusiastic encouragement from party activists.

Christie met with Cerf, Del Grosso, and Anderson in his Trenton office on October 12 and laid plans for a triumphal contract announcement. Booker was noticeably absent. “Cory Booker will not be anywhere near this press conference,” Christie announced icily, according to two people at the meeting. The governor made clear that
he was furious that Booker was talking of a possible gubernatorial run. Christie was counting on Democrats to put up only token opposition, resulting in a landslide reelection, to position him as a strong presidential contender in blue as well as red states in 2016.

Meanwhile, as Joe Del Grosso campaigned among union members for the contract, the influence of the national school reform movement—and in particular Zuckerberg's money—was palpable. Touting the contract to his members, the aging union president said repeatedly that he had made the best deal he could under tough circumstances. He said he was proud of the contract because it treated educators as professionals. He emphasized that it won teachers the right of peer review, to weigh in on colleagues' evaluations—a critical protection, as he saw it, in an age of tightening accountability. But his strongest argument, to which he returned again and again, was that teachers would collect $31 million in back pay, courtesy of Zuckerberg. With New Jersey stuck in economic doldrums, Del Grosso said, more than one hundred other locals had been forced to settle for no back pay at all.

“We had an opportunity to get Zuckerberg's money,” he said, in summing up the tradeoff. “Otherwise it would go to the charter schools. I decided I shouldn't feed and clothe the enemy.”

The union was scheduled to vote on October 29, but nature intervened as Hurricane Sandy devastated the New Jersey shore and large swaths of the state. The rescheduled vote came on November 14. By then, the back pay provision loomed even larger for teachers and other union members because, as a telephone survey found, one in three of them had suffered storm-related losses or helped relatives who did. “People lost cars, have to get a new roof, have taken in relatives who lost their homes,” a union official explained. “It made people think, ‘Holy shit, this contract will put thousands of dollars in my pocket.'” The contract passed with sixty-two percent of the vote.

From Facebook headquarters, Zuckerberg issued a statement: “Our hope was always to support and reward effective teachers in all they do
to give kids the great education they need and deserve, and this is the most important step yet.”

The contract indeed increased accountability for Newark teachers, and Cami Anderson aggressively used the new tools to mete out consequences to those with the lowest ratings and reward those with the best. Throughout the district, there was new, if uneven, focus on teaching quality, with the strongest principals following the new evaluation system as a guide to coach teachers on lesson design, strategies to engage all learners, the use of data to guide instruction, and the creation of “cultures of achievement” in classrooms.

But the fine print in the contract revealed that many costly union perks remained securely in place, such as fifteen paid sick days and three paid personal days—putting the district on the hook to hire substitutes one of every ten days for every teacher. Also intact were long-standing annual pay bumps for veteran teachers—from $2,025 at fifteen years to $8,950 at thirty—skewing the pay scale dramatically in favor of more senior members, of whom 560 earned more than $92,000 a year. Zuckerberg had wanted a contract that quickly raised the salaries of promising young teachers as an incentive for them to remain in Newark. But the district couldn't afford pay bumps at both ends of the scale. A new teacher consistently rated effective would have to work nine years before making $60,000 in base pay—hardly a magnet for the star-quality graduates Zuckerberg had hoped to attract. Even with bonuses, fourth-year teachers wouldn't come close to making the $100,000 available to top performers in Washington. Nor did Zuckerberg realize his goal of paying merit bonuses of up to fifty percent of a teacher's salary. The cash-strapped district couldn't have afforded them after his money ran out.

Moreover, in the wake of the fundraising scramble to finance labor reforms, millions of dollars ended up not being spent. The proposed buyouts for weak teachers—touted by both Langone and Robertson as the key reason for their contributions—never materialized. Neither did the new contract for principals, whose union refused to ne
gotiate. Anderson used more than $300,000 of that money to pay retention bonuses to principals and assistant principals in schools with the greatest academic need. But more than half of those who received the bonuses left their positions within a year.

The official announcement of the new contract, on November 16, 2012, resembled a Christie coronation. He and the AFT's Randi Weingarten appeared on MSNBC's
Morning Joe
, accepting plaudits from host Joe Scarborough for putting children's interests above politics. Invoking Christie's fortitude during Hurricane Sandy, Weingarten said, “This is the way government should work, whether at the collective bargaining table or in face of natural disaster.”

Christie's political capital was soaring in Sandy's wake. National television broadcasts showed him trudging the shattered shoreline day after day, comforting victims and, in a tableau that irked many Republicans, advocating for federal help as he and Obama surveyed the wreckage on the weekend before the presidential election. His approval rating would soon pass seventy percent, with almost half of New Jersey Democrats saying he deserved reelection. Booker later announced that he would pass up the governor's race to run for the U.S. Senate in November 2014, to succeed the eighty-nine-year-old incumbent, Frank Lautenberg.

Even Christie's vision of standing side by side with Weingarten at a news conference came to pass. It took place in the gymnasium of Newark's Speedway Elementary School with hundreds of children sitting behind him in uniforms and dozens of television cameras recording his every word. Christie, Weingarten, Cerf, Anderson, Del Grosso, and the CEO of the Foundation for Newark's Future, Greg Taylor, all had turns at the microphone, declaring victory for the children of Newark. Booker, on Christie's orders, sat in the audience.

An effusive Del Grosso, in a charcoal-gray suit with a white silk handkerchief in the chest pocket, spoke as if peace was at hand in the long war between unions and education reformers. “For my city to become better, education has to be better,” he said. “It's time for all
of us to say where did we fail, what did we do wrong, and how do we fix it?”

Anderson followed Del Grosso at the podium, hugging her once and future nemesis as they passed. Christie kissed Anderson on the cheek as he followed her. “This is by far the most gratifying day of my governorship—by far,” Christie said with obvious emotion. “The kids of this city deserve better, and teachers, by voting for this contract, said they want to give it to them.” It was a remarkable peace offering from a governor who rose to national prominence three years earlier decrying the greed of teachers' unions.

“Hell,” Christie said, trying out what sounded like a presidential campaign theme in the aftermath of Obama's reelection, “if Randi Weingarten and I can come together, for God's sake, President Obama and John Boehner and the rest of them can come together, too . . . Someone asked me this morning what's the future of government in the aftermath of this election. And this is what it is right here.”

Asked afterward if his union was likely to vote to continue the accountability reforms when the contract expired in three years, Joe Del Grosso responded, “Let's pray there's another Zuckerberg.”

10

September 2012–June 2013

E
VEN AS MONEY
and power poured into the battle for a transformative teachers' contract, equally high-stakes battles were being waged in schools across Newark to improve education student by student. One such effort, at
BRICK
Avon, aimed to rescue a single child, Alif Beyah.

Bernadette Scott had immediately noticed Alif's profound weakness in reading when he showed up in her sixth-grade literacy class in 2010. Conditioned to failure, he had built a popular persona to camouflage it: the lovable goof-off. Scott recognized immediately that Alif loved football and made a deal with him: when she assigned the class a writing prompt, he was to write about the game he loved, and she would work with him to develop an expository essay that earned a passing grade. “I remember the day he looked at me and said, ‘I got it, Miss Scott,'” she said. She taught him to follow the same format to complete other writing assignments. In Scott's view, “he was crying out, ‘I want to learn, but I need you to see me for me and not another black male sitting in your classroom.'”