The Prize (28 page)

It was a window onto why teachers consistently tell researchers that, given the choice, they would opt for a good principal and supportive working conditions over merit pay. Indeed, research had found no correlation between merit pay and student achievement, although reformers and venture philanthropists were fighting hard to make it a staple of new teacher contracts.

Shakel Nelson, the gifted fifth-grade math teacher, came close to leaving Peshine because she and her husband needed more family income. She calculated that she would be financially better off moving to a school with a shorter day and finding a part-time job in the evening. With fourteen years in the district, she fell into a cohort of teachers whose salary on the new pay scale—$66,000—would be $20,000 less than if the old one had continued. Even if she won every merit bonus, she'd still be behind.

“It makes me feel afraid,” Nelson said. “You kind of look down the
road and you plan your life, and you think, ‘I'll be okay.' And then you're not where you thought you'd be. But I've had horrendous administrators in the past who were more into putting teachers down than supporting us. Life can be hell in those situations. I have to have my sanity to make it through the day, and being here is better for my sanity. So as much as the money pains me, I'm going to stay.”

The teachers' union held elections several weeks later, and Del Grosso came within nine votes of being ousted, largely because of a backlash over the contract. A caucus seeking to remake the union along the lines of a left-wing social movement won control of the executive board. The brief moment of comity between labor and reformers on the teachers' contract was over. Del Grosso and his union became hardened opponents of Anderson and every aspect of her agenda.

Despite the strife in Newark, Anderson was ebullient when she appeared before the board members of William Ackman's Pershing Square Foundation in Manhattan in June 2013. The board was eager to hear how the foundation's $25 million gift to Newark—the biggest donation other than Zuckerberg's—was spurring reform of the district.

“As someone who's anal retentive about setting levers and milestones, I'm feeling pretty awesome about milestones reached versus goals set,” Anderson began.

She rattled off accomplishments. The new contract, made possible by philanthropy, was a signal achievement for teacher accountability. She had made concrete changes in the workings of the district—recruiting five new assistant superintendents who now supervised and coached all principals. There were new evaluation systems for teachers and principals and eight Renew schools—“my most proud accomplishment.” Asked about results in the classroom, she said a number of schools had improved from the lowest performance ranking to the middle, and some in the middle were now at the top. Emphasizing strong principals as the heart of her improvement strategy, she
reported that she had replaced almost fifty of the district's seventy-five school leaders, calling her last round of hires “so phenomenal I'm pinching myself.”

The real story was more mixed, as would be expected in a district with such profound challenges. But that wasn't the way Anderson—or many reformers in pursuit of transformational change—tended to tell their stories. The school improvements she reported were based on her own school-rating rubric. But based on state standardized test scores, Newark children had declined in proficiency since her arrival, in math in all tested grades, and in language arts in all but two. And Anderson neglected to report that students in all eight Renew schools were “falling behind” the rest of the district, according to her own rubric. By the end of the next year, she would lose confidence in five of her “phenomenal” new principals and remove them.

Although Anderson focused almost exclusively on the positive, the board was well aware of virulent resistance to her reforms, which had made news in New York City. “So, everything's going great except you need bodyguards,” summed up Pershing board member Whitney Tilson, a prominent advocate of education reform nationally.

At that very moment, a large, athletic figure could be seen moving down the corridor toward the conference room. Heads turned as everyone realized it was Cory Booker. “There he is—my bodyguard!” Anderson declared with a laugh. “What timing!” Tilson exclaimed.

It was a remarkable entrance, but in fact it marked the beginning of Booker's official exit from Newark. Senator Frank Lautenberg had died two days earlier, and Booker was arriving from his funeral at a nearby synagogue. Within days, Booker would be running for Lautenberg's open Senate seat, traveling the country to amass what would become an $11 million campaign war chest for a special election in October.

He assured the Pershing Foundation's board that his departure would not hinder the reform effort, regardless of who succeeded him, because the governor still would hold the reins and no Newark mayor had the power to interfere. With Anderson able to count on at least
two more years of Christie at her back, he said, “we can get two school years from now where every school is a school of hope, promise, and performance.” Once again, Booker was shifting into his high rhetorical gear, soaring far above facts on the ground.

Booker wasn't alone in turning his attention from Newark. Christie was laying the groundwork for a presidential campaign. And Zuckerberg, with almost all of his $100 million now spent or committed—half of it on the hard-fought contract and a quarter of it on charter schools—was beginning to look for his next big philanthropic move. Anderson was about to be left largely on her own, carrying on the mission they had started three years earlier.

12

June 2013–May 2014

T
HE TIME HAD
come, Chris Cerf told Cami Anderson, to “rip off the Band-Aid.” That meant putting in place the radical reorganization of the school district that had been looming since Christie and Booker's late-night conversation in 2009 in the back of the mayoral SUV. In a sweeping use of gubernatorial power, Anderson, as Christie's agent, would significantly downsize the school district to adjust for years of falling enrollment and make way for the expansion of charter schools. With parents demanding them, Christie authorizing their expansion, and Zuckerberg and other donors funding their start-up costs, charters were now on a path to enroll forty percent of Newark students within the next three years.

Newark was on its way to becoming a “hybrid” district, like Washington, D.C., with forty-four percent of children in charters, Detroit with fifty-five percent, and Philadelphia with twenty-eight percent.
This was the emerging shape of public education in more and more urban districts. While charter schools nationally had produced mixed results, there was little question that children in Newark charters were
performing better than those in district schools, in some cases far better, although the lower concentration of needy students remained a factor. But the increasingly pressing question, in Newark and in cities around the country, was, What would become of the children left behind in district schools? School systems in Philadelphia and Detroit were struggling to avert fiscal collapse. Now Newark was at a tipping point, with more and more children and state dollars exiting for charters.

Booker, Christie, and Zuckerberg hadn't planned for this impasse. The biggest challenge, Booker had said at the outset, “is breaking this iceberg of immovable, decades-long failing schools. They'll melt into many different school models. They're going to flower, just like the cherry blossoms in Branch Brook Park.” Clearly no one had a road map for the treacherous path from failure to utopia. That, in a sense, was the assignment Anderson had taken on. On the horizon were huge disruptions in children's lives, adults' jobs, and long-standing community relationships with neighborhood schools. Nonetheless, she gave her plan a name that conveyed harmony and optimism: One Newark.

Anderson announced her vision at an invitation-only cocktail party in June 2013 in the spacious lobby of the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. Remembering the drubbing she took the previous year, when hundreds of uninvited residents heckled her speech at Rutgers about Renew schools, she hired private security guards to bar gate-crashers.

The audience was stocked with leaders of Newark's charter schools, education reformers from New York, and consultants whose firms were collecting millions of dollars in philanthropic funds by working for Anderson. While numerous Newark clergy and civic leaders were present, missing from the invitation list were the parents and parent leaders whose children would be most affected by the reorganization. The omission was the subject of whispered disbelief among the locals in attendance.

After admiring testimonials to her from a charter leader, a district
principal, and Cerf, Anderson delivered a twenty-minute speech, promising to create an online, unified enrollment system for all district and charter schools. Similar systems had been adopted in charter-heavy New Orleans, Washington, and Denver. By replacing charter lotteries, she said, the new system would make it as easy to apply to charters as to district schools, greatly reducing the selection bias toward the most motivated families. Dousing the caution light she had held up to charters for the past two years, she said in the strongest terms that parents deserved the right to choose charter schools for their children. “Who can blame them?” she asked, adding, “How dare we . . . say they should be trapped in failed schools while we get our act together?” Acknowledging that the district would shrink, she called on the reform movement's leaders and funders to lobby alongside her for laws giving the district the flexibility charters had to hire and fire teachers based on merit. Only then, she said, would district schools be able to compete and survive, albeit on a smaller scale. She received a sustained standing ovation.

Anderson had only the outline of a plan, with details yet to be developed, but the logo, “One Newark,” was everywhere, on folders and materials handed out to guests, on wall posters, and beaming from flat-screen televisions around the room. Having handpicked her audience, Anderson used her speech as an opportunity to reframe her raucous two years in office as a major success that had been obscured by unfair, politically motivated attacks. Along the walls were large posters that she called her “accomplishment storyboards,” each with a large, red ink stamp declaring, “DONE.” Raising student achievement—“DONE.” Turning around failing schools—“DONE.” Engaging the community—“DONE.” In fact, the initiatives were seriously un-done.

A few days after her speech, Anderson sent an email to all who attended with a link to a questionnaire seeking feedback on her vision and the event. Like the evening itself, it seemed designed to come out positively. Each question offered six possible answers, five of them lau
datory. For example, “What did you think of the ‘accomplishments' storyboards (check all that apply)?” was followed by these choices:

• They were awesome!
  

• It's amazing how much has been accomplished.
  

• They were informative.
  

• They were a nice addition to the room.
  

• I wish you had covered more accomplishments.
  

• I thought they just took up space.
  

Anderson spent much of the fall working in her tenth-floor office on a master plan for the district's survival. To guide the analysis, she turned to the Parthenon Group, which had advised other school systems experiencing aggressive charter growth. “Districts across the United States are passing the buck till they end up like GM,” with dwindling revenue and crushing costs, one of the consultants said. “The goal is to adapt over three years to changes you can foresee.”

Anderson wanted the plan to address the many overlapping complexities of urban education—considerations her superiors had neglected to consider. How to ensure that charters, as they expanded, enrolled a representative share of Newark's neediest children. How to improve district schools fast enough to persuade families to stick with them. How to close underpopulated schools without adding to neighborhood blight. How to retain the best teachers, given that she estimated she would have to lay off a thousand of them in the next three years. How to find money to modernize schools that on average were eighty years old. How to stabilize the district's finances for long-term survival. “This is sixteen-dimensional chess!” she said often.

Demographic data essentially pointed a dagger at the district. In the next three years, its schools would lose 5,600 students and $249 million in state funds to charters, requiring the closure of up to twelve district schools. Half would be in the South and West wards, home to
the highest concentration of African American families, most of the lowest-performing schools, and, not coincidentally, the largest exodus to charter schools. The district, still responsible for educating a majority of Newark children, would face a structural deficit of $100 million, requiring extensive layoffs.
“You look at the data, and all you see is a train wreck,” Anderson said.

Surrounded by artifacts of superintendents past on the walls of her conference room, Anderson and her staff scripted the most sweeping rearrangement of education in Newark history. In a matter of months, more than a third of district schools would be closed, renewed, relocated, phased out, repurposed, redesigned, or taken over by charters. Rather than sending children automatically to a neighborhood school, as they had for a century, families would select from fifty-five remaining district schools and sixteen charter schools that had agreed to forgo lottery admissions. Parents were to enter up to eight top choices online, and an algorithm would make school assignments. Preferences would be given to children whose schools were closing and those with the lowest family incomes or learning disabilities—giving the highest-need students a better shot at their top choices. As part of her plan to broaden access to charters, she asked them to take over district schools in some of the city's poorest neighborhoods.