The Prize (30 page)

O
N NOVEMBER
5, 2014, all of Newark seemed to stand still and stricken as word spread of the untimely death of its civic steward, Professor Clement Price, at age sixty-nine from a massive stroke. In a stirring eulogy at Price's funeral, Mayor Ras Baraka said the city already missed the sound of his “distinct, calming voice . . . forcing all of us to deal with each other, to see each other in one collective narrative—our story—our Newark.”

Newark needed that voice more than ever amid the polarizing rancor over education. In an interview shortly before he died, the usually optimistic Price had delivered a grim summation of the reform effort. “At the outset,” he said, “this was an opportunity, I thought, to put public education at long last at the center of Newark's civic agenda. I think that opportunity was lost. There was a huge consensus here that schools needed dramatic reform. Now the space for that conversation has almost disappeared.”

For four years, the reformers never really tried to have a conversation with the people of Newark. Their target audience was always
somewhere else, beyond the people whose children and grandchildren desperately needed to learn and compete for a future. Booker, Christie, and Zuckerberg set out to create a national “proof point” in Newark. There was less focus on Newark as its own complex ecosystem that reformers needed to understand before trying to save it. Two hundred million dollars and almost five years later, there was at least as much rancor as reform.

Newark illustrated that improving education for the nation's poorest children is as much a political as a pedagogical challenge. Redirecting large district bureaucracies—for decades, the employers of last resort in distressed cities—in the service of children in classrooms is a treacherous process, activating well-organized public workers, political organizations, and unions invested in the status quo. Voter backlashes against education reformers in mayoral elections in New York City in 2013, in Newark in 2014, and in Chicago in 2015 revealed the tenuous nature of disruptive changes made without buy-in from those who have to live them.

Howard Fuller, the former Milwaukee superintendent and the first African American to become prominent in the education reform movement, happened to pass through the city in the fall of 2014 on a promotional tour for his memoir,
No Struggle, No Progress
. He literally cringed at the political spectacle that reform had fostered. “I think a lot of us education reformers—and I include myself—have been too arrogant,” he said. “It's not even what you do sometimes, it's the way you treat people in the process of doing it. If your approach is to get a lot of smart people in the room and figure out what ‘these people' need and then we implement it, the first issue is who decided that you were smart? And why do you think you can just get in a room and make decisions for a community of people? You don't think they'll respond the way they responded? I'm not saying you can ever create this level of change without resistance, but I don't see how this is politically sustainable over time.”

Even in the aftermath of the uprising against One Newark, Chris Cerf, the state's chief architect of the Newark effort, said he had no
regrets about imposing changes unilaterally. A more inclusive process, he said, would not have yielded as much progress—in particular, more schools run by high-achieving charter networks. “You have no chance of giving these kids the lives they deserve if you don't essentially override the local political infrastructure—no chance at all,” he said. “I honestly don't think there's a logic-based counterargument to that . . . There's no chance this political culture would have been able to rise above the question of who gets what. They had their chance.”

But a year later, in the summer of 2015, the state announced a sudden and stunning change of strategy. Despite his plummeting popularity, Christie was making a run for the White House. Opposition to Anderson and her agenda was drawing national attention—with more than one thousand students marching out of class and into downtown traffic, teachers refusing to carry out her latest reforms, and Baraka taking his fight for local control to the
New York Times
op-ed page. In early June, Christie covertly invited Baraka to Trenton to discuss education. Days before his formal campaign launch, the Republican governor and the Democratic mayor issued a joint announcement that they had reached an agreement to begin the process of returning to Newark long-lost control over its public school district. Anderson was not the person to lead in this new era, the governor said. She was given three hours to decide whether to resign or be fired. She resigned. “I don't blame Cami at all for coming to the decision that we did that it was time for her to move on,” Christie told reporters. Anderson's former patrons moved quickly to write her out of the narrative of school reform in Newark. “She came here, she gave service, and she's now moved on,” Booker said.

There was a sense of déjà vu all over again—the white Republican governor and Newark's black Democratic mayor coming together to fix the public schools, declaring in a joint statement, “The future of our children deserves no less.” And to complete the tableau, Christie announced the new superintendent would be the founding leader of the reform effort—Chris Cerf, who just had left his job at the education technology firm headed by Joel Klein.

But this Newark mayor was certain to be a very different partner for the state than Booker. And now Baraka was tantalizingly close to reclaiming Newark's prize. Still, there were legislative and regulatory hurdles to be cleared, which meant Cerf would remain in charge for at least a year, probably longer. A committee with five members appointed by Christie and four by Baraka would oversee the process. Cerf sent signals immediately that he was committed in the interim to pushing ahead with the agenda of charter school expansion, citywide school choice, and increased teacher responsibility, but he also made clear he was ready to compromise on at least some grassroots concerns about One Newark. There were suggestions that Baraka would get some of his own brand of reforms—like community schools, with social services for families and neighborhoods as well as students—financed with some of the Zuckerberg bounty that Anderson hadn't spent. Indeed, since Baraka's election, some of Zuckerberg's remaining dollars had begun flowing to community-based initiatives—the mayor's summer youth-employment program, a citywide campaign to increase the college graduation rate—instead of systems reforms, a shift long sought by the staff of the Foundation for Newark's Future but only recently embraced by its board. The voices of Newark, it appeared, were beginning to be heard.

While praising the new direction of FNF, Baraka declared himself unmoved by Cerf's newly conciliatory demeanor, calling his appointment “a clear indicator that Governor Christie is still Governor Christie, and we should not expect anything to the contrary of him.” He added, “We are in this fight to govern and be in charge of our lives. The Governor should expect nothing less from Newark.”

Cerf appeared to be following the lessons of Washington, D.C., where Michelle Rhee's autocratic leadership gave way in 2010 to a far more collaborative chancellor in Kaya Henderson. She pursued an agenda similar to Rhee's and closed fifteen schools in 2013, but only after a yearlong vetting process with affected families, making multiple changes in response to their input. She also presided over slow, but steady, achievement gains. While the backlash against Rhee fueled the
ouster of Washington's mayor in 2010, the city elected a new mayor in 2014 who promised to keep Henderson in office. “Movements that don't include beneficiaries are doomed to fail,” Henderson said.

Put another way, education reform is too important to be left to reformers alone. One person who drew this lesson from Newark was Mark Zuckerberg. He had vowed at the outset to learn from his experience and to use it to become a better philanthropist. Based on his subsequent initiatives, he appears to have learned a lot. He and Priscilla Chan have said publicly that they intend to spend the rest of their lives as philanthropists working on the challenge of improving education for the nation's most underserved children. With their Newark commitment due to expire at the end of 2015, they have refocused their Startup: Education foundation on low-income communities close to home, in the Bay Area. A priority of the foundation from now on, according to Jen Holleran, is understanding the desires of the communities where they make grants. There are likely to be a lot of them. With a contribution of almost $1 billion in stock to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation for unspecified future gifts, Zuckerberg and Chan became the nation's most generous philanthropists in 2013. They announced plans in May 2014 for $120 million in grants to schools in a series of high-poverty communities in the Bay Area. The amount was similar in size to their gift to Newark, but the method was not. The couple wrote in an op-ed in the
San Jose Mercury News
that they were working through parents, teachers, school leaders, and officials of both charter organizations and school districts “so that we understand the needs of students that others miss.” By contrast, in Newark they worked through politicians and arrived with little knowledge of the community, the schools, or the impediments to reform.

Well before the gift to Newark, Priscilla Chan had made a personal cause of working with children like those who struggled the most in Newark. As a pediatrician caring for underserved children, she became convinced that schools, on their own, were unlikely to meet the
needs of students raised amid extreme poverty and violence. Working with educators and researchers, she is developing a school that would operate alongside a community health center, providing medical and mental health care in tandem with education and community-based services, creating a web of support for students with the greatest needs, beginning in early childhood. The school and health center would draw on neuroscience research to jointly address adverse childhood experiences—such as poverty, trauma, and neglect—that can interfere with a student's ability to learn, even before kindergarten. In contrast with the approach in Newark, Chan's starting point was children, their needs, and a school equipped to address them.

It was tempting to imagine how this kind of support system might have affected Alif Beyah. He was in free fall at
BRICK
Avon when a principal, assistant principal, special education teacher, and basketball coach wove themselves into a safety net in partnership with his mother and caught him. Flush with hope from his remarkable progress, Alif went to Newark Vocational High School in the fall of 2013. But his support system didn't go with him. He made the varsity basketball team as a freshman but struggled academically and quickly lost hope, despite heavy encouragement from his coach and his mother. “I'm just not on their level,” he kept saying of his teachers.

The second semester was immeasurably worse. In March, a lifelong friend of Alif's was stabbed and killed at age fourteen while the two of them walked home from a pickup basketball game. It was a calamity that could have derailed any child. For one already at risk, it was all the more devastating. For weeks, his mother said, Alif cried himself to sleep and lost all motivation. He ended the year with F's in English, math, and history, and was sent to summer school.

Anderson had vowed in her first weeks on the job to fix the district's broken summer school system, but the improvements didn't make their way to Alif. He retook freshman English and math, but his English teacher quit, and he was taught by rotating substitutes who he said simply distributed work packets. He passed math but flunked English.

In the fall of 2014, Newark Vocational was relocated to unused space in West Side High School as part of Anderson's One Newark reorganization. Alif arrived for his sophomore year two credits behind, which disqualified him from playing on the basketball team, which had been his strongest anchor. Meanwhile, with the district's attention focused on implementing sweeping change, some of the most basic functions—such as student scheduling at certain high schools—had broken down. Throughout the fall semester, Alif had no English or math classes. Although Anderson's Grad Tracker program was supposed to ensure that students who failed classes regained the credits, there was no arrangement for Alif to make up freshman English and history.

Meanwhile, he was frequently late for school or absent, occasionally posting videos of himself and friends on Facebook in a haze of marijuana smoke. Melinda Weidman, the
BRICK
Avon vice principal, found the videos one day on Facebook. Taken aback, she contacted Alif and his mother and began visiting him at West Side, introducing herself to guidance counselors, social workers, after-school coordinators, and assistant principals, hoping to weave him another safety net. “The whole endeavor,” Weidman said, “is just trying again, again, again.”

Breakdowns like these led Princess Williams, the gifted kindergarten teacher at
BRICK
Avon, to take a dramatic and unexpected step in her path as an educator. From the time she entered teaching, she had vowed never to work in a charter school, convinced that charters didn't serve children with the greatest needs—those with troubled histories like her own, rooted in the city's pathologies. But for most of the 2013–14 school year at
BRICK
Avon, Williams tried without result to persuade the district to provide an aide for severely disturbed children in her kindergarten class, including two who threw furniture at her and their classmates. Other students didn't feel safe, she said, affecting their ability to concentrate and learn. In the fall of 2014, she made an emotional decision to leave the district for
SPARK
Academy, the
KIPP
charter elementary school. Williams said she wanted to be
come an education leader in Newark and perhaps beyond. With charters now a major presence in public education, she felt compelled to learn from the inside what the best of them could offer students like hers.