The Prize (7 page)

“That's when I said I want to teach, and I want to teach in Newark,” she said. “I want to help cultivate those brilliant minds. I want to deposit in my hometown what people deposited into me. I want to teach in Newark because I love my city. I love it because there's so much promise here. I want to invest my life's work in the city, because I believe in it.”

Avon Avenue School, where Princess Williams saw so much promise, was 105 years old, an immense hulk of red brick rising three stories and filling almost a full square block. The grand scale reflected the school's aspirations—very much akin to Williams's—when in the early 1900s Newark and public education were passageways to opportunity for hundreds of thousands of working-class immigrants and their children. The city was a national leader in manufacturing
and retail. It had visionary civic leaders who built public institutions—the library, the museum—into engines of democracy that spread culture and literacy to the masses. In heavily poor, immigrant communities like Avon's, public schools remained open all summer to “continue the process of Americanization” of disadvantaged children and “give the opportunity for a large number to advance rapidly,” in the words of Addison B. Poland, Newark's turn-of-the-century superintendent.

The Avon area in the early 1900s was mostly German immigrants, living in three- and four-family homes, working in factories, and sending their children to the neighborhood school. A century later, after economic decline, riots, and white flight, it was almost all black and poor. Nearly half of the children came from families who lived in what the government classified as “extreme poverty,” or fifty percent of the federal poverty level, approximately $11,000 a year for a family of four.
The school had suffered along with the neighborhood. Nothing inside worked as it was supposed to, even the clocks, which each told a different time, all of them wrong. Barely one in six students in third through seventh grade had passed the most recent state literacy test, and the math results were even worse, especially in the middle school, where only four percent of seventh graders passed.

“A generous description of Avon Avenue students would be ‘semi-literate,'” wrote Gordon MacInnes, a policy analyst, summarizing the years leading up to the turnaround effort that drew Williams there. “The results on the math test raise this question: was there any intentional effort to teach mathematics to Avon Avenue students?”

MacInnes emphasized that poverty posed an enormous barrier to learning in Newark and nationally. The pattern was consistent across the country: the poorer the children, the lower the test scores. Yet worse than the damage from poverty at Avon, he found, was the district's unconscionable and systematic neglect of the children's needs. MacInnes wrote with outrage and astonishment, hurling aside the detached tone of most policy papers: “There is no helpful explanation
how the Avon results could be overlooked for so many years without triggering intensive attention from NPS,” the Newark Public Schools administration.

During the summer of 2010, the newly appointed leaders of Avon, Dominique Lee and Charity Haygood, along with Williams and other teachers, were intently studying the school's academic results and developing a reform strategy rooted in supporting and strengthening the teaching staff. All of them had a personal journey that led them to teach in Newark. Lee, just twenty-five years old at the time, had spent most of his childhood in low-income housing developments in Pontiac, Michigan, with a single mother who was periodically on welfare. Then, as if by magic—in Lee's view, by God's grace—his father, who had been living in Texas, reappeared to care for him as he entered his teens. Having risen into management at Exxon, his father took a position in the Detroit area with ExxonMobil after the two oil giants merged. Lee moved in with his dad in suburban Bloomfield Hills but remained at his urban Pontiac high school. Accustomed to making B's and C's, he faced a new standard with his father: nothing below an A would do. Lee graduated at the top of his class, was admitted to the University of Michigan, and graduated with honors. He liked pointing out that he was a third-generation college graduate on his father's side, first generation on his mother's. “I should be a statistic,” he said. “I'm a black male with an uneducated single mother. ‘Amazing grace!' God ‘saved a wretch like me.'”

After college, when Lee arrived at Newark's Malcolm X Shabazz High School to teach social studies and English, many of his students reminded him of his younger self—except that no one had saved them. They were often reading four or more years below grade level, couldn't name the continents, and didn't know the difference between a governor and a mayor. Angular and high-energy, a towering six feet five inches tall, Lee was irrepressibly positive, pushing his students and himself. After struggling for three years to teach basic skills in tandem with the Civil War, he felt compelled to confront the larger prob
lem: four lower schools, all serving Newark's poorest children, fed into Shabazz, and barely a quarter of their graduates were proficient in reading and math. His idea was to recruit a small group of highly motivated Newark teachers for each of those schools, to build a culture of excellence in which newcomers and veterans together would raise the quality of teaching and learning. He called his idea “a kind of naïve little dream to meet the neediest children's needs.”

His first call was to Charity Haygood, then a district assistant principal who had come to Newark thirteen years earlier with Teach for America and made it her home. They connected instantly. Haygood grew up in Denver, with a single mother who never finished high school but inspired her to work her hardest. She attended chronically low-performing Manual High School, which was closed soon after she graduated—later to be reopened—but she credited teachers and classmates in her college-bound classes with pushing her to aim high. She was admitted to Colorado College and, based on her family's poverty, received a full scholarship.

She also shared Lee's religious conviction. For years, Haygood and her husband, a civil rights attorney, had led a weekly church youth group and had taken into their home children whose parents struggled with addiction and illness. “If you live in Newark and you're going to do what needs to be done, you have to be brave enough to act in faith,” she said. “It's not about being the boss, but being the servant willing to wash other people's feet. More than anything, it's about understanding you don't have all the answers. This is so much bigger than me. It's bigger than Cory Booker. It's bigger than Barack Obama. It's recognizing that you've got to be humble.”

They began planning in earnest in 2009, recruiting four colleagues from other Newark schools. Princess Williams was the only one of them to have been born and raised in the city. At dinner one night, they brainstormed a name for their organization and came up with Building Responsible, Intelligent, Creative Kids, or
BRICK
—an allusion to Brick City, Newark's nickname from the 1940s, when brick housing projects stood at the heart of the city.

They spent eighteen months reviewing research, consulting educators, and visiting high-achieving urban schools, including charter schools. The earliest charters were expected to serve as laboratories for innovative practices that district schools would adopt and spread. In fact, there had been little cross-pollination in Newark or elsewhere. The
BRICK
team, though, took it upon themselves to glean many lessons from the city's best charter schools, and found charter school leaders eager to help. They organized themselves as a nonprofit agency through which they raised private money to purchase the rigorous, early-literacy program, developed at the University of Chicago for kindergarten through third grade, that was used in the two leading charter networks—the
TEAM
schools of the national
KIPP
organization and North Star Academy, a subsidiary of Uncommon Schools. This was the
STEP
program Williams now used with her kindergarten class.

They envied the charters' freedom to hire the best teachers and to set their schedules based on student needs—unconstrained by union contracts, tenure law, and the district bureaucracy. But
BRICK
's founders resolved to work in district schools. They were convinced that charters didn't serve children from the most struggling families, with the greatest learning needs, the kind who came to Avon. They believed some charters deliberately avoided these students, or pushed them out. Even the
TEAM
schools, which went to great lengths to recruit the most disadvantaged children, faced a selection bias: the most motivated parents with the highest ambitions for children were applying in droves. The Avon teachers felt almost personally insulted by the notion that the district was too broken to fix. Princess Williams had turned away overtures to teach at
TEAM
and North Star, despite being impressed by their commitment to top-level instruction. “My calling is to fix the public schools,” she said. “If something is broken and we have the power to fix it, why would we abandon it for something else? It's like saying, ‘Because so much negative is happening in Newark, we should just totally level the town and bring in new people.'” That was the message many in Newark took from Governor Christie's call to “grab the system by the roots, pull it out and start over.” With more
than four out of five children in district schools at the time, that was where the
BRICK
teachers felt they belonged. “If you want to change public education, you have to attack the district buildings,” Lee said.

Clifford Janey, then the Newark superintendent, encouraged the
BRICK
team to write a proposal for a school. They wanted to concentrate on the early school years to ensure students were reading proficiently by third grade. They proposed to open with only kindergarten, first, and second grades, and then to grow one grade a year. Most charters in Newark began with a single grade level, then added one a year as the founding class advanced. They also asked for a waiver from the union contract to hire teachers of their choice, another hallmark of charters. In April 2010, Janey named Dominique Lee and his team to lead Avon, but instead of only three grades, he gave them all nine, six hundred and fifty students, in kindergarten through eighth grade. He also assigned them the existing staff, under whom Avon students had failed for years.

If they had a choice, Lee said, they would have rejected about a third of Avon's forty teachers as subpar. But among the others they found capable teachers who they believed could become good with the right support, and good ones who could become exceptional. It was a mantra of the reform movement that children and their genius were trapped in failing schools, but the
BRICK
leaders found gifted teachers were trapped there as well. Since few Newark principals spent time observing teachers and supporting their growth, teachers throughout the district had languished for years with unrealized potential. Avon, for example, already had a star-quality third-grade team in Sharon Rappaport, Teresa Olivieria, and Regina Sherrod, who coaxed impressive gains from their students, only to see them lose ground in later years with less effective teachers. Because so few teachers had received meaningful support from principals, Lee and Haygood looked not for preexisting powerhouses but for teachers who knew their subjects, had strong relationships with students, and were willing to work on their practice with a goal of becoming more effective.

The
BRICK
leaders divided administrative responsibilities so Hay
good could devote the bulk of her time to observing teachers and helping them improve. Dressed in the
BRICK
uniform of yellow shirt and navy pants, her dark hair bound in a curly ponytail, she radiated kindness, even when delivering harsh assessments. “Charity can tell you essentially, ‘You suck,' and you walk out with a smile on your face,” said Lee.

Rappaport said she and some other veterans resented the new leaders at first: “They came in saying we were going to work longer days, longer weeks, longer years, and I said, ‘Who let them in here? This is
our
building.'” But she said she changed her mind because of one of the newcomers, Chris Perpich, who at half her age was her instructional coach and assistant principal. With modest suggestions, one at a time, she said, he made her a stronger teacher.

The new leaders also required all teachers to develop a “
BRICK
plan” for each student, an individualized improvement program with specific responsibilities for families as well as teachers. Federal law mandated such plans for students with disabilities, but the
BRICK
leaders felt all parents should know how their children performed in comparison to national standards in reading, writing, and math, and how to help each of them meet the bar. After so many years of failure as the norm, they said, parents often didn't know what to expect of children. The
BRICK
plan listed up to three tasks for families to perform with students every night, and three kinds of academic support activities that teachers would carry out with them every day.

One of the cruel ironies of Newark's schools was that throughout their long decline, the district often appeared on paper to be in perfect compliance with all requirements. A 2009 outside review of the Avon Avenue School found that the curriculum aligned well with state standards in math and literacy. And the district had a written policy requiring principals to observe teachers regularly, supplying feedback and coaching to ensure they were reaching all children.

But inside Avon, as in many schools across the district, reality bore
little resemblance to the script. An application for federal aid, filed shortly after the outside review, reported that too many teachers displayed “an inability to captivate student interest and motivate them.” And there was “minimal use of higher order questioning.”
The quality of the curriculum had little relevance without effective instruction. Numerous students recalled that in earlier years, while they sat in class trying to learn, other children routinely ran, yelled, or fought in the halls. Principals and teachers appeared powerless to stop them. Avon was mentioned in the police blotter almost as often as in the
Star- Ledger
's education coverage. In 1996, an Avon kindergarten teacher was indicted on charges of official misconduct for ordering her five-year-old students to line up and punch a classmate in the back for tearing up her lesson plan. In 1998, two men were charged with selling heroin and cocaine from an apartment next door.