The Prize (9 page)

What Booker, Christie, and Zuckerberg set out to achieve in Newark had not been accomplished in modern times—turning a failing urban school district into one of universally high achievement. In districts across the country, the education reform movement and the Obama administration had similarly been advocating strategies built on test-based accountability for teachers and rapid expansion of charter schools—strategies whose value was not grounded in scientific research but which advocates saw as remedies for the influence of unions and large bureaucracies. Results were mixed at best. New Orleans, where Hurricane Katrina destroyed all but a handful of district schools, was on its way to becoming a city of almost all charters—all of them non-union—and reformers pointed to it as an exemplar, citing a twenty-point rise in the percentage of third through eighth graders scoring at least “basic” on the state achievement tests. However, only twelve percent achieved the “mastery” level, defined as being “well prepared” for the next grade. And a number of scholars questioned whether the curriculum was aligned too narrowly to tests instead of fostering richer learning. In Washington, D.C., in the wake of Rhee's replacement by Kaya Henderson, who continued her policies, students would go on to post the largest gains of all urban districts on a national assessment of reading and math skills in 2013. Across the country, the results of the National Assessment of Education Progress showed improvement in urban districts over the previous decade, but proficiency remained dauntingly low, and the gap between poor and minority students and all others—in D.C. and elsewhere—was
widening rather than closing. “The deep message here is that nobody knows how to educate large numbers of disadvantaged kids successfully,” wrote Paul Hill, founder of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, which advocated the development of “portfolio” districts that combined traditional, charter, and contract schools. That verdict became even more ominous when a study revealed that in the 2012–13 school year, for the first time in fifty years, more than half of American public school children lived in low-income families.
Hill said the national test results called for an urgent and extensive exploration of a variety of approaches to meet students' needs in each community—a more humble prescription than the rallying cry of Booker and many reformers: “We know what works.”

In one of the first expenditures of his philanthropic bounty, Booker immediately launched a community engagement campaign. But the $1 million contract to manage it—which rose eventually to almost $2 million—went not to someone from the community, but rather to a consultant with strong credentials in the school reform movement, Bradley Tusk, of Tusk Strategies in New York City. There was no public disclosure of Tusk's hiring or his qualifications, which included no experience on the ground in Newark. Tusk had managed New York mayor Michael Bloomberg's reelection effort as well as a successful campaign to lift the New York State cap on charter school expansion. He also advised NBC's
Education Nation
team on what his website called the “often very politically-charged education reform landscape.” And he advised Rhee, after she left Washington, on strategy for Students First, a national lobbying organization she launched as a political counterforce to teachers' unions.

In Newark, Tusk spent heavily on billboards, television, and radio, although local organizers warned that word of mouth from neighbors, friends, and family was far more powerful. Everyone he hired had connections to the education reform movement. He brought on a national communications firm, SKDKnickerbocker, whose principals included Anita Dunn, a former Obama White House commu
nications director and adviser to Michelle Rhee when she was D.C. chancellor. Notably, he contracted with Education Reform Now, a mobilizing arm of Democrats for Education Reform, the political action committee that advocated for charter schools and was backed by hedge fund managers. The group had worked with Tusk in New York on the campaign to lift the cap on charter schools.

The public face of the engagement effort, announced by Booker in early November as a campaign of “relentless outreach,” was a series of eleven forums for Newark residents. “We want bottom-up, teacher-driven reforms that will be sustained,” the mayor said at one forum, although he missed most of them. “We can now access the resources—whatever we need—but we need a community vision for change and reform.”

Booker's call for a community vision resonated with Tynesha McHarris. A rising star among Newark activists, she was respected for her commitment to the city's most vulnerable youth. At twenty-five, she already had founded and run reentry programs for young men returning from prison, an intensive summer literacy campaign for 150 elementary school students, and a leadership initiative for teenage girls on confronting sexual violence. While an undergraduate at Rutgers University's Newark campus, McHarris led a protest in front of Shabazz High School, demanding action to address abysmal student achievement. A stunning beauty with an untamed Afro, she stood out in the crowd most of all for her poster: “What Would Malcolm X think of Malcolm X Shabazz High School?”

Like many fellow local activists, she had grown skeptical of Booker and his heroic national reputation despite the expansive unfinished business in Newark. When a close friend, Jeremiah Grace, signed on to organize the ten community forums and a door-knocking campaign to mobilize participants, McHarris warned, “Be careful, dude. Nobody wants to get near that.” But when Grace told her that Booker had given him the latitude to galvanize a citywide discussion about education and that he needed her help, she saw it as an opportunity. “I was tired of what I'd seen, tired of knowing when Newark kids got
locked up exactly what schools they'd come from. I was frustrated that the schools were so bad. I still had in my mind a report on Newark by the Council of Great City Schools in 2007—it said there is no shared vision for the city's schools. I wanted to be part of creating a shared vision for Newark.”

McHarris, Grace, and other organizers hired dozens of hourly workers to knock on thousands of doors to recruit residents to forums, and they won endorsements from more than a hundred nonprofit organizations. A list of frequently asked questions given to canvassers included this noticeably pointed one: “Is this about Cory Booker?” The suggested answer was that it was about everyone in Newark, including Booker. The mayor joined the canvassers several times, including on a Saturday morning in the Stella Gardens housing project. “We don't want to pull people out of the public school system,” he told residents. “We want to make it the best public school system in the country.”

In truth, there was a palpable consensus in Newark that the city was failing its schoolchildren. Elected city officials, including the most outspoken defenders of district schools, had been sending their children to private and parochial academies for generations. So many district school parents were opting for charter schools that the best ones had waiting lists in the thousands. The failure of education was a subtext at vigils for murder victims, held with depressing weekly regularity by the Newark Anti-Violence Coalition. At one gathering at South Ninth Street and South Orange Avenue, where thirteen-year-old Dante Young was gunned down under a church archway, his sister cried out to the young men leaning against buildings watching from afar: “Y'all carry book bags but you don't carry books. Get back to school! Study! Get out of the streets!”

A similar message was reaching the young people of Newark through an unconventional but highly authoritative source: Akbar Pray, a notorious drug kingpin in the 1980s, who became an evangelist for education from prison, after losing three of his own sons to
violence. “The game is dead,” he said in audio messages and letters distributed online. Get an education, it's your way up and out, he admonished the next generation. “Each day here I run into a brother or homie that is barely literate, can scarcely read and is about to be released and has no idea as to what he is going to do when he gets out. How is he going to stay out of the institutional trap? I am bothered,” he wrote.

Students in one Newark high school wrote back to Pray, to thank him for his guidance and concern. Interviewed in the visiting room at the Otisville, New York, federal prison, in his twenty-fifth year of a life sentence, the aging convict said the students' responses heartened him. He then leaned forward with a troubled expression, signaling that he wanted to share a private thought. “Some of them didn't write even one complete sentence,” he said in a whisper. “What's wrong with these schools?”

The community engagement campaign was called Partnership for Education in Newark—known by the uncatchy shorthand PENewark—and McHarris kicked off most discussions by telling audiences with feeling, “It's our goal to collect the voices of
every
Newarker.” Residents of all ages came
to the forums, and many took seriously the offer to “have a voice of influence,” as the outreach campaign's literature promised.

Perhaps the most consistent plea was for the district to treat the social and emotional health of children and families as essential to learning. The effect of poverty on student performance had been reduced to a war of sound bites in the politically polarized national conversation about education. Reformers said district schools used poverty as an excuse for failure rather than fixing the real problems—bad teachers, bloated and incompetent bureaucracies, and low expectations. Defenders of traditional schools said reformers willfully ignored the well-documented toll of poverty as part of a campaign to discredit public education and demonize unions. But among those who came to the forums, poverty was a glaring fact of life, not a debating point. Schools didn't need excuses; they needed help supporting children and families.

At one forum, young men and women who grew up amid the mayhem of the crack epidemic became emotional about gang wars shattering yet another generation of families. They wanted to volunteer to work with students one or both of whose parents couldn't, or simply didn't, support them academically.

“Don't lose those of us who came up and saw it was so horrible. No one can change it the way we can change it ourselves,” said Calvin Souder, a lawyer who went to prep school and college on football scholarships. While in law school in the early 2000s, Souder had taught for five years at one of Newark's most challenging schools, Barringer High, and said some of his most difficult students were children of former classmates who turned to gangs and gave up on education. “Those of us who have had success need to get in our nice cars and drive into the neighborhood and park next to the drug dealer and say to the kids, ‘I got an education and I succeeded, and the cops aren't going to come take my car, because I own it. And you know what? Mine is better than the dealer's,'” he said.

Souder's remarks set off a cascade of offers to help the hardest-to-reach students. “Teachers need to bring people like us to the classroom to talk to kids,” said Crystal Anderson, herself a product of the Newark schools, now a coordinator for a large mentoring organization. “It can't just be ‘I taught you how to read and write and now it's time to go home.' It's not just about passing the HSPA test,” she said, referring to the state's high school proficiency exam.

“I have kids every day in my program, their homes are broken by drugs,” said Shareef Austin, who supervised evening sports programs at Newark's Westside Park. “Tears come out of my eyes at night worrying about them. If you haven't been here and grown up through this, you can't help the way we can.”

School counselors called for workshops to teach young parents
what to do at home to help children succeed in school. One social worker offered to share a curriculum she had prepared, “How to Be a Parent of a Child Who Learns.”

Despite the spirited participation at the forums, Tynesha McHarris kept finding confirmation of her initial doubts about the community engagement effort. She asked why her paycheck was coming from an organization called Education Reform Now, which was allied with charter schools and their supporters on Wall Street, and was told that Bradley Tusk had brought them on. “Who's Bradley Tusk?” she demanded. Only then did she learn that he was her boss, his firm making over $1 million while she was taking home less than $600 a week.

Shareef Austin, the recreation leader who pleaded for attention to the children of crack addicts, said no one called to follow up with him or his friends about their interest in mentoring students whose parents were absent. “I guess those ideas look little to the people at the top, but they're big to us, because we know what it can mean to the kids,” he said.

A planned phase two of the community engagement campaign never happened. A senior aide to Booker privately deemed Tusk's work “a boondoggle.” According to a board member of the Foundation for Newark's Future, which paid the bill, “It wasn't real community engagement. It was public relations.”

McHarris and the other organizers did not know that Booker and Zuckerberg already had agreed on an agenda. Nor had anyone told them of the tough choices embedded in it, such as closing failing schools, expanding charters, and weakening teacher tenure. If they had known, the organizers said, they would have asked residents to weigh in on these tradeoffs, which could have led to important community conversations. Instead, discussions ranged widely. One Newark principal said a stricter policy on school uniforms would help, with clear consequences for those who failed to wear them. “Charter schools can send you home for that,” she said. An assistant principal mentioned an initiative in Mississippi that integrated the arts into the
curriculum. A Newark high school freshman said she wanted “an environment where everyone would want to learn. It's hard if everyone around you is playing around.”