4

Engaging the Community

September 2010–February 2011

 

BOOKER CALCULATED CORRECTLY. Timing the Zuckerberg announcement to the premiere of Waiting for Superman swept the young billionaire, the mayor, the governor, and Newark into an extravaganza of media attention. Every television network carried the story and, within three hours of the Oprah segment, so did 263 news outlets across the country and around the world. The following Monday, NBC began a week of heavily promoted television programming called Education Nation, sponsored in large part by the Gates and Broad foundations—an arrangement that drew some criticism because the coverage dovetailed closely with the venture philanthropists’ views. NBC kicked off the week with Booker, Christie, and Education Secretary Arne Duncan as featured guests on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, talking about Zuckerberg’s $100 million gift and the threesome’s commitment to turning around public education in Newark.

Although residents of Newark had to tune in to Oprah to learn that their mayor, their governor, and a billionaire planned to transform their schools, Booker vowed to the national television audience that this would be the people’s project—driven by Newark parents and their demands for change.

“What I believe is that Newark, New Jersey, can help lead America back,” Booker declared, “but we have to let Newark lead and not let people drop in from outside and point the way.”

“What he is doing that is so smart,” Duncan said, gesturing toward Booker. “He’s trying to put in place a process to empower average parents, the parents of Waiting for Superman who have been disempowered for too long. He’s going to put them in the driver’s seat.”

The testimonials to grassroots democracy came against the backdrop of a major political setback for the school reform movement. Less than two weeks earlier, a voter backlash over the record of Washington, D.C., schools chancellor Michelle Rhee had contributed to the ouster of Mayor Adrian Fenty, who had appointed and defended her. A heroine of reformers—and of the Waiting for Superman movie—Rhee had ridden like a crusader through the bureaucracy of the faltering school district, firing hundreds of teachers and dozens of principals and imposing strict accountability for student performance. As resistance rose among teachers, unions, and many parents, Rhee posed resolutely on the cover of Time with a broom, as if sweeping aside all who stood in her way. “Cooperation, collaboration and consensus-building are way overrated,” she famously declared in a speech to the Aspen Institute.

No one doubted that urban education across the country needed a jolt. Schools were catastrophically failing children in the poorest neighborhoods, and there was little accountability—for teachers, principals, or the bureaucracy itself. Nor was there recourse through the ballot box. Democracy favored unions and powerful political bosses, whose loyalists tended to dominate turnout in school board elections and whose candidates often fought harder for adult jobs than for children’s education. Only in districts run by reform-friendly mayors or governors rather than school boards—such as New Orleans, Washington, New York, and now Newark—did officials have a free hand to impose politically unpopular changes. But even Rhee’s allies in the reform movement were critical of her autocratic approach, and the warnings loomed large over Newark.

“Education reform is not about its leaders and their prerogatives. It’s about communities,” Michael Lomax, president of the United Negro College Fund and an ardent reformer, wrote on The Root, an online magazine. “Education reform doesn’t have to be—indeed, cannot be—force-fed to communities of color . . . We can be equal partners in ensuring what is best for our children and all children. It won’t work any other way.”

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 communications 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.”

Some comments aligned with the Booker-Zuckerberg agenda, particularly its call for autonomy for individual schools and principals. At a forum held at BRICK Avon, teachers and leaders of the turnaround school said they wanted to be able to spend money where it was needed most, rather than having budgets dictated by the central office. Principal Charity Haygood told the room that Avon had only one social worker for 650 students who lived in neighborhoods racked by poverty and violence. “We’d allocate our money differently if we had the authority,” she said. “We so desperately need help so we can move up.” A BRICK Avon assistant principal said the school needed a waiver from state seniority protections to keep from losing a number of younger teachers in the next layoff. “These are valuable suggestions,” Booker boomed from the back of the room.

Despite Booker’s public promises of “bottom-up” reform led by the people of Newark, he quietly hired a team of education consultants—none from Newark—soon after the Oprah announcement, to create a “fact base” of the district’s needs and to lay the groundwork for the changes he and Zuckerberg had agreed on over the summer. Booker raised $500,000 from a charitable arm of Goldman Sachs and $500,000 from the Broad Foundation to start paying the firm of Global Education Advisers, whose consultants charged $1,000 and more a day. The total bill for the firm and its consultants eventually reached $2.8 million, with the excess paid by Mark Zuckerberg’s foundation, Startup: Education, and matching funds from William Ackman’s Pershing Square Foundation. With no public money involved, no public notice was legally required, and as with Tusk’s hiring, none was given.

The merging of public and private business only progressed from there. Also without public notice, Booker arranged for two of his top city hall aides to get paid with the philanthropic money for their efforts to secure the donations and set up a local foundation to oversee them. Bari Mattes, Booker’s fundraiser, received $120,000 between October 2010 and June 2011, in addition to her city hall pay of $83,000 for the first ten months of 2010. Booker’s education adviser, De’Shawn Wright, got $94,500, atop a 2010 salary of $140,000, which was paid by the Newark Charter School Fund. In other words, a substantial portion of the paycheck of the person who counseled Booker on policies affecting the district as well as the charter schools came not from taxpayers but from a privately funded charter school organization.

These arrangements were as philosophically and personally entwined as they were closely held. Even Shavar Jeffries, president of Newark’s advisory school board—“advisory” because the state held all the power—who actually supported most of the reforms Booker and Zuckerberg sought, was in the dark about who was spending the Zuckerberg money, and on what. “This remains a black hole to me and thus I suspect everyone,” Jeffries wrote in an email to Jen Holleran, the executive director of Zuckerberg’s foundation. “I’d like to know how funding decisions are being made, who’s at the table when they’re being made and how all of this is tied into district decision-making and planning?”

Jeffries had put his finger on one of the thornier questions surrounding private philanthropy in public education. Almost all philanthropy is by definition undemocratic, its priorities set by wealthy donors and boards of trustees, who by extension can shape the direction of public policy in faraway communities. Representatives of Zuckerberg, Booker, and Christie spoke of their partnership as a “three-legged stool,” in which the mayor, the governor, and philanthropists would jointly chart the direction of the district.

To exert hometown influence over how the private donations were spent, Booker insisted on creating a local foundation to handle the Zuckerberg gift and matching donations. But seats on the board of what was called the Foundation for Newark’s Future went only to donors who gave at least $10 million (later reduced to $5 million), pricing all Newark residents and foundations out of contention. Only Zuckerberg, billionaire financier Ackman, and Goldman Sachs met the threshold. Their representatives, along with Booker as an ex-officio member, made up the board, with the result that the donors decided how their own money would be spent. They paid their first CEO, Greg Taylor, $380,000 a year, but took so few of his recommendations that he left in frustration in less than two years for a job with the National Basketball Association.

The board convened monthly in a black, glass-walled office tower high above downtown Newark. On the day of its meeting in May 2011, two flat-screen televisions in the lobby carried the large headline WHO’S DUMPING GM STOCK? over photographs of Ackman and billionaire investor George Soros. Fourteen floors above, in a conference room with windows overlooking the Passaic River, the CEO of Ackman’s foundation was chairing the FNF meeting, where it was reported that Soros’s foundation was considering a donation to help match Zuckerberg’s $100 million gift. Although Soros ended up not giving, it was no coincidence that two men moving the stock market on that day were also in positions to move the direction of school reform in one of America’s poorest cities. In a twist, their private business concerns were public while their potential effect on the public’s business was private. This was not what Shavar Jeffries had in mind regarding transparency.

 

The contrast between Booker’s private actions and his public vow to involve Newark residents was in high relief one Sunday morning in early January 2011 when he convened representatives of seven billionaire donors to hear where the reform effort was headed—none of which was known to Newark residents.

The presentation was led by Christopher Cerf, founder of the Global Education Advisers consulting firm. In December, Christie had named Cerf his education commissioner, in charge of reforms across the state, and in particular in the Newark Public Schools, which he now would control on the governor’s behalf.

Tall, fit, and exuding confidence, Cerf was in many ways an archetype of a school reformer. A Democrat who spoke with convincing passion of his concern for the poorest children in failing districts, he was highly educated, accomplished, and unwaveringly sure that his vision was right. He often invoked war metaphors in discussing the politics of education reform. A product of Amherst College and Columbia Law School, he had been a Supreme Court clerk to Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and associate White House counsel under Bill Clinton. Cerf had become a sort of central switching station for the education reform movement, with connections at all levels. For eight years he was general counsel and then president of the Edison Project, later Edison Schools, Inc., and now EdisonLearning—a for-profit operator of public schools and an early combatant in the campaign to disrupt the government-run, unionized model of education. The company ultimately failed to deliver promised profits or notable academic gains for students, but it was a training ground for several leaders of the education reform movement. While at Edison, Cerf attended the Broad Superintendents Academy, founded by Eli Broad, the Los Angeles billionaire whose philanthropy aimed to reshape school districts along the lines of high-performing businesses. Cerf then worked for four years at Joel Klein’s side to redesign the New York City school system.

“I was asked to reorganize everything from the ground up—a $22-billion-a-year system, 1,500 schools, 1.1 million students,” Cerf explained one day over coffee. “My specialty is system reform. I take on micropolitics, selfishness, corruption, old customs unmoored from any clear objectives.”

Cerf said he’d met Booker at a fundraiser in his suburban town, near Newark, when Booker first ran for mayor. He recalled being thrilled by the young councilman’s blistering critique of the Newark schools and enthusiasm for charters. Cerf was soon an unofficial education adviser to Booker, and when Booker became mayor in 2006, Cerf pressed him to demand control of the state-run district from Governor Jon Corzine, a fellow Democrat. Booker demurred, insisting that no Democrat would turn over urban schools to a mayor on the wrong side of the teachers’ union. Exasperated that Booker wouldn’t use his star power to try to pressure Corzine, Cerf let the relationship atrophy. “Cory was everyone’s choice of a black man to put out there as a voice for choice, charters, and vouchers, but here was this billion-dollar district he wasn’t touching,” Cerf said.

When Christie won in 2009, Cerf tried again and hit pay dirt. “I kept shaming him until he gave up,” Cerf said.

Gathered around a conference table to hear from Cerf in the city’s public access television studio were representatives of more money than had ever been assembled in Newark, or perhaps most cities in the world. Jen Holleran, a former private school teacher and principal with a graduate business degree from Yale, was representing Zuckerberg. The directors of William Ackman’s Pershing Square Foundation and Silicon Valley venture capitalist John Doerr’s NewSchools Venture Fund were at the table, as was the CEO of the Newark Charter School Fund, whose donors included the Gates, Fisher, Walton, and Robertson foundations; Laurene Powell Jobs; and Newark’s Prudential, Victoria, Gem, and MCJ Amelior foundations.

As Cerf rose to address the funders, he called Newark an important new front for education reform: “whole district reform—taking a whole district that’s frozen in place, failing children, and turning it into something different.” Newark, he said, was a perfect test: “It’s manageable in size, it’s led by an extraordinary mayor, and it’s managed by the state. We still control all the levers.”

Cerf was well known to the funders in his former role as Klein’s top deputy in New York City in charge of innovation and strategy, a title he shorthanded as “chief of transformation.” Transformation was a popular word among education reformers. Teach for America promised “transformational teachers”; New Leaders for New Schools, “transformational” principals; the Broad Center, superintendents “with transformational skill and will” who would enact “transformational, sustainable and replicable reforms.” The NewSchools Venture Fund, which backed entrepreneurship, subtitled its tenth annual summit, “Education Entrepreneurs and the Transformation of Public Education.”

“I’m very firmly of the view that when a system is as broken as this one, you cannot fix it by doing the same things you’ve always done, only better,” Cerf told the funders. “There are those who will say, ‘Gosh, we need literacy programs. We need reading tutors. We need more resources in the library.’ We’ve tried all that. We want to get from good to great, but the bureaucracy drives everything. We have top-down, prescriptive policies and we’ve barely moved from awful to adequate.”

The fifty-six-year-old Cerf, dressed in jeans and a gray sweater, with silvery hair and reading glasses perched low on his nose, stood at a whiteboard with a black marker and sketched out a blueprint for Newark that mirrored the one he and Klein had followed in New York. Indeed, Cerf said he and Booker recently had run it by Klein, who was now executive vice president of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, in charge of a new education technology division, soon to be named Amplify. The plan was to drastically reduce the size of the centralized school district and create a “portfolio” of schools, including traditional public schools, charters, and programs tailored to student needs, such as single-sex schools and a school for returning dropouts. Business methodology would inform strategies in the transformed district: invest in best-in-class data systems to track student outcomes; treat principals like CEOs, giving them autonomy over school budgets, staffing, and instruction, and holding them accountable for results; and renegotiate union contracts to loosen tenure protections, allowing for dismissal of ineffective teachers and rewards for the best ones.

As part of the portfolio strategy, Zuckerberg and the other donors had already agreed to pay start-up costs for new charter schools as well as for a number of new district high schools modeled on programs from around the country. Newark’s lame-duck superintendent, Clifford Janey, had pursued several new models in hopes of luring back dropouts and students leaving for charters and private schools. But Janey lacked the money and staff to get new schools up and running. The donors saw launching them as an “early win,” delivering tangible benefits to parents and children.

None of these plans were aired at the recently concluded public forums, although each implied upheavals for Newark children and families—from job losses for hundreds of low-skilled workers at the district’s headquarters to school reassignments for thousands of children.

Booker told the donors about another initiative still under wraps. He had secured commitments from the city’s two largest charter networks to double in size, in return for his promise to arrange grants from Zuckerberg, Ackman, and other philanthropists to cover their start-up costs. This would increase the charter enrollment by ten thousand pupils, and reduce that of the district, over the next five to seven years. The mayor emphasized that charters also would need space in district schools to expand.

“You’re going to announce co-location for free,” Cerf declared, as if imposing by fiat another Klein policy on Newark.

“That’s the happiest news of the week,” Booker exclaimed. This meant that new charters would open inside existing, underpopulated district schools, rent-free—a policy that had provoked anger and tension in New York between parents of charter and traditional public schools because of the charters’ visibly superior resources. Indeed, in Newark the charters would end up having to pay the cash-hungry district to use its space.

The funders around the conference table were struck by the easy rapport between the mayor and the commissioner. Booker, in a brown pullover sweater and black pants, leaned far back in his chair, listening intently as Cerf spoke, often nodding in assent, his big hands clasped behind his head.

The two talked about the importance of making Newark the most attractive destination for talented, mission-driven teachers from around the country.

“We need to be the sexiest city to teach in, not New Orleans and not D.C.,” Booker said.

“We’re going to have cabaret shows,” Cerf said.

“You and I singing the blues,” Booker said, throwing his head back for a full-throated laugh.

Cerf, Booker, and the funders also brainstormed about bringing in outside experts to lead various aspects of the district’s transformation. They needed “the smartest person in the country” on school finance, a “brainiac” on teacher evaluation systems. Cerf suggested several members of the team that had worked closely with Klein. Everyone agreed with Cerf that they needed what he called “a communications strategy to soften the battlefield for the conflict to come, to create a counternarrative to the status quo.”

The experts being mustered—men and women who started out with Klein or Teach for America or McKinsey’s education division and now were consultants to charter networks, school districts, state departments of education, and venture philanthropists, and many others—were representative of what Dominique Lee of BRICK Avon called the “school failure industry.” They gravitated to districts rich in venture philanthropy or in Obama administration grants for failing schools, including New York’s under Klein, Washington’s under Rhee, and now Newark’s under Booker and Cerf. They ran communications campaigns, built data systems, analyzed test scores, taught principals how to train and evaluate teachers, rewrote tenure laws, restructured districts’ central offices, advised labor negotiations. Although children in these districts were mostly black and brown, the consultants were almost all white, setting up inevitable tension about the money they made even as public school budgets kept shrinking. The going rate for consultants in Newark and elsewhere on the East Coast was $1,000 a day, and their pay comprised more than $20 million of the $200 million in philanthropy spent or committed in Newark. “Everyone’s getting paid, but Raheem still can’t read,” observed Vivian Cox Fraser, president of the Urban League of Essex County, where Newark is located.

 

While Chris Cerf helped colleagues get consulting jobs in Newark, he got none of the bounty for himself. Christie named him education commissioner before his consulting firm received its first check, and he severed all ties to the firm. Cerf said he had never intended to accept money for his efforts. A pedigreed lawyer with extensive political, business, and public policy experience, he likely would have commanded a seven-figure salary in the private sector. Instead, with two children in college and a third in private school, he took the commissioner’s post, which paid a salary of $140,000.

It was easy to imagine, however, that Cerf would have a hard time explaining his role to Newark residents. Here was someone who railed against urban politicians for using public money to ply friends and allies with jobs and contracts. Now, with private money, he appeared to be doing the same. Cerf had no question that his own choices were meritorious, made purely in the interest of children, and that the old-style political patronage definitely was not. “I didn’t see how it was anything but trying to be helpful,” he said.

But that’s not how it came across in the Star-Ledger, Newark’s daily newspaper, in an article dominating the front page on February 23, 2011, reporting that a firm originally founded by the state’s education commissioner had been hired to overhaul Newark schools. The newspaper obtained a confidential list created by the firm of options to close or consolidate up to a dozen of the lowest-performing district schools—displacing thousands of children—to make room for charters and new high schools. Despite the mayor’s promise to engage them in every step of the reform process, this was news to the citizens of Newark, as was the role of a firm founded by Cerf and paid by billionaires.

As it happened, the advisory school board was scheduled to have its monthly meeting that night—usually a sleepy, sparsely attended affair featuring votes on such items as a field-trip policy or supply contracts. By the time it began, more than six hundred parents and activists had converged, raging against what one after another saw as an obvious conspiracy of rich outsiders to make a killing off the Newark schools.

“We not having no wealthy white people coming in here destroying our kids!” an enraged mother shrieked. From aisles and balconies, men and women screamed, “Where’s Christie?” “Where’s Booker?”

The meeting was held at Fifteenth Avenue School, a failing and crumbling hulk with flickering lights and a faulty sound system. It was one of the schools the consultants had proposed for closure, with an overall student proficiency rate of only twenty percent. Its students would be dispersed to surrounding schools, including some with a similar failure rate. In the leaked document, Fifteenth Avenue was designated as the new home of a high-performing Newark charter school, which was in fact what eventually became of it.

School board members took the microphone, one by one, to say they knew nothing of the plan and to declare themselves “insulted” and “disrespected” by the governor, the mayor, and various outside forces. But the sound system kept cutting in and out, chewing up their words. From the jam-packed auditorium, parents and activists looked up to the dais to see their elected board members soundlessly tapping their microphones, straining over the din to complain that they, like Newark residents, had no power.

Those who did have power—Booker, Cerf, the governor, Zuckerberg—were not there. It fell to Deborah Terrell, the interim superintendent, appearing at her first board meeting, to try to shift the conversation to the underlying challenge. Clifford Janey had stepped down the previous month, and Booker had told funders that Terrell was only a figurehead; a deputy to Cerf would wield ultimate authority while Booker and Christie recruited a permanent superintendent.

“Our kids are not getting the education they deserve, and it’s the fault of the adults, and we have to recognize that,” Terrell said with feeling. “Public education as we know it no longer exists in Newark.”

The raucous crowd quieted respectfully as she spoke. Tall and striking, always immaculately coiffed and dressed, she had a principal’s knack for asserting authority over a room. She came by the respect honestly, having led two Newark elementary schools that both won the U.S. Department of Education’s sought-after Blue Ribbon award for achievement or significant improvement. Just as important to everyone in the jam-packed auditorium, she was one of them, as she took care to point out when she rose to speak.

“I was born and raised in Newark. I live here, went to school here, my kids went to school here,” she said.

But no one took up her point that the Newark district was failing its students. The main item on the agenda—a report by the facilities director on the dubious results of $150 million in state funds spent on school construction in Newark—seemed only to reinforce the crowd’s conviction that someone they couldn’t see was getting rich on the backs of their kids.

The state government had paid $14.5 million for plans to replace a school struck by lightning five years earlier, but now had decided not to rebuild it after all. (Cerf later reversed the decision, and construction went forward.) Three recently built schools had such serious flaws, from leaking roofs to unsafe handrails, that they still lacked occupancy certificates. Boilers in two schools were damaged beyond repair; unable to afford replacements and with no state repair funds available, the district was using mobile boilers mounted on trucks.

“Where’d the money go? Where’d the money go? Where’d the money go?” the crowd chanted, growing louder and louder.

 

Newark’s most influential business and community leaders were bombarding the city hall switchboard, demanding explanations from the mayor. How would he calm the city? What was the way forward? After decades of efforts to improve education in Newark, they had been hopeful that the Zuckerberg gift and the alignment of Booker and Christie would at last catalyze sustainable and positive change. But already the whole effort seemed to be unraveling.

The mayor turned to Clement Price, the respected professor of African American history and leading historian of Newark, and asked him to assemble concerned civic leaders to help him regain trust. Booker had pressed Price into service so often as a behind-the-scenes peacemaker that Price had given himself an unofficial title: Newark’s civic steward. Raised under segregation in Washington, D.C., the son of a federal civil servant and a teacher, the gentlemanly and distinguished scholar was known deferentially throughout Newark as “Dr. Price”—Clem, to friends. At sixty-six, he held one of the highest faculty honors at Rutgers, as a Board of Governors Distinguished Service Professor. Adding to his many academic and civic obligations, Price had recently been named vice chairman of President Obama’s advisory council on historic preservation. His expanded workload and travel schedule left little time for stewardship. But when Booker called, he stifled a sigh and agreed to help.

Early on a Saturday morning, Price convened about twenty business and community organization leaders at Conklin Hall on the Rutgers Newark campus. It was an establishment crowd, including leaders of the Prudential Foundation, a coalition of major businesses, smaller local philanthropies, the city’s oldest Puerto Rican community organization, revered religious leaders. Just as a clergyman would have opened with a blessing, Price opened with an invocation of Newark history. The very building where they were gathered, he said, was the site of a famous black student occupation in the 1960s, the era when Newark’s black majority rose up against corrupt, white minority rule. The student sit-in led to the hiring of more black professors and administrators and the admission of more black students.

Booker brought Cerf along to explain to the group what he had done as a consultant as well as to lay out the vision for the district. Those around the table were quick to fault the two men for proceeding in a way that activated the city’s deepest and most racialized fears.

“Your theory of change may be perfect, but this is the average Newarker’s nightmare,” one leader said of the report leaked to the Star-Ledger. “We believe in conspiracies, we were fed them growing up, with our milk. This was the making of the perfect Newark conspiracy.”

“This is the DNA of the city,” Price said. “Even if there’s no evidence of conspiracy, there’s the ability to imagine one.”

The leaders in the room made clear their exasperation with Booker’s missteps with the Zuckerberg gift.

“Where’s the discipline in the process? What are the responsible roles, what’s the plan to engage the community?” asked Al Koeppe, CEO of the Newark Alliance, a coalition of the state’s biggest corporations.

“It’s as if you guys are going out of your way to foment the most opposition possible to what you’re doing,” said Richard Cammarieri, a leader of a community development organization and one of the only consistent Booker critics invited by Price.

Cerf emphasized that his motives were altruistic. “Public education embodies the noble ideal of equal opportunity,” he said. “It’s the catalytic lever that executes on that myth. I know equal opportunity was a massive lie. It’s a lie in Newark, in New York, in inner cities across the country. Call me a nut, but I am committing my life to try to fix that.”

Cerf and Booker vowed to meet more regularly with community audiences and to solicit more feedback from parents and teachers. Booker, for his part, attributed any missteps to the urgency of the task. “Parents don’t have time for around-the-edges reform,” he said. “They need transformational reform.” Besides, he added, within three years, he or Christie or both could be out of office. If Christie was defeated, a union-friendly Democrat would take office and likely return the Newark schools to local control. “We want to do as much as possible right away before someone else takes over,” Booker said. “Entrenched forces are very invested in resisting choices we’re making around a one-billion-dollar budget. There are jobs at stake.” The notion of “fixing” a badly broken and impoverished district in three years seemed wildly unrealistic to men and women who had worked for decades with Newark’s families, children, and schools. But Booker asked them to unite behind him and help rally public support to the reform effort.

Cerf warned that the process was sure to be rancorous. “Real change is inevitably hard and deeply unpopular,” he said. “And change has casualties. You can’t make real change through least-common-denominator, consensus solutions. One reason school reform has failed is the tremendous emphasis on consensus.”

Cammarieri, a former school board member, bristled at the choice of words. “I get nervous when we’re talking about schoolchildren and you say, ‘Change is going to have casualties,’” he said. “I don’t want to take risks with children. Please, plan carefully and comprehensively.”

“Why not say, ‘Change has beneficiaries’?” suggested Price, with a hint of a chuckle. “You don’t want to sound like General Grant. Try to sound a little more like Abe Lincoln.”