6

Searching for Newark’s Superman

January–May 2011

 

WAITING FOR SUPERMAN had its own social action strategy, in which education reformers around the country hosted showings of the movie to recruit supporters. Mark Zuckerberg cohosted one in October 2010 with four hundred guests at a theater in Palo Alto, a few blocks from what was then Facebook headquarters. His fellow hosts included venture capitalist John Doerr and his wife, Ann, and Sheryl Sandberg and her husband, Dave Goldberg, the chief executive of Survey Monkey. The theater was packed with Silicon Valley’s leading venture capitalists and executives of the hottest start-ups and tech companies and private equity investors. After the movie, the crowd massed around a table where charter school networks and other reform organizations were accepting donations—“a check-writing party,” a participant called it.

A guest congratulated Zuckerberg on the Newark gift and asked who would be the superintendent.

“Anyone we want,” he replied with a smile.

Zuckerberg could be forgiven for believing this. After all, he had the backing of Christie and Booker, who held all the cards in Newark—or at least appeared to. And they had agreed with him that their first order of business was recruiting a credentialed reformer as superintendent to carry out their ambitious agenda.

But politicians had agendas and timetables that Zuckerberg wasn’t prepared for. After John King had turned down the job, Booker had no plan B. When Chris Cerf became New Jersey’s education commissioner in January, the superintendent search intensified. In March 2011, with the school board elections looming, Cerf and Booker became enthusiastic about Jean-Claude Brizard, superintendent of schools in Rochester, New York, yet another former deputy to Klein in New York City and a graduate of the Broad Academy. He was smart, passionate, and politically astute, and he had the kind of battle scars that Cerf considered a badge of honor, including a vote of ninety-five percent no confidence from Rochester’s teachers’ union. He also was a seasoned educator, having risen through the ranks in New York City beginning as a teacher of incarcerated students on Rikers Island.

Cerf and Booker told Brizard in March that the job was his in principle, pending the governor’s okay. They were in the process of arranging for him to meet with Zuckerberg in Palo Alto and with a community task force in Newark when Christie suddenly announced on March 17 that there would be no decision on the superintendent until May. This came as a shock to Zuckerberg, who had expected a decision months earlier and had made clear his impatience. He heard the news from Jen Holleran, executive director of his foundation, who learned it from a reporter.

Christie offered no public explanation, but he and Booker privately acknowledged that they were acting at Adubato’s behest. The Newark boss was a linchpin of the powerful Essex County political machine, which had helped deliver pivotal Democratic legislative support for Christie’s budget cuts and his pension and benefit reforms in the face of stiff union pushback. This made him an essential, if unsung, factor in Christie’s national celebrity as a Republican who could sell a conservative agenda to a liberal state.

The delay had to do with the upcoming school board elections in which Adubato’s slate would face Ras Baraka’s. Adubato warned Christie and Booker that naming a superintendent before the election could provide a focal point for opponents of reform, increasing turnout for the Baraka slate.

Anyone unfamiliar with the byzantine politics of education in Newark—Zuckerberg, for example—would be understandably puzzled that the take-no-prisoners governor would make this concession to Adubato. Since the state ran the schools, Christie could veto any school board decision that went against his wishes. So why worry? The board exercised huge symbolic power in the racial shadowboxing of Newark politics. The spectacle of a white Republican governor continually overruling the elected representatives of a black and brown school district—and doing so in the name of saving its children—would make it hard for any state-appointed superintendent to win the public’s trust. Christie and Booker both were content to let Adubato work his magic, hoping he would deliver them a board that backed their agenda. “It was a good decision,” Christie said later, defending his curtsy to the Democratic boss, even though the strategy failed.

It was becoming clear that Christie’s purported omnipotence over the Newark schools was not exactly as advertised. One of the consultants on the ground described how the realization dawned on him: “The mayor seemed indecisive on the superintendent search, so I thought, ‘Why not go straight to the governor, since he’s not afraid to pull the trigger?’ But then it turns out Adubato pulls the governor’s trigger. Maybe we should’ve just cut the deal with him.”

Cerf explained the delay to Brizard, who agreed to wait. Soon afterward, however, former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel was elected mayor of Chicago and asked Brizard to come for a chat. “I met with him and told him I’m actually heading to Newark,” Brizard recalled. “He asked if I had an offer in writing, and I said no. He said, ‘Then you’re available.’” Brizard went to Chicago, leaving Newark without a candidate. “It was like a bomb dropping,” said Cerf. (Emanuel would let Brizard go seventeen months later.)

It was hardly surprising that Brizard chose the nation’s third-largest school district over one with one-tenth the enrollment. But another attraction was the clarity of the lines of authority in Chicago: all of them led to Emanuel. In Newark, they were indecipherable, a hazard for a superintendent. “You can have complete control on paper, but a lot of people can come back with daggers and you’re buried,” Brizard said.

A striking feature of the Newark reform effort, from the beginning, was that no one was in charge. Cerf’s concept of a “three-legged stool” implied that Zuckerberg, the governor (through the state-appointed superintendent), and the mayor would call the shots together. To those trying to carry out reforms, this arrangement was opaque and baffling. One of the consultants tasked with redesigning the district said in a private conversation, “I’m not sure who our client is. The contract came through Bari Mattes’s office [Booker’s chief fundraiser], so that suggests Booker is the client, but he has no constitutional authority over education. The funding is from Broad, Goldman Sachs, and Zuckerberg, but they have no legal authority. I think Cerf is the client, because the state runs the district. But I’m not positive.” In other words, the consultants worked for the person who originally founded the consulting firm.

Although Booker, Christie, and Cerf were emphatic about the need to impose accountability on a notoriously unaccountable bureaucracy, it was becoming apparent that no one of them was ultimately accountable for making it happen.

 

From three thousand miles away, Zuckerberg and Sandberg were alarmed. Six months had passed since the Oprah announcement, and the quest for a model of transformational urban education appeared in real danger of coming apart amid leaks, political deals, public rancor, and mismanagement. Jen Holleran had been traveling to Newark week after week, spending one to three days at a time, asking hard questions about how Booker was implementing the vision they had agreed on. A product of Harvard College, Harvard Graduate School of Education, and Yale School of Management, Holleran had credentials that no one in Booker’s circle could question. She had been an executive of a national education reform organization and also packed considerable soft power through a long-standing friendship with Sheryl Sandberg. The two were in the same book club in San Francisco when Sandberg was vice president of Google and Holleran was working in the Oakland school superintendent’s Office of School Reform. Now, Holleran’s dispatches from the ground in Newark were raising concern. In early 2011, Sandberg began discreetly calling people who had worked with Booker, asking if he had the ability to concentrate on his and Zuckerberg’s reform venture.

It was Booker’s operating style to launch multiple missions at once, assuming some would crash on takeoff, some would fall by the wayside, and some would go the distance. “I’m thinking, ‘Do everything you can right now, instead of worrying what tomorrow will be like or the next day,’” Booker said. “Right now, if TEAM [the charter network] expands another school, if you add another school model, if you expand the school day, if you change the life of one kid, today you can do something—right now. People allow their inability to control everything to undermine their determination to do something.”

Had the young Internet entrepreneur gone online for a cursory search of local news coverage, he would have known at the time he made his gift that Booker already had more challenges than he could count: the surge in violence, the fiscal crisis, the political rebellion on the council, his heavy travel schedule. The Star-Ledger reported that Booker spent more than one in five days out of the city in 2011. Sandberg had taken charge of vetting the $100 million arrangement, which specified in writing that Christie would delegate “strategic and operational” leadership of the state-controlled schools to Booker. But despite her widely respected business acumen, she too was apparently caught off guard.

As Booker traveled the country making speeches and moved from crisis to crisis, the Facebook duo stumbled upon an open secret in Newark. Clement Price, the Rutgers historian, summed it up this way: “There’s no such thing as a rock-star mayor. You’re either a rock star or a mayor. You can’t be both.” In a pique of frustration one night over Booker’s rapidly shifting attention, a city hall aide put it more crudely: “Everybody who comes to work here arrives with a hard-on or a crush, and then at some point you say, ‘WTF?’”

Zuckerberg and Sandberg summoned the mayor to a meeting at Facebook headquarters on Saturday afternoon, April 2, where they made it clear they considered the pace of progress unacceptable. There was no superstar superintendent, no comprehensive reform plan, no progress toward a game-changing teachers’ contract. If these are the wrong metrics for measuring progress, they asked, what are the right ones? They were holding Booker accountable for performance—as they did their own employees, and as Booker, Christie, and the reform movement vowed to do with teachers and principals.

Zuckerberg and Sandberg said firmly that they saw no way the overall effort could succeed without a strong superintendent in place, and soon. Zuckerberg, who had an unassuming habit of referring to Facebook simply as “a company”—as if he ran a shoe store or car repair shop—remarked, “I’ve only run one company, but in my experience, a company needs a leader.”

Booker was contrite. “Guilty as charged,” he remembered saying.

After three hours of talk, Zuckerberg and Chan invited Booker, who was accompanied by Cerf and two other advisers, to their home in Palo Alto for pizza and salads. The main topic of conversation was not education but the couple’s adorable new puppy, a fluffy white Hungarian sheepdog named Beast, who had his own Facebook page that already had 97,000 “likes.” Zuckerberg posted on Facebook a picture of Booker cuddling Beast.

Within days, hundreds of people had commented adoringly—most about Beast, but plenty about the celebrity mayor.

“Isn’t it nice to cuddle the world famous, Mr. Booker?”

“Beast is cute, but Cory is the catch!”

“So ♥ Beast & Cory Booker!!!”

“SO jealous! LOVE Cory!”

 

Back home, angry overflow crowds became a regular feature of public hearings on the schools, where a core group of union and grassroots activists denounced every proposed reform as a conspiracy of the mayor and governor against the interests of Newark’s children. One Saturday morning, Cerf gamely agreed to meet with concerned residents and found himself facing more than four hundred parents, grandparents, and teachers in the auditorium of Louise A. Spencer School. Charter schools had organized parents of their students for the occasion, providing free busing, and the auditorium was divided down the middle, charter parents on the right, public school parents on the left. The charter parents wore their schools’ branded T-shirts, with slogans—navy blue for TEAM schools (“Be the Change”), a division of the national KIPP network; forest green for North Star Academy schools (“Change History”), a division of Uncommon Schools; bright red for Lady Liberty Academy, a Newark-only charter.

The divide only sharpened when several charter parents took the microphone to say the public schools had failed their children. One parent, Bendue James, said her daughter had been beaten up at Mount Vernon School but was now thriving at RISE Academy, a TEAM charter. Crystal Williams, with two children at North Star, had to compete with hecklers from the public school side. “Your teachers and principals are not educating your child,” she yelled over their jeers.

A North Star father, a substitute teacher in the public schools for ten years, said with disdain that he saw too many district school parents “absolve themselves of any responsibility” for their children. As boos rose from the left side of the room, he faced the public school cheering section and thundered derisively, “When we talk about children, the apple never falls very far from the tree.”

From the podium, board president Shavar Jeffries banged his gavel, demanding order but also peace. “We’re acting like Bloods versus Crips, charters versus district. That’s a gangster mentality,” he said gravely. “We need to educate our children. It is not productive to fight each other all the time.”

Cerf, nursing a cough and lingering bronchitis, appeared to be flagging as the meeting entered its third hour and Wilhelmina Holder, a grandmother and veteran public school activist, approached the microphone. “Oh, I am tired,” he said under his breath, although loud enough for Holder to hear. Before Cerf realized it, she was teeing him up like a golf ball.

“Mr. Cerf, you’re no more tired than I am,” Holder scolded, recalling the decades she had spent advocating for Newark’s schoolchildren. The left side of the room roared approval, and she went on. Was he more tired than single mothers in the room who worked two or three jobs to provide for their children? More roars from the left side. Was he more tired than . . . ? A chastened Cerf held up a hand in surrender, urging Holder and everyone in the room to ask whatever they wished. They did—for another hour and a half.

“You haven’t begun to address resources for students whose schools will close,” she said. “What’s the message to their parents? Is it, ‘We don’t care about your child, we’re going to close your school and destroy the community’?” she asked. And what’s with all those consultants in Room 914 at the district headquarters? “Put some color in that room!” she said to whistles and cheers from the left side. “And some intelligence.”

Nonetheless, Booker and Cerf’s agenda lurched forward, thanks to the round-the-clock work of the consultants. They quietly revised the earlier proposal to close or consolidate failing district schools; those with the most vociferous community support were no longer on the list. The advisory school board, at the time still dominated by Adubato’s forces, approved the plan in April and voted to lease the freed-up space to charter schools, over jeers and hoots from an audience stocked with union and grassroots activists. Marques-Aquil Lewis, a rehabilitated former gang member elected to the board in 2009, warned that hundreds of district school students would be uprooted from familiar teachers and buildings in order to accommodate the new or expanding charter schools. Meanwhile, the district students were being reassigned to schools that also were failing.

“We talking about inviting back what happened in 1967—chaos,” Lewis said. “We giving a child an invitation to join a gang, to carjack a car, to commit a murder by creating chaos.”

He didn’t mention that the reshuffling was also designed to benefit district students seeking alternatives to large, comprehensive high schools. Among the new options Zuckerberg was helping to finance was Bard High School Early College, a respected and rigorous academic program whose students in New York City, many from disadvantaged backgrounds, graduated with a diploma and two years of college credit. Another was YouthBuild, through which failing, unemployed, formerly incarcerated students in forty-six states finished high school while learning construction trades and other skills. A third, Diploma Plus, offered programs tailored to reengage dropouts and students on the verge of flunking out of high school. More than six hundred students from across the city had signed up for six proposed new schools at an open house.

“Newark must get in front of the death spiral of Detroit and so many cities,” said Dan Gohl, then director of innovation and change for the district. “We are faced with the fight for the very life of public education.” He argued that the new schools held out a survival strategy for urban districts losing students—and state funds—to charters. They could counter those losses, he said, enrolling students who previously had dropped out and luring highly motivated students who might have gone to charters or private schools.

Gohl had to compete with an increasingly restive audience angered by the earlier votes. Although the new programs were to be district schools with unionized teachers and principals, Donna Jackson, a full-time activist who rarely missed a board meeting, heckled him throughout his presentation, encouraging students to join in. “Don’t let him talk, kids. Just boo him. Boo his ass,” she yelled. “You know what this is all leading to—it’s privatization.” Now the audience was booing all new schools, whether public or charter, ignoring all the facts. Unlike for the session with Cerf, charter schools hadn’t mobilized parents to attend the board meeting.

A majority of board members proceeded to vote down all the new schools. Down went Bard, YouthBuild, Diploma Plus, all of them. After each vote, Jackson led the crowd in a chant of “Cory fails! Cory fails!”

“The only thing we should be concerned about is whether our kids succeed or fail,” board president Jeffries, who voted for most of the schools, said sadly.

Richard Cammarieri, the former board member who for years had demanded attention to disastrous student performance, watched in dismay. “These are potentially very good opportunities, but the process is poisoning the well for them,” he said.

Dominique Lee of BRICK Avon Academy sat in a back row, his head buried in his hands. He had hoped the Zuckerberg gift would spur support for efforts like BRICK’s to change Newark schools from within. “It’s turned into a thing against Cory, not what’s good for the kids,” he said.

The final word was Cerf’s, not the board’s, and the next day he overruled all the no votes, clearing the way for the new schools to open. Reached that afternoon by phone, he was furiously resolute.

“I can’t have any more talks about ‘respecting the community.’ Who is the community?” he asked. “Is it the generation of students, now voiceless, who dropped out? Is it the last five people who had a mic? Is it the parents who are lining up for charters, or is it the loudmouths? There’s a level of ignorance and basic conspiracy-mongering and micropolitical decision-making that inevitably dominates any decision on education. This is exactly a poster child for why education reform doesn’t happen. It’s all a detriment to educating kids. They’re literally not entitled to have their voice taken seriously. At the end of the day, I have to do what is right.” There was a long pause, and then this: “Just wait until we name a white superintendent.”

 

Soon after Booker returned from his meeting at Facebook headquarters, with renewed urgency about finding a superintendent, Zuckerberg sent one of the company’s motivational posters for emphasis: DONE IS BETTER THAN PERFECT.

Cami Anderson had been in the mix from the beginning. At age thirty-nine, she had spent her entire career in reform circles. She’d taught in Teach for America, gotten a master’s degree in education at Harvard, then joined TFA’s executive team in New York for five years. She later helped run New Leaders for New Schools, whose mission was to train principals as agents of reform; one of its founders, Jon Schnur, became an architect of Obama’s Race to the Top. She’d been a senior strategist for Booker’s 2002 mayoral campaign and had been superintendent of alternative high schools in New York under Joel Klein.

Anderson had two apparent marks against her. First, she was white. Since 1973, Newark had had only African American superintendents, and ninety-five percent of district students were black and brown. Booker clearly had hoped to name a minority, beginning with his first choice, John King, whose black and Puerto Rican heritage spanned Newark’s two largest demographic groups. Some of the mayor’s advisers had even raised concerns about Jean-Claude Brizard, on grounds that he was Afro-Caribbean, not African American. At one point, Cerf said he was considering corporate leaders, but the only one he mentioned was black. “If Dick Parsons said ‘I’d like to give a year of service,’ I think I’d look at that,” he said, referring to the retired chairman and CEO of Time Warner.

But Anderson had an interesting backstory. She often mentioned that she had grown up with nine adopted siblings who were black and brown. Her domestic partner, Jared Robinson, was African American, and they had a biracial son named Sampson Douglass, in honor of Frederick Douglass.

But there was another mark against Anderson: she was known for having an insular and uncompromising management style. “She has her own vision and she won’t stop at anything to realize it,” said Rebecca Donner, a friend since childhood, now a novelist. “If you’re faint of heart, if you’re easily cowed, if you disagree with her, you’re going to feel intimidated.” Cerf and Booker were well aware of this trait, but came to see it as a virtue. As Cerf put it, “Nobody gets anywhere in this business unless you’re willing to get the shit absolutely kicked out of you and keep going. That’s Cami.”

Booker named a community task force to interview superintendent candidates, although in the end its members said there was only one viable candidate. He turned to Clement Price, the overworked civic steward, to chair it, and Price again agreed. Anderson was interviewed in late April, and word trickled out that the task force was impressed. They asked extremely tough questions, and she seemed ready for all of them. They told her that her New York position as head of alternative education—prominently including incarcerated students on Rikers Island—could make it appear that Newark had hired a prison warden to run its schools. She replied that every student deserves a quality education, including the formerly incarcerated. Asked if she knew that angry crowds were packing school board meetings, she replied, “One thousand parents are showing up for meetings? That’s the kind of place I want to work.” They asked point-blank if she had orders from Christie and Booker to privatize public schools. “She was clear that she would not take orders from anyone,” Price said. “She told us she believed in listening to the community, giving principals significant authority, bringing in talented education leaders. She did not sound like an ideologue.” Afterward, Price said he was surprised that even stern skeptics of Booker and Christie seemed impressed. “I hate to admit this, Clem, but I like her” was the reaction from longtime activist and advisory panel member Junius Williams. So did Robert Curvin, a revered Newark native who was a civil rights leader in the 1960s, a Princeton-trained PhD, and a lecturer in political science at Rutgers. “The imperative for Newark now is to have the best superintendent we can find,” Curvin wrote in support of Anderson in the Star-Ledger. “I wish there could have been more minority choices in the pool, but there were not.”

The announcement took place on May 4, 2011, at Science Park High School, Newark’s most selective magnet school, which sent more than ninety percent of its students to colleges, including the Ivy League. Christie, Cerf, and Booker were all on hand, beaming with satisfaction, in a room jammed with reporters, camera crews, and about thirty Newark civic leaders and politicians.

The plan was for Christie, Booker, and Cerf to comment briefly, giving center stage to Anderson and the important work of improving schools. Christie and Cerf followed the script, but Booker waxed poetic for half an hour. He veered into rhetorical flights, such as: “The thing that distinguishes her most to me is one simple aspect about her, and that is her love. It’s not the kind of love that her life partner gets to enjoy in that individual-focused kind of way. This is the kind of love King called us to do. Agape love. She will weep for a child that’s not her own when she sees a child whose potential is being squandered. She has a level of love in her spirit that is like her mother’s, where I may not have a biological attachment to that child but every single one of them is mine, is my kid, and my destiny is intricately and intimately wrapped up with theirs.” By the time he finished and Anderson took the microphone, the audience of school board members, civic leaders, parent activists, and journalists had been standing for more than forty-five minutes. Many were now leaning against walls and window ledges.

There was considerable speculation early that morning about whether Anderson would bring her son and domestic partner to her debut press conference, as a signal to Newark that she was no garden-variety white superintendent. Would she seem to be using them as props? Or would it look stilted for her not to be surrounded by family at such an important moment? The speculation ended when cars carrying Anderson and her family pulled up in front of Science Park High. The stroller came out first, then Jared Robinson, and then Anderson, carrying fourteen-month-old Sampson Douglass Anderson Robinson. Baby Sampson and father Jared Robinson received a very positive reception. At one point, Myra Jacobs, a grandmother who led the PTA at Central High School and was usually suspicious of outsiders, approached Robinson and suggested under her breath that he accompany Anderson to meetings whenever possible.

“It’s a strong force you’ll bring to this community, and I think you have a sense of what I mean,” Jacobs said, raising her eyebrows for effect.

“I do indeed,” Robinson responded with a smile.

When her turn came to speak, Anderson got right down to business. “Every single child, regardless of circumstances, should have a skill they can attain to make the choice they want, whether it’s career or college. All kids, all choices,” she said. Her strategy for getting there was straightforward: put excellent teachers and excellent leaders in every school and classroom. “Period. Full stop,” she added for emphasis. “I’m more interested in results than fads.”

She also called on her family experience. “My family is multiracial, and many of my siblings joined us because of unthinkable challenges that made it really hard for them to be placed in a home setting,” Anderson said. “. . . My belief in the potential of every Newark student is based on those life lessons.” In Newark’s daunting dropout and failure rates, she said, “I literally see the faces of my brothers and sisters who’ve overcome so many challenges in their own lives.

“As one example, we’re all too aware of the challenging statistics facing African American men in everything from incarceration rate to graduation rate,” she went on. “And it’s part of my personal passion to work alongside all the great leaders here to change those facts, because quite literally, those are my brothers, my life partner and soul mate, and now my son, who by the way just learned to walk.”

She received a heartfelt ovation, which would have been a poignant ending to her introduction to Newark.

But the newsmakers then took questions. Asked why he felt so strongly about the Newark schools, Christie launched into his story, which had played well on the campaign trail, of having been born in the city, although his parents moved the family to the suburbs in search of better schools. “You know,” he went on, “I don’t think I’d be governor if I went to school in Newark.” There were audible gasps. Most men and women in the audience had been born, raised, and educated in Newark. Conversation after the press conference focused almost exclusively on Christie’s remark, not on a new era in Newark schools. Students at Science Park High, the top achievers in the city, heard of the comment within minutes and asked teachers how the governor could have said that.

“How does that inspire students to become governor, to become president?” asked Alturrick Kenney, one of the newly elected school board members on Baraka’s slate. “We need to talk differently because children are listening.”