7

Hi, I’m Cami

May 2011–September 2011

 

THE NEWARK PUBLIC SCHOOLS has its headquarters in a drab, ten-story downtown office building occupied mostly by state agencies. The school district fills the top three floors, crowned by the superintendent’s suite and a photo gallery of its many occupants stretching back to 1855. The early leaders sport high collars, bushy mustaches, and wire-rimmed glasses. Over time, styles change, but through 118 years and eleven superintendents, two things remain constant: everyone in the photographs is white, and everyone is male. Then, in 1973, comes a line of demarcation—when Newark’s first black mayor, Kenneth Gibson, appointed his first superintendent—and for the next thirty-eight years, everyone is black—five men and two women.

Then, in 2011, comes Cami Anderson—white, blond, and much younger than the others—jarringly out of sync with everyone before her. And while every superintendent for 156 years gazes out from a formal portrait, Anderson stands against a blank wall, smiling, her hair slightly mussed, as if she had paused momentarily for a snapshot while attending to something else. The camera angle is tight, so her face fills the frame, exaggerating the anomalies.

Anderson had arrived in Newark as a life-sized challenge to the status quo. She made this clear when, early on, she refused to hire the girlfriend of one city councilman and fired the cousin of another one. “The trading post is closed,” as she put it. Her image as an agent of change was evident even in the way she introduced herself. “Hi, I’m Cami,” she said to parents, principals, and teachers, even to students, displaying a lack of deference to local custom. All adults in the schools—from janitors to superintendents—addressed each other as Mr. or Mrs. or Dr., a veneer of respectfulness undisturbed by the district’s tarnished history.

“Hi, I’m Cami,” Anderson greeted a middle-aged African American male teacher in a summer school classroom early in her tenure. “Okay if I just walk around?” He nodded assent.

Dressed in khaki slacks and a peach-colored blouse, peace symbols swinging from her earrings, her blond hair in a ponytail, Anderson headed like a bullet train for the very back of the room, where several young men were laughing loudly, basically ignoring three plastic boxes of dirt on a lab table in front of them. They were attending summer school at Science Park High School, the elite magnet school during the rest of the year. The state-of-the-art science lab was crowded and cacophonous, with thirty-five students squeezed around lab tables. All had failed freshman earth science and had to pass it in order to get back on track to graduate. On the whiteboard, the subject of the unit was identified as wetlands.

“Hi, I’m Cami,” Anderson said to the students at the back table. “Can you guys tell me what you’re doing?”

They clearly had no idea who she was or what she was doing there.

“No,” one boy shot back, as if telling her to bug off. Anderson squared her shoulders, authority figure–style, and turned to the boy next to him, who snapped to attention. With a nod toward the plastic containers, he said respectfully, “This is a wetland.”

“Why are you making a wetland?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“What did you guys do before today?”

He thought for a while. “This,” he answered, again nodding at the dirt.

Just then another boy wandered by, wearing a T-shirt that said on the front, “How to Keep an Idiot Busy. (See back.)” The back had the same message, ending, “See front.”

Anderson asked the teacher how he determined if students were grasping what he taught and how he adjusted his approach to reach those who didn’t. He gave a rambling answer, mentioning quizzes and interim assessments, then blamed the students. “It’s tough to do environmental science in urban districts,” he said. She told him that the boys at the back table didn’t understand the lesson. In their case, he had another excuse: “They’re special ed.”

Needless to say, these were the wrong answers, signs of a mentality Anderson had been crusading to purge from education since witnessing its crushing effect on her adopted siblings. Anderson understood only too well that it was hard to teach kids who were accustomed to failing, who lived in poverty, who lost friends to violence, whose fathers abandoned them, who burned with anger, who struggled with learning disabilities—but that’s what made teachers so vitally important. If a teacher didn’t expect his students to succeed, if he saw them as losers and gave up on them, what chance did they have to break the mindset of failure that had landed them in summer school in the first place?

Next, Anderson went into a geometry class. There were only eighteen students, almost all girls. They were working intently in groups, calculating the altitude of a rhombus. Their teacher, a young African American woman with six years of experience, radiated competence and purpose, moving throughout the room, checking everyone’s progress. These students had not failed anything—ever. Rather, they were in summer school to get ahead. “I wanted to spend my summer doing something useful,” a girl who attended Arts High School, a selective magnet, told Anderson. “I didn’t want to have zero period,” said a girl from Technology High, another magnet, referring to classes scheduled before the regular school day began. “So I decided to knock it out of the box right now.” Anderson asked the teacher where she taught during the school year. She named one of the most troubled high schools in Newark, adding quickly that she hoped to transfer soon to a selective magnet. This was another factor in the failure equation. Teaching the best students was a reward, sought by almost everyone in education. Talented teachers won the honor, and struggling students got the leftovers.

“Well, that was instructive!” Anderson declared as she walked back to the school office with Edwin Mendez, a vice principal during the school year who supervised multiple summer school sites. She asked for a candid explanation of how the system worked: How did these students and teachers end up here? Mendez outlined a bizarre bureaucratic procedure in which all Newark schools sent lists of failing students to the district at the end of the regular school year, only three days before summer school began. The roster sent to each summer school site was invariably inaccurate—Science Park High had 2,400 students on its summer roster, of whom only 1,176 actually enrolled. Another high school had 1,860, but only 900 showed up. Moreover, he said, many students were incorrectly assigned to classes they had passed, not those they had failed. The reason? “Somebody didn’t do their job,” said Mendez, using a generic explanation in Newark for why systems failed.

As for the teachers, Mendez explained, the district office conducted a “mass posting” of all available summer school jobs, everyone applied at once, and the best teachers got the advanced classes, because those required a higher level of academic rigor. The weak teachers got the classes—and the students—no one else wanted.

“That’s totally backwards,” Anderson declared. “The kids who failed the first time around need more rigor. We need the strongest teachers with the weakest students.”

She took notes on everything Mendez said, thanked him for his candor, then headed off to observe kindergarten through eighth grade at Speedway School, about two miles away.

“Hi, I’m Cami,” she said jauntily to the Speedway security guard.

The older African American woman looked over her glasses at Anderson and responded without expression, “I’m Ms. Grimsley.”

 

Cami Anderson grew up in “lily white” Manhattan Beach, California, as her mother described it, and attended the University of California at Berkeley. But nothing about her upbringing was conventional.

She was the second child of Sheila and Parker Anderson, a child welfare advocate and the community development director for Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley. Sheila Anderson managed a large child welfare agency in Los Angeles and occasionally brought into her home severely abused and neglected children who were difficult to place. In some cases, they stayed. Beginning when Cami was a year old, her parents adopted nine children in ten years, later having another biological child, bringing the total to twelve. Cami’s place in the birth order changed seven times, her mother said.

The Andersons raised their large family in a three-bedroom, one-bathroom house. One adopted child was born addicted to heroin and struggled with physical and emotional pain. Another had been hospitalized from severe physical, sexual, and chemical abuse. Two were orphans from Vietnam, each born to an African American GI and a Vietnamese woman. Everyone had laundry duty, dinner duty, and other jobs, all assigned at Sunday family meetings. Those with after-school activities were responsible for arranging their own rides. Cami Anderson said she never felt put upon. “It was just who we were.”

All of the children went together to school, where the adopted siblings were among the only students of color. Anderson recalled being upset as early as elementary school that teachers found some of her siblings unmanageable and punished them. At home, her mother tapped their strengths, she said, by breaking tasks down to size and setting clear expectations. From an early age, her mother recalled, Cami was her siblings’ defender. “Cami understood them and wanted to explain to the rest of the world how much they’d been through,” Sheila Anderson said. “She became the interpreter.”

Her distinctive personality emerged in middle school. Anderson became passionate about acting and theater through classes at Santa Monica Playhouse, where its founder and director, Evelyn Rudie, used improvisational exercises to push children to tap their inner selves. Rudie then created characters in plays and musicals that allowed young actors to express onstage who they really were. “Cami was always cast as the hardass,” recalled Rebecca Donner, her writer friend, who met Anderson at the playhouse the summer after sixth grade and has remained close ever since. “She played the person from the wrong side of the tracks, very assertive and tough, who wouldn’t let anyone push her around.”

Anderson’s breakout role came at age eleven, when she starred in a musical as a fearless cowgirl defending her town against three rough, leering bad guys. While belting out a song, “You’ve Got Another Think Coming,” swinging the microphone cord like a lasso, she slugged her way across the stage, leaving all three bullies unconscious—one draped over a ladder, another stuffed in a whiskey barrel, the third sprawled on the floor. The curtain fell with the loudmouthed little blonde standing alone and triumphant in her shiny red cowboy boots, having single-handedly saved the day. It was, Donner recalled, “a show-stopper.”

As an educator, Anderson similarly styled herself as lone champion of the defenseless, speaker of inconvenient truths. In New York City, under Klein, she was senior superintendent for five years, responsible for 30,000 students in alternative high schools and 60,000 more in prison, drug treatment and teen pregnancy programs, suspension centers, GED programs, career and technical training, and adult education centers. The position gave her critical distance on aspects of Klein’s reform agenda, particularly charter schools. As Klein championed the expansion of charters, Anderson saw no benefits reaching her own students. She told of trying in vain to find a charter school that would serve incarcerated students, blending social services and no-excuses academics.

In Newark, it quickly emerged that while Anderson had all the credentials valued by the reform movement, she differed with her bosses on the role of charter schools in urban districts. She pointed out that charters in Newark served a smaller proportion than the district schools of children who lived in extreme poverty, had learning disabilities, or struggled to speak English. Moreover, she had the same concerns Dominique Lee of BRICK Avon expressed about charters disproportionately attracting parents she called the “choosers”—those with time to navigate the charter lotteries and to foster a striving attitude at home. Charters were under the control of Cerf, not Anderson. They drew from the same student population as the school district, but the state alone decided whether and how much they would expand and whether to close those that performed poorly. The local superintendent’s only role was to react. In cities like Newark, where the overall student population was static, growth for charters meant shrinkage for the district. Newark charters now were growing at a pace to enroll forty percent of children in five years, leaving the district with sixty percent—the neediest sixty percent, according to Anderson. Booker, Christie, and Zuckerberg had searched the country for a leader of education reform in Newark, but in practice, Newark had two school systems and she governed only one of them. Anderson pointed out that she was expected to turn Newark’s public schools into a national model, yet as children left for charters—and state funds followed them—she would be continually closing schools and dismissing teachers, social workers, and guidance counselors. And because of the state’s seniority rules, the most junior teachers would go first, without regard to merit. Anderson called this “the lifeboat theory of education reform,” arguing that it could leave a majority of children to sink on the big ship. “Your theories of change are on a collision course,” she told Cerf and Booker. “I told the governor I did not come here to shuffle the deck chairs on the Titanic,” she said. “I did not come here to phase the district out.”

Surprisingly, Cerf, Booker, and Christie had no plan for ensuring a stable learning environment for children in district schools as they advocated aggressive expansion of charters. They couldn’t answer Anderson’s questions: How many district schools will have to close? Where will displaced children go if there is no longer a school within walking distance? (With its long history of neighborhood schools, Newark did not provide school busing.) How will district teachers address an increasing concentration of children with emotional and learning challenges? Had anyone calculated a sustainable size for a diminished Newark district? In shaking up the bureaucracy, reformers said often that they were prioritizing children’s education over adult jobs. But in their zeal to disrupt the old, failed system, many of them neglected to acknowledge the disruption they were going to cause in the lives of tens of thousands of children.

 

Anderson’s gale-force advocacy for her point of view was a major asset, given the baffling lines of authority among Booker, Christie, and the philanthropists. But it also became a liability, alienating everyone who tried to suggest changes in her approach. Even among fellow reformers, she developed a reputation as “not playing well in the sandbox with others,” as several of them put it.

Before Anderson was hired, Zuckerberg and other donors anticipated a much faster expansion of charters. But they put the plans on hold in the face of Anderson’s resistance. Although Anderson had to answer to Christie and Cerf, they often gave in to her demands, as did the board of the Foundation for Newark’s Future. She insisted that she, not the politicians or philanthropists, was the education expert. Talking privately with aides, she would say, “I’m the supe!” She regularly pointed out that she had more money than the FNF: “I’ve got a billion dollars and they’ve got only a hundred million,” she told the aides. Early and often, she threatened to quit and throw the reform effort into even more disarray. Cerf, Holleran, and others privately told colleagues that Anderson was, in effect, their horse to ride; like it or not, they were committed to her success, because as Anderson fared, so fared all of them—and education reform in Newark.

In her first summer on the job, Anderson aired her concerns about charters at a conference of the KIPP schools network in Nashville, attended by some of the nation’s wealthiest donors to charter schools. Many of those in attendance were alarmed, and said so, which made Anderson livid. “There were meetings all over the country about me after that speech at KIPP, reformers framing me as anti-charter, anti-innovation, defender of the status quo. Seriously?” She said she simply was challenging her allies to join her in seeking a strategy that would benefit district as well as charter students.

But back in Newark, the middle ground seemed more elusive than ever. Many grassroots activists regarded Anderson from the day of her arrival as an occupying force—an agent of Booker, Christie, and Zuckerberg. In her first month on the job, she went to city hall to pledge open and candid communication with the city council, laying out her belief in principals as the prime agents of change in schools and the district. “To me,” she said, “great leadership is everything—putting a great principal in every school, helping them set student achievement targets and come up with a game plan, and then frankly staying out of their way. Not bogging them down.” This strategy—to give principals more autonomy while at the same time making them accountable for results—was patterned on Klein’s and Cerf’s work in New York, and Anderson believed in it passionately. She didn’t say a word at city hall about charter schools.

The council members were cordial and thanked her for coming. But at the end, Council President Donald Payne Jr. suggested that nothing Anderson accomplished would matter as much as the fact that she was imposed on Newark by the state. “What is your perspective on local control?” he asked. “Because if we get back local control, it puts you out of business.”

 

Anderson moved swiftly on her strategy to vest principals with much of the responsibility for reforming the district. She hired seventeen new ones in her first summer, recruiting from around the country, and within three years had replaced well over half of the seventy she inherited. She eliminated binders full of monthly paperwork they had been required to complete, telling principals to spend the time as instructional leaders, observing and coaching teachers to higher and higher levels of effectiveness. Every month, she led training sessions with all seventy principals in various aspects of her reform strategy, terming the sessions “the West Point” of principal training.

In the past, the district’s central office had filled teacher vacancies with little input from principals, often saddling them with men and women ill suited to the school or its students. The priority had been to ensure that every teacher had an assignment, not to maximize the level of instruction. From now on, Anderson said, when vacancies occurred, principals should select the highest-quality applicant and best fit for their school team—an approach common in most workplaces, although unfamiliar in Newark public schools and many other districts.

The policy change had an immediate impact. The previous year’s school closings left about a hundred teachers without jobs. In her first months in Newark, Anderson hired consultants to create a staffing system called Talent Match, in which principals would post all vacancies online, and any interested teacher could apply. Cerf and many reformers saw this system—which they called “mutual consent,” meaning teachers and principals chose each other—as essential to education reform. Flexing their new autonomy, principals throughout the district filled vacancies with teachers they considered the best, leaving about eighty without placements. Not all the leftovers were inferior, however; some taught subjects for which there were no vacancies.

The idea had one major flaw: the district had no way of shedding the leftover teachers. New Jersey’s tenure law included strict seniority protections. If Anderson laid off all eighty excess teachers, those with the longest tenure could “bump” junior ones in any school, without regard to merit, undoing many principals’ choices. Anderson said this would lead to “catastrophic” consequences. “Kids have only one year in third grade,” she said. With Cerf’s encouragement, again following his and Klein’s New York playbook, she decided to keep all excess teachers on the payroll as a temporary solution while Booker, Cerf, and Christie worked to change the state tenure and seniority laws. The cost in the first year was $8 million. Anderson assigned the excess teachers to support duties in schools, emphasizing that Newark had no “rubber room,” in which unassigned teachers sat idle and collected pay.

 

Every Monday, Anderson gathered with her leadership team in her tenth-floor conference room, where the agenda often involved replacing dysfunctional district practices with management systems that emphasized accountability for each desired result. On the walls around them were aging posters and plaques created by past superintendents, under whom much of the dysfunction originated. The most prominent poster featured a smiling, bright-eyed girl sitting extra-tall at her desk, chin tilted up in expectation. “There are no sad faces when education works,” read the caption. It was signed by Eugene Campbell and Charles Bell, the superintendent and school board chair during the era of self-dealing and neglect that led to the state takeover.

One morning, the topic of the leadership meeting was Newark’s abominable high school graduation rate of fifty-four percent. An analyst had discovered that a significant number of students dropped out because they didn’t learn until it was too late that they had failed too many courses to graduate. Anderson and her team were adopting a computerized system they called Grad Tracker to alert district leaders and high school principals as soon as a student failed a required class; principals would be responsible for taking immediate steps to ensure the student made up the credits and got back on track.

Only one person at these meetings had taught or worked as a principal in the Newark schools—Roger Leon, acting director of academic affairs, who grew up in Newark and graduated from Science High. A Newark teacher or administrator for almost thirty years, Leon doubled as an unofficial anthropologist for Anderson, called upon regularly to explain the origins of policies and customs that made no sense to the systems-minded newcomers.

“Roger, I call you an encyclopedia, so don’t disappoint me,” Anderson said during a discussion about Grad Tracker. “What was the system before?”

Leon, a small, bespectacled man respected throughout Newark for his twin skills as educator and political survivor, explained that when a student failed a required class, there was a point person in one of the district’s regional offices who alerted the school’s director of guidance, who in turn was responsible for ensuring that the student recovered the missing credits. Anderson asked why that didn’t work. “The point person retired and the director of guidance position no longer exists,” Leon said.

“Oh! That’s sustainable,” Anderson said, slapping the table in exasperation. Although Leon’s anthropology lessons were invariably disconcerting, Anderson relished their gory details: “I feel as if a hundred mysteries have just been solved. Or revealed.”

Later, in an interview, Leon said the old approach drew on research suggesting that struggling students often made progress when they got one-on-one attention from an interested staff member. “If you failed a class, there was supposed to be a plan in place for you to recover credits, and someone who cared about you was supposed to monitor it,” he said. “It would’ve been a good system, but no one followed through. No one was accountable.” Once again: somebody didn’t do their job.

 

If Anderson needed an anthropologist in Leon to understand the strange workings of the Newark district, many longtime employees viewed her and her leadership team as equally foreign. At times, they seemed to the veterans to speak a language all their own. For example, education reformers referred to high-risk decisions made in the name of progress as “building the airplane while we’re flying it.” Anderson, Booker, and Cerf invoked the phrase at various times to connote that the urgency of their task required them to act first and deal with consequences later. Their decision to keep excess teachers on the payroll in hopes of eventually changing seniority protections was a classic illustration. Principals with disproportionately younger staffs were grateful to avoid the upheavals that had occurred in the past when these teachers were bumped to make way for more senior teachers in need of a position. But what if the legislature refused to change the seniority law, causing the pool of excess teachers to balloon as Anderson closed more and more schools? She, Booker, and Cerf had no plan for this costly—and likely—eventuality.

Often employing the lingo of business, Anderson presented herself as a skilled manager in her monthly training sessions with principals, telling them in the first such session to run their schools as if they were CEOs. She told them to create a document listing three to five goals for raising student achievement and to assign everyone in the building specific responsibilities for reaching them. “Every good and high-performing coach and CEO has a game plan—a lean, focused, clear plan,” she said. “They’re setting goals and going after them like their life depended on it.”

As part of this process, she said, principals should articulate something she called a BHAG (“Bee-hag”). When no one appeared familiar with the term, Anderson explained that it stood for a Big Hairy Audacious Goal. This, she said, was a clear and seemingly impossible objective around which everyone in a school could organize to achieve previously unthinkable progress. She credited the term to best-selling business author Jim Collins, whose many analyses of successful companies were treated as scripture across the school reform movement.

Several staff members said they felt that the district had been overtaken by a cadre of technocrats, most of them white and commuting from New York, whose vocabulary was rich in education reform buzzwords. Besides “transformational”—never incremental—change, they also made it a priority to “move the needle,” which meant to achieve measurable progress, usually in test scores. To do this, they had to “pull the right levers,” like allowing principals to choose their teachers. They would “drill deep” or “take a deep dive” into complex issues. They divided strategies into “buckets,” such as the accountability bucket, the teacher-evaluation bucket. They took liberties with parts of speech, changing nouns into verbs—as in, “Bucket those two ideas together”—and adverbs into nouns, as when Anderson referred to her expertise in “behindedness,” or students who were several years behind their grade level. Data had to be “robust.” They worried about “optics,” or how things would look to the public. The reasoning of critics was invariably “fatally flawed.” The district desperately needed more “bandwidth,” or highly skilled people at every level, necessitating the hiring of consultants to fill the gap until permanent hires were recruited through a “robust talent pipeline.” And paraphrasing Collins, the prolific business writer, you had to get “the right people on the bus and in the right seats.”

Anderson shared the reform movement’s faith in business-style management and accountability. The goal, she said, was to mobilize the bureaucracy around high performance rather than mere compliance with rules. She hired the Parthenon Group, consultants in international business strategy who had worked for Joel Klein in New York, to upgrade the district’s data and accountability systems. They eventually were paid more than $3 million, mostly from philanthropy. Among Parthenon’s early assignments was the creation of “data dashboards” for principals—another practice adopted from Klein, who had taken it from the business world. Corporate leaders used dashboards to see a company’s vital statistics at a glance, like drivers surveying a car’s gauges. But unlike the dashboards of corporate executives, which were updated continuously, the principals’ dashboards—displaying the passing rate of students by race and income on standardized tests, attendance and dropout rates, and other metrics—were updated only once a year, when new test score data arrived. Several principals said privately that they could have assembled the data themselves.

Anderson violated one of her own principles of management by going more than a year without recruiting a permanent leadership team. Instead, she relied heavily on consultants, many of them paid $1,000 a day, and she persuaded Zuckerberg, Ackman, and the other philanthropists to foot the bill. After pressing Anderson without result to submit a grant request specifying which consultants she intended to hire for which tasks and at what price, the board of the Foundation for Newark’s Future—Booker and representatives of Zuckerberg, Ackman, and Goldman Sachs—gave in and awarded her $4 million to spend mostly at her discretion on what it designated on the foundation’s website as “technical assistance.” The goal of the grant was “to transform Newark Public Schools into a service-oriented organization, primarily focused on talent management and human capital, finance and operations, and innovation.”

Two of the highest-paid consultants were friends and former colleagues of Anderson, Alison Avera and Tracy Breslin, both senior officials in New York under Klein and Cerf and both fellows at the Broad Academy. Both had worked for the Global Education Advisers consulting firm originally founded by Cerf, and Anderson asked them to stay on for about a year in two of her most strategic positions—Avera as interim chief of staff and Breslin, who had extensive experience in human resources, as interim director of a new Office of Talent. Breslin would oversee three of Anderson’s top initiatives: negotiating a new teachers’ contract; supervising the new staffing system through which principals rather than district bureaucrats selected teachers; and implementing a new teacher evaluation system, developed by the nonprofit consulting firm The New Teacher Project.

The arrangement was unusual on several levels. Avera and Breslin were married to each other; had they been public employees, nepotism rules would have prohibited one from supervising the other. A number of other officials complained that they could not get a hearing from Avera or Anderson on concerns related to Breslin’s high-stakes initiatives, seeding frustration in the ranks. There was also considerable contention about their pay. Avera and Breslin had joined Global Education Advisers at $1,200 and $1,000 a day, respectively, and they continued at those rates for Anderson; Breslin charged overtime on days when she worked more than eight hours, even though her contract specified that she be paid by the day, not the hour. The staff of the Foundation for Newark’s Future ultimately barred the practice, according to officials familiar with Breslin’s compensation. In less than eighteen months working for Anderson, FNF’s tax records showed, their combined pay exceeded $740,000. The FNF staff repeatedly pressed Anderson to negotiate lower rates, arguing that their long-term assignments didn’t conform to traditionally shorter-term consulting work. But Anderson said she needed their help and expertise as she sought a permanent team while simultaneously learning the workings of the district and moving to reform it. “I had to fix the plane, fly the plane, figure out who should be on the plane, and make sure we didn’t crash the plane,” she said. After appealing to the FNF board, she got her way.

Anderson herself was paid $247,500 a year, plus a potential bonus of $50,000, for a total of just under $300,000 if she achieved goals that she and Cerf, as commissioner, were to negotiate at the outset of each school year. Tying extra pay to the achievement of specific goals was typical of performance-based contracts in the private sector. But Cerf and Anderson waited until the school year was almost over to finalize the goals—akin to tailoring an answer sheet to a test taker’s responses. Each year, she received almost all of the available bonus money.

 

There was an advantage to taking the helm of a school system as troubled as Newark’s: you could make a major impression by doing some basic things right. Jen Holleran had observed early in her time there, “The scariest thing and the most hopeful thing is that so little works.”

It was long accepted in Newark that student registration took up much of the first week of school, with lines of children and parents snaking out the entranceway and often around blocks. As a result, many children lost up to a week of instruction, and lessons were constantly interrupted by the arrival of new students. The Global Education Advisers consulting team had reported with alarm shortly before Anderson’s arrival that the district had no action plan to achieve a smooth opening of schools in the fall.

Anderson made it a signature project to have a successful opening day. She put longtime school business administrator Valerie Wilson in charge, and Wilson deployed a team of project managers—the Successful School Opening Team—who worked all summer to ensure principals in all seventy buildings had a teacher for every classroom, a desk for every child, clean bathrooms and floors, security guards assigned, walls painted, light bulbs in every socket, leaks patched. Wilson’s team arranged for student registration to begin an unheard-of two weeks before school opened, so that all students were on a class roster on day one.

On the first day of classes, as children streamed into BRICK Avon Academy, Patricia Hargrove, the school’s secretary, sat at her desk looking in disbelief and wonder at the front counter, where lines of children and parents used to clamor for her attention. No one was there. “I’ve been here twenty-seven years,” she said, “and I don’t think I’ve ever seen this happen.”

Anderson spent the morning visiting schools and observing classrooms. One of her stops was George Washington Carver Elementary, a struggling school in a neighborhood racked by violence and home foreclosures. Carver had been losing population, and over the summer, a KIPP charter school, SPARK Academy, had moved onto its third floor, forcing a reorganization of classrooms and causing considerable anger in the neighborhood. Carver principal Winston Jackson had taken the lead in calming the community, saying that he and the SPARK principal were committed to all the children in the building. His message, essentially, was: Keep your eyes on the prize—the children, that is.

Anderson sent word that Jackson should take her to observe three teachers in action—his newest teacher, a veteran teacher, and a third whom he was free to choose. Only forty-five minutes into the first day of school, the newest teacher and the veteran had everyone enthusiastically engaged and on task. The third, a tenured fifth-grade math teacher, appeared hopelessly flustered, stumbling through a lesson on the area of a square. Afterward, huddling with Jackson in the school lobby, Anderson delivered withering feedback, not mentioning the energy and student participation evident in two of the three classrooms. According to Anderson, all three teachers had unclear objectives, particularly the math teacher, who seemed to confuse geometry and algebra.

Then she turned to the class of the veteran teacher, whose eighth-grade class had been discussing a short story. Why, Anderson asked, would she assign eighth graders to work in groups on the first day of school? “You’ve got to set up the group. Who’s the recorder? On day one, you can’t be a group and expect kids to talk,” she said. But Carver was a neighborhood school, and most of its eighth graders had been talking to each other all their lives, both in and out of school. The class discussion had, in fact, been lively. Jackson, appearing somewhat stunned, listened deferentially.

“But still, it’s great to see learning on day one,” Anderson declared, bullish on the orderliness of her opening day. And off she went to continue inspecting the troops.