The Prize (10 page)

Some comments aligned with the Booker-Zuckerberg agenda, particularly its call for autonomy for individual schools and principals. At a forum held at
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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
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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 over
see 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 “transfor
mational, 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.