The Prize (11 page)

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 get
ting 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 af
fair 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.”

5

November 2010–April 2012

O
N THE SECOND
floor of Newark's Central High School, Milagros Harris worked hard to coax historical imagination out of eighteen sophomores and juniors arrayed around her in varying poses of classic teenage boredom. She was introducing her students to the Holocaust through a curriculum known as Facing History, and she asked them to contemplate the mindset of ordinary Germans at the time. Did everyone in Germany want to kill all the Jews?