The Prize (16 page)

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 fam
ily 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.”

7

May 2011–September 2011

T
HE 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 se
lective 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.