The Prize (17 page)

“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 ef
fort 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.