The Prize (18 page)

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 con
stantly 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.