The Prize (15 page)

It was hardly surprising that Brizard chose the nation's third-largest school district over one with one-tenth the enrollment. But another attraction was the clarity of the lines of authority in Chicago: all of them led to Emanuel. In Newark, they were indecipherable, a hazard for a superintendent. “You can have complete control on paper, but a lot of people can come back with daggers and you're buried,” Brizard said.

A striking feature of the Newark reform effort, from the beginning, was that no one was in charge. Cerf's concept of a “three-legged stool” implied that Zuckerberg, the governor (through the state-appointed superintendent), and the mayor would call the shots together. To those trying to carry out reforms, this arrangement was opaque and baffling. One of the consultants tasked with redesigning the district said in a private conversation, “I'm not sure who our client is. The contract came through Bari Mattes's office [Booker's chief fundraiser], so that suggests Booker is the client, but he has no constitutional authority over education. The funding is from Broad, Goldman Sachs, and Zuckerberg, but they have no legal authority. I think Cerf is the client, because the state runs the district. But I'm not positive.” In other words, the consultants worked for the person who originally founded the consulting firm.

Although Booker, Christie, and Cerf were emphatic about the need to impose accountability on a notoriously unaccountable bureaucracy, it was becoming apparent that no one of them was ultimately accountable for making it happen.

From three thousand miles away, Zuckerberg and Sandberg were alarmed. Six months had passed since the
Oprah
announcement, and the quest for a model of transformational urban education appeared
in real danger of coming apart amid leaks, political deals, public rancor, and mismanagement. Jen Holleran had been traveling to Newark week after week, spending one to three days at a time, asking hard questions about how Booker was implementing the vision they had agreed on. A product of Harvard College, Harvard Graduate School of Education, and Yale School of Management, Holleran had credentials that no one in Booker's circle could question. She had been an executive of a national education reform organization and also packed considerable soft power through a long-standing friendship with Sheryl Sandberg. The two were in the same book club in San Francisco when Sandberg was vice president of Google and Holleran was working in the Oakland school superintendent's Office of School Reform. Now, Holleran's dispatches from the ground in Newark were raising concern. In early 2011, Sandberg began discreetly calling people who had worked with Booker, asking if he had the ability to concentrate on his and Zuckerberg's reform venture.

It was Booker's operating style to launch multiple missions at once, assuming some would crash on takeoff, some would fall by the wayside, and some would go the distance. “I'm thinking, ‘Do everything you can right now, instead of worrying what tomorrow will be like or the next day,'” Booker said. “Right now, if
TEAM
[the charter network] expands another school, if you add another school model, if you expand the school day, if you change the life of one kid, today you can do something—right now. People allow their inability to control everything to undermine their determination to do something.”

Had the young Internet entrepreneur gone online for a cursory search of local news coverage, he would have known at the time he made his gift that Booker already had more challenges than he could count: the surge in violence, the fiscal crisis, the political rebellion on the council, his heavy travel schedule. The
Star-Ledger
reported that Booker spent more than one in five days out of the city in 2011.
Sandberg had taken charge of vetting the $100 million arrangement, which specified in writing that Christie would delegate “strategic and opera
tional” leadership of the state-controlled schools to Booker.
But despite her widely respected business acumen, she too was apparently caught off guard.

As Booker traveled the country making speeches and moved from crisis to crisis, the Facebook duo stumbled upon an open secret in Newark. Clement Price, the Rutgers historian, summed it up this way: “There's no such thing as a rock-star mayor. You're either a rock star or a mayor. You can't be both.” In a pique of frustration one night over Booker's rapidly shifting attention, a city hall aide put it more crudely: “Everybody who comes to work here arrives with a hard-on or a crush, and then at some point you say, ‘WTF?'”

Zuckerberg and Sandberg summoned the mayor to a meeting at Facebook headquarters on Saturday afternoon, April 2, where they made it clear they considered the pace of progress unacceptable. There was no superstar superintendent, no comprehensive reform plan, no progress toward a game-changing teachers' contract. If these are the wrong metrics for measuring progress, they asked, what are the right ones? They were holding Booker accountable for performance—as they did their own employees, and as Booker, Christie, and the reform movement vowed to do with teachers and principals.

Zuckerberg and Sandberg said firmly that they saw no way the overall effort could succeed without a strong superintendent in place,
and
soon
. Zuckerberg, who had an unassuming habit of referring to Facebook simply as “a company”—as if he ran a shoe store or car repair shop—remarked, “I've only run one company, but in my experience, a company needs a leader.”

Booker was contrite. “Guilty as charged,” he remembered saying.

After three hours of talk, Zuckerberg and Chan invited Booker, who was accompanied by Cerf and two other advisers, to their home in Palo Alto for pizza and salads. The main topic of conversation was not education but the couple's adorable new puppy, a fluffy white Hungarian sheepdog named Beast, who had his own Facebook page that already had 97,000 “likes.” Zuckerberg posted on Facebook a picture of Booker cuddling Beast.

Within days, hundreds of people had commented adoringly—most about Beast, but plenty about the celebrity mayor.

“Isn't it nice to cuddle the world famous, Mr. Booker?”

“Beast is cute, but Cory is the catch!”

“So ♥ Beast & Cory Booker!!!”

“SO jealous! LOVE Cory!”

Back home, angry overflow crowds became a regular feature of public hearings on the schools, where a core group of union and grassroots activists denounced every proposed reform as a conspiracy of the mayor and governor against the interests of Newark's children. One Saturday morning, Cerf gamely agreed to meet with concerned residents and found himself facing more than four hundred parents, grandparents, and teachers in the auditorium of Louise A. Spencer School. Charter schools had organized parents of their students for the occasion, providing free busing, and the auditorium was divided down the middle, charter parents on the right, public school parents on the left. The charter parents wore their schools' branded T-shirts, with slogans—navy blue for
TEAM
schools (“Be the Change”), a division of the national
KIPP
network; forest green for North Star Academy schools (“Change History”), a division of Uncommon Schools; bright red for Lady Liberty Academy, a Newark-only charter.

The divide only sharpened when several charter parents took the microphone to say the public schools had failed their children. One parent, Bendue James, said her daughter had been beaten up at Mount Vernon School but was now thriving at
RISE
Academy, a
TEAM
charter. Crystal Williams, with two children at North Star, had to compete with hecklers from the public school side. “Your teachers and principals are not educating your child,” she yelled over their jeers.

A North Star father, a substitute teacher in the public schools for ten years, said with disdain that he saw too many district school parents “absolve themselves of any responsibility” for their children. As boos rose from the left side of the room, he faced the public school
cheering section and thundered derisively, “When we talk about children, the apple never falls very far from the tree.”

From the podium, board president Shavar Jeffries banged his gavel, demanding order but also peace. “We're acting like Bloods versus Crips, charters versus district. That's a gangster mentality,” he said gravely. “We need to educate our children. It is not productive to fight each other
all
the time.”

Cerf, nursing a cough and lingering bronchitis, appeared to be flagging as the meeting entered its third hour and Wilhelmina Holder, a grandmother and veteran public school activist, approached the microphone. “Oh, I am tired,” he said under his breath, although loud enough for Holder to hear. Before Cerf realized it, she was teeing him up like a golf ball.

“Mr. Cerf, you're no more tired than I am,” Holder scolded, recalling the decades she had spent advocating for Newark's schoolchildren. The left side of the room roared approval, and she went on. Was he more tired than single mothers in the room who worked two or three jobs to provide for their children? More roars from the left side. Was he more tired than . . . ? A chastened Cerf held up a hand in surrender, urging Holder and everyone in the room to ask whatever they wished. They did—for another hour and a half.

“You haven't begun to address resources for students whose schools will close,” she said. “What's the message to their parents? Is it, ‘We don't care about your child, we're going to close your school and destroy the community'?” she asked. And what's with all those consultants in Room 914 at the district headquarters? “Put some
color
in that room!” she said to whistles and cheers from the left side. “
And
some intelligence.”

Nonetheless, Booker and Cerf's agenda lurched forward, thanks to the round-the-clock work of the consultants. They quietly revised the earlier proposal to close or consolidate failing district schools; those with the most vociferous community support were no longer on the list. The advisory school board, at the time still dominated by Adubato's forces, approved the plan in April and voted to lease the freed-
up space to charter schools, over jeers and hoots from an audience stocked with union and grassroots activists. Marques-Aquil Lewis, a rehabilitated former gang member elected to the board in 2009, warned that hundreds of district school students would be uprooted from familiar teachers and buildings in order to accommodate the new or expanding charter schools. Meanwhile, the district students were being reassigned to schools that also were failing.

“We talking about inviting back what happened in 1967—chaos,” Lewis said. “We giving a child an invitation to join a gang, to carjack a car, to commit a murder by creating chaos.”

He didn't mention that the reshuffling was also designed to benefit district students seeking alternatives to large, comprehensive high schools. Among the new options Zuckerberg was helping to finance was Bard High School Early College, a respected and rigorous academic program whose students in New York City, many from disadvantaged backgrounds, graduated with a diploma and two years of college credit. Another was YouthBuild, through which failing, unemployed, formerly incarcerated students in forty-six states finished high school while learning construction trades and other skills. A third, Diploma Plus, offered programs tailored to reengage dropouts and students on the verge of flunking out of high school. More than six hundred students from across the city had signed up for six proposed new schools at an open house.

“Newark must get in front of the death spiral of Detroit and so many cities,” said Dan Gohl, then director of innovation and change for the district. “We are faced with the fight for the very life of public education.” He argued that the new schools held out a survival strategy for urban districts losing students—and state funds—to charters. They could counter those losses, he said, enrolling students who previously had dropped out and luring highly motivated students who might have gone to charters or private schools.

Gohl had to compete with an increasingly restive audience angered by the earlier votes. Although the new programs were to be district schools with unionized teachers and principals, Donna Jackson,
a full-time activist who rarely missed a board meeting, heckled him throughout his presentation, encouraging students to join in. “Don't let him talk, kids. Just boo him. Boo his ass,” she yelled. “You know what this is all leading to—it's privatization.” Now the audience was booing all new schools, whether public or charter, ignoring all the facts. Unlike for the session with Cerf, charter schools hadn't mobilized parents to attend the board meeting.

A majority of board members proceeded to vote down all the new schools. Down went Bard, YouthBuild, Diploma Plus, all of them. After each vote, Jackson led the crowd in a chant of “Cory fails! Cory fails!”

“The only thing we should be concerned about is whether our kids succeed or fail,” board president Jeffries, who voted for most of the schools, said sadly.

Richard Cammarieri, the former board member who for years had demanded attention to disastrous student performance, watched in dismay. “These are potentially very good opportunities, but the process is poisoning the well for them,” he said.

Dominique Lee of
BRICK
Avon Academy sat in a back row, his head buried in his hands. He had hoped the Zuckerberg gift would spur support for efforts like
BRICK
's to change Newark schools from within. “It's turned into a thing against Cory, not what's good for the kids,” he said.

The final word was Cerf's, not the board's, and the next day he overruled all the no votes, clearing the way for the new schools to open. Reached that afternoon by phone, he was furiously resolute.

“I can't have any more talks about ‘respecting the community.' Who is the community?” he asked. “Is it the generation of students, now voiceless, who dropped out? Is it the last five people who had a mic? Is it the parents who are lining up for charters, or is it the loudmouths? There's a level of ignorance and basic conspiracy-mongering and micropolitical decision-making that inevitably dominates any decision on education. This is exactly a poster child for why education
reform doesn't happen. It's all a detriment to educating kids. They're literally not entitled to have their voice taken seriously. At the end of the day, I have to do what is right.” There was a long pause, and then this: “Just wait until we name a white superintendent.”