The Prize (19 page)

Then she turned to the class of the veteran teacher, whose eighth-grade class had been discussing a short story. Why, Anderson asked, would she assign eighth graders to work in groups on the first day of school? “You've got to set up the group. Who's the recorder? On day one, you can't be a group and expect kids to talk,” she said. But Carver was a neighborhood school, and most of its eighth graders had been talking to each other all their lives, both in and out of school. The class discussion had, in fact, been lively. Jackson, appearing somewhat stunned, listened deferentially.

“But still, it's great to see learning on day one,” Anderson declared, bullish on the orderliness of her opening day. And off she went to continue inspecting the troops.

8

August 2011–June 2012

I
T WAS A
week before the first day of school at
SPARK
Academy, the charter elementary school that shared space with Carver Elementary, in one of Newark's most impoverished and violent neighborhoods.
SPARK
principal Joanna Belcher was leading her teachers in a workshop on the “growth mindset,” which called for viewing setbacks—for children as well as themselves—as opportunities to learn. The thirty-year-old Belcher hardly looked the part of an inner-city principal—she was white, with long, thick golden-brown hair—but she had won the affection of Carver as well as
SPARK
teachers with her respectful attitude and passion for excellence and justice. She had worked in inner-city district schools for six years in Washington, D.C., and in California, and had resisted working for charter schools until
KIPP
leaders promised her a school that enrolled, in her words, “kids most charters don't serve.” On the back of all the teachers' chairs, she had taped a statistic for them to contemplate. For example: “Only 1/10 students growing up in poverty will graduate from college.”

In midsession, who should arrive but Cory Booker. He was escort
ing Cari Tuna, then the girlfriend, later the wife, of Dustin Moskovitz, who had become a billionaire by virtue of cofounding Facebook with Mark Zuckerberg, his Harvard roommate. Hoping Moskovitz and Tuna would help match Zuckerberg's $100 million gift, Booker took her to see two of the city's highest-performing charter schools.

Booker vowed to do anything to help
SPARK
succeed. He told the teachers that Belcher had his cell-phone number, that he expected her to call or text him with any problems. “Hit me up on Facebook. Tweet me. I will respond and take care of it,” he promised.

Most of
SPARK
'
S
teachers had begun their careers as recruits to Teach for America. Unlike many of their TFA peers, who left the classroom after two years, they had continued to teach in inner cities, becoming fiercely committed to addressing the needs of underserved children, whether in district or charter schools. They had moved over the summer onto the third floor of George Washington Carver, which had lost forty percent of its enrollment in nine years. Belcher and her team were impressed by the dedication and passion that Winston Jackson, Carver's principal, had for the school and its community. But they were alarmed to learn that the district had for years treated Carver as a dumping ground for teachers no other principal wanted. The result was that some of the weakest teachers had charge of some of the city's most challenging children. By contrast, Belcher recruited nationally for teachers she deemed best suited to meet her students' needs.

The
SPARK
teachers took Booker up on his offer to help them. One problem, they said, was a row of burned-out and abandoned houses across the street from the school, dangerous havens for crime and criminals that Carver and
SPARK
children passed daily. “If kids have to go through a pathway of hazards, that's reprehensible,” Booker replied. “Tweet me and I'll put my director of neighborhood services on it.” The houses had stood vacant for years without triggering city attention. The same was true of the environs of most schools in the South Ward.

The teachers asked Booker what his plan was to support the Carver
students, who occupied the other floors of the building. Fewer than thirty percent of them were reading at their grade level.
“I'll be very frank,” Booker answered. “I want you to expand as fast as you can. But when schools are failing, I don't think pouring new wine into old skins is the way. We need to close them and start new ones.”

One of twenty-three schools in Newark in danger of being closed for rock-bottom test performance under the No Child Left Behind law, Carver indeed was failing. But why? The district had systematically neglected it. So had the police. For years, gangs routinely held violent nighttime initiation rites in the school's play area, and sometimes Jackson arrived early in the morning to find blood pooled on school steps. He reported this at community meetings with police and pleaded for extra security, but never got a response.

Within a month of
SPARK
's arrival, there was another initiation, with blood splattered on school steps and bloody handprints on the sidewalk. A security camera recorded grainy images of nine young men mauling another at 9:30 at night, while some
SPARK
teachers remained at work on the third floor. The next morning, Jackson immediately emailed two school district officials, asking them to arrange a meeting with Anderson and the police. No one responded. Belcher wrote to the same officials six days later, asking, “Please let us know what the next steps are.” Still no response. Jackson then asked Belcher to email the mayor, which she did, attaching three pictures of the trail of blood on “the steps our K–2 scholars use to enter the building.” Within twenty minutes, Booker responded: “Joanna, your email greatly concerned me. I have copied this email to the police director who will contact you as soon as possible. Cory.” Police director Samuel DeMaio called the next day, the police captain for the precinct visited the day after that, and the gang unit soon afterward. Police stepped up their after-hours presence around the school, and a detective assured Belcher and Jackson that the gang members would congregate elsewhere when they realized the area was being watched. The gang indeed moved on.

As Booker had suggested, the reform movement's prescription for failing schools was to close them and replace them with charter schools or schools based on models that had succeeded in other cities and states. But if charters or new models could succeed, why couldn't a failing district school be revived, thereby sparing children the dislocation of having to leave teachers and classmates they had come to know and trust?

That was the question posed by Dominique Lee and Charity Haygood, the founders of
BRICK
Avon. Their vision was to support and coach district school teachers—not only to make them better instructors, but also to kindle motivation as more and more staff members recognized untapped potential in themselves and colleagues. They saw it as the equivalent of a grassroots movement, catching fire among staff, students, and families. They pushed teachers hard to work on their practice, to raise their expectations of students and lead them to mastery. They also secured a federal school improvement grant to extend the school day by ninety minutes. The pressure was not universally welcome; by the end of the year about a dozen teachers asked for transfers to other schools, including most of those the new leaders considered the weakest.

But there was a more troubling exodus. A third of Avon's students left each year, their parents forced out of the neighborhood by evictions, family strife, or fears of violence. With no school busing in Newark, and many Avon families unable to afford a car, the children had to transfer schools. From the start,
BRICK
Avon made its biggest bet on raising the performance of the youngest children, from kindergarten through second grade, in hopes of escorting them to the all-important threshold of success—reading proficiently by grade three—and from there to higher performance in all subjects. “We think it's a realistic goal that if a child is with us three years, he should be at grade level,” said Chris Perpich, the
BRICK
Avon assistant principal who had won over veteran teacher Sharon Rappaport with the quality of his coaching. But the school leaders hadn't factored in the toll of transience and poverty in Avon's catchment area—the poorest
in Newark. By the time their first kindergarten cohort reached third grade, barely thirty percent remained at Avon. Rather than welcoming a reading-ready class, third-grade teachers were almost starting from scratch.

“The ethos when I went through Teach for America was that good teaching and good leadership could solve the problems of poverty,” said Dominique Lee. “That's part of the pie, but that's not all of the pie. Our most dynamic teachers were burning out—the need and anger in the children, the mental health issues, the absenteeism, the transience.”

They were witnessing the effect of what researchers call adverse childhood experiences, multiple traumas that, studies have shown, significantly interfere with learning and focus in children in the most disadvantaged communities. One year, state child-welfare workers were monitoring fifteen of twenty-six children in Princess Williams's kindergarten class for alleged neglect or exposure to domestic violence. Children with more than one traumatic experience—violence, severe poverty, family breakup, or substance abuse in the home—were more than twice as likely as others to fail at least one grade.
And trauma was hard to avoid in the South Ward of Newark, where violent crime rose seventy percent from 2010 to 2013.

“Our children's nervous systems are designed from birth to be in trauma mode,” said Haygood, the Avon principal who had worked in Newark schools for more than a decade. “I don't think we understood that at first. We were like, ‘If you just work hard enough, we can fix it.'”

Still, the new leaders were improving the school, although not at the pace they expected. In their first three years at Avon, school-wide scores on state tests in math showed the third-steepest increase in the district, although almost sixty percent of students still were below grade level—in literacy, almost seventy-five percent. In New Jersey, there is no standardized testing before third grade, so the only yardstick for early grades came from
STEP
, the research-based literacy program Avon had adopted on the advice of charter school leaders.
When
BRICK
arrived,
STEP
testing showed that only seven of fifty-five first graders were on track to read proficiently by grade three. Two years later, thirty-four out of seventy-two were on track, an increase from thirteen to forty-seven percent. This was a dramatic and positive change, but it still left more than half the class off track. The results in Williams's class were much more encouraging. When her twenty-three students arrived in 2011, for example, all but one failed the
STEP
readiness test for kindergarten; they couldn't spell their names, count to twenty, distinguish between a letter and a word, or recognize that words progressed from left to right across a page. At the end of the year, eleven of them met
STEP
's rigorous national benchmark for first grade, with another seven missing it by one question. Those eighteen children all met the district's standard for promotion, however. But only five of them would still be at Avon for third grade in the fall of 2014.

The unanimous conclusion of teachers and leaders at Avon was that they needed more resources, to support children not only in the classroom but also outside it. But how could resources be a problem in a district with a billion-dollar budget?

In decrying the failure of the Newark schools, Christie regularly highlighted the vast amount of money spent on them, three-quarters of it provided by the state's taxpayers. The governor put the figure at $24,000 per student; in fact, it was closer to $20,000, still an extraordinary sum in national terms. California spent $9,139 per student in 2011, Texas spent $8,671, and almost half of all states spent under $10,000.
Newark's bounty was a direct result of a series of state supreme court rulings in the 1980s and 1990s in the landmark case of
Abbott v. Burke
, directing extra resources to the lowest-income districts.

Christie had not funded the full formula since taking office, citing the state fiscal crisis, but the allocation was still equivalent to about $20,000 per student. Less than half of this, though, reached district schools to pay teachers, social workers, counselors, classroom aides, secretaries, and administrators—the people who actually delivered
education to children. The rest went into the central bureaucracy, which technically served students but at huge cost. For example, the district calculated that it spent $1,200 a year per student on Avon's janitorial services;
BRICK
founder Dominique Lee researched the cost on the private market and found it was close to $400 per student. The difference could have paid salaries for up to ten additional teachers and counselors, he said. The central office also paid for specialists who diagnosed learning disabilities, and math and literacy experts who helped teachers adapt to the newly demanding Common Core State Standards.

But district money gushed and oozed in myriad directions. Saddled with dilapidated school buildings, some dating to the Civil War, the district spent $10 million to $15 million a year on structural emergencies like crumbling façades and caving roofs—money that was supposed to help educate children. It spent another $4 million in rent for its headquarters in a drab, aging downtown office building owned by the real estate giant Hartz Mountain Industries, a large contributor to state and local politicians' campaigns. When district officials tried unsuccessfully to break the lease years earlier to move to less expensive quarters, the rival landlord filed a lawsuit alleging political shenanigans, which Hartz Mountain emphatically denied.
In 2012, the district facilities director discovered that high school football stadium lights were bizarrely being left to burn all night, costing $300,000 a year.