The Prize (29 page)

Anderson and her team held more than a dozen meetings with charter school leaders to vet the plan. But there were no comparable meetings with parents of schoolchildren to preview the tumultuous changes. Anderson said she feared that any public hearings, like school board meetings, would have been co-opted by “political forces whose objective is to create disruption.” And she said it would have been impossible to address individual concerns without unwinding the whole design. “That is the nature of sixteen-dimensional chess,” she said. “You can't create concessions in one place that then create problems in another.”

Convulsive change was inevitable in a district facing fiscal ruin, massive overcapacity, and an urgent need for improvement. And some
version of Anderson's ideas—particularly her emphasis on requiring charters to enroll more of the neediest children—might have won public support if residents had been given a voice in the process. But effectively imposing a dramatically rearranged school system on families and communities, after a number of unfulfilled promises of “bottom-up reform,” triggered a predictable uprising.

District parents were cryptically alerted to the radical reconfiguration on December 16, 2013, one day before Anderson announced it publicly. A letter went home in students' backpacks inviting parents to school-by-school meetings the following night to learn of “bold and urgent actions.” With only one day's notice, the meetings were poorly attended, although word of the changes spread swiftly. Anderson was braced for an uproar—“December-palooza,” she called it to her staff—and she got one. Parents immediately began picketing schools that were designated to close. Many said they feared for the safety of their children, who would be forced to attend schools in unfamiliar neighborhoods. Fears were rampant in the South Ward, where murders had increased seventy percent in four years. Jacqueline Edward, a mother of two children in district schools, blurted out one afternoon, as if addressing Anderson in absentia, “Can you guarantee me my daughter's safety?” She described gang activity and drug dealing near the school where her daughter would be reassigned. “My twenty-eight-year-old started off in a gang, and we fought to get him out,” she said. “My twenty-two-year-old has a lot of anger issues because Daddy wasn't there. I just refuse to see another generation go that way.”

Although One Newark offered parents for the first time the chance to opt out of any failing neighborhood school, the overall shape of the plan left many Newark families convinced that their children were not being handled with care. Neighborhood schools were part of a delicately balanced ecosystem that served many needs for families. Anderson persuaded charter schools to take over three neighborhood K–8 schools, portraying the move as an opportunity for some of the lowest-income children to attend the most sought-after pro
grams. But the charters agreed to serve children only in kindergarten through fourth grade. Children in the upper grades had to go elsewhere. That removed a trusted source of child care for parents who relied on older siblings to accompany younger ones to and from school. In a focus group arranged by the district, parents from both district and charter schools complained that they felt poorly informed, inconvenienced, and dissatisfied with the new enrollment system. Two representative comments from the focus group summary: “The community would've received the changes better if it was not shoved down their throats” and “It felt like one big experiment.” Anderson's staff distributed performance ratings for each charter and district school to help parents make their selections. But as one parent said in the focus group, “The ratings for most schools were failing.”
Anderson had delivered on the reformers' goal of increasing parental choice and expanding high-performing charters, but as before, good choices remained in short supply.

One reason for this was the disappointing results at Anderson's first round of eight Renew schools. She had hoped they would flourish and attract parents who otherwise would enroll children in charters. Indeed, almost every aspect of the schools had improved: stronger teachers and principals, more rigorous curriculum, longer school days, and noticeably better learning environments. When test scores arrived in 2014, Anderson called a press conference to announce “incredible gains” over the previous year. She neglected to report that, when viewed across the two years since she had designated them in urgent need of renewal, scores at all but one of the schools had fallen, in some cases by double digits, in either literacy or math or both. Nonetheless, Anderson insisted that the strategy eventually would bear fruit and designated eight more schools for renewal as part of One Newark.

In effect, Anderson was asking parents and the community to trust that her strategies, in time, would deliver results for their children. Indeed, it was reasonable to assume that progress would come slowly, as teachers and students adjusted to multiple changes at the school and classroom levels. But trust was an early casualty of the top-down ap
proach that Booker and Christie embraced even before Anderson's arrival. And Anderson's declarations of victory, based on less than complete presentations of data on student performance, only exacerbated unease. She announced a ten percent increase in the graduation rate—an accomplishment Christie touted in his State of the State address—but results from the ACT college admission test, taken by all juniors, showed that only two to five percent of students in nonmagnet high schools were prepared for college. Meanwhile, throughout the district, proficiency had declined in both literacy and math in every tested grade on the state standardized test since 2011, the year before Anderson arrived. The state had made the tests more difficult over those years, but students' results statewide hadn't suffered.

Although she had vowed to bring accountability to a district that long resisted it, Anderson said she should not have to answer for the declining test scores. She called the state test “fatally flawed,” adding, “If we had a better test, we'd have better gains.” Her defense spoke volumes about the muddle that reform had become at the ground level. Anderson had relied on state test scores to decide which schools to close for poor performance, but now—echoing many union leaders and opponents of test-based accountability—she was saying that those tests didn't accurately measure whether children were learning.

Anderson also argued that by using new powers in the teachers' contract to weed out weak teachers and reward the best ones, she was raising the quality of the teaching corps across the district, which would eventually translate into higher student achievement. There again, progress was slower than advertised. Anderson bullishly announced that only five percent of teachers rated effective or better had left the district in the past year, compared to almost forty percent of those rated ineffective. But the actual numbers, which she did not announce, painted a different picture. So many teachers had gotten effective ratings that the departures included more of them than those at the bottom. Nonetheless, Anderson hailed the overall trend as an important shift. In the coming year, using the new state law to
bring tenure charges against the lowest-rated teachers, she and her staff would move to shift the balance further.

With no data yet showing that the district's students were improving under Anderson, it was perhaps not surprising that almost half of the applicants to kindergarten listed charter schools as their first choice in the One Newark enrollment process.
But the popularity of charters didn't translate into support for One Newark. Many charter parents had relatives who worked for district schools or other children who attended them, and they too were adamantly against closing schools and eliminating jobs—even though both were inevitable consequences of the growth of charters. “You see parents dropping their children off at charter schools and then joining a picket at Two Cedar Street [the district headquarters] because I laid off their cousin,” Anderson said.

Christie remained steadfastly committed in public to Anderson and her agenda, though not in a way that helped her in Newark. Asked during his 2013 reelection campaign about local resistance to Anderson, he responded, “I don't care about the community criticism. We run the school district in Newark, not them.”
The governor cruised to a twenty-two-point victory, solidifying his status as a GOP presidential contender. On the day after Christmas, he and Anderson met privately in his Trenton office, and he promised his support, no matter how intense the opposition. “I left thinking, ‘He's totally engaged,'” Anderson recalled.

Two weeks later, the scandal known as Bridgegate broke, with revelations that senior Christie appointees caused a massive traffic jam at the George Washington Bridge in September 2013—an apparent payback to the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee, whose town was snarled with cars for days, for refusing to support Christie's reelection. The governor said he knew nothing of the plot. As the United States attorney investigated, Christie had his own career to worry about.

With Christie weakened, and opponents emboldened, resistance to
Anderson's plan grew so fierce that a prominent pastor told the governor he feared civil unrest. Anderson moved out of Newark, telling friends that she was concerned for her family's safety. In late January 2014, she stopped attending public school-board meetings, saying the vitriol directed at her had made them counterproductive.

That March, Anderson lost her most ardent defender when Chris Cerf left his job as state education commissioner to join Joel Klein at Amplify, the education technology business within Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. The next month, seventy-seven pastors signed an open letter to Christie calling for a moratorium on One Newark, citing “venomous” public anger and “an overwhelming sense of frustration, community disenfranchisement and alienation.”

The rage engulfed the mayor's race, which was by now in full swing, and it fueled Ras Baraka's rallying cry against outside control. “When I become mayor,
we
become mayor” was his slogan, repeated in every speech and emblazoned on a campaign bus in which he traveled the city. Baraka fashioned Anderson into a stand-in for all outsiders—a universal “they.” Attendance at his Saturday breakfast rallies doubled immediately after the announcement of One Newark. “They want to close our schools. Their idea of fixing Newark is getting rid of you!” he declared to loud cheers at a packed rally in the North Ward, where previously he had had little support. “We have to look the devil in his face and say, ‘Not only are you wrong. We don't want you here.'” The festering resistance to Anderson, the backlash against One Newark, and the first mayoral campaign of the post-Booker era became one and the same. “Cami Anderson has handed Ras Baraka the most powerful weapon in his arsenal,” said a city councilman running on a slate opposed to Baraka's.

The election became a proxy for the national battle between reformers and unions for control of public education. Baraka had the solid support of every union representing Newark school employees—teachers, principals, custodians, clerks, security guards, cafeteria workers. They and national unions raised just over $600,000 for his
race.
The national education reform movement raised almost $5 million for Baraka's opponent, Shavar Jeffries, the former school board president who advocated closing the worst district schools and leasing them to the best charter schools. New Jersey's most powerful Democratic political bosses also rallied behind Jeffries, viewing Baraka as a threat to their own power.

While Jeffries had publicly supported the reformers' agenda throughout his years on the school board, he was harshly critical of their approach. Since the announcement of the Zuckerberg gift, he had spoken out repeatedly against the top-down strategy for spending it. He too was a Newark native, with an inspiring life story—an orphan at age ten when his mother was murdered, he went on to be a top student at Duke University and Columbia Law School—and he insisted that reform could succeed only if the community embraced it. “Education reform comes across as colonial to people who've been here for decades,” he said. “It's very missionary, imposed, done
to
people rather than in cooperation with people.” He called Anderson a detriment to her own cause—and his. “She behaved like an enemy out of central casting, the disrespectful way she treated our community,” he said.

Although Jeffries won the fundraising battle by miles, Baraka won the war, foiling both the billionaires and the party bosses with a decisive victory in May 2014. At his filled-to-capacity victory party, the candidate and his supporters spoke as if they were waging a liberation movement as much as a political campaign.

“Today we told them that the people of Newark are not for sale!” Baraka declared as the final tally was announced. “That people outweigh money in a democracy! That Broad Street should be more important than Wall Street!” Surrounding him on the stage were leaders of every education workers' union, dozens of his former students at Central High School, and a phalanx of campaign workers.

“
We
are the mayor,” Baraka rasped above the cheers. The crowd echoed the slogan, the words resounding through the ballroom of the historic Robert Treat Hotel, named for Newark's colonial-era founder.

And yet when Baraka, in one of his first acts as mayor, met with Christie and asked him to return control of the schools to Newark, the governor responded with an emphatic no. “We are the deciders on what happens in the school system,” Christie said. It was an assertion of authority in the face of a rising tide of resistance that seemed destined eventually to have its day. But not now, and not—as long as Christie held the cards—in the person of a mayor backed by every union in the school district. Newark's tattered prize—its district schools and all that they represented to so many, from the youngest kindergartner in Princess Williams's class to the leading politicians, from the dwindling ranks of public workers to the most ambitious philanthropists in the land—was in fact still in play.