The Prize (8 page)

The disconnect between rules and reality was hardly limited to education. Down the hill from the Avon school, a city sign for years had warned, “No Littering $1,000 Fine.” No one in the neighborhood had $1,000 to spare, so the seemingly harsh consequence was a joke, as the broken liquor bottles, crushed beer cans, and candy wrappers strewn in all directions made clear. As school board member Marques-Aquil Lewis once put it: “This is Newark. Rules were made to be broken.”

Against this backdrop, the new leaders of Avon fanned across the neighborhood in the summer of 2010 to knock on every door and talk to parents about working together to change the school. They gained credibility when they persuaded the district to light Avon's playground, which led to a blossoming of nighttime hoops. And Dominique Lee successfully fought the district to have the aging school's interior repainted with a trim of bold, primary colors, as opposed to the default hues of beige and brown. In late summer, four hundred men, women, and children from the neighborhood turned out for a barbecue—the best attendance anyone could recall at a school event.

Yet doubts kept surfacing in the form of a recurring question: Are you turning Avon into a charter school? Charters had become a code
word in parts of Newark for rich, white outsiders who hid self-interest behind a veil of altruism—a narrative of distrust going back to urban renewal days.

Lee patiently batted away the rumors, affirming
BRICK
's solid commitment to district schools. But the question rankled. Why vent so much anger and fear on charters while excusing the district for failing Avon students for so long? One day, in response to yet another question about the rumor, he blurted out: “No, we are not a charter school. But what is it about charters that's scarier than four percent proficiency in math?”

A life-sized casualty of the long decline arrived in sixth grade on the opening day of the rechristened
BRICK
Avon Academy, three weeks before the
Oprah
announcement. His name was Alif Beyah, and he had been promoted year after year despite failing basic subjects. He also was a discipline challenge, forever getting thrown out of class for refusing to do his work.

“He acted—excuse my French—like an ass to me in the hallway one day and I suspended him,” said Melinda Weidman, the assistant principal for the middle school grades.

But the next morning, she said, Alif returned and apologized, pleading to be allowed to go back to class. Another time, she gave him detention and noticed that he arrived precisely on schedule to serve his time. When she called him out for being disrespectful, she said, he was quick to own up to it, showing genuine remorse.

Weidman, a former high school social studies teacher, was small, with blue eyes, long blond hair, and a voice like a drill sergeant's. The rowdiest eighth graders straightened up when they saw her coming, in part because they knew she'd risk her safety to protect them if a fight broke out. They'd seen her do it.

Weidman built a relationship with Alif's mother, Lakiesha Mills, who confided that she and her boys' father had recently split up. She worked from noon until midnight at concession stands at various arenas and rarely was home to make dinner or supervise homework and
bedtime. She was terrified that Alif would fall increasingly behind and slip into a brutally familiar spiral: failure in school, leading to anger and eventually expulsion, with nowhere to turn but the streets. She was desperate for help.

Weidman began to conclude that this wiry stringbean of a troublemaker with large, dark eyes and a shy smile was in fact a good boy. But somewhere along the line he had fallen far off the track, and now, on the verge of becoming a teenager, faced maximum peril.

“I just started looking out for him and wanting to figure out what had happened,” Weidman said.

Part of the explanation was in Alif's cumulative record—known in the school district as a cume card—an oversized, vanilla-colored chart with handwritten notations added year by year, listing his teachers and grades beginning in kindergarten. Every year through third grade—years when he should have learned to read—he got mostly D's and F's. By his own admission, he was a hellion. “I was bad then,” he said. “I used to just sit in class and do no work. I was not acting right.” Looking back, he couldn't explain why, nor could his mother. Lakiesha Mills said she had assumed that Alif simply wasn't trying. A cousin who was an aide in Alif's third-grade classroom told Mills that he refused to pay attention or do his work. Mills said it didn't occur to her that his teachers could have been responsible.

But it is hard to separate a discipline problem from a teaching problem, especially in a classroom of young children. The
BRICK
team took the view that effective teachers were a powerful antidote to most misbehavior—teachers who captured and held children's attention through a combination of strong pedagogy, empathy, and leadership. Even reluctant learners tended to get caught up in the positive flow. As it turned out, Haygood and Lee determined that Alif had almost uniformly weak teachers in those years. Asked what he thought of the teachers, Alif said he liked most of them, but he recalled that his classes were full of disruptions, and he always joined in. “If other kids were talking, I always went along with them,” he said.

In those years, Avon had four certified teachers on the payroll as
full-time tutors to support struggling students, thanks to the New Jersey Supreme Court's landmark
Abbott
v. Burke
decisions. In a series of rulings in the 1990s, the court ordered the legislature to equalize the funding of New Jersey's poorest and most affluent districts in the name of guaranteeing educational opportunity to the state's poorest children. But Alif and his mother said he never was offered tutoring.

Required to repeat third grade, he landed the second time around in the class of Sharon Rappaport, one of Avon's finest and firmest teachers. His reputation preceded him. “I saw his name on my class list, and I just took a deep breath and thought, ‘We're going to work this out,'” Rappaport recalled.

A mother of five who demanded the same respect and cooperation from pupils that she got at her dinner table, Rappaport was meticulously organized about reaching all her students, from stars to strugglers. Raised in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in the 1960s, she felt connected to them as a fellow child of what she called “the ghetto,” who grabbed education as her ticket out. She immediately noticed that Alif had almost no foundation in reading. She also recognized that he needed tremendous emotional support just to bring himself to try to learn.

“You could tell he really wanted to do well, to be proud of himself,” she said. “He would get this little glow if you praised him.” She sat with him during independent-reading periods, reading aloud to him, asking questions about the texts and working on letter sounds. She praised every positive step he took—a word he spelled correctly, a neatly written sentence. She developed relationships with his mother and father, talking often about how he was doing at school and at home.

Rappaport also noticed that Alif was relatively strong in math and asked him to stay after school to help tutor students who were failing. His attitude changed dramatically, and his mother was stunned.

“That was one of his teachers that he really, really loved,” his mother said. “She knew how to go about getting inside children that age. He'd come home and say, ‘Mrs. Rappaport wants me to do this. She wants
me to do that.' He loved staying after school and helping her. He began to believe that he could be good in math. Mrs. Rappaport embraced him, and for the first time he felt comfortable enough to try.”

At the end of the year, Alif failed the state proficiency test in literacy, but he easily passed in math, falling only five points short of “advanced proficient.” For the first time in his life, he made the honor roll, with all A's and B's, except for a C in reading and writing.

After his banner year with Rappaport, though, Alif returned to making D's and F's in fourth and fifth grade. On his cume card, under a category labeled “Demonstrates Evidence of Learning Through Completion of Class and Homework Assignments,” he received an N, for “not evident.” Yet both years, under the old Avon regime, he had been promoted to the next grade.

The idea behind every school reform effort taking shape in Newark—from the Booker-Christie-Zuckerberg plan to
BRICK
—was that in the future there would be no Alifs. Equipping five-year-olds from the poorest neighborhoods in Newark with a strong foundation in reading and math, along with a love of learning, represented an essential first step on a path toward a better life. For now, the odds were stacked perilously against poor children everywhere. Research had shown that children in the lowest-income families heard only a fraction of the words or conversations that were the daily bread of the more affluent. By age three, the difference was an astonishing twenty million words.
They also had little exposure to books. After kindergarten, the gap grew wider and more treacherous every year. Children who entered first grade without basic literacy skills were unlikely to read proficiently by the end of third grade, which was equivalent to falling off a cognitive cliff. Elementary education boiled down to this: children learn to read by third grade; they read to learn from then on. After third grade, reading was the ball game—math moved into word problems, social studies and science into demanding texts, language arts into novels. A straight line ran from the poor reading skills of Avon third graders to the single-digit passing rate of its middle school
ers on state reading and math tests. Children who couldn't keep up in later grades became frustrated, alienated, and more likely to act out. According to a consultant's analysis of Newark district data, only four percent of students who arrived in high school significantly below grade level went on to pass the state proficiency test for graduation.

Every brand of education reformer shared the same end goal—to reverse the damaging tide of poverty that robbed the poorest children of their potential. The big difference lay in where they started: from the top down or the bottom up.

4

September 2010–February 2011

B
OOKER CALCULATED CORRECTLY
. Timing the Zuckerberg announcement to the premiere of
Waiting for Superman
swept the young billionaire, the mayor, the governor, and Newark into an extravaganza of media attention. Every television network carried the story and, within three hours of the
Oprah
segment, so did 263 news outlets across the country and around the world. The following Monday, NBC began a week of heavily promoted television programming called
Education Nation
, sponsored in large part by the Gates and Broad foundations—an arrangement that drew some criticism because the coverage dovetailed closely with the venture philanthropists' views. NBC kicked off the week with Booker, Christie, and Education Secretary Arne Duncan as featured guests on MSNBC's
Morning Joe
, talking about Zuckerberg's $100 million gift and the threesome's commitment to turning around public education in Newark.

Although residents of Newark had to tune in to
Oprah
to learn that their mayor, their governor, and a billionaire planned to transform their schools, Booker vowed to the national television audience that
this would be the people's project—driven by Newark parents and their demands for change.

“What I believe is that Newark, New Jersey, can help lead America back,” Booker declared, “but we have to let Newark lead and not let people drop in from outside and point the way.”

“What he is doing that is so smart,” Duncan said, gesturing toward Booker. “He's trying to put in place a process to empower average parents, the parents of
Waiting for Superman
who have been disempowered for too long. He's going to put them in the driver's seat.”

The testimonials to grassroots democracy came against the backdrop of a major political setback for the school reform movement. Less than two weeks earlier, a voter backlash over the record of Washington, D.C., schools chancellor Michelle Rhee had contributed to the ouster of Mayor Adrian Fenty, who had appointed and defended her. A heroine of reformers—and of the
Waiting for Superman
movie—Rhee had ridden like a crusader through the bureaucracy of the faltering school district, firing hundreds of teachers and dozens of principals and imposing strict accountability for student performance. As resistance rose among teachers, unions, and many parents, Rhee posed resolutely on the cover of
Time
with a broom, as if sweeping aside all who stood in her way. “Cooperation, collaboration and consensus-building are way overrated,” she famously declared in a speech to the Aspen Institute.

No one doubted that urban education across the country needed a jolt. Schools were catastrophically failing children in the poorest neighborhoods, and there was little accountability—for teachers, principals, or the bureaucracy itself. Nor was there recourse through the ballot box. Democracy favored unions and powerful political bosses, whose loyalists tended to dominate turnout in school board elections and whose candidates often fought harder for adult jobs than for children's education. Only in districts run by reform-friendly mayors or governors rather than school boards—such as New Orleans, Washington, New York, and now Newark—did officials have a free hand to impose politically unpopular changes. But even Rhee's al
lies in the reform movement were critical of her autocratic approach, and the warnings loomed large over Newark.

“Education reform is not about its leaders and their prerogatives. It's about communities,” Michael Lomax, president of the United Negro College Fund and an ardent reformer, wrote on
The Root
, an online magazine. “Education reform doesn't have to be—indeed, cannot be—force-fed to communities of color . . . We can be equal partners in ensuring what is best for our children and all children. It won't work any other way.”