Book Notes: The Prize: Who's in Charge of America's Schools?

I picked this book up because I work in Newark and I wondered about the results of the Zuckerberg gift of $100 million (plus $100 million of additional matching donations) to the Newark public school system in 2010.

My understanding from reading this book is that the Newark district has suffered from serious problems for a long time. The high school graduation rate was around 50%. There was strong agreement that the existing system was failing students. Because of the combination of Zuckerberg money and (at the time) the star power of Corey Booker and Chris Christie, the district was able to recruit some of the top people working in education reform to head up a plan for comprehensive change.

I think this book does a good job of highlighting how difficult things like education reform really are. This is a case where you had 1) complete agreement that the existing system was failing, plus 2) a lot of money to throw at the problem, plus 3) "smart" leaders to design and implement a plan, and what you end up with is a very mixed bag of results. My understanding is that between 2010 and now, Newark has significantly grown the enrollment of some successful charter schools, but that the district schools, which continue to serve the majority of students, have not shown any clear overall improvement. A lot of the Zuckerberg money was basically appropriated by the teacher's and principal's unions as part of contract negotiations and did little to improve teacher quality or provide incentives to good teachers.

There are also some difficult questions of morality. If you can enroll 40% of students in high performing charter schools, but this makes conditions in the other 60% of the district schools even worse, do you do it? If Newark has effectively been using its school budget as a supplement to welfare programs by giving low level jobs like janitorial work to people who otherwise couldn't find work, is that a glitch or a feature of the system? How do you confidently decide that the community disruption caused by firing all those people going to be outweighed by improved student outcomes?

The reforms put in place seem to have been extremely unpopular with the citizens of Newark, and led to the election of Ras Baraka as mayor on a platform that was strongly anti-school reform. Shavar Jeffries, chair of the school board, is quoted as saying "Education reform comes across as colonial to people who've been here for decades. It's very missionary, imposed, done to people rather than in cooperation with people." That is completely understandable and to some degree makes me question the entire premise of school reform.

On the other hand, however, Chris Cerf, one of the architects of the reforms, says "You have no chance of giving these kids the lives they deserve if you don't essentially override the local political infrastructure. There's no chance the political culture would have been able to rise above the question of who gets what. They had their chance." That also makes a lot of sense to me - at some point you have to take away the keys.