Dale Russakoff

“The Prize” tells the story of how difficult school reform / improvements can be, even when funding is available and political leaders are on board. Russakoff describes how then Mayor (and now N.J. Senator) Corey Booker together with N.J. Governor Chris Christie, had hoped to transform the failing Newark, N.J. school system into a national model of effectiveness. Booker used his rising star status to enlist donations from Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and several hedge fund managers to contribute heavily to develop innovative methods to improve the educational system for the inner-city youth. Even the teachers and union were cooperative in the initiatives. Yet even with 200 million dollars for the project, the impact of the poverty of the community, inertia, and lack of community buy-in proved too much to overcome.… (meer)

I found the book both tedious and fascinating. The school district is failing and a crack team of well funded leaders are brought in to save it. The problem is that the know they can't save it because of rules written in state and even federal law that make many changes to the district make up impossible. Most parents get fed up with the district and jump into the open arms of the charters, the future planned for the district. What's left behind is a group of parents and community leaders terrified of losing what little stability left in their lives, their sludge pit of a local school. Eventually, the voters elect new leaders who fight the education experts and the move to charters is slowed, but can not be stopped.… (meer)

This book is written like a piece of fiction; the amount of detail related to interpersonal interaction is stunning.

I had heard of Mark Zuckerberg's $100 million gift to the Newark School System before I had read this book. But this is only half of the money given; it was a matching grant, given alongside another $100 million from the likes of the Gates and Walton foundations.

More importantly, the Newark School System runs an annual budget of around $1 billion. So $200 million sounds like a lot, until you realize it’s just 20% of annual expenditures.

Cory Booker was the inspiration behind the project, the mayor of Newark at the time. Chris Christie was the governor of New Jersey, and supported Booker’s vision. There’s a comment in the books along the lines of, “you can either be a rockstar or a mayor, and Booker is the former.”

Mark got into education reform philanthropy because of his wife, Priscilla Chan. Zuckerberg, along with Sheryl Sandberg [Operations at Facebook], were convinced that student performance would increase dramatically if teachers had performance-based pay [even though the research shows that a student’s household situation is the biggest factor]. They, as well as all the other big names in education reform philanthropy, were very excited about the possibilities of charter schools.

Meanwhile in Newark, locals had a completely different idea of what was going on. They weren’t asking the question “how can we improve the education of our students.” They were talking about job security. The public school system is the largest public employer in Newark, and through it’s tenure system, guarantees thousands of teachers jobs regardless of performance. Charter Schools were seen as an enemy as well.

Although Booker and Zuckerberg had good intentions, it turns out that neither of them spent much of their times in the schools they were changing up, or spent much time looking for community feedback. They quickly became branded as public enemies, even though they were trying to help [and chipping in money to do so].

The funding was supposed to transform the school system over the course of five years [2010 to 2015]. Yet Booker, Christie, and Zuckerberg didn’t end up making this kind of time commitment. Instead, only the superintendent they hired stayed on through the end. Change was not “transformative” as Booker had pledged, and no national models were created.

Looking back on the experiment, I don’t think we should judge anyone involved to have made a terrible mistake. But it could have gone better.

I recommend this book for those looking to learn more about politics on the scale of a large city, education reform, and venture philanthropy.… (meer)