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Assessing The $100 Million Upheaval Of
Newark's Public Schools
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left to right, Oprah Winfrey, Coey Booker and Mark Zuckerberg
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Terry Gross, Host
September 21, 2015
In 2010, Cory Booker, who was then mayor of Newark and is now a U.S. senator, wanted to create a series of reforms in the Newark schools that could serve as a model for other cities.
He enlisted the support of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg donated $100 million with the understanding it would be matched by another 100 million from other sources. The optics were perfect - an African-American Democratic mayor, a white Republican governor and the cofounder of a social media giant come together to rescue the schools.
Dale Russakoff writes that almost everyone on all sides was well-intentioned, and that makes the failures, as well as the successes, of this five-year experiment important to wrestle with. Russakoff chronicles this experiment in school reform in her new book "The Prize: Who's In Charge Of America's Schools." Dale Russakoff was a reporter for The Washington Post for 28 years, covering politics, education and social policy.
DALE RUSSAKOFF: Yes. I think this is one city where the ideas of the education reform movement were tried all in one place. Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark, had the idea that just to bring of these ideas to one city and use the extraordinary powers of a governor who controlled that school district and the money from Mark Zuckerberg of a hundred million dollars to try everything that - as he said, what was working in the school reform movement. So in that view, it was dramatically expanding charter schools, getting rid of teachers whose evaluations found them to be weak, judging other teachers by their test scores and rewarding them and streamlining the management of the school district so that it ran more like a business.
TERRY GROSS: So right from the start, there's a problem. Booker and Zuckerberg announce this gift of a hundred million dollars to reform the Newark schools. They announce it on "Oprah."
RUSSAKOFF: Well, it played disastrously in the community because, immediately, nobody understood why do we have to turn on "Oprah" at 4 o'clock to find out what's going on in our own city? And if you want to save the schools for the benefit of our children, why weren't we told?
GROSS: So Cory Booker takes the Zuckerberg money and creates a local foundation to handle the Zuckerberg gift and the matching donations. It's called Foundation for Newark's Future. But you're right that the seats on this foundation went only to donors who gave $10 million or more. That was later reduced to $5 million or more, which meant that virtually no one from Newark could afford to serve on this foundation that was trying to change the Newark schools. How did that play in the community?
RUSSAKOFF: Well, that was again totally alienating of the community because there were a number of local foundations in Newark that had been involved for years in education. And, you know, $5 million as an annual gift just was not in their budget. And so they were excluded from having any say, but more importantly, there was no way for the parents, the teachers, the principals, the community leaders - just, you know, really, really intelligence, smart, committed people who had been in the fray for years in the lives of children in education - to be part of this.
GROSS: One of the criticisms of how the money was handled was that $20 million went to consultants, and a lot of the consultants were paid, like, a thousand dollars a day. And you compare that to what teachers make in a year, and that what was their response to that?
RUSSAKOFF: Well, that was another case of, like, you know, this enormous gap between the people who have come to save the Newark children and the people who actually cared for and taught the Newark children. And it became a huge flashpoint because Mark Zuckerberg had indicated that he wanted to give teachers enormous bonuses if they were the top teachers in the district. And that wasn't possible because the district just didn't have the money to pay those bonuses beyond the time that they would have the Zuckerberg money. So there were some merit bonuses put into the contract, but they were relatively small. And the new contract that came out of this reform effort also required teachers in quite a few schools to work longer hours, longer years and to work some weekends for a pretty small stipend that was added to their annual pay.
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