The Prize (2 page)

It seemed that every side in the education debate had its eyes on a different prize. In impoverished cities, the school district with its bloated payroll was often the employer of first and last resort. Over the years in Newark, numerous politicians had actually taken to call
ing the district budget “the prize.” Reformers saw in districts like Newark an opportunity to prove that systems built around unions and large public bureaucracies were themselves an obstacle to learning. At the heart of it all were the children and a question continually posed by their parents and teachers: Were the battles waged in their name really improving young lives?

The education of the poorest Americans has been a cause of the wealthiest since Reconstruction, when Northern industrialists built schools of varying caliber across the South for former slaves. Henry Ford created the Ford English School in 1913 to teach “basic reading and speaking comprehension skills” to mostly foreign-born factory workers.
Early in the twentieth century, Andrew Carnegie's foundation developed the “Carnegie unit,” or the credit hour, which became the currency of learning: to graduate from high school, students still must earn a certain number of credits, based not on what they have learned, but on time spent in classes.

In the most spectacular example of education philanthropy in the twentieth century, Walter Annenberg stood with President Clinton in the White House Rose Garden in late 1993 and committed $500 million to “guarantee our nation's future” by financing reforms in thousands of urban and rural schools. The Annenberg Challenge, as it was known, drew $600 million in matching contributions and reached more than 1.5 million children in thirty-five states. But the overwhelming verdict was that while the effort benefited many individual schools and children, it didn't dent the problems in the larger system.

Discontent over public education had been galvanized in 1983 by a five-alarm federal report,
A Nation at Risk
, announcing that American students had fallen significantly behind those in other industrialized countries, jeopardizing the nation's economic competitiveness. “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war,” the report said.

Top corporate leaders worked alongside governors to raise state aca
demic standards and institute standardized testing to monitor student progress. Their efforts ultimately led to the No Child Left Behind law, signed by President George W. Bush in 2002, which dramatically expanded testing and required reporting of student scores by race and income level. That data documented a yawning gap between the academic achievement of poor and minority children and all others. In the late 1980s, a movement championed mainly by conservative Republicans sought to give parents in inner-city districts publicly subsidized vouchers to enroll children in religious or private schools.

In 1990, Teach for America began recruiting elite college graduates to teach for two years in the lowest-income communities. The goal was to develop a generation of future leaders dedicated to battling inequity in the education system, whether from inside or out. They were deemed “education entrepreneurs”—an oxymoron only a few years earlier—and many went on to found charter schools, new teacher and principal training programs, consulting practices, and other ventures intended to upend the existing system. By the end of the decade, they had some of the nation's largest fortunes behind them.

For generations, the foundations of deceased early-twentieth-century industrialists had dominated education philanthropy. Beginning in 2000, there was a rapid changing of the guard as living billionaires—Bill Gates of Microsoft, the Walton family of the Walmart fortune, Michael Dell of Dell computers, and Eli Broad, the California insurance and real estate magnate—became the nation's top donors to K–12 education.
These spectacularly successful entrepreneurs, who mostly made their fortunes disrupting established industries with technology and new business models, were drawn to young reformers trying to do the same in public education. They defined the system itself as the problem.

“It was a change in the meaning of philanthropy,” said Kim Smith, a cofounder of the NewSchools Venture Fund, a philanthropy financed by Silicon Valley venture capitalists. “In the past, if you gave money to, say, housing or the arts, the need would be perpetual. You didn't believe it would one day sustain itself. But this group of people
understands leverage. If you get education right, you're going to get people jobs, reduce incarceration, et cetera. So the idea was to help people analyze what's not working and inspire entrepreneurs to solve problems.”

They became known as “venture philanthropists” and called themselves investors rather than donors, seeking returns in the form of sweeping changes to public schooling. Employing management consultants and the kinds of analytic tools that fueled the rise of their companies, they pressed for data-driven accountability systems to measure the effectiveness of teachers and schools. President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan incorporated many of those goals into Race to the Top, a $4.3 billion initiative that induced states to expand charter schools and to tie teachers' evaluations, pay, and job security to growth in their students' standardized test scores. The stated goal was to put single-minded focus on what was best for children, even if at the expense of upending adult lives and livelihoods.

In the beginning, Democratic politicians almost universally spurned the cause, as did many African American leaders, perceiving these efforts as threats to the Democratic base in cities—unions, public sector jobs, and politicians who doled them out. They questioned the credibility of a movement to reform education for America's lowest-income black and brown schoolchildren that was led by white elites and financed by some of the richest men on the planet—labeled the “billionaire boys' club” by education historian Diane Ravitch, a onetime reformer who emerged as a prominent opponent of the movement she had once embraced. An early exception within the ranks of the voucher movement was Howard Fuller, whose long journey through civil rights activism, Black Power advocacy, the African liberation movement, and community organizing had led him to the cause of education in his native Milwaukee, where low-income and minority children were dropping out of district schools in droves. After doing battle as an activist and later as superintendent of schools, he resigned in 1995, declaring the district “hopelessly mired in the status quo.”

But Fuller was an outlier, and reformers recognized they had a problem. Cory Booker couldn't have arrived at a more opportune time.

Booker had emerged from the first generation of black leaders born after the civil rights movement. His parents, who grew up in the segregated South and participated in sit-ins in the 1960s, were among the first African Americans to rise into management at IBM. They raised him and his brother in the almost all-white suburb of Harrington Park, about twenty miles from Newark. “We wanted our sons to learn to navigate in the larger world,” recalled his mother, Carolyn Booker. “This, too, was part of the struggle.”

Cory Booker made it look easy. Six foot three, gregarious and charismatic, he was an honors student, a football star in high school, and president of his senior class. One success followed another. He graduated from Stanford University, went on to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and then to Yale Law School. Ed Nicoll, a forty-year-old self-made millionaire who was studying law at Yale, became one of his close friends. In class, where most students showcased abstract-thinking skills, Nicoll said, Booker spun folksy stories about his family, often ending with a point about social justice. “He got away with it and he enchanted everyone from left to right,” Nicoll said. “In a class where everybody secretly believed they'd be the next senator or the next president of the United States, it was absolutely clear that Cory had leadership written all over him . . . Even back then, people said he'd be the first black president.”

Instead of pursuing lucrative job prospects after law school, Booker went to Newark in 1997 to represent poor tenants, paid by a Skadden Foundation fellowship. He moved into low-income housing in an area of the Central Ward that was riddled with drugs and crime, organizing tenants to take on slumlords and growing close to a number of community activists. With their support, he ran for city council the next year, arguing that government was part of the problem—city hall looked the other way when slumlords gave money to the
right politicians. Ed Nicoll took time off from his work in finance to help Booker raise money for his campaign. His advice was simple. Tell wealthy donors your own story: a privileged young African American moves to one of the nation's poorest cities to tackle the unfinished business of the civil rights movement. Booker found Nicoll's lesson invaluable.

“He was the first person who told me—and many people have said it since—that investors bet on people, not on business models, because they know successful people find a way to be successful,” Booker said.

Booker raised more than $140,000, an unheard-of sum at the time for a Newark council race. In the spring of 1998, after a grassroots campaign that included knocking on every door in his ward, Booker, who had just turned twenty-nine, edged out four-term councilman George Branch in a runoff.

With his golden résumé and gritty surroundings, Booker quickly displayed a gift for attracting media attention. He was featured on
60 Minutes
, on the
CBS Evening News
, and in
Time
magazine for staging hunger strikes and camping out for weeks at a time in drug corridors to demand better security for law-abiding residents. “I moved onto the front lines, the last frontier for really, truly making justice happen, and that's in our inner cities,” Booker said in an interview with Dan Rather.

He called his political philosophy “pragmatic Democratic,” looking to government but also private and faith-based initiatives to address poverty. Departing further from the standard playbook for urban Democrats, Booker became an early champion of charter schools, arguing that the poorest children—like the richest—should be able to opt out of bad schools. He later took the even more unconventional step of embracing vouchers for private schools for the same reason.

Booker was a valuable asset for the almost universally white, rich, Republican voucher movement, which along with the charter movement introduced him to some of his major political donors. He began
shuttling between two worlds: the troubled streets of Newark and the rarefied redoubts of wealthy donors, where he became a potent fundraiser and mesmerizing orator.

His education views won him an invitation in September 2000 to deliver a speech at the conservative Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. In an impassioned address, still featured on the institute's website more than a decade later, Booker depicted Newark residents as captives of self-dealing, nepotistic, patronage-dispensing politicians who ignored their needs. He said this was particularly true in the “repugnant” school system. “I define public education not as a publicly guaranteed space and a publicly run, publicly funded building where our children are sent based on their
ZIP
code. Public education is the use of public dollars to educate our children at the schools that are best equipped to do so—public schools, magnet schools, charter schools, Baptist schools, Jewish schools.”

In Booker's view, that speech launched his national reputation. “I became a pariah in Democratic circles for taking on the party orthodoxy on education, but I found a national community of people who were feeling the same way, on the left and the right,” he said. “In 2002, when I first ran for mayor, I had all these Republican donors and donors from outside Newark, many of them motivated because we have an African American urban Democrat telling the truth about education.”

One of them was Ravenel Boykin Curry IV, then a thirty-six-year-old principal in a family-owned hedge fund in Manhattan. Curry, a Democratic supporter of charter schools who became one of Booker's most generous backers, confessed that he hadn't given a thought to Newark at the time. “It seemed hopeless,” he said. “Everyone just looks out and sighs and thinks, ‘There's nothing I can do.' Then this guy with great political skills who's willing to make the sacrifices we weren't willing to make comes along, and it reignites the old flame: ‘Oh, yeah, we can still change the world.'”

Curry wrote Booker a check and introduced him to some of his Harvard Business School classmates. “They let Cory into their board
rooms and offices, introduced him to people they worked with in hedge funds,” said a Democratic operative who worked with them. “As young finance people, they looked at a guy like Cory at this stage as if they were buying Google at seventy-five dollars a share. They were talking about him being the first black president before he even got elected to the city council, and they all wanted to be a part of that ride. If it was twenty-five years, that was fine. They were in.”

In his 2002 campaign against four-term mayor Sharpe James—who embodied the urban machine politics Booker decried to the Manhattan Institute—Booker drew more than $3 million in contributions, from Republicans as well as Democrats. James turned the newcomer's fundraising against him, branding him an agent of rich, white outsiders, a time-honored way to inflame Newark voters' passions. According to an analysis by Think Progress, more than $565,000, in fact, came from Wall Street financiers and investors. James won the race, but by the smallest margin in his then thirty-two-year political career. A documentary about the hard-fought campaign,
Street Fight
—financed by Curry and made by his younger brother, Marshall—was nominated for an Oscar in 2005 and became a staple of Booker's political narrative. The campaign inspired Curry, Whitney Tilson, Charles Ledley, and John Petry, all hedge fund managers enriched by the late-1990s boom on Wall Street, to seek out and support more Democrats who embraced charter schools and opposed the influence of teachers' unions on the party. They ultimately formed a political action committee, Democrats for Education Reform, with Booker as one of their star fundraisers. The group's beneficiaries would come to include the 2004 U.S. Senate candidate from Illinois, Barack Obama.