The Prize (20 page)

More than eighty percent of the Newark Public Schools budget went to salaries and benefits, which was typical for a school district. Still, many positions were unnecessary, created years earlier and still locked in by state civil service rules and seniority laws. These jobs were mostly near the bottom of the pay scale, bestowing income and benefits on low-skilled workers for whom no similar opportunities existed in Newark. Unlike in the private sector, where one clerk served multiple managers, NPS assigned multiple clerks to individual managers.

All of this reflected the district's history of operating as both a pa
tronage mill and an educational institution, controlled by whatever political machine happened to be in office—Irish American, Italian American, African American. After fifteen years in charge, the state had done little to ensure that money reached the underserved children who desperately needed it.

Although Anderson laid off hundreds of workers—clerks, security guards, custodians, attendance counselors—the schools saw no increase in resources, largely because overall district revenue was shrinking as students left for charters. Meanwhile, the excess teacher pool ballooned to consume more than $60 million in Anderson's first three years, leading her to cut school budgets in order to pay teachers who had no classroom—all in the name of school reform.

Under state law, charters received only ninety percent of the allotment for district school students, on the assumption that districts had some administrative costs related to charters. But they had none of the legacy costs that came from decades of serving as an employer of last resort for a struggling city. Even starting out with less, well-run charter networks got more money to their schools than the district did, fueling a perception that the state favored them over traditional public schools.

SPARK
Academy, the
KIPP
charter school that Booker had visited with philanthropist Cari Tuna, provided a striking illustration of what the district's money and staff could have been doing for children. According to financial documents from Newark's
KIPP
schools, the charter network sent $12,664 per child to
SPARK
Academy, while the Newark Public Schools sent only $7,597 per child to
BRICK
Avon.
The
KIPP
schools also raised large sums of philanthropy to cover start-up costs for new schools, but once they reached full enrollment,
SPARK
and the others operated fully on public funds.

In addition to having more money at the school level, Joanna Belcher, the
SPARK
principal, had wide latitude to use it to address the particular needs of her students. Because
SPARK
, like all charters in Newark and the great majority nationally, was non-union, she and
her leadership team also were free to adjust teachers' schedules and responsibilities. “We designed the school and the budget purposely based on what kids are going through and what they need,” she said.

To support students who struggled, Belcher placed two certified teachers in each kindergarten, as well as in every math and English class in grades one through three. Students who fell behind got small-group instruction from one teacher while the other led the lesson for those on grade level. For children who still couldn't keep up, a full-time learning specialist—one for each grade—provided tutoring and other interventions. By contrast, Avon and all district schools had one teacher in each classroom. In kindergarten, there was also a classroom aide, who was not required to have graduated from college. Most district schools shared one to two specialists among all grades, if they had any at all. Nor were district classes necessarily smaller. Williams had twenty-three kindergarteners in her class, versus
SPARK
's twenty-six. It was mind-boggling to contemplate what Avon kindergarteners could have learned had there been two Princess Williamses in Room 112 instead of one.

While all charters had equal flexibility with staff and resources, there was wide variation in their results and in the makeup of their student bodies. North Star had by far the highest student test scores in Newark, followed by a number of individual charter schools.
TEAM
's schools ranked sixth among charters in a 2012 analysis by district consultants.
A Stanford University study in the same year found that Newark children in charter schools gained an extra seven and a half months of reading skills and nine months in math.
However, some Newark charters failed dramatically—the state shut down one for financial improprieties and another for such poor instruction and classroom management that children were deemed unsafe. And in other New Jersey cities, charter students learned “significantly less” in reading and about the same in math as their district peers, according to the Stanford study.

All Newark schools, charter and district, served a low-income population, but some considerably more than others. Of the high-per
forming charter networks,
KIPP
had the largest proportion of children in poverty and those who had behavior and learning disabilities, although still not as large as the district's. Seventy-three percent of
KIPP
students qualified for a free lunch, meaning they lived on no more than $30,000 per family of four. At
BRICK
Avon, eighty-three percent qualified, compared to seventy-nine percent on average across the district. At top-scoring North Star, sixty-eight percent qualified.
The
KIPP
network invested time and money combating the selection bias for charters. It was the only Newark charter to provide school busing, opening access to the large number of children whose families didn't own cars or couldn't arrange to take them to and from school on public transit.

Belcher considered great teaching and leadership crucial, but not sufficient for a quality education in a city as troubled as Newark. She knew that not all children had an adult at home who could consistently treat their education as a priority. Rather than leave such issues to individual teachers to overcome, Belcher made them a responsibility of the school by creating a dean of student and family engagement, a position that didn't exist in any district school. Belcher conceived of it after observing Diane Adams, a tall and lanky kindergarten teacher who walked with the perfect posture of a dancer, her frizzy ponytail swinging with each step. With a fun and spirited teaching style that all but camouflaged how demanding she was, Adams could energize even the most reluctant learners. When Belcher asked her how she did it, Adams said she had a different strategy for each child, built on whatever it took to entice them to love school. She arrived early or stayed late to tutor or just to talk, she rewarded milestones with treats tailored to particular students, and most important, she had a talent for persuading the adults in children's lives—if not a parent or grandparent, then a family friend—to get involved in helping them learn. At the end of that year, Belcher pulled Adams out of the classroom and asked her to develop individualized help for all struggling students, in the name of removing barriers to learning. Adams worked with teachers, parents, the school's social workers, outside service providers—
serving as a designer, coordinator, and dispatcher of student support, drafting detailed assignments for everyone involved. “The systems queen,” Belcher called her.

Some cases took a team, if not a village. Belcher herself provided dedicated assistance. One morning late in 2011, a mother of three
SPARK
students was badly beaten by her boyfriend while her children were in school. The mother appeared in the school office, her face bruised and swollen, clutching her newborn baby and desperate for help. Belcher accompanied her and the baby to the hospital, persuaded her to file a police report, and went with her to the courthouse, where they sat together for hours waiting for a lawyer to be assigned. “I'd never seen that in all my career—a principal coming to court with a victim,” said attorney Suzanne Groisser, a specialist in domestic abuse who handled the case.

Even more unusual was what happened back at
SPARK
, where the systems queen took up the case. Diane Adams created a carpooling schedule involving seven different staff members, who would pick up the three children each morning at a neutral location—the family had moved to a shelter whose address was secret—and return them each day after school. The lead social worker, Sarah Dewey, formerly a teacher in the Bronx, held counseling sessions with the children and also guided teachers on how to speak with them about the traumatic experience, to help them feel safe and able to learn. Within two weeks, the mother called with a special request: she wanted a set of
SPARK
banners to hang in their room at the shelter so the children would feel at home. Each letter stood for a school value: Seek knowledge, Pursue justice, Act as a team, Reach for excellence, Keep going. Not one of her children missed a day of school throughout their months in the shelter, and all finished the year above grade level.

More often, Adams worked with students who had severe behavior problems. In the case of one boy, whose home life was chaotic, she and Dewey found a willing partner in a stepfather, who recently had been released from prison and wanted to play a role in the boy's life.
Another boy experienced such volcanic anger that he slugged teachers without warning. Dewey created an “office” for him—with his own child-sized desk and chair—in a corner of her work space, and she and Adams supervised his work while his mother went through the long process of having him classified for psychiatric treatment. Princess Williams had a student at Avon with similarly violent tendencies (in his fiercest rages, he threw chairs, terrifying classmates), but it took the district bureaucracy almost eight months to deliver the support she requested.

A brother and sister at
SPARK
who had been model students suddenly began throwing daily tantrums, disrupting classes. Realizing that they consistently lost control at particular times, Adams assigned a teacher on break shortly before their meltdown times to pull each of them out of class for ten minutes of one-on-one attention. That got them through the rest of the day. It also protected the learning atmosphere for their classmates.

Although many district teachers voluntarily gave long hours to help struggling students, this kind of administrative flexibility would not have been possible in district schools, where the union contract barred the assignment of teachers to nonteaching tasks, such as carpooling or spending break time with children who needed to calm down. At
SPARK
, being available and responsible for all students was part of every job description. Rather than cite the student-teacher ratio as a defining statistic, Belcher referred to the ratio of adult staff to students, 61:520. “
EVERY ADULT IN THE BUILDING
(from lunch aides to custodians to teachers) is 100% responsible for every single child,” she wrote in an email to the staff.

For its 520 students,
SPARK
had two full-time social workers and a third who worked half-time—a stark contrast to larger district schools that had only one or sometimes two. Together, they conducted group therapy sessions with a total of seventy children a week and individual therapy with fifteen. Dewey started a grief group one year for five children who had lost a parent or close family member to murder. At
the same time, she provided play therapy daily for one child and three days a week for another. District social workers typically were too busy to do therapy.

The
KIPP
schools in Newark adopted a deliberately forgiving policy toward parents who missed enrollment deadlines after winning a lottery. If parents failed to contact most charters by the deadline, they lost their child's slot to the next student on the waiting list. But Joanna Belcher was convinced that parents who needed the most support were also likely to miss deadlines. She deployed her staff to track them down, holding their places until the opening day of school, despite the uncertainty this created for teachers. Belcher's hunch was squarely on target in the case of a kindergartner named Da'Veer Snell.

Her staff located Da'Veer's mother, Dyneeka McPherson, less than a month before kindergarten was to start, and Belcher scheduled a home visit, a standard
SPARK
practice to get to know families and children's needs before school began. McPherson arranged to meet Belcher at her grandmother's apartment. She was then twenty-two, and Da'Veer, age five, was her oldest of four children. The young, slender mother in cutoffs and a white top explained that she had applied to both
SPARK
and North Star, and that Da'Veer had been picked in both lotteries, but she had missed both deadlines. She said she recently had called North Star and learned that Da'Veer had lost his spot. When Belcher told McPherson that he was still on the
SPARK
roster, McPherson closed her eyes as if a prayer had been answered and said, her voice catching, “I want him to be better than me.”

Beside her sat Da'Veer, lean and quiet with large, dark eyes that made him appear unusually serious as he colored a picture with concentration. He had attended preschool tuition-free for two years, thanks to a program ordered as part of the
Abbott
rulings to prepare New Jersey's poorest children to learn. But school quality varied widely, and when Belcher showed Da'Veer the letters of the alphabet in random order, he correctly identified only five. Like Williams's stu
dents at
BRICK
Avon, he was far behind
STEP
's national benchmark for literacy in kindergarten-age children.

“We're going to promise to do everything we can to help you go to college,” Belcher told him, as McPherson watched with a look of wonder.

McPherson and Da'Veer's father, Kevin Snell, had faced long odds almost since birth. Both children of drug addicts and raised by their grandmothers, McPherson said they fell in love at age twelve and pledged to each other to do better than their parents. “We decided we can't raise our children the way we was raised,” she said. She worked hard in school and believed she would have been successful in life with more support. But she and Snell had two children by the time she graduated from Central High School in 2007, and two more soon after. Snell had worked since age fifteen on a farm in northwestern New Jersey; he lived there four days a week.