The Prize (25 page)

“Look how much
better
you did,” she said, pulling out his results from January. Then he had stalled after sixty-four words; today he got to ninety-two. “Now do you believe me?” she asked. Alif looked at her gratefully. He had to admit that he was making progress. That was Carlson's mission as much as teaching him to decode and encode vowel sounds, consonants, welded sounds, and more. She had to keep him from giving up—the way he never gave up in basketball.
We didn't come this far to lose
.

Alif took a range of other assessments, and Carlson sent all of them to the district office to be analyzed and scored. When the results arrived a week later, she had to catch her breath. His reading level had risen from second to fifth grade. In one category, word attack skills, he had moved from the equivalent of a midyear second grader to a beginning eighth grader. Rather than tell Alif immediately, she asked him to come the next morning at 7:50 with his mother to see the results. She also invited Charity Haygood and Melinda Weidman. Everyone was there on time except Alif and his mother, who apologized, say
ing that her son made them both late by insisting on taking a shower, even though he'd taken one the night before. Alif just stood there, rubbing his eyes as if someone had yanked him from a deep sleep. Carlson had prepared a PowerPoint slide show that she projected onto the Smart Board, showing Alif's scores in six skill clusters as well as his overall reading level. “Alif's Woodcock Reading Mastery Test Scores,” the top line read. “Alif, you see your name up there in lights, right?” Carlson asked. He nodded, his eyes almost closed, fingers twirling his hair. In the left column was his initial score from September, and in the right, the latest one. She went line by line, reading the scores aloud, before and after. His jaw dropped open when she read that he was sounding out words like an eighth grader. When she reached his overall skill level of fifth grade, a jump of almost three grades, Alif covered his mouth with his hand and looked wide-eyed at the Smart Board. All evidence of sleepiness vanished, and now he was alert, a smile exploding across his face. Haygood threw out her arms like a proud mother and walked toward him, her eyes tearing. He stood to meet her, and they wrapped their arms around each other. More hugs followed: Weidman, then Carlson, and then his mother. “I worked hard and I feel proud of myself,” he said, addressing himself as much as everyone else. He stood in silence for a while, savoring this wondrous experience of success in school. “Reading is going to come easier to me. Now I
have
to come back next year and make more progress.”

The school district agreed to promote Alif to high school if he passed eighth-grade math in summer school. He did, with a grade of A-minus, third in the class. He also had to sign a contract with Avon, promising to read independently and do online remediation exercises for at least forty minutes a night. His mother monitored his independent reading, and Carlson checked his online work, reporting regularly to his mother, who refused to let him go out unless he kept to the schedule. The contract required him to attend high school faithfully unless he had a doctor's excuse and to return to Avon every day for tutoring with Carlson at 3:15. In addition, he had to behave him
self; lapses would lead to detention or suspension—from basketball as well as school.

A few days after celebrating Alif's test results, Carlson found out that she had been rated “highly effective” under the district's new evaluation system, which entitled her to a merit bonus of $10,000—$5,000 for receiving the highest possible grade, and an extra $5,000 because Avon students ranked among the neediest in Newark, academically and economically. This was the fruit of the new teachers' contract, with merit pay that Zuckerberg and other philanthropists considered essential to attracting and retaining the best teachers. Asked if the incentive of extra money had influenced the way she worked with Alif or other students, Carlson answered, “Not at all. Don't get me wrong—the money is nice. But just the progress my students have made, and the progress Alif has made, and how it's changed his life—that's the bonus for me.”

Carlson had been thinking seriously of transferring to another school because of Avon's extended day, which then ended at 4:15 p.m. She and her husband had two children, whom they had adopted and who were now ages seven and eight, and she wanted to be home when they got out of school. “I adopted these children to give them a better life,” she said. “I know I'm giving them a better life than they would've had, but I could do better for them, and that's hard.” In the end, she decided to return to Avon, in part because she had promised Alif she would work with him another year. “If I stayed home, I would do better for my kids, but what's happening with Alif is why I teach,” she said.

As the school year ended, Haygood announced over the loudspeaker that her daughter, having just graduated from Spelman College, was going to become a teacher in Newark. She asked all students to stop by the office and compose a sentence or two in a book of advice for her. Alif was one of the first to show up. “Don't ever give up on a student,” he wrote.

11

February 2012–June 2013

T
HE TEACHERS' CONTRACT
was a trophy for Zuckerberg, Booker, Christie, and Anderson, but at the same time, Anderson had a school district to run. On a Friday evening early in 2012, after eighteen months on the job, she unveiled her most dramatic proposal to turn around the Newark public schools. Like superintendents in many other struggling urban districts, she would close schools to shore up finances as enrollment shrank. But unlike in some other cities—or in Newark the previous year, when Cerf and the consultants were calling the shots—she promised there would be gains in return for the pain. She would consolidate the district's twelve lowest-performing kindergarten-through-eighth-grade schools into eight “Renew schools,” each with a top principal who would be given latitude to handpick the best teachers and preside over a longer school day, new curriculum, more computers, enhanced training time for teachers, and extensive engagement of parents. Anderson hoped these eight schools would become “proof points,” evidence that her strategies could turn around all Newark schools. She and her leader
ship team rehearsed how to answer angry parents: “Your child's school didn't have the ingredients for success. We're providing those ingredients so that children can soar.”

She chose for her presentation a lecture hall at the Paul Robeson Center at Rutgers University's downtown Newark campus, anticipating an audience of about two hundred mostly invited civic and education leaders. Instead, roughly a thousand people turned out, a mix of parents whose children's schools were closing, teachers, union activists, politicians, and a cadre of hecklers who came to almost every public forum to inveigh against Christie, Booker, and purported conspiracies.

Nothing else went as Anderson had planned either. A respected Rutgers administrator who was supposed to introduce her called a day earlier to say she couldn't make it because of a sick parent. A prominent minister, who had agreed to share the stage and close the presentation, phoned in sick with laryngitis. Another influential pastor who was supposed to be there called to say he was stuck in traffic in New York City. Anderson stood alone on the podium.

The heckling began almost as soon as she started to speak. “It's great to have an opportunity to talk,” Anderson said.
“We don't want you to talk!”
several voices yelled from the crowd.
“Sit down!”
others called from around the room. Anderson spoke from PowerPoint slides that appeared on a projection screen beside her, as if addressing a business conference. One slide, a quote from Martin Luther King Jr., said, “This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.”

Anderson did manage to get through some of her talk, including a recitation of dismal student test scores at the twelve schools she had targeted. Most had shrinking enrollments, she said, leaving buildings one-third to one-half empty, too expensive to maintain. In some of them, only twenty percent of students were reading at their grade level. “We have to have a frank conversation about what it's going to take to put our kids on a path to success so they can access the twenty-
first century,” she said. This seemed to earn her a few moments of attention.

But the heckling resumed when she proposed to close schools. She bowed her head for a moment, then looked up with lips tightened, holding the microphone in both hands, fixing her gaze on the angry crowd. “We're proposing . . .” Anderson said loudly, as dozens of people in the crowd shouted her down. “WE'RE PROPOSING . . .”

“
Cami must
go!
” a woman shrieked above the din. “
Send the devil back to New York!
” yelled a union activist.

No one came to her aid, not even to ask everyone to be civil, to hear her out—much less to state the obvious: Newark was failing its children on a massive scale and something had to change. In all the years the crisis had been building, there had been no comparable public outcry. In 2005, a lone school board member, Richard Cammarieri, had demanded urgent action, citing high schools where fewer than twenty students passed the state proficiency test, and elementary schools—particularly in the South Ward—that had become dumping grounds for the weakest teachers, rendering them “voids of academic exercise.” He had called for an “urgent, systemic response.”
The district had ordered up studies, but nothing had changed. “It was just utter passivity. It was hard to explain,” Cammarieri recalled. “We literally manufactured the bullets the charters are now firing at us.”

As the noise level rose in the Robeson Center, the school board members sat in silence. Police officers stood in place. Anderson's executive team, almost all white, from New York City, and unknown to the crowd, sat motionless in the front row. Cerf, knowing he would have fueled the furor had he intervened, remained seated and silent too. Booker was not there. Anderson, in fact, had asked him not to come, assuming that his presence would have provoked even more opposition.

Anderson hurried through the rest of her presentation, proposing to lease the closed schools to charters—providing they eliminated practices that had the effect of screening out the neediest students.
“Charters are
not
equity!” screamed a teacher from a school targeted for closure.

By then it was impossible to hear anything but angry voices yelling all at once. Amid the cacophony, Anderson said something about wanting this to be the beginning, not the end, of a community discussion. “I look forward to coming together on behalf of our kids,” she added, barely audibly. “So I thank you and I look forward to additional conversation.” With that, she left the podium and the room, exiting by a side door. Her final PowerPoint slide remained on the screen: “Our kids can't wait. We must act now. Get involved.”

The scene oddly recalled her showstopping theater performance at age eleven, when she stood alone and triumphant onstage, having bested the bad guys. But this time, the opposition was still standing, and she was gone.

The Robeson Center audience was an especially stark example of the growing opposition to top-down reform in Newark. Anderson was certain that the teachers' and principals' unions had packed the house, since school closings and expansion of charters threatened hundreds of jobs. Indeed, unions were there in force, including teachers and principals but also cafeteria workers, clerks, security guards, janitors—workers who had few options for secure employment outside the school district. So were parents, fearful that children whose schools were closing would have to walk through gang-ruled territory or cross highly trafficked thoroughfares to reach their reassigned schools. Affected principals had learned of the plan only that morning, alerting staffs, who alerted parents, who came to protest what they saw as a violation of their right to a voice in the fate of their children's schools. There it was again: disrespect. The word rose from conversations all over the auditorium.

It didn't take unions to stir up fears that school closings and charter schools were part of a conspiracy by wealthy profiteers. “Some people believe that sincerely, and some people use that belief,” Richard Cammarieri said. As Councilman Ron Rice Jr. had said in 2010, soon
after the Zuckerberg gift was announced, Newark suffered from “extreme xenophobia,” particularly toward white outsiders who sought to change the city's direction. The victimization narrative stretched back to urban renewal and white flight. “We drink it with our mother's milk,” as a prominent civic leader had told Booker and Cerf during the uproar over reform a year earlier.

Despite the obvious barriers, many leaders in the city saw the potential to change the conversation about education. “I've not met one person who does not believe we should improve our schools—grassroots activists, single mothers, agitators, quiet school retirees, librarians,” said Reverend William Howard, a respected Baptist pastor who had come to Newark after having played a prominent role in the anti-apartheid movement. At first he was supportive of Cami Anderson, counseling her to work patiently and humbly to nurture change from within. “I'm judging from the revolution in South Africa and Zimbabwe,” he said. “I know that no abiding change in human communities is imposed.”

Two days after the public battering, Anderson was undeterred, certain that parents would embrace her vision once they understood it. At home in Newark, preparing for a Super Bowl party and sporting a well-worn Giants football jersey, she said of the presentation at the Robeson Center, “I'd give it a B-minus. If I could change three or four things, it would've been an A.” Sitting at her dining room table beside a stack of district documents, she said she had no intention of turning back, and in fact was already laying plans with her leadership team to hold information sessions with parents from each affected school. Just as Cerf had said of her, Anderson had the capacity to “get the shit absolutely kicked out” of her and keep going. She said she had learned her lesson from Friday night: when she met with parents, she would have district security guards block access to others. She wanted to talk with the real community.