The Prize (27 page)

Nelson's students' difficulties went well beyond academics. One boy's father had been murdered early in the school year. When Nelson stood beside his desk and encouraged him, the boy tried hard and sometimes solved problems. When she moved on to help another student, he put his head on his desk, dropping his pencil on the floor. A girl from a particularly troubled family who was acing tests stopped trying when her estranged, emotionally disturbed parents resumed contact and began fighting.

As a Renew school, Peshine had been given the added resource of a math coach, who met regularly with Nelson and her fellow math teachers to go over student assessment data and pinpoint skills they needed to reteach. The bulk of the test questions on one assessment were word problems, and most of Nelson's students had missed more than half of them. Out of curiosity, Nelson had converted the word problems to number problems, then tested students again. Scores
went up at least thirty points. “They do much better when there's no reading,” she told the coach. As it turned out, Nelson's students had a reading problem as well as a math problem. Only one in five fifth graders were reading at grade level, according to their state tests, but under the new Common Core State Standards, reading was increasingly important to math mastery, with new emphasis on logical reasoning, demonstrating “why” as well as “what.”

One math teacher shook her head, looking over the failing grades of a boy named Emanuel, who had a more urgent problem than reading or math. “His sister was shot at Essex County College,” she said. “It's always on his mind.”

In a school of 612 students, Peshine's lone social worker couldn't begin to support all the teachers who tended daily to troubled children. Barnes and her teachers created a special class for children who had suffered trauma, incorporating relaxation, tai chi, yoga, dance, stretching, deep breathing, and movement with gentle musical accompaniment. All teachers were to seek out children in their classes who were especially sad or angry, and urge them to attend. There was no shortage of candidates. Students loved the classes, visibly relaxing to the music and movement, opening up about their feelings in conversations with each other and teachers. All but two children in one class on one day were motherless. One boy's brother had been murdered. A girl had become homeless when she and her drug-addicted mother and twin infant siblings were evicted from their apartment.

There was no question that Anderson had equipped the Renew schools to serve children better. She had given them stronger principals and teachers, assessments to measure what students were and weren't learning, curriculum aligned to the Common Core standards, online learning programs that individualized instruction. Principals were evaluating teachers with a new and demanding rubric—paid for with millions of dollars in philanthropy—identifying specific steps that each should take to better reach students, then following up with coaching. There was a new team of assistant superintendents
observing all of the district's principals to ensure that evaluations, curriculum, and the exacting Common Core standards were being implemented consistently from school to school. But as experiences at Peshine and other Renew schools made clear, students who were years behind in reading skills or struggling with emotional problems—legacies of poor schooling, poverty, and pervasive violence—needed more than new and improved systems, no matter how well implemented.

One problem was that the quality of the teachers at Renew schools was mixed. Charter schools searched nationally
as well as locally for the best talent, with generous support from Zuckerberg and the matching donors. They got up to $17,500 to spend recruiting and training each new teacher and more than $200,000 for each new principal. But district schools had to choose mostly from Newark's existing supply, since leftover teachers in the excess pool already were bursting the budget.

Also, while Anderson recognized that students needed more social and emotional support, she told Renew principals that the district couldn't afford it. She asked principals to shift funds within their budgets—for example, by consolidating small classes to eliminate a teaching position, then using the savings to pay for a counselor or tutors. But that fell far short of the resources that reached
KIPP
's
SPARK
Academy in the form of extra teachers, tutors, social workers, and a dean dedicated exclusively to family support.

On their own time, Peshine teachers and staff found ways to brighten the children's outlook. Salimah Gordon, the school's liaison to parents, came up with the idea of a “Daddy-Daughter Dance”—not father-daughter, which she feared would leave girls with absent biological fathers feeling excluded. “A daddy can be any male figure in your life—your father, grandfather, uncle, older brother,” she explained to girls in every class. Gordon had been planning the April 2013 event since Peshine opened the previous fall as a Renew school. She wanted to create “a moment the children will never for
get—something they'll always have as a happy memory from childhood.”

The response exceeded her wildest hopes: girls signed up by the score, listing uncles, cousins, neighbors, family friends—and of course fathers—as their escorts. Some girls told her with excitement of usually uninvolved fathers who had said yes.

Finally the night arrived, and sixty-three daddy-daughter pairs passed under an archway of pink, white, and black helium balloons into the Peshine cafeteria, which was transformed for the evening into a ballroom. Huge sashes billowed from the ceiling, creating a pink, white, and black canopy—the work of a parent volunteer who had spent all day creating it, balanced on a stepladder. Peshine music teacher Steve Pittman, the deejay for the night, spun slow and fast love songs of every pop genre and decade. Barnes led a procession of girls—dressed in a rainbow of satiny and silky gowns—as Pittman played Stevie Wonder crooning “Isn't She Lovely.” Daddy-daughter pairs lined up for hours to pose for photographs, taken by Joanne Rutherford-Pastras, a first-grade Peshine teacher by day.

One dad after the next expressed amazement to see so many Newark men in one room, honoring daughters. Muraad Abdus Salaam, a city firefighter escorting his stepdaughter, looked around at one point and said, “In fifty-three years in Newark, I've never seen a school do anything like this. They're showing the men it's time to step it up.”

Gordon, the parent liaison, another daughter of Newark, purchased thin silver bracelets with her own money for each man to give each daughter, and Barnes instructed the men to face the girls and repeat a pledge to love, lead, and encourage them as they snapped the bracelets—featuring two hearts coming together in a clasp—onto their wrists. She asked them to declare their love publicly, and many did.

One man stepped forward in a white dress shirt and pink satin tie, matching his daughter's pink and white party dress. “I'm here to support you in whatever you do,” he said into the microphone, holding
her hand. “I've got your back. Daddy loves you and I'll always be here for you. You understand that?”

In a burst of emotion, the girl buried her head in her father's chest as he wrapped her in his arms.

The budget crisis Cami Anderson foresaw upon her arrival in Newark hit with full force in 2013. Announcing a $57 million revenue gap in March, she cut over $18 million from school budgets and laid off more than two hundred attendance counselors, clerical workers, janitors, parent liaisons, and security guards, most of them Newark residents with few comparable job prospects. “We're raising the poverty level in Newark in the name of school reform,” she told a group of funders, unhappily. “It's a hard thing to wrestle with.” At the same time, she was awarding significant raises to her own leadership team, which she did not make public.

The painful budget cuts were met with an increasingly frequent chorus from critics of the reform effort: “What happened to the Zuckerberg money?” Wilhelmina Holder, the grandmother and ubiquitous reform critic, tartly observed, “The sweet potato pie is looking more like a sliver.”

The layoffs fueled rising resistance to Anderson's plans for the district, but she further riled opponents by arriving at the annual budget hearing in March 2013 with a spending plan that was noticeably short on information. School board members pressed for specifics on which positions and services would be eliminated by her cuts. Would schools lose art or music teachers? Would they have even fewer social workers? But Anderson's staff said the information wasn't available, and the board—with mere advisory status—had no authority to demand it. In addition, the budget understated by more than half the cost of the excess teacher pool, which was a major cause of the funding gap. The board proceeded to vote down Anderson's budget for the coming year, and also voted no confidence in her—in both cases unanimously, but without effect because of the state's control.

Anderson overrode the budget vote, moving ahead with her spending plan. She said she saw the votes as a backlash against layoffs, not a rebuke for delivering a less-than-transparent budget. She later referred to board member Shavar Jeffries, a supporter of charter schools, as a “hypocrite.” She accused him of voting against the budget because he intended to run for mayor and couldn't defend a vote for layoffs, even though the layoffs were necessitated by the district's loss of revenue to charter expansion, which he supported. Jeffries sternly defended his vote, saying he couldn't support a budget without knowing its impact on schools. “She was asking for a billion dollars without telling us how she was going to spend it,” he said. Increasingly, Anderson characterized opposition to her as opposition to reform, asserting that even allies who questioned her approach weren't sufficiently committed to doing what was best for kids.

In the spring of 2013, Ras Baraka declared his candidacy for mayor, with a fiery address vowing to “take back Newark” from the control of outsiders. He made clear that Anderson would be a prime target. “We are witnessing a school-reform process that is not about reforming schools,” he told a packed auditorium in his South Ward district. He gave no hint that although he detested the reformers' tactics, he shared a number of their goals. “We have to reform our own schools and find good-willed and fair-minded people to help us, not hedge fund groups and special interests,” he said. As the city council's education committee chairman, Baraka introduced a resolution calling for a moratorium on all of Anderson's initiatives until she produced data showing that they were improving student achievement, taking a page from the reform movement's insistence on accountability. The resolution passed unanimously, without effect because the council had no power over schools. Within days, Anderson sent an aide to suggest to Baraka that he take a leave of absence, arguing that he had a conflict of interest because he was opposing initiatives as a mayoral candidate that he was supposed to carry out as a principal.

He refused, and the following day a video of his defiant account of
the incident was emailed to supporters with this question: “Are we going to stand by like chumps, and allow this ‘Interloping Outsider' to harass one of our own?”

The staff at Peshine, proud of their hard work and commitment, soon had cause to feel that they were being seriously undervalued. In June 2013, when Anderson sent something called an “Election to Work Agreement” to the turnaround and Renew schools, they learned that an appendix to the new teachers' contract required them to work longer days and years for a flat $3,000 stipend. The previous year, teachers at Peshine, Avon, and several other schools with extended schedules had been paid $12,000 to $15,000, or about $50 an hour, for the extra time, under a federal school improvement grant—a sweet deal the teachers' union had struck with the previous superintendent. The teachers said they knew the bonanza wouldn't last. But they calculated that the new stipend amounted to less than $10.50 an hour for working two weeks in the summer, an extra hour every day, and three weekend days annually. Joe Del Grosso, the union president, had not mentioned the flat-fee stipend in campaigning for the contract, and many teachers acknowledged they had overlooked it. The contract required teachers at turnaround schools to sign the agreement and accept its terms or leave for the excess teacher pool. Teachers called their union in alarm, only to discover that the union was party to the deal.

Longer school days were becoming more common across the country as one of many approaches to boosting student achievement, and Anderson wanted to extend the hours of many Newark schools. Paying hourly wages for the extra time would be prohibitive, she said—particularly at the $50 rate agreed to by her predecessor. “That created the problem by setting totally absurd expectations. In what universe are you going to be able to pay up to fifteen grand forever?” she asked. “I was not going to do hourly pay. It sends the message of clock-punching. It doesn't treat teachers like professionals.” The contrast with her defense of $1,000-a-day pay for long-term consultants was not lost on teachers.

“They should have the same deal we have,” Davis Hannah, Peshine's visual arts teacher and union rep, said of Anderson and her executive team at a meeting of union members. “If we have to get slave wages, they should, too.” Zuckerberg had wanted the contract to raise the status of teachers in society, certainly not to make them feel exploited.

After venting anger toward Anderson and their union for more than an hour at a meeting in the Peshine auditorium, teachers, one by one, rose to say they didn't want to leave Peshine even if they had to accept what they considered degrading pay. What emerged was a devastating picture of working conditions in much of the district. They said they felt unspeakably lucky to have leaders who supported them, who wanted to help them become better teachers. They had worked for too many principals who were ineffective at best, bullies at worst. “This is the best year I've had in almost thirty years in the district,” said the school's music teacher. Another teacher said her stomach used to tighten when her classroom doorknob turned, a signal that a previous principal was arriving to conduct an observation that invariably would be harsh and provide no useful feedback. With Barnes, Lewis, or Meah, she said, observations were constructive, not punitive.