The Prize (6 page)

He was not able to complete the sentence, as Winfrey exclaimed, slowly, as if in amazement, “ONE. HUNDRED. MILLION. DOLLARS?” The audience broke into applause. “YO! YO! YO! YO! YO!” Winfrey whooped, and she, Booker, Christie, and the studio audience gave Zuckerberg an explosive standing ovation. The world's youngest billionaire philanthropist remained seated, blushing, appearing uncomfortable amid the adulation.

Asked by Winfrey why he picked Newark, out of all the cities in the country, the T-shirted entrepreneur in open blazer and running shoes gestured toward the dark-suited politicians and said, “Newark is really just because I believe in these guys. Running a company, the main thing that I have to do is find people who are going to be really great leaders and invest in them, and that's what we're doing here. We're setting up a $100 million challenge grant so that Mayor Booker and Governor Christie can have the flexibility they need to . . . turn Newark into a symbol of educational excellence for the whole nation.”

3

September 2010

F
AR FROM THE
set of the
Oprah
show, a young teacher from Newark named Princess Williams had embarked on a profoundly different approach to repairing public education. For eighteen months, Williams had worked with school leaders Dominique Lee, Charity Haygood, and three other teachers and administrators preparing to take the helm of Avon Avenue School, one of the very worst in the state, in one of Newark's poorest neighborhoods. Booker was right, they agreed, that the district urgently needed a systemic overhaul. But as teachers, they knew that transforming education would require far more than strict accountability, performance incentives, and heightened emphasis on data. They were intimately familiar with the challenges Newark children brought to the classroom, and they knew of no model for addressing them other than child by child, teacher by teacher, school by school, from the bottom up. As Booker, Zuckerberg, and Christie vowed on television to create a national model for turning around failing districts within five years, Williams, Lee, and Haygood resolved to commit their entire careers to Newark's schools. They considered themselves reformers too, hav
ing arrived in the Newark school district initially through Teach for America. Princess Williams, who signed on as Avon's lead kindergarten teacher, felt a sense of destiny about teaching Newark children.

Lee referred to Room 112, Williams's kindergarten classroom, as “the future.” The door opened onto a room appointed with simple, homemade learning activities—a large calendar highlighting the date and day of the week, a chart displaying the day's weather (clouds), Post-it notes in a repeating color pattern enumerating the days since school started. A clothesline stretched across the room, with student work hanging at child's-eye level. On this day, the line displayed colored paper on which children had represented the numbers zero through ten in dots, stars, or blocks. Williams had written an enthusiastic remark on each.

Looking younger than her twenty-seven years, the small, pretty teacher wearing a rose-colored blouse over brown cropped pants commanded complete attention from twenty-three children seated before her on an alphabet rug. “We have a special visitor who would like to show you two new letters,” she announced with excitement. “Drumroll, please!”

The children rapidly and rhythmically slapped their legs, eyes focused with anticipation on Williams. The teacher reached dramatically behind a whiteboard and slowly, her dark eyes widening, revealed a white stuffed owl with brown speckles, holding a card bearing the letter O in its beak. There were oohs, ahhs, and wriggles of excitement.

“I want you to meet Echo,” said Williams, cuddling the fluffy toy in her lap. “What letter did he bring for us?” The class answered in unison. She then turned the card over and showed them a picture of an octopus. “O. Octopus. Aw,” everyone chanted. Then Williams made Echo disappear behind the whiteboard and emerge with a card displaying a G and a picture of a board game. “G. Game. Gih,” everyone said.

Williams noticed one girl not looking at Echo. Without raising her voice or breaking the mood, she said, “Sah'Jaidah, our eyes are look
ing at the letters so our brains all remember them and make a connection to the sound.” Sah'Jaidah looked immediately at Echo, who now was showing the class a K and a kite, followed by an H and a hat. Williams had the children hold their hands in front of their mouths to feel the hot air as they made the “h” sound.

It all appeared to unfold effortlessly, with the grace and pacing of ballet. But everything Williams did that day and every day was the result of serious thought, preparation, and even love. She knew from experience that learning represented a lifeline for every child seated before her. Her calling was to ensure that they loved it and craved it, starting now, at the beginning of kindergarten. She treated every moment of every class as an opportunity to infuse the ordinary with wonder—a special visit from Echo to light up a phonics lesson, a pause to create a sensory connection to the rush of air in the “h” sound. It was no coincidence that Echo was within arm's reach. Williams placed him there when plotting out the day's lesson to guard against any interruption in the action, which could allow young minds to wander, breaking the spell of learning. As if to illustrate the risk, squeals and shrieks arose from the kindergarten class next door. “Yes, I'm wearing fishnets!” the teacher could be heard screaming above the clamor, which went on for several minutes as Williams's class moved to their tables where phonics workbooks awaited them for a writing activity. “Look for the O page in the workbook,” she said, as if sending them off on a treasure hunt. “Oooh! Lanice found it! Let's see quiet thumbs-up if you found the O page.” She moved among the tables, giving encouragement and help to those who hadn't found the right page. When the noise died down next door, Williams's students were busy at work, writing O's and circling pictures of an orange, an ocean, an octopus, an owl.

She seemed to have endless ways to make learning playful. When calling on students to spell sight words—those they were supposed to recognize instantly, without sounding out—she offered them a choice: play it (as if strumming a banjo with each letter), shoot it (as if throwing a basketball), kick it, or punch it. A girl named Shaniyah,
her braids clasped with colorful barrettes, loved kickboxing, so she kicked out each letter of c-a-n.

Explaining the difference between a square and a rectangle one day, Williams summoned the two smallest and two tallest children and asked the class if the four of them could form a square with their bodies as its sides. “NOOOO!” chorused about half the students. Since not everyone got it, she instructed the short and tall students to lie down in a four-sided figure. “Are these sides all the same or are two shorter and two longer?” she asked. Some children still weren't sure. She reached for some masking tape, running a strip alongside each student, then asked the four to stand so that everyone could see the resulting four-sided figure. Clearly the sides were unequal. “OOOOH!” everyone exclaimed. So what is it, Williams asked. “A RECTANGLE!” they all said with excitement.

At the beginning of school, few of her students could distinguish between the front and back cover of a book. Nor did most know that words moved from left to right in a sentence, although New Jersey provided free preschool led by certified teachers for children in the poorest school districts. Williams used a literacy program called
STEP
, developed at the University of Chicago to measure each child's pre-reading skills and target instruction to their individual needs.

But beyond tools and teaching skill, what made Williams powerful as a teacher was her connection to her students. She was one of them, and they could feel it. One day, teaching a lesson on the importance of vivid details in storytelling, Williams sat down at a whiteboard and said she wanted to draw a picture of her family's recent barbecue. What details should be in the picture? Everyone had ideas: a grill, hamburgers, hot dogs, grass, the sun, the sky, her baby cousin, her mother, her aunt. As Williams drew the pictures, one boy asked, “Where's your daddy?” A girl who never had known her own father cast an annoyed look at the boy and declared, as if stating the obvious, “Miss Williams ain't got no daddy!” Williams responded that she did have a father, but he wasn't there.

“The children know I'm from Newark. They'll tell me a parent is in
jail or parents were fighting. They blurt it out during a lesson,” Williams said one day after school, sitting in a child-sized chair under the clothesline of her students' latest work. Once, a little girl confided that she had seen her mother's boyfriend beat up her father the night before. With no time to think about what to say, the response rolled out from her life experience: “Miss Williams has seen things like that. One day you'll be able to choose not to be in situations where people treat each other that way. I'm going to help you do that.”

Knowing well that poverty cramped children's horizons, Williams talked to them of “excellence,” striving to surpass their best. At the end of each day, she singled out the students who had done so. Some of those who missed the cut were invariably disappointed, but Williams reminded them that they knew how to handle it. “Don't pout! Blow it out!” they said along with her, taking a deep breath and exhaling. “I push them to be more excellent, never to accept mediocrity, otherwise they hit a ceiling,” she said. She sometimes lay in bed at night thinking of ways to raise their expectations of themselves. If a child liked to braid hair, Williams would say, “That's a great skill for a surgeon.” Those who talked a little too much in class heard, “You should think about becoming a debater.”

“I think a lot about what distinguished me from my friends who became statistics,” she said. “Yes, I saw people get shot. Yes, I saw people get arrested in my own family. But I never had a teacher say, ‘I'm going to expect less of you because of what you're going through.' We have to say, ‘We understand this is very hard for you, but we're not going to use that as an excuse to hold you to a lower standard, and you can't allow it to make you lower your own standards for yourself.'”

Williams came by this understanding the hard way, beginning at age seven, when she, her mother, and two brothers fled their Newark apartment—and Williams's stepfather—for a battered-women's shelter. From then on, there were periods of stability alternating with homelessness. But through it all, Williams's mother, Samantha Lucien, focused her children on learning as the surest path to a better life.
Lucien told her children that her own childhood was troubled, as was her education, and now she wanted—expected—only the best for them.

Williams took her mother's expectations as her own, as did her brothers. When money ran short and their electricity was turned off, she would gather her books and go into the hallway of their apartment building to do her homework under the fluorescent lights. It didn't occur to her to ask her teacher or mother for a reprieve. She was valedictorian of her middle school and won a scholarship to Kent Place, an all-girls private school in upscale Summit, New Jersey, through a national program for students of color with leadership potential, A Better Chance. She excelled as a student and a dancer, even when the family became homeless again and she commuted by bus from a Newark shelter to attend classes with daughters of privilege. As holidays approached, her classmates talked of traveling overseas—“like something that happened every day: you got on a plane and went to Madrid. I was going to Six Flags.” It was the mid-1990s, and urban styles hadn't made it to Summit, so when Williams arrived at Kent Place one day with braids and extensions, she recalled drawing a crowd. “It felt like a cultural barrier,” she remembered. “They said, ‘Your hair grew!'”

Halfway through her junior year, she was suffering from depression and transferred to West Side High School back home in Newark. There Williams met students she considered as bright as she was—students she was sure would have excelled, as she did, if given opportunities—and yet the school system appeared to treat them as if they weren't worth the effort. While some of her own teachers were excellent, Williams felt that, overall, she had gone from a level of rigor that challenged her every day to no rigor at all—no advanced placement classes, no anatomy and physiology. “The mindset at West Side was ‘These kids can't do AP. They're nowhere near ready for it. They're incapable,'” she said. Worse still, most of the students appeared to have the same expectations of themselves. “They mostly didn't do home
work until the period before it was due,” she said. By contrast, she and her group of friends were always studying. She'd sit in the cafeteria reading and taking notes while other kids talked. Inevitably, someone would ask why she was studying at lunchtime, why she carried a book bag full of books, why she carried books at all, she recalled. What made her normal at Kent Place—a drive for knowledge and excellence—made her an outlier among most kids back home.

In her senior year at West Side, Williams's family became homeless again and wound up living in a family friend's basement, in a single room lit by one lamp. She remembered sitting under it filling out her college applications, telling herself, “This is going to get me out of here.” She got into New York University, where she studied and graduated alongside the academic elite from around the country.

While there, she did a work-study program in the New York City public schools, tutoring struggling elementary school readers under the supervision of teachers she considered exceptional—experienced, nurturing, demanding of themselves and the children. She found herself imagining what her friends and classmates at West Side would have become with teachers like that all along the way.