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Costly Quest to Fix Failing Schools

Ruth Marcus on

WASHINGTON -- When Dale Russakoff began writing about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's $100 million gift to help fix the failing schools in Newark, N.J., she assumed she would end up telling an uplifting story of transformational change.

"It sounded to me at the time like, well, that's enough money to do anything," Russakoff recalled of watching Zuckerberg announce the gift before a whooping "Oprah" audience in 2010, joined by a political odd couple in the form of Newark's charismatic, reform-minded Democratic mayor, Cory Booker, and New Jersey's Republican governor, Chris Christie.

"I didn't think it was going to be the miracle that they talked about," Russakoff said, "but I thought that it was going to be noticeable, positive change in education in a city that had been so neglected by history."

Plagued by corruption and mismanagement, the schools had been taken over by the state in 1995 -- hence the importance of Christie's involvement. But the system remained a disaster, with fewer than 40 percent of third- through eighth-graders reading or doing math at grade level.

Russakoff, a former Washington Post reporter, devoted the next several years to real-time reporting about what happened to Zuckerberg's $100 million and another $100 million in matching funds. The effort she relates in "The Prize" is a far more complex and humbling endeavor than anticipated, a case study in the difficulty of translating good intentions into concrete results.

As told by Russakoff, it is a story of well-meaning reformers so convinced of the correctness of their approach, and the urgency of their task, that they failed to do the hard work of winning support from a wary community while spending millions on $1,000-a-day consultants.

 

It is a story of politicians, especially then-Mayor Booker, with more ambition than attention span, leaving behind unfinished business -- and students lagging years below grade level -- as they climb the political ladder.

It is a story of the earnest young billionaire whose conviction that the key to fixing schools is paying the best teachers well collided with the reality of seniority protections not only written into teacher contracts but embedded in state law.

It is a story of dedicated teachers like Princess Williams, whose kindergartners began the school year not knowing the difference between the front and back cover of a book, and the difficulty of solving educational problems in the context of such pervasive poverty and neglect.

It is, above all, a heart-breaking story of students like Alif Beyah, a seventh- grader reading at a second-grade level, stumbling over simple words yet "promoted year after year despite failing basic subjects."

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