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The Prize: Who's in Charge of America's Schools?, by Dale Russakoff
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Review
A New York Times Bestseller “A brilliantly reported behind-the-scenes account of one city’s attempt to right its failing public schools. . . .Russakoff maintains a cleareyed distance, her observations penetratingly honest and incisive to what she sees and what she hears. I suspect some may have regretted letting Russakoff in. We couldn’t have asked for a better guide. . . . THE PRIZE is paradoxically a sobering yet exhilarating tale. For alongside the stories of those calling the shots, Russakoff tells the stories of those most profoundly affected by their decisions: teachers, students and their parents. . . . I repeatedly found myself writing in the margins, ‘Wow,’ either because of the heroic efforts by teachers and staffers or because of the obstacles facing their students. . . . THE PRIZE may well be one of the most important books on education to come along in years.” —Alex Kotlowitz, New York Times Book Review“A stunning account of efforts by wealthy outsiders and ambitious politicians to fix Newark's failing public schools. Veteran journalist Dale Russakoff's narrative is rich with details and anecdotes that showcase the quality of her writing and bring Newark to life for people who have never lived or visited there….The story likely will unnerve educators, reformers, taxpayers, politicians, parents and students anywhere."—Chicago Tribune "if you read Russakoff’s account and find your beliefs vindicated, you’re not trying hard enough."—The Seventy Four “Washington Post reporter Russakoff’s fascinating study of the struggle to reform the Newark school system reveals the inner workings of a wide range of systemic and grassroots problems (charter schools, testing, accountability, private donors) plaguing education reform today… Russakoff’s eagle-eyed view of the current state of the public education system in Newark and the United States is one of the finest education surveys in recent memory.”—Publishers Weekly, STARRED "This is of one the most disturbing and powerful books I've read in years. The point of this story is not that the well intentioned Mark Zuckerberg and his wife gave $100 million to help those less fortunate. The point is they gave it to the wrong people. This deeply researched story left me cheering for teachers, crying for schoolchildren, and raging at politicians. With The Prize, Dale Russakoff demonstrates why she is one of the great nonfiction voices of our time." —James McBride, author of The Color of Water and The Good Lord Bird "Dale Russakoff managed to get amazing access to the inside story of Mark Zuckerberg’s giant gift to Newark’s schools. And she shows how it all fell apart, derailed and compromised by arrogant reformers, ambitious politicians, and short-sighted special interests. An essential history of the modern education-reform movement, both infuriating and inspiring." —Paul Tough, author of How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character "Dale Russakoff, one of America’s great journalists, illuminates one of the country’s great problems—the failure of inner city schools—with on-the-ground reporting that extends from the governor’s office and fancy philanthropies down (or up) to the small miracles performed every day by dedicated Newark classroom teachers. Defenders of charter schools and district schools will find not the usual talking points and platitudes, but hard truths contained in Russakoff’s brilliant blend of skeptical and compassionate reportage." —Jonathan Alter, author of The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies "With The Prize Dale Russakoff has brilliantly rendered the hopes, complexities, pitfalls, and flaws of the efforts to reform American education. This is not simply the compelling story of a single conflict-ridden school system, it is a metaphor for the failing institutions that have betrayed an entire generation of American children."—Jelani Cobb, author of To the Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip-Hop Aesthetic"The Prize is a riveting cautionary tale. Despite the best intentions of philanthropists and politicians, big money and big data will not save urban education, as long as reform efforts are undemocratic and overlook the realities of poor children's lives. With her deep ties to Newark, only Dale Russakoff could have told this poignant story. The Prize is essential reading for anyone who cares about how to give hope to America's most vulnerable kids."—Dana Goldstein, author of The Teacher Wars"The fight for, or over, the children of Newark might have been “merely” an important story about the future of public education in America, but in Russakoff’s accomplished hands—and with a cast of characters including Chris Christie, Cory Booker, and Mark Zuckerberg—it has become a Shakespearean spectacle of cross-purposes: ambition, altruism, and just about any human drive that invites an equal and opposite reaction."—Diane McWhorter, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Carry Me Home
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From the Inside Flap
Mark Zuckerberg, Chris Christie, and Cory Booker were ready to reform our failing schools. They got an education. When Mark Zuckerberg announced to a cheering Oprah audience his $100 million pledge to transform the downtrodden schools of Newark, New Jersey, then mayor Cory Booker and Governor Chris Christie were beside him, vowing to help make Newark “a symbol of educational excellence for the whole nation.” But their plans soon ran into the cityÂ’s seasoned education players, fierce protectors of their billion-dollar-a-year system. ItÂ’s a prize that, for generations, has enriched seemingly everyone, except NewarkÂ’s children. Dale Russakoff delivers a riveting drama of our times, encompassing the rise of celebrity politics, big philanthropy, extreme economic inequality, the charter school movement, and the struggles and triumphs of schools in one of the nationÂ’s poorest cities. As Cory Booker navigates between his status as “rock star mayor” on OprahÂ’s stage and object of considerable distrust at home, the tumultuous changes planned by reformers and their highly paid consultants spark a fiery grassroots opposition stoked by local politicians and union leaders. The growth of charters forces the hand of NewarkÂ’s school superintendent Cami Anderson, who closes, consolidates, or redesigns more than a third of the cityÂ’s schools—a scenario on the horizon for many urban districts across America. Russakoff provides a close-up view of twenty-six-year-old Zuckerberg and his wife as they decide to give the immense sum of money to Newark and then experience an education of their own amid the fallout of the reforms. Most moving are RussakoffÂ’s portraits from inside classrooms, as homegrown teachers and principals battle heroically to reach students damaged by extreme poverty and violence.The Prize is an absorbing portrait of a titanic struggle, indispensable for anyone who cares about the future of public education and the nationÂ’s children. Â
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Product details
Hardcover: 246 pages
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (September 8, 2015)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0547840055
ISBN-13: 978-0547840055
Product Dimensions:
6 x 1 x 9 inches
Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.4 out of 5 stars
136 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#317,259 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Very revealing. Dale Russakoff details the Newark fiasco that has become the edu-reform movements crowning failure. She takes you right into the fleshy underbelly of the so-called "school reform" movement. Booker and Christie are exposed as the nasty, money grubbing, "what's in it for me" politicians that we always knew they were while manipulating Zuckerberg out of millions. You can see the change in Zuckerberg from philanthropic dupe to hardcore reformist from dealing with the bozos in charge of the Newark Public Schools. They say power corrupts. Add a 100 million dollars and you see the ultimate in corruption. Good read, especially if you still believe our children should not be for sale!
Dale Russakoff's "The Prize" is such a good, and important book. It tells us the story of what happened after Mark Zuckerberg donated $100 million to remake the failing Newark Public Schools. The book is refreshing in so many different ways. It looks at what happens AFTER the initial media euphoria died down, when the nuts and bolts of governance make the difference between success and failure. The Zuckerberg/Christie/Booker effort, for all the hype, has to be diagnosed with a failing grade. Russakoff gives us the story from the ground up, where efforts to bring change to political systems are won and lost. This one was lost on the ground, and Russakoff speaks truth to all sides engaging in the debate on how to best educate our children. Charters vs. traditional public schools? Merit pay for teachers? "Corporatists" trying to ram top down educational theories and practices onto school districts, rewarding a network of consultants wired into the "ed reform" movement? All that, and much more is looked at in this book, with no ideological ax to grind (that I can detect).There are many pervasive problems in government, and solving those problems requires a willingness to expend some political capital, as well as really concentrating, time wise, on the task at hand. From the book:"The Star-Ledger reported that Booker spent more than one in five days out of the city in 2011. Sandberg had taken charge of vetting the $100 million arrangement, which specified in writing that Christie would delegate “strategic and operational†leadership of the state-controlled schools to Booker. But despite her widely respected business acumen, she too was apparently caught off guard. As Booker traveled the country making speeches and moved from crisis to crisis, the Facebook duo stumbled upon an open secret in Newark. Clement Price, the Rutgers historian, summed it up this way: “There’s no such thing as a rock-star mayor. You’re either a rock star or a mayor. You can’t be both.†Another tidbit from the book: The public face of the engagement effort, announced by Booker in early November as a campaign of “relentless outreach,†was a series of eleven forums for Newark residents. “We want bottom-up, teacher-driven reforms that will be sustained,†the mayor said at one forum, although he missed most of them. “We can now access the resources—whatever we need—but we need a community vision for change and reform.â€Unfortunately our political system does not lend itself to the necessary investments of time and capital by elected leadership. Mayor Booker and Governor Christie come out relatively badly, in spite of good intentions. Both were looking to political futures beyond the positions they were in, and while in our system that is accepted, we must also accept the downside of looking beyond the current political horizon. Mayor Booker has become Senator Booker, and Governor Christie is looking to become President Christie. Superficial decision making in difficult areas, in so many instances, kicks the difficult into the future, and allows opportunity for progress to dissipate.Russakoff looks at the particulars of the "reform" movement in Newark post donation, including the Booker effort to raise an additional $100 million to match the Zuckerberg grant, the ignorance of Zuckerberg to the realities of making changes to the teachers contract, and the eventual disconnect between the reform movement and the people they are supposed to be helping. Investing time is not the only requisite for success. Good management and clear lines of authority are a necessity for success. The misstep on the teachers contract, and the crazy system of accountability that existed in the Newark public schools, contributed to the ultimate failure. From the book:"A striking feature of the Newark reform effort, from the beginning, was that no one was in charge. Cerf’s concept of a “three-legged stool†implied that Zuckerberg, the governor (through the state-appointed superintendent), and the mayor would call the shots together. To those trying to carry out reforms, this arrangement was opaque and baffling. One of the consultants tasked with redesigning the district said in a private conversation, “I’m not sure who our client is. The contract came through Bari Mattes’s office [Booker’s chief fundraiser], so that suggests Booker is the client, but he has no constitutional authority over education. The funding is from Broad, Goldman Sachs, and Zuckerberg, but they have no legal authority. I think Cerf is the client, because the state runs the district. But I’m not positive.†In other words, the consultants worked for the person who originally founded the consulting firm. Although Booker, Christie, and Cerf were emphatic about the need to impose accountability on a notoriously unaccountable bureaucracy, it was becoming apparent that no one of them was ultimately accountable for making it happen."No clear lines of authority, no one person responsible, and huge change needed. Not a recipe for success. For those thinking that only the "corporatist" reformers come off badly that is not so. The teacher unions get nicked as well, and the status quo is described for what it is, a failure for students. Complicated problems do not lend themselves to easy, or ideologically rigid solutions. When you read this outstanding effort by Dale Russakoff that will become apparent.
Russakoff does a great job documenting a city that is normally ignored. She outlines the issues in a powerful narrative, and has no problem showing the arrogance of the righteous--Cory Booker, Chris Christie, et. al. If Booker runs for president in 2020, this book needs to be re-released, and he needs to be asked about what is contained here.February 1, 2019 update: Because Booker has announced his run for president, I thought I would place here my full review for my blog and Africology: The Journal of Pan-African Studies.***Book Review: Neo-Colonialism By PowerPoint: The Fight For, And Against, The Newark, N.J. SchoolsThe word “conspiracy†gets thrown around a lot in African communities, ever since the middle of the last century. And it’s understandable: the assassinations of King and X, the discovery of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s COINTEL-PRO files, and the disposal in one way or another of any leader of African descent who doesn’t toe the blood-dotted line of the West. But how much of a conspiracy is it when the victim doesn’t have the required amount of power for self-determination in the first place? This book, released today, is about how relatively powerless people fought back against their status when, insult to injury added, even their relatively little power was taken from them.It starts with Cory Booker, the neo-liberal mayor of Newark, New Jersey, and Chris Christie, the conservative governor of the state, secretly deciding all by themselves in the backseat of a Chevy Tahoe in 2009 that they will transform American education by turning Newark into a laboratory for the New York-based, greatly monied education reform movement. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook, develops a political man-crush on Booker and signs on by 2011, pledging $100 million (to be matched by other donors) to make New Jersey’s largest city into a charter-school haven in five years, staffed by six-figure, non-unionized teachers. Like the benevolent colonizers of old, all believe they go in with good intentions: self-government by the dark, poor people has not worked in the internal colony, the reasoning goes, or the state would not have taken over the school district back in 1995. The teacher’s unions are stopping progress, the reformers argued to themselves, by making sure they tie the hand of local politicos and school board members. So, they privately reasoned, the only way to change the system is to overthrow it—to go past all the community obstacles. So they hire $1,000-a-day consultants and get to work.After absorbing the opening shot heard-round-the-world of the revolution it now understood it was a pawn in, the Newark grassroots is then introduced to Cami Anderson, a white woman of hippie background who has been named the school’s superintendent by Christie and Booker. Like education reformer Michelle Rhee did in Washington, D.C., she then sets out, from the community perspectives, to close as many schools and alienate every teacher and parent she can. Meanwhile and not coincidentally, charter schools, some rising out of the closed public ones, begin flourishing in the the old, struggling-against-decay, never-recovered-from-the-1967-rebellion ghetto, providing resources and specialized attention to small, selected groups of poor Black and Brown children the always-struggling public schools can’t match.Everyone flexes what muscle they have. The teacher’s unions demand their back pay as a condition to their negotiations with Booker and Anderson over being able to fire bad teachers and financially reward good ones, and get it. The money people get their calls answered from the celebrity mayor, who eventually uses his Captain America persona to get elected to the U.S. Senate in 2013. Newark students organize and protest Anderson, with more than a little help from a well-known local name: Ras Baraka, a high-school principal and city councilman (and one of the sons of poet-activists Amiri and Amina Baraka). He seizes the issue that will get him elected mayor in 2014, defeating a Theo Huxtable-type candidate propped up by the same education reform movement. “The festering resistance to Anderson, the backlash against [the top-down reforms], and the first mayoral campaign of the post-Booker era became one and the same.†The street protests grow so large and consistent in Newark that Christie—days away from announcing his Republican presidential nomination run this past summer—makes a deal with newly-elected Mayor Baraka that, at this September 2015 writing, may transfer city education power back to the people a year from now. A bewildered Anderson is sent packing, replaced, amazingly, by a former state education commissioner—one of the chief architects of the neo-colonial plan! Whether the new school district superintendent cleans up his own mess is this story’s next chapter, to be written by today’s journalists and tomorrow’s historians.Dale Russakoff, a longtime Washington Post journalist and resident of Montclair, a middle class suburb of Newark, embeds herself with Christie, Booker and Anderson while, simultaneously, sits in on more than 100 school-related community meetings (“There it was again: disrespect. The word rose from conversations all over the auditoriumâ€), and the reporting not only shows, but shines. Her spectacular juggling act blames everybody but those whose demonstrated first commitment is to the students. In her telling, nearly everyone involved received something and/or learned something but the city’s least-of-these. She makes a clear observation that needs to be on T-shirts in the city: “For four years, the reformers never really tried to have a conversation with the people of Newark. Their target audience was always somewhere else, beyond the people whose children and grandchildren desperately needed to learn and compete for a future.â€The book’s author might not agree with the following assessment: that her carefully crafted work clearly documents that white supremacy’s psychotic historical urge to covertly or overtly experiment with the lives of poor Black people—whether medically, socially, economically or, in the case, educationally—is not some obscure 19th or 20th century Africana Studies classroom topic, but as current as the next awarded education grant. African-Americans used to be classified as sub-human, because of their three-fifth status under the U.S. Constitution. Then, after the Civil War, they became second-class citizens, because they didn’t have the right to vote or use public accommodations. In this updated 21st century form of pseudo-democracy, poor Black and Brown communities like Newark are filled with sub-citizens: those who have no input on their future, no matter how much taxes they pay and how often they vote. Christie and (especially) Booker should be ashamed of their public actions here, but who could, or would, succeed in shaming them that they would actually respect?
Brilliantly researched and insightful reportage on how foundations are being held responsible for fixing education rather than the government. Russakoff's knowledge of effective instruction is a bit superficial: she sees teachers who love their students as enough, which unfortunately is not true. It was fascinating to consider that Cami Anderson's vision of effective instruction might likewise be narrow, not about loving kids, but about certain rigid protocols. The frustrating part is that I do believe Anderson and Zuckerberg wanted to do well. I believe that there are lots of folks out there who want to help children but do bad things in the name of helping children. Because there is no government oversight or clear expectations, public education is the Wild West with the casualties being young low SES children. It is a disheartening time. Time to vote and support the candidates with the least ties to lobbyists and the most intellectual integrity.
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