January 9, 2019
Dear Friends and Family,
This is Segment 10 of the series on Socialism entitled, “Education: Reforming America’s Schools.” It includes four case study reform efforts for large urban schools. Three were successful: New Orleans, Washington D.C., and Denver and one fell far short of success: Newark. If you are interested in the trials and deliberations to get to the endpoint then click on the PDF link.
My Takeaways:
It is far, far easier to enact or evolve into socialistic practices and policies than to extract a populace from them. The reason: portions of the population become dependent on the practices and policies and consider it a right that should not be taken away. Examples would include the lazy on welfare, the elderly on Medicare, or the poor on Medicaid. Such is also the case in Public-Schools. As was stated in The Prize, a book used in the segment, “Doing It in education reform inevitably involves a prizefight between powerful forces in American politics: the muscular and monied teacher’s union with old guard political patrons on one side and on the other, an ascendant alliance of recently elected officials backed by education reformers and reform financers.” In each of the four case studies the approach to the prizefight was different.
• New Orleans: They avoided the prizefight by starting anew, taking advantage of Hurricane Katrina
• Washington, D.C.: They tackled it by setting up a competition between traditional vs. charter schools with the threat of closure for the poorer performing schools.
• Denver: They avoided the prizefight to some degree because they were in a growth phase for their school system. Therefore, they could close failing schools and replace them with charter-like policies and practices, thereby providing job opportunities for displaced teachers.
• Newark: They attempted to change solely via top-down policy change (Mayor Cory Booker’s six-point agenda) supplemented by a lot of donor money (unfortunately the typical political approach) which led to an all out power struggle which they lost. The community suffered more as a result and the donors wasted significant funds, but the leaders walked away from the situation.
This is why I stated in segment 9 that I learned the most about Socialism from the four segments #8 through #11. Specifically,
• How easy it is to make the “Promise” and achieve buy-in to it, then proceed to enter into socialistic practices.
• How the resultant consequences of enactment sneak up over time on the effected organization(s).
• How very difficult it is then to extract the populace from the socialistic grip, even though the need or benefits for doing so are so apparent. Seemingly, the reformers odds of winning the prizefight are always less than the defenders. Think about the prizefight in the U.S. when we are forced to pare some of the entitlements that exist today when we come to grips with the fact that we can no longer afford them.
The above case studies provide us with three potential strategies to do so in our school systems. Unfortunately, the only case studies for paring entitlements are the miseries of places like Greece in Europe.
There was another significant learning from this segment of excerpts quite apart from Socialism. It deals with why urban schools in poverty stricken, low-income areas have such difficulty achieving academic performance. I encourage you to read the paragraph titled ‘The Learning Issue of the Poor’ in the Newark section of the excerpt.
Next:
Segment 11 focuses on Charter Schools – what they are and what they are not and why they have been successful in outperforming the traditional socialistic model of the 20th century in the U.S.
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
This is Segment 10 of the series on Socialism entitled, “Education: Reforming America’s Schools.” It includes four case study reform efforts for large urban schools. Three were successful: New Orleans, Washington D.C., and Denver and one fell far short of success: Newark. If you are interested in the trials and deliberations to get to the endpoint then click on the PDF link.
My Takeaways:
It is far, far easier to enact or evolve into socialistic practices and policies than to extract a populace from them. The reason: portions of the population become dependent on the practices and policies and consider it a right that should not be taken away. Examples would include the lazy on welfare, the elderly on Medicare, or the poor on Medicaid. Such is also the case in Public-Schools. As was stated in The Prize, a book used in the segment, “Doing It in education reform inevitably involves a prizefight between powerful forces in American politics: the muscular and monied teacher’s union with old guard political patrons on one side and on the other, an ascendant alliance of recently elected officials backed by education reformers and reform financers.” In each of the four case studies the approach to the prizefight was different.
• New Orleans: They avoided the prizefight by starting anew, taking advantage of Hurricane Katrina
• Washington, D.C.: They tackled it by setting up a competition between traditional vs. charter schools with the threat of closure for the poorer performing schools.
• Denver: They avoided the prizefight to some degree because they were in a growth phase for their school system. Therefore, they could close failing schools and replace them with charter-like policies and practices, thereby providing job opportunities for displaced teachers.
• Newark: They attempted to change solely via top-down policy change (Mayor Cory Booker’s six-point agenda) supplemented by a lot of donor money (unfortunately the typical political approach) which led to an all out power struggle which they lost. The community suffered more as a result and the donors wasted significant funds, but the leaders walked away from the situation.
This is why I stated in segment 9 that I learned the most about Socialism from the four segments #8 through #11. Specifically,
• How easy it is to make the “Promise” and achieve buy-in to it, then proceed to enter into socialistic practices.
• How the resultant consequences of enactment sneak up over time on the effected organization(s).
• How very difficult it is then to extract the populace from the socialistic grip, even though the need or benefits for doing so are so apparent. Seemingly, the reformers odds of winning the prizefight are always less than the defenders. Think about the prizefight in the U.S. when we are forced to pare some of the entitlements that exist today when we come to grips with the fact that we can no longer afford them.
The above case studies provide us with three potential strategies to do so in our school systems. Unfortunately, the only case studies for paring entitlements are the miseries of places like Greece in Europe.
There was another significant learning from this segment of excerpts quite apart from Socialism. It deals with why urban schools in poverty stricken, low-income areas have such difficulty achieving academic performance. I encourage you to read the paragraph titled ‘The Learning Issue of the Poor’ in the Newark section of the excerpt.
Next:
Segment 11 focuses on Charter Schools – what they are and what they are not and why they have been successful in outperforming the traditional socialistic model of the 20th century in the U.S.
Happy Learning,
Harley
SOCIALISM – SEGMENT 10
EDUCATION: REFORMING AMERICA’S SCHOOLS – EXCERPTS
TO SAVE PUBLIC EDUCATION WE MUST REINVENT IT: EXPERIENCES OF NEW ORLEANS, WASHINGTON D.C., AND DENVER PUBLIC SCHOOLS: If we were creating a public education system from scratch, would we organize it as most of our public systems are now organized? Would our classrooms look just as they did before the advent of personal computers and the internet? Would we give teachers lifetime jobs after their second or third year of teaching? Would we let schools survive if, year after year, half their students dropped out? Would we send children to school for only eight and a half months a year and six hours a day? Would we assign them to schools by neighborhood, reinforcing racial and economic segregation?
Few people would answer yes to such questions. But in real life we don’t usually get to start over; instead, we have to change existing systems. And that threatens tightly held interests – such as teachers’ rights to lifetime jobs – triggering enormous political conflict. One city did get a chance to start over, however. In 2005, after the third-deadliest hurricane in U.S. history, Louisiana’s leaders wiped the slate clean in New Orleans. After Katrina, they handed more than 100 of the city’s public schools – all but 17 – to the state’s Recovery School District (RSD), created two years earlier to turn around failing schools. Over the next nine years, the RSD gradually turning them into charter schools – a new form of public school that has emerged over the last quarter century. Charters are public schools operated by independent, mostly nonprofit organizations, free of most state and district rules but held accountable for performance by written charters, which function like performance contracts. Most, but not all, are schools of choice. In 2017 the Orleans Parish School Board, which is elected, decided to transition its last four traditional schools to charter status, and someday soon 100% of the city’s public-school students will attend charters.
The results should shake the very foundations of American education. Test scores, school performance scores, graduation and dropout rates, college-going rates, and independent studies all tell the same story: the city’s RSD schools have doubled or tripled their effectiveness. The district has improved faster than any other in the state – and no doubt in the nations. On several important metrics, New Orleans is the first big city with a majority of low-income minorities to outperform its state.
Schools in New Orleans don’t improve “because the people running them are better,” says Jay Altman, founder of New Orleans first charter school. “Rather, it is because teachers and school leaders have more autonomy to be adaptive in this new system – they can improve more quickly, they can more easily make thousands of small changes and decisions that need to be made every week and every year to better meet the needs of students and parents and teachers. The new system allows schools to evolve more quickly and demands it.”
Washington, D.C. also started with a clean slate, but in a very different way. In 1996 Congress created the D.C. Public Charter School Board, which grants charters to nonprofit organizations to start schools. After 20 years of chartering, the board has performance contracts with 65 nonprofit organizations to operate about 120 schools and 46% of the city’s public-school students attend them. Families choose the charter school they prefer. The board closes or replaces those in which kids are falling behind, while encouraging the best to expand or open new schools. The competition from charters helped spur D.C.’s mayor to take control of the school district and initiate some of the most profound reforms any traditional district has embraced. Yet D.C.’s charter sector still has higher test scores, higher attendance, higher graduation and college enrollment rates, and more demand than the city’s traditional public schools. The difference is particularly dramatic with African American and low-income students, despite the fact that charters have received significantly less money each year – some $6,000 to $7,000 less per pupil – than district schools.
Leaders in other struggling urban districts have paid close attention to such reforms, and they are spreading. A decade ago the elected school board in Denver, frustrated by the traditional bureaucracy, decided to embrace charter schools. The board gave most charters space in district buildings and encouraged the successful ones to replicate as fast as possible. Then they began turning district schools into “innovation schools,” with many of the autonomies that help charters succeed. When these efforts began, Denver had the lowest academic growth of any of Colorado’s 20 largest cities. By 2012 it had the highest. Despite this progress, however, Denver has not been able to narrow the achievement gap between races and income groups. The gaps have actually widened, because white and middle-class students have raised their scores faster than minority and low-income students.
Most of the debate in this field is stuck on the tired issue of whether charter schools perform any better than traditional public schools. The evidence on that question, from dozens of careful studies, is clear: on average, charters outperform traditional public schools. On five key characteristics – teacher quality, school discipline, expectations for student achievement, safety, and development of character – 13 percentage points more charter school parents were “very satisfied” with their schools than traditional school’s parents in 2016.
What matters is not whether we call them charter schools or district schools or “innovation schools” or “pilot schools,” but the rules that govern their operation. Do they have the autonomy they need to design a school model that works for the children they must educate? Are they free to hire the best teachers and fire the worst? Do schools experience enough accountability – including the threat of closure if they fail – to create a sense of urgency among their employees? And when they close, are they replaced by better schools? If the answer to these questions is yes, the system will be self-renewing. Its schools will constantly improve and evolve – as we see in New Orleans, Washington, D.C., and Denver.
Source: Reinventing America’s Schools by David Osborne
NEWARK: 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.”
Booker gave Zuckerberg a six-point agenda drawn from a McKinsey recommendation which in turn was based on the original plan Booker had devised for Christie. The plan was to drastically reduce the size of the centralized school district and create a “portfolio” of schools, including traditional public schools, charters, and programs tailored to student needs, such as single-sex schools and a school for returning dropouts; best-in-class data systems to track student outcomes; treat principals like CEOs, giving them autonomy over school budgets, staffing, and instruction, and holding them accountable for results; and renegotiate union contracts to loosen tenure protections, allowing for dismissal of ineffective teachers and rewards for the best ones. It also included recruitment and training of top-quality educators for future openings and a community awareness program to build public support and services for disaffected youth. Zuckerberg made clear that his primary goal was to find a way to attract, nurture, and handsomely reward top teachers. Like almost every school district in the country, Newark paid teachers based on how long they had held their jobs and how many graduate degrees they had earned, although neither correlate with increased effectiveness. In other words, teachers who transformed students’ lives receive the same pay as the deadwood. He wanted a labor contract that would reward Newark teachers who improved their students’ performance.
Booker asked Zuckerberg for $100 million over five years. The mayor conceded, however, that he did not know at the time what the initiatives would cost. Zuckerberg agreed, with the caveat that Booker would have to match it with another $100 million from other donors. Booker didn’t blink, although this meant raising a king-sized amount of money in an economy still reeling from the financial crisis of 2008.
The first step was the selection of a “superstar” superintendent to lead the charge. Booker’s first choice was John King, then deputy New York State education commissioner, who had led some of the top-performing schools in New York City and Boston. After much thought, King turned them down. Zuckerberg, Christie, and Booker expected to arrive at their national model within five years. King believed it could take almost that long to change the system’s fundamental procedures and to raise expectations across the city for children and schools. John’s view was that no one has achieved what they’re trying to achieve: build an urban school district serving high-poverty kids that gets uniformly strong outcomes. You’d have to invest not only a long period of time but tremendous political capital to get it done. King also had questions about a five-year plan overseen by politicians who were likely to seek higher office.
The learning rate issue of the poor: The odds were stacked perilously against them. Research had shown that children in the lowest-income families heard only a fraction of the words or conversations that were the daily bread of the more affluent. By age three, the difference was an astonishing twenty million words. They also had little exposure to books. After kindergarten, the gap grew wider and more treacherous every year. Children who entered first grade without basic literacy skills were unlikely to read proficiently by the end of third grade, which was equivalent to falling off a cognitive cliff. Elementary education boiled down to this: children learn to read by third grade; they read to learn from then on. After third grade, reading was the ball game – math moved into word problems, social studies and science into demanding texts, language arts into novels. A straight line ran from the poor reading skills of third graders to the single-digit passing rate of its middle schoolers on state reading and math tests. Children who couldn’t keep up in later grades became frustrated, alienated, and more likely to act out. Every brand of education reformer shared the same end goal – to reverse the damaging tide of poverty that robbed the poorest children of their potential. The big difference lay in where they started: from the top down or the bottom up.
What Went Wrong: Despite Booker’s public promises of “bottoms-up” reform led by the people of Newark, he quietly hired a team of education consultants. Booker said, “We don’t want to pull people out of the public-school system. We want to make it the best public-school system in the country.” In truth, there was a palpable consensus in Newark that the city was failing its schoolchildren. Elected city officials, including the most outspoken defenders of district schools, had been sending their children to private and parochial academies for generations. So many district school parents were opting for charter schools that the best ones had waiting lists in the thousands. To exert hometown influence over how the private donations were spent, Booker insisted on creating a local foundation to handle the Zuckerberg gift and matching donations. But seats on the board of the Foundation for Newark’s Future went only to donors who gave at least $10 million (later reduced to $5 million), pricing all Newark residents and foundations out of contention. Booker told the donors that he had secured commitments from the city’s two largest charter networks to double in size, in return for his promise to arrange grants to cover their startup costs. This would increase the charter enrollment by ten thousand pupils, and reduce that of the district, over the next five years. This meant that new charters would open inside existing, underpopulated district schools, rent free – a policy that had provoked anger and tension when invoked in New York between parents of charters and traditional public schools. Indeed, in Newark the charters would end up having to pay the cash-hungry district to use its space.
Although the children in these districts were mostly black and brown, the consultants brought in were almost all white, setting up inevitable tension about the money they made even as public-school budgets kept shrinking. The going rate for consultants in Newark and elsewhere on the East Coast was $1,000 a day, and their pay comprised more than $20 million of the $200 million in philanthropy spent of committed in Newark. “Everyone’s getting paid, but Raheem still can’t read,” observed Vivian Fraser, president of the Urban League in Newark.
The donors in the room made clear their exasperation with Booker’s missteps. Zuckerberg summoned the mayor to a meeting at Facebook headquarters on April 2, 2011 where he made it clear that he considered the pace of progress unacceptable. There was no superstar superintendent, no comprehensive reform plan, no progress toward a game-changing teacher’s contract. Booker was contrite, saying “Guilty as charged.”
Zuckerberg and other donors anticipated a much faster expansion of charters. Surprisingly Booker, Christie, and the head of the State Educational Commission had no plan for ensuring a stable learning environment for children in district schools as they advocated aggressive expansion of charters.
“Doing it” in education reform inevitably involved a prizefight between two powerful forces in American politics: muscular and monied teacher’s union with old-guard political patrons on one side and, on the other, an ascendant alliance of recently elected officials backed by education reform financers. But nothing revealed the dimensions of the power struggle as vividly as Booker, Christie, and Zuckerberg’s quest for what they called a “transformational” teacher’s contract, one they hoped would become a model for attracting the nation’s most talented college graduates to teach in distressed cities. The goal was to apply business-style accountability to teacher pay – abolishing the long-standing system of basing salaries on years of service, instead of making student performance the measure of a teacher’s worth. They wanted the contract to ease the removal teachers with the worst evaluations and to reward the best ones with pay raises, handsome bonuses, and more remunerative career opportunities.
Tenure and seniority protection were enshrined in New Jersey state law, and contracts alone couldn’t eliminate them. Christie was working to change that statewide, but this required then to win over the legislature. After arduous negotiations, in the summer of 2012 the legislature did pass a measure that empowered the district to strip tenure from teachers with two consecutive years of poor performance ratings and made student growth on standardized tests a factor in their evaluations. In return for union support, however, New Jersey lawmakers kept seniority protections intact. [NOTE: For those unfamiliar with seniority protections in union contracts, it usually means two things: First, it is extremely difficult to fire anyone for poor performance usually it has to be for cause and second, if there is a layoff the less senior people by contract have to be laid off before the senior people].
The Results: The cost of labor reforms for the teacher’s contract was about $50 million – for merit bonuses, a one-time stipend to encourage teachers to switch to a universal pay scale, and back pay. Under the universal pay scale teachers would no longer receive higher pay for earning degrees, instead they would get tuition support but only for graduate programs which added another $8.5 million. Additionally, the head of the reform effort asked for a $20 million buyout fund to encourage weak teachers to leave, and another $15 million for an anticipated new principals’ contract. The estimated total cost of the labor agreements was $100 million. This came to half the anticipated philanthropic bounty of $100 million from Zuckerberg and $100 million in matching gifts. But Booker hadn’t raised enough money to match – the condition for unlocking Zuckerberg dollars.
In late July, Booker and the reformer leadership gathered representatives of some of the nation’s wealthiest education philanthropists to ask for $37 million to complete the $100 million match, unlock Zuckerberg’s full gift and finance the teacher’s contract. To make the sale, they had to argue that Newark’s contract would be “Transformational” for the country, but they had to acknowledge it wasn’t transformational, even for Newark, because of its seniority protection. No one volunteered to write any checks. In the end, it was Christie who came up with pledges of about $25 million, in the fall of 2012, tapping some of his political donors.
In June 2013, the head of the reform effort, Cami Anderson, appeared before the board members of one of the contributing foundations. She reported, based on state standardized test scores, Newark children in public schools had declined in proficiency in math in all tested grades, and in language arts in all but two. Students in all eight Renew schools were “falling behind” the rest of the district. At that very moment Cory Booker entered. It marked the beginning of Booker’s official exit from Newark. Senator Frank Lautenberg had died two days earlier and Booker was arriving from his funeral at a nearby synagogue. Within days, Booker would be running for Lautenberg’s open Senate seat.
Source: The Prize: Who is in Charge of America’s Schools by Dale Russakoff.
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
EDUCATION: REFORMING AMERICA’S SCHOOLS – EXCERPTS
TO SAVE PUBLIC EDUCATION WE MUST REINVENT IT: EXPERIENCES OF NEW ORLEANS, WASHINGTON D.C., AND DENVER PUBLIC SCHOOLS: If we were creating a public education system from scratch, would we organize it as most of our public systems are now organized? Would our classrooms look just as they did before the advent of personal computers and the internet? Would we give teachers lifetime jobs after their second or third year of teaching? Would we let schools survive if, year after year, half their students dropped out? Would we send children to school for only eight and a half months a year and six hours a day? Would we assign them to schools by neighborhood, reinforcing racial and economic segregation?
Few people would answer yes to such questions. But in real life we don’t usually get to start over; instead, we have to change existing systems. And that threatens tightly held interests – such as teachers’ rights to lifetime jobs – triggering enormous political conflict. One city did get a chance to start over, however. In 2005, after the third-deadliest hurricane in U.S. history, Louisiana’s leaders wiped the slate clean in New Orleans. After Katrina, they handed more than 100 of the city’s public schools – all but 17 – to the state’s Recovery School District (RSD), created two years earlier to turn around failing schools. Over the next nine years, the RSD gradually turning them into charter schools – a new form of public school that has emerged over the last quarter century. Charters are public schools operated by independent, mostly nonprofit organizations, free of most state and district rules but held accountable for performance by written charters, which function like performance contracts. Most, but not all, are schools of choice. In 2017 the Orleans Parish School Board, which is elected, decided to transition its last four traditional schools to charter status, and someday soon 100% of the city’s public-school students will attend charters.
The results should shake the very foundations of American education. Test scores, school performance scores, graduation and dropout rates, college-going rates, and independent studies all tell the same story: the city’s RSD schools have doubled or tripled their effectiveness. The district has improved faster than any other in the state – and no doubt in the nations. On several important metrics, New Orleans is the first big city with a majority of low-income minorities to outperform its state.
Schools in New Orleans don’t improve “because the people running them are better,” says Jay Altman, founder of New Orleans first charter school. “Rather, it is because teachers and school leaders have more autonomy to be adaptive in this new system – they can improve more quickly, they can more easily make thousands of small changes and decisions that need to be made every week and every year to better meet the needs of students and parents and teachers. The new system allows schools to evolve more quickly and demands it.”
Washington, D.C. also started with a clean slate, but in a very different way. In 1996 Congress created the D.C. Public Charter School Board, which grants charters to nonprofit organizations to start schools. After 20 years of chartering, the board has performance contracts with 65 nonprofit organizations to operate about 120 schools and 46% of the city’s public-school students attend them. Families choose the charter school they prefer. The board closes or replaces those in which kids are falling behind, while encouraging the best to expand or open new schools. The competition from charters helped spur D.C.’s mayor to take control of the school district and initiate some of the most profound reforms any traditional district has embraced. Yet D.C.’s charter sector still has higher test scores, higher attendance, higher graduation and college enrollment rates, and more demand than the city’s traditional public schools. The difference is particularly dramatic with African American and low-income students, despite the fact that charters have received significantly less money each year – some $6,000 to $7,000 less per pupil – than district schools.
Leaders in other struggling urban districts have paid close attention to such reforms, and they are spreading. A decade ago the elected school board in Denver, frustrated by the traditional bureaucracy, decided to embrace charter schools. The board gave most charters space in district buildings and encouraged the successful ones to replicate as fast as possible. Then they began turning district schools into “innovation schools,” with many of the autonomies that help charters succeed. When these efforts began, Denver had the lowest academic growth of any of Colorado’s 20 largest cities. By 2012 it had the highest. Despite this progress, however, Denver has not been able to narrow the achievement gap between races and income groups. The gaps have actually widened, because white and middle-class students have raised their scores faster than minority and low-income students.
Most of the debate in this field is stuck on the tired issue of whether charter schools perform any better than traditional public schools. The evidence on that question, from dozens of careful studies, is clear: on average, charters outperform traditional public schools. On five key characteristics – teacher quality, school discipline, expectations for student achievement, safety, and development of character – 13 percentage points more charter school parents were “very satisfied” with their schools than traditional school’s parents in 2016.
What matters is not whether we call them charter schools or district schools or “innovation schools” or “pilot schools,” but the rules that govern their operation. Do they have the autonomy they need to design a school model that works for the children they must educate? Are they free to hire the best teachers and fire the worst? Do schools experience enough accountability – including the threat of closure if they fail – to create a sense of urgency among their employees? And when they close, are they replaced by better schools? If the answer to these questions is yes, the system will be self-renewing. Its schools will constantly improve and evolve – as we see in New Orleans, Washington, D.C., and Denver.
Source: Reinventing America’s Schools by David Osborne
NEWARK: 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.”
Booker gave Zuckerberg a six-point agenda drawn from a McKinsey recommendation which in turn was based on the original plan Booker had devised for Christie. The plan was to drastically reduce the size of the centralized school district and create a “portfolio” of schools, including traditional public schools, charters, and programs tailored to student needs, such as single-sex schools and a school for returning dropouts; best-in-class data systems to track student outcomes; treat principals like CEOs, giving them autonomy over school budgets, staffing, and instruction, and holding them accountable for results; and renegotiate union contracts to loosen tenure protections, allowing for dismissal of ineffective teachers and rewards for the best ones. It also included recruitment and training of top-quality educators for future openings and a community awareness program to build public support and services for disaffected youth. Zuckerberg made clear that his primary goal was to find a way to attract, nurture, and handsomely reward top teachers. Like almost every school district in the country, Newark paid teachers based on how long they had held their jobs and how many graduate degrees they had earned, although neither correlate with increased effectiveness. In other words, teachers who transformed students’ lives receive the same pay as the deadwood. He wanted a labor contract that would reward Newark teachers who improved their students’ performance.
Booker asked Zuckerberg for $100 million over five years. The mayor conceded, however, that he did not know at the time what the initiatives would cost. Zuckerberg agreed, with the caveat that Booker would have to match it with another $100 million from other donors. Booker didn’t blink, although this meant raising a king-sized amount of money in an economy still reeling from the financial crisis of 2008.
The first step was the selection of a “superstar” superintendent to lead the charge. Booker’s first choice was John King, then deputy New York State education commissioner, who had led some of the top-performing schools in New York City and Boston. After much thought, King turned them down. Zuckerberg, Christie, and Booker expected to arrive at their national model within five years. King believed it could take almost that long to change the system’s fundamental procedures and to raise expectations across the city for children and schools. John’s view was that no one has achieved what they’re trying to achieve: build an urban school district serving high-poverty kids that gets uniformly strong outcomes. You’d have to invest not only a long period of time but tremendous political capital to get it done. King also had questions about a five-year plan overseen by politicians who were likely to seek higher office.
The learning rate issue of the poor: The odds were stacked perilously against them. Research had shown that children in the lowest-income families heard only a fraction of the words or conversations that were the daily bread of the more affluent. By age three, the difference was an astonishing twenty million words. They also had little exposure to books. After kindergarten, the gap grew wider and more treacherous every year. Children who entered first grade without basic literacy skills were unlikely to read proficiently by the end of third grade, which was equivalent to falling off a cognitive cliff. Elementary education boiled down to this: children learn to read by third grade; they read to learn from then on. After third grade, reading was the ball game – math moved into word problems, social studies and science into demanding texts, language arts into novels. A straight line ran from the poor reading skills of third graders to the single-digit passing rate of its middle schoolers on state reading and math tests. Children who couldn’t keep up in later grades became frustrated, alienated, and more likely to act out. Every brand of education reformer shared the same end goal – to reverse the damaging tide of poverty that robbed the poorest children of their potential. The big difference lay in where they started: from the top down or the bottom up.
What Went Wrong: Despite Booker’s public promises of “bottoms-up” reform led by the people of Newark, he quietly hired a team of education consultants. Booker said, “We don’t want to pull people out of the public-school system. We want to make it the best public-school system in the country.” In truth, there was a palpable consensus in Newark that the city was failing its schoolchildren. Elected city officials, including the most outspoken defenders of district schools, had been sending their children to private and parochial academies for generations. So many district school parents were opting for charter schools that the best ones had waiting lists in the thousands. To exert hometown influence over how the private donations were spent, Booker insisted on creating a local foundation to handle the Zuckerberg gift and matching donations. But seats on the board of the Foundation for Newark’s Future went only to donors who gave at least $10 million (later reduced to $5 million), pricing all Newark residents and foundations out of contention. Booker told the donors that he had secured commitments from the city’s two largest charter networks to double in size, in return for his promise to arrange grants to cover their startup costs. This would increase the charter enrollment by ten thousand pupils, and reduce that of the district, over the next five years. This meant that new charters would open inside existing, underpopulated district schools, rent free – a policy that had provoked anger and tension when invoked in New York between parents of charters and traditional public schools. Indeed, in Newark the charters would end up having to pay the cash-hungry district to use its space.
Although the children in these districts were mostly black and brown, the consultants brought in were almost all white, setting up inevitable tension about the money they made even as public-school budgets kept shrinking. The going rate for consultants in Newark and elsewhere on the East Coast was $1,000 a day, and their pay comprised more than $20 million of the $200 million in philanthropy spent of committed in Newark. “Everyone’s getting paid, but Raheem still can’t read,” observed Vivian Fraser, president of the Urban League in Newark.
The donors in the room made clear their exasperation with Booker’s missteps. Zuckerberg summoned the mayor to a meeting at Facebook headquarters on April 2, 2011 where he made it clear that he considered the pace of progress unacceptable. There was no superstar superintendent, no comprehensive reform plan, no progress toward a game-changing teacher’s contract. Booker was contrite, saying “Guilty as charged.”
Zuckerberg and other donors anticipated a much faster expansion of charters. Surprisingly Booker, Christie, and the head of the State Educational Commission had no plan for ensuring a stable learning environment for children in district schools as they advocated aggressive expansion of charters.
“Doing it” in education reform inevitably involved a prizefight between two powerful forces in American politics: muscular and monied teacher’s union with old-guard political patrons on one side and, on the other, an ascendant alliance of recently elected officials backed by education reform financers. But nothing revealed the dimensions of the power struggle as vividly as Booker, Christie, and Zuckerberg’s quest for what they called a “transformational” teacher’s contract, one they hoped would become a model for attracting the nation’s most talented college graduates to teach in distressed cities. The goal was to apply business-style accountability to teacher pay – abolishing the long-standing system of basing salaries on years of service, instead of making student performance the measure of a teacher’s worth. They wanted the contract to ease the removal teachers with the worst evaluations and to reward the best ones with pay raises, handsome bonuses, and more remunerative career opportunities.
Tenure and seniority protection were enshrined in New Jersey state law, and contracts alone couldn’t eliminate them. Christie was working to change that statewide, but this required then to win over the legislature. After arduous negotiations, in the summer of 2012 the legislature did pass a measure that empowered the district to strip tenure from teachers with two consecutive years of poor performance ratings and made student growth on standardized tests a factor in their evaluations. In return for union support, however, New Jersey lawmakers kept seniority protections intact. [NOTE: For those unfamiliar with seniority protections in union contracts, it usually means two things: First, it is extremely difficult to fire anyone for poor performance usually it has to be for cause and second, if there is a layoff the less senior people by contract have to be laid off before the senior people].
The Results: The cost of labor reforms for the teacher’s contract was about $50 million – for merit bonuses, a one-time stipend to encourage teachers to switch to a universal pay scale, and back pay. Under the universal pay scale teachers would no longer receive higher pay for earning degrees, instead they would get tuition support but only for graduate programs which added another $8.5 million. Additionally, the head of the reform effort asked for a $20 million buyout fund to encourage weak teachers to leave, and another $15 million for an anticipated new principals’ contract. The estimated total cost of the labor agreements was $100 million. This came to half the anticipated philanthropic bounty of $100 million from Zuckerberg and $100 million in matching gifts. But Booker hadn’t raised enough money to match – the condition for unlocking Zuckerberg dollars.
In late July, Booker and the reformer leadership gathered representatives of some of the nation’s wealthiest education philanthropists to ask for $37 million to complete the $100 million match, unlock Zuckerberg’s full gift and finance the teacher’s contract. To make the sale, they had to argue that Newark’s contract would be “Transformational” for the country, but they had to acknowledge it wasn’t transformational, even for Newark, because of its seniority protection. No one volunteered to write any checks. In the end, it was Christie who came up with pledges of about $25 million, in the fall of 2012, tapping some of his political donors.
In June 2013, the head of the reform effort, Cami Anderson, appeared before the board members of one of the contributing foundations. She reported, based on state standardized test scores, Newark children in public schools had declined in proficiency in math in all tested grades, and in language arts in all but two. Students in all eight Renew schools were “falling behind” the rest of the district. At that very moment Cory Booker entered. It marked the beginning of Booker’s official exit from Newark. Senator Frank Lautenberg had died two days earlier and Booker was arriving from his funeral at a nearby synagogue. Within days, Booker would be running for Lautenberg’s open Senate seat.
Source: The Prize: Who is in Charge of America’s Schools by Dale Russakoff.
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
| 10_soc_reforming_schools.pdf |