By John Thompson.

When Dale Russakoff conceived of The Prize, she “viewed education reform from a distance but as a movement full of promise.”  She was eager to follow the story of Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million matching gift to the Newark schools.  The subtitle of this invaluable book is, “Who’s in Charge of America’s Schools?”

The best thing about The Prize is that it is an objective look by a non-educator investigating under the hood of corporate school reform. We educators are all too familiar with the test, sort, reward, and punish mentality of the Billionaires Boys’ Club and the technocracy they have tried to impose on public schools.  The press and the public have properly focused on Russakoff’s balanced narrative about the way that Cory Booker, Chris Christie, Christopher Cerf, Cami Anderson and other corporate reformers squandered the $200 million fund that Zuckerberg made possible.

If aliens would come down from another planet and buy a copy of The Prize, at least two things would jump out. Newark has long been overburdened by “legacy costs.” Its buildings were crumbling, and its central office was the employer of first and last resort.  Reformers, educators, patrons, and everyone else had reason to be angry at the bloated management systems and inefficiencies.

But, inexplicably a new type of donor, known as “venture philanthropists,” concluded that firing one discrete group of people, teachers, was the path to solving the problems created by other, confusing, interconnected groups of people, including generations of voters. Worse, they sought to recruit new talent to the high-poverty district by evaluating teachers with algorithms and other untested experiments that would punish teachers for the sin of teaching in poor schools. They supposedly sought to make the profession more attractive by striking down its most basic (and necessary) rights.

Even worse, although reformers lacked the experience and knowledge necessary to improve teaching and learning, they would have been qualified for the task of rationalizing the civil service and administrative sector. Venture philanthropists ignored the mundane problems which they were capable of addressing, moved to their level of incompetence, and tried to reorganize schools around their theories. They did so while being blissfully unaware of the social and cognitive science, and education history which explained why their hypotheses were almost certainly doomed from the first.

Secondly, a Martian might read Russakoff’s portrait of edu-philanthropists as a caricature. Surely, humans don’t all embrace a monoculture where elites march lockstep without thinking ahead, ridiculing dissenters, and ignoring evidence that doesn’t reinforce their preconceived notions. As Russakoff shows, reformers had a variety of personalities and quirks. But, as had long been true, it was a matter of pride in their world that all corporate reformers, across our diverse nation, must always be in lockstep, or “on the same page” in implementing the same experimental model. This mindset was known as “convergence.” It is hard to imagine a mentality, held sacred by the 1%, that would be less likely to succeed in improving public education in the inner city.

The reason why test-driven, accountability-driven reformers have been able to hold their coalition together, I believe, is that they have not seen the need for grappling with complex, inter-connected problems and devising solutions. Competition-driven reform merely required them to lay down a set of incentives and disincentives, and to let the Market figure out the solutions. Consequently, their two unquestioned pillars of school improvement were a) merit pay and b) charter schools. These true believers not only ignored the history of disappointing outcomes in merit pay; they were oblivious to the way that it would require high stakes testing and the way it would thus corrupt instruction in many or most schools. Moreover, their devotion to charter schools would require mass closures of neighborhood schools, and that would require the destruction of seniority and other due process rights of teachers.

Standing in contrast from the unified reform front was the complex and contradictory views of the educators, unions, and patrons who opposed the social engineering that was called One Newark. But, when facing a common enemy, they united. Russakoff is fair in describing the both the problems with the city’s schools and the complexities of coalition’s victorious counter-attack against reformers. A fuller account of the way that top-down reformers’ hubris undermined their market-driven plan can be found here. My take on some educators’ criticism of Russakoff’s conclusions will be forthcoming.

Until the controversial Cami Anderson makes her appearance in page 118 of The Prize, there doesn’t seem to be anyone in the reform inner circle with real world knowledge of schools, teaching, and learning.  Anderson had worked for New York City Chancellor Joel Klein and she knew that the reformers’ faith in charter schools was a recipe for “a trainwreck.” Charters created what Anderson called “the lifeboat theory of reform” leaving the majority of children to sink.

The potential value of Anderson’s expertise, narrow and limited as it was, was undercut by her domineering personality. She “styled herself as the lone champion of the defenseless, speaker of inconvenient truths.” Despite being incredibly tone deaf in regards to the community’s concerns, Anderson’s inner circle included one veteran administrator with an understanding of the system’s institutional history. Anderson seemed to continually hear that administrator’s stories as confirmation of her belief that only transformational, never incremental, change was needed. Transformational change required an end to seniority protections, mass school closures, and the expansion of charters in a way that would somehow avoid a repetition of the history of excluding kids who made it more difficult to meet ambitious test score targets.

In an interview with Edushyster, aptly titled A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Hubris, Russakoff said, “Someone said to me that they didn’t understand why there was so much opposition if there’s also so much of a constituency that wants to put their kids in charters in Newark. But the proponents and opponents are often the same people.”

The Prize explains why Newark families had such contradictory feelings towards charter schools. Many (or most?) families had a child (or children?) who would benefit from a transfer from a neighborhood school to a charter. But, many or most had children who would not be accepted and retained by a charter, or be subjected to educational malpractice by test-driven schools. A few high-performing charters were humane and enlightened, but it is hard (or impossible) to believe that many of those schools would be available. Also, Newark schools were a prime employer of African-Americans and many qualified educators and other employees from the community faced the loss of their jobs, being replaced by affluent young outsiders. Finally, school closures that ignored gang territories and other logistics created outright danger, as well as headaches for parents facing complicated trade-offs.

There were alternatives, however. New Jersey’s experience with the Abbott case had shown the value of high-qualify early education and teaching young children to read for comprehension, not just decode enough to improve bubble-in test scores. Moreover, Russakoff reports that during a brief effort to engage the community, “perhaps the most consistent plea was for the district to treat the social and emotional health of children.”

At this point, I have a quibble with The Prize. Everyone who Russakoff spoke to – reformers and educators –  supposedly agreed that “a strong foundation in reading and math, along with a love of learning, represented an essential first step.” By this point in our reform wars, those words may or may not be accurate. But, corporate reform has a long history of ducking that difficult task of teaching reading for comprehension, and aligning and coordinating, high-quality early education. Instead, they adopted the simplistic silver bullet and “deputized” teachers as the agent to overcome the legacies of poverty and oppression.

Regardless, Russakoff is correct in writing “A straight line ran from the poor reading skills of Avon third graders to the single-digit passing rate of its middle schoolers.” In that school and others, frustrated kids with poor reading skills were more likely to act out. Only 4% of kids who arrived in high school significantly behind would graduate.

Unless reformers, as they had long done, ignored that well-established reality, One Newark and the use of test scores to punish and reward teachers for the deficits that children brought to their classrooms made no sense.  The failed Newark plan did not arise in a vacuum. It was a boilerplate version of the outcome-driven faith that teachers, alone, can systematically overcome the legacies of poverty, oppression, and segregation.

One Newark illustrates the essence of the national battle between persons who sought a bottom-up, tough-minded, and coordinated attack on the poverty that undermines instruction and those who seek quick, cheap, and easy shortcuts. Top-down reformers believed that calls to address the legacies of generational poverty and trauma were “excuses” and “low expectations.” These non-educators were in awe of Cory Booker, who believed, “The question facing cities is not ‘Can we deal with our most difficult problems—recidivism, health care, education?’ The real question is ‘Do we have the will?’” He said the biggest challenge ”is breaking the iceberg of immovable, decades-long failing schools.”  They’ll melt and “flower, just like the cherry blossoms in Branch Brook Park.”

Even if they were not all as clueless as Booker, reformers did not do what Russakoff and a Renew school’s principal did, and listen to teachers about the biggest reasons why it is hard to recruit and retain teachers. They heard from teachers who “had worked for too many principals who were ineffective at best, bullies at worst.” Teacher quality mandates did not take into account the reality of “horrendous administrators” and schools where “life can be hell” for teachers. As has been largely true across the nation for a decade, the reform solution was evaluation regimes where a teacher’s “stomach turned when the classroom doorknob turned, meaning a principal was about to conduct an observation that would invariably be harsh and useless.”

I will close with Anderson’s visit to a school. It stands as a metaphor for how One Newark focused on the hypotheses of national reformers but ignored the actual facts in schools that were failing poor children.  Anderson asked an exceptional teacher where she taught and learned it was a troubled high school. This great teacher was seeking a transfer to a selective magnet. Rather than consider the conditions that drive top teachers out of high-challenge schools, Anderson complained that this is completely backward and we need “the strongest teachers with the weakest students.” Her policy preferences were further reinforced when learning the way that the bureaucracy fouled up the postings of the proper students to the classes they need because, “Somebody didn’t do their job.”

But, punishing some people for the actions of others won’t improve schools. Eliminating the rights of teachers won’t make their bosses do their jobs better. And, there was one more interesting point of the anecdote. Anderson was visiting a summer school! Its policy of assigning the best teachers to the top students was not related to the collective bargaining contract! The bureaucracy operated by tradition. The teachers unions who reformers demonized had nothing to do with summer school assignments!

What do you think? Is The Prize a valuable book that primarily explains why corporate school reform fails?  Why didn’t Cory Booker, Chris Christie, Christopher Cerf, Cami Anderson try to tackle the real problems of the Newark schools?