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, “Who’s in Charge of America’s Schools?,” gets to Russakoff’s main point.

The best thing about The Prize is that it is an objective analysis of one of the nation’s most prominent corporate school reform failures. And, it comes at great time. Even after the repudiation of Michelle Rhee in Washington D.C and John Deasy in Los Angeles, edu-philanthropists in love with test, sort, reward, and punish plan to create so many charters in those two cities that it would leave the rest of their schools and unions in ruins.  Anyone who reads 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, will understand that the new assaults are the same as the old ones. They will cause more harm than good for students, and leave the teaching profession and their cities’ public education in tatters.

Mark Weber, “The Jersey Jazzman,” criticizes the way that reviewers ranging from Conor Williams to Joe Nocera cite The Prize. But, Williams writes for The 74, which spins anything and everything as evidence that teachers unions must be destroyed. I’m more struck by Nocera’s New York Times review of Russakoff’s book. He doesn’t come completely over to the side of teachers who oppose market-driven, test-driven reform, but Nocera comes much closer with his critique of One Newark: 

It’s great for the 30 percent who are learning from charter school teachers. But as Russakoff puts it in the most poignant line in her book, “What would become of the children left behind in district schools?”

There is another way to approach reform, a way that includes collaboration with the teachers, instead of bullying them or insulting them. A way that involves the community rather than imposing top-down decisions. A way that allows for cross-pollination between charters and traditional public schools so that the best teaching practices become commonplace in both kinds of schools.

I no longer believe that cross-pollination between charters and neighborhood schools is likely. I also suspect that Russakoff (and Nocera) would not agree with my position on seniority – that we must mend it, but not end it. And some may believe she is too critical of collective bargaining contracts that defend the due process rights of educators. Above all, we must remind Nocera (and Russakoff) of how many “horrendous” charter schools have been created. They often do the seemingly impossible, replace dysfunctional neighborhood schools with charters that are worse.

We should carefully read the narrative that Russakoff chose to write. In the first place, she reported the union side of the seniority argument. The union went along with the new New Jersey teacher evaluation law (based in large part on the Colorado law that states across the nation were coerced into adopting by the Duncan administration.) She cites the New Jersey union president who explained that if we combined the uncertainty created by that law with the budget crunch, without maintaining the rule of “Last In First Out,” then “many districts would lay off their most expensive (senior) teachers without regard to merit. … It would put this union and all unions out of existence.”

Moreover, Russakoff then cites Dr. Damian Betebenner, the creator of the growth model that was inappropriately imposed on teacher evaluations. Betebenner said that simply focusing on teachers and growth is “pretty obviously myopic” and “a lot of high-stakes accountability has become self-defeating.” Russakoff then concluded, “Nonetheless, test-based teacher accountability for student performance remained a primary goal of the reform movement.”

Russakoff also borrows a convention that for better and for worse has become institutionalized in modern nonfiction. She pairs the experiences of educators and students in the KIPP SPARK charter school and the Avon BRICK neighborhood school. This opens her up to valid criticism by the Jersey Jazzman for “extrapolating what she sees at one charter school (SPARK Academy, part of TEAM/KIPP) out to the entire Newark charter sector.” He then challenges Russakoff’s conclusion that SPARK (and other charters?) don’t spend as much on student supports but often do a better job providing those services.

Taking the last issue first, I’m no expert on Newark and New Jersey school finance. My reading of the differences between Russakoff, also not an expert on this single issue, and the Jersey Jazzman is that he is an expert, and he works closely with other experts. On the other hand, Russakoff spent 4-1/2 years in Newark schools seeing what actually reaches down into schools. So, I will stay out of that dispute while focusing on the narrative in The Prize.

It is possible that One Newark, with its $20 million dollars in consulting fees, may have helped reduce the cost of janitorial services.  If venture philanthropists want to proclaim that as their great victory, they are free to adopt that rallying cry. I look forward to their high-dollars graphics, proclaiming: Give Us Your Children’s Schools and We’ll Save You $800 a Whack on Janitorial Costs!

I hope they also shout from the rooftops about another reform “victory.” Corporate reform gave teachers at Renew schools an offer they couldn’t refuse, requiring them to work a longer day for about $10.50 an hour extra.  The consultants who pushed these reforms were paid $1000 per day.

On the other hand, let’s consider the virtues of Russakoff’s pairing the KIPP and the neighborhood school. Given the ubiquitous mantra that KIPP and other high-performing “No Excuses” schools serve the “same” students as failing inner city schools, The Prize offers a reality check that should be welcomed. In contrast to the Avon BRICK school, which was 83% low-income, KIPP students were only 73% low-income. Even though KIPP accepted a higher percentage of students with behavioral problems and learning disabilities than other charters, they still served a smaller percentage than the district as a whole. And the high-performing North Star was only 68% low-income!

The twin school narratives then created another opportunity to translate social science and edu-politics into a story with faces on it. In this case – as is often true in neighborhood schools as well as charters – dedicated teachers at Avon BRICK began with the TFA ethos of “‘good teaching and good leadership could solve the problems of poverty.’” But, as usual in those efforts, the most dynamic teachers were burning out and practical experience taught them about “the need and anger in our children, the mental health issues, the absenteeism, the intransience.’”

The BRICK educators learned the hard way that “our children’s nervous systems are designed from birth to be in trauma mode. … I don’t think we understood that at first. We were like, ‘If you just work hard enough, we can fix it.” One teacher, Princess Williams, had a class of 26 kindergarten students with 15 of them being monitored by the state for neglect or exposure to domestic violence.

And this led to an interesting twist on the genre where a dedicated teacher gives it her all but is worn down and transfers to the easier job of teaching in a magnet or suburban school. In this case, the now married Princess Fils Aime was exhausted by the task of dealing with emotionally disturbed children. Worn down, she transferred to easier challenges at KIPP SPARK which has two other teachers to help her handle a high-challenge KIPP class.

And that brings us back to helping Joe Nocera and the non-education press to learn how to ask the right questions. What parent would agree to a policy that benefits one of her children but seriously damages one or two of her other kids? The Prize does an invaluable service in helping to explain how true believers in top-down reform may or may not have benefitted many of the 30% of students headed for charters. They did so, however, by harming the schools serving the majority of poor children. They created even more intense concentrations of children from extreme poverty and trauma; they took failing schools and made them worse.

Of course, the same tragedy has unfolded across urban America. We can now expect to hear the same corporate reform spin from Newark to New Orleans and Memphis, from Los Angeles to Washington D.C.  Their new meme was previewed during the 10th anniversary of Katrini events when researchers documented the unintended consequences of their gold-plated reforms. The chorus will sing:

Yes, we reformers were too prideful. We suspended and pushed out too many students. We burned out too many educators. We ignored early education and the socio-emotional. We did not understand the importance of trauma. But, we’re sincere. We’re learning. We’ll promise to demonize our opponents less. We double-dog promise to try to listen to our patrons more.  We promise, promise, promise to try to serve more of the same students that neighborhood schools serve.

After reading The Prize, it will be hard for anyone to give credence to venture philanthropists and their snake oil. They’ve had their chances to show that their expensive experiments can do more good than harm to children. Now, it is clear that their new assaults on Los Angeles and D.C., and other cities yet to be named are about ego and control. Its not about the quality of schools; their concern is who runs them.

What do you think? Has corporate reform deteriorated into a fight over who’s in charge of our schools, not a viable effort to help kids? Doesn’t Russakoff’s The Prize help educators and families  in our counterattack?