Why Did $100 Million New Jersey School Reform Fail?

Veteran Washington Post reporter who spent four years inside Newark, N.J., reform effort explains.

March 2, 2016

Dale Russakoff

Author and investigative reporter Dale Russakoff signs copies of her book, The Prize, after discussion sponsored by GSHED. (Logan Werlinger/GW Today)

By Ruth Steinhardt

In 2010, the public school system of Newark, N.J., was in disarray. Only 40 percent of children were reading at grade level, and 53 percent of students would never graduate.

In an attempt to turn the district around, Mark Zuckerberg, the then 26-year-old founder of Facebook, announced on the Oprah Winfrey show that he had donated $100 million to improve schools. He had partnered with Democratic Newark Mayor Corey Booker and Republican New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, two ambitious and charismatic politicians who were rising stars in their respective parties.

“They thought they were going to turn [Newark] into a district of universally high performance and emerge in five years with a model to turn around struggling schools in America,” said investigative reporter and Washington Post veteran Dale Russakoff, whose book “The Prize” chronicles the arc of that ambitious initiative.

Ms. Russakoff, who embedded herself in Newark for four years, spoke Monday at a Q & A and book signing organized by the George Washington University Graduate School of Education and Human Development and introduced by GSEHD Dean Michael Feuer.

The problems with these well-intentioned efforts were numerous from the start, Ms. Russakoff said. The first was the project’s unrealistic scope and timeline.

“Changing education in the nation’s cities takes decades, not years, and it takes reckoning with the effects of poverty on children’s lives and minds,” she said. “Mr. Christie and Mr. Booker were thinking in politician time.”

Another issue was that the reform was almost entirely driven by external forces. “[Mr. Zuckerberg] told me later that he thought he was doing what the people on the ground in Newark wanted,” Ms. Russakoff told her Marvin Center audience. “But no one on the ground had been consulted.”

In fact, she said, none of the figures constructing the reform had firsthand knowledge of the area they intended to repair, and most were so highly paid as to be entirely removed from its problems.

Consultants from New York City were imported at astronomical cost, eating up most of the budget that Mr. Zuckerberg and the donors who matched his investment had provided. For instance, $2 million went to a community engagement director who organized forums for residents to share their needs and experiences, but the feedback that emerged was never incorporated into the reform plan.

Reformers failed to address the effects of the poverty ravaging Newark, which was so severe that residents in the community forums sometimes broke down in tears describing what children faced outside the classroom.

“The reform movement says poverty is an excuse for failure,” Ms. Russakoff said. “But poverty is also a root cause of failure for children growing up.”

One place the money did not go: the poorest classrooms.

Ms. Russakoff described a kindergarten class she regularly attended in which 15 of the 26 children were child welfare cases, exposed to drugs, violence and neglect. Some children were so emotionally damaged that they threw chairs and tried to hit their classmates, making it impossible for anyone in the class to learn. But the teacher, whom Ms. Russakoff described as perhaps the best she met, was unable to get funding even for a single classroom aide to help address these children’s needs.

“She did not need excuses,” Ms. Russakoff said. “She needed help.”

Ms. Russakoff clarified that the Newark reforms were not a complete failure. The plan installed new principals who brought energy and stronger institutional leadership. Some of the reform initiatives, these principals said, helped them to define what good teaching was and to coach teachers to more effectiveness.

Newark also had a direct effect on Mr. Zuckerberg’s philanthropic evolution, Ms. Russakoff said. His recent donation of 99 percent of his and his wife’s Facebook shares to charity was guided, she said, by principles he learned from the failures of Newark, including restricting their giving to long-term investments and never bypassing the communities in which those investments were centered.

But had the politicians involved learned from this fiasco? Ms. Russakoff shook her head regretfully.

“I definitely don’t think Christie and Booker have changed at all,” she said.