5 Questions With ‘The Prize’ Author Dale Russakoff
When Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced on “Oprah” in 2010 that he was donating $100 million to the city of Newark to improve its schools, longtime Washington Post reporter Dale Russakoff decided to follow along and see what happened next. Over the next four years, she talked with teachers, parents, students, administrators, politicians, donors — just about every major figure in the story, in Newark and beyond — to build a deeply researched, nuanced and thoughtful report.
The result, her book “The Prize,” has just been published to widespread acclaim. In it, Russakoff details the missteps and controversies that plagued the reformers from the beginning — starting, perhaps, with their decision to announce the gift on national television before telling anyone in Newark about it. Even with an additional $100 million in matching funds, the largesse seems to have done shockingly little to improve the quality of Newark’s public schools.
Anyone who’s interested in how to improve urban schools — and how not to — will find a wealth of information and insight in “The Prize.” By focusing deeply on one city’s issues, the book illuminates many of the problems that all cities face.
Dale Russakoff, author of “The Prize.”
Russakoff sat down recently with Learning Lab to discuss her book and what she learned in reporting it. An edited version of that conversation follows.
The Newark schools had $200 million to spend, and yet by the end of your story it seems that too little has changed. What do you think they could have done differently to get better results?
I think that they had a fixed idea of how to do it, and I think they thought it was all about fixing the systems and not about addressing what the needs are in the classroom. In fact there was an email very early in the process, when they were all communicating about this gift, and it said, “MZ’s money is not going to the classroom.”
And it was just a given. Because that would be a waste — that would go down a rathole, so let’s fix the systems. And consultants can figure out everything else.
What they were doing was kind of from the top down. They wanted to change the system and create a perfect system to create a model that could then be transferred to cities across the country. And I think that that’s trying to figure out “How do you fix the whole system?” without thinking about children.
Although you note that most people on all sides had good intentions, what made it so difficult for them to work together productively?
They actually came to Newark with an idea that because the system was in such disrepair and so dysfunctional that the people in the district didn’t know what they were doing or didn’t know how to improve education. What they came in with was the idea “We have to fix this,” and, in effect, to the people of Newark, “We have to fix you.”
And I think that was not only rude and insulting, it wasn’t smart — because there are so many people in the schools who are gifted and who continue to try every day, in spite of being trapped in a failing system. And those are the people who are dying to have a chance to fix the system.
Had those people been involved, I think that they would have had better ideas for what needed to be done. And they also would have been able to speak to the whole community about why this is important, as opposed to the community feeling like these are foreigners, these are aliens who’ve come to try to do something to us rather than with us.
I think that’s been a real problem in the education reform movement. And I think there are people in the reform movement who know that and are trying to change that and trying to make this more of a bottom-up, as opposed to a top-down, movement. Because the recognition is that if you do this topeople, no matter what happens, when you’re gone, it won’t be sustained anyway. So what have you accomplished?
[Zuckerberg’s gift] was announced on “Oprah,” and nobody in Newark knew about it before Oprah’s 5 Questions With ‘The Prize’ Author Dale Russakoff:
