"The Prize" Uncovers Venture Philanthropy At Work in Newark
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 "The Prize" Uncovers Venture Philanthropy At Work in Newark - Living in Dialogue - Linkis.com:
