Why Did $100 Million New Jersey School Reform Fail?
Veteran Washington Post reporter who spent four years inside Newark, N.J., reform effort explains.
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 Why Did $100 Million New Jersey School Reform Fail? | GW Today | The George Washington University:
