2024 the best public schools in america review

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When Mark Zuckerberg announced in front of a cheering Oprah audience his $100 million pledge to transform the Newark Schools - and to solve the education crisis in every city in America - it looked like a huge win for then-mayor Cory Booker and governor Chris Christie. But their plans soon ran into a constituency not so easily moved - Newark's key education players, fiercely protective of their billion-dollar-per-annum system. It's a prize that, for generations, has enriched seemingly everyone, except Newark's students.

Expert journalist Dale Russakoff delivers a story of high ideals and hubris, good intentions and greed, celebrity and street smarts - as reformers face off against entrenched unions, skeptical parents, and bewildered students.

Reviewer: Todd Steven Burroughs
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: AMONG THE BEST IN 21st CENTURY NONFICTION TRADITION
Review: Russakoff does a great job documenting a city that is normally ignored. She outlines the issues in a powerful narrative, and has no problem showing the arrogance of the righteous--Cory Booker, Chris Christie, et. al. If Booker runs for president in 2020, this book needs to be re-released, and he needs to be asked about what is contained here.February 1, 2019 update: Because Booker has announced his run for president, I thought I would place here my full review for my blog and Africology: The Journal of Pan-African Studies.***Book Review: Neo-Colonialism By PowerPoint: The Fight For, And Against, The Newark, N.J. SchoolsThe word “conspiracy” gets thrown around a lot in African communities, ever since the middle of the last century. And it’s understandable: the assassinations of King and X, the discovery of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s COINTEL-PRO files, and the disposal in one way or another of any leader of African descent who doesn’t toe the blood-dotted line of the West. But how much of a conspiracy is it when the victim doesn’t have the required amount of power for self-determination in the first place? This book, released today, is about how relatively powerless people fought back against their status when, insult to injury added, even their relatively little power was taken from them.It starts with Cory Booker, the neo-liberal mayor of Newark, New Jersey, and Chris Christie, the conservative governor of the state, secretly deciding all by themselves in the backseat of a Chevy Tahoe in 2009 that they will transform American education by turning Newark into a laboratory for the New York-based, greatly monied education reform movement. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook, develops a political man-crush on Booker and signs on by 2011, pledging $100 million (to be matched by other donors) to make New Jersey’s largest city into a charter-school haven in five years, staffed by six-figure, non-unionized teachers. Like the benevolent colonizers of old, all believe they go in with good intentions: self-government by the dark, poor people has not worked in the internal colony, the reasoning goes, or the state would not have taken over the school district back in 1995. The teacher’s unions are stopping progress, the reformers argued to themselves, by making sure they tie the hand of local politicos and school board members. So, they privately reasoned, the only way to change the system is to overthrow it—to go past all the community obstacles. So they hire $1,000-a-day consultants and get to work.After absorbing the opening shot heard-round-the-world of the revolution it now understood it was a pawn in, the Newark grassroots is then introduced to Cami Anderson, a white woman of hippie background who has been named the school’s superintendent by Christie and Booker. Like education reformer Michelle Rhee did in Washington, D.C., she then sets out, from the community perspectives, to close as many schools and alienate every teacher and parent she can. Meanwhile and not coincidentally, charter schools, some rising out of the closed public ones, begin flourishing in the the old, struggling-against-decay, never-recovered-from-the-1967-rebellion ghetto, providing resources and specialized attention to small, selected groups of poor Black and Brown children the always-struggling public schools can’t match.Everyone flexes what muscle they have. The teacher’s unions demand their back pay as a condition to their negotiations with Booker and Anderson over being able to fire bad teachers and financially reward good ones, and get it. The money people get their calls answered from the celebrity mayor, who eventually uses his Captain America persona to get elected to the U.S. Senate in 2013. Newark students organize and protest Anderson, with more than a little help from a well-known local name: Ras Baraka, a high-school principal and city councilman (and one of the sons of poet-activists Amiri and Amina Baraka). He seizes the issue that will get him elected mayor in 2014, defeating a Theo Huxtable-type candidate propped up by the same education reform movement. “The festering resistance to Anderson, the backlash against [the top-down reforms], and the first mayoral campaign of the post-Booker era became one and the same.” The street protests grow so large and consistent in Newark that Christie—days away from announcing his Republican presidential nomination run this past summer—makes a deal with newly-elected Mayor Baraka that, at this September 2015 writing, may transfer city education power back to the people a year from now. A bewildered Anderson is sent packing, replaced, amazingly, by a former state education commissioner—one of the chief architects of the neo-colonial plan! Whether the new school district superintendent cleans up his own mess is this story’s next chapter, to be written by today’s journalists and tomorrow’s historians.Dale Russakoff, a longtime Washington Post journalist and resident of Montclair, a middle class suburb of Newark, embeds herself with Christie, Booker and Anderson while, simultaneously, sits in on more than 100 school-related community meetings (“There it was again: disrespect. The word rose from conversations all over the auditorium”), and the reporting not only shows, but shines. Her spectacular juggling act blames everybody but those whose demonstrated first commitment is to the students. In her telling, nearly everyone involved received something and/or learned something but the city’s least-of-these. She makes a clear observation that needs to be on T-shirts in the city: “For four years, the reformers never really tried to have a conversation with the people of Newark. Their target audience was always somewhere else, beyond the people whose children and grandchildren desperately needed to learn and compete for a future.”The book’s author might not agree with the following assessment: that her carefully crafted work clearly documents that white supremacy’s psychotic historical urge to covertly or overtly experiment with the lives of poor Black people—whether medically, socially, economically or, in the case, educationally—is not some obscure 19th or 20th century Africana Studies classroom topic, but as current as the next awarded education grant. African-Americans used to be classified as sub-human, because of their three-fifth status under the U.S. Constitution. Then, after the Civil War, they became second-class citizens, because they didn’t have the right to vote or use public accommodations. In this updated 21st century form of pseudo-democracy, poor Black and Brown communities like Newark are filled with sub-citizens: those who have no input on their future, no matter how much taxes they pay and how often they vote. Christie and (especially) Booker should be ashamed of their public actions here, but who could, or would, succeed in shaming them that they would actually respect?

Reviewer: William Manzi
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Education Lessons from Newark: Money without a Plan brings Failure
Review: Dale Russakoff's "The Prize" is such a good, and important book. It tells us the story of what happened after Mark Zuckerberg donated $100 million to remake the failing Newark Public Schools. The book is refreshing in so many different ways. It looks at what happens AFTER the initial media euphoria died down, when the nuts and bolts of governance make the difference between success and failure. The Zuckerberg/Christie/Booker effort, for all the hype, has to be diagnosed with a failing grade. Russakoff gives us the story from the ground up, where efforts to bring change to political systems are won and lost. This one was lost on the ground, and Russakoff speaks truth to all sides engaging in the debate on how to best educate our children. Charters vs. traditional public schools? Merit pay for teachers? "Corporatists" trying to ram top down educational theories and practices onto school districts, rewarding a network of consultants wired into the "ed reform" movement? All that, and much more is looked at in this book, with no ideological ax to grind (that I can detect).There are many pervasive problems in government, and solving those problems requires a willingness to expend some political capital, as well as really concentrating, time wise, on the task at hand. From the book:"The Star-Ledger reported that Booker spent more than one in five days out of the city in 2011. Sandberg had taken charge of vetting the $100 million arrangement, which specified in writing that Christie would delegate “strategic and operational” leadership of the state-controlled schools to Booker. But despite her widely respected business acumen, she too was apparently caught off guard. As Booker traveled the country making speeches and moved from crisis to crisis, the Facebook duo stumbled upon an open secret in Newark. Clement Price, the Rutgers historian, summed it up this way: “There’s no such thing as a rock-star mayor. You’re either a rock star or a mayor. You can’t be both.” Another tidbit from the book: The public face of the engagement effort, announced by Booker in early November as a campaign of “relentless outreach,” was a series of eleven forums for Newark residents. “We want bottom-up, teacher-driven reforms that will be sustained,” the mayor said at one forum, although he missed most of them. “We can now access the resources—whatever we need—but we need a community vision for change and reform.”Unfortunately our political system does not lend itself to the necessary investments of time and capital by elected leadership. Mayor Booker and Governor Christie come out relatively badly, in spite of good intentions. Both were looking to political futures beyond the positions they were in, and while in our system that is accepted, we must also accept the downside of looking beyond the current political horizon. Mayor Booker has become Senator Booker, and Governor Christie is looking to become President Christie. Superficial decision making in difficult areas, in so many instances, kicks the difficult into the future, and allows opportunity for progress to dissipate.Russakoff looks at the particulars of the "reform" movement in Newark post donation, including the Booker effort to raise an additional $100 million to match the Zuckerberg grant, the ignorance of Zuckerberg to the realities of making changes to the teachers contract, and the eventual disconnect between the reform movement and the people they are supposed to be helping. Investing time is not the only requisite for success. Good management and clear lines of authority are a necessity for success. The misstep on the teachers contract, and the crazy system of accountability that existed in the Newark public schools, contributed to the ultimate failure. From the book:"A striking feature of the Newark reform effort, from the beginning, was that no one was in charge. Cerf’s concept of a “three-legged stool” implied that Zuckerberg, the governor (through the state-appointed superintendent), and the mayor would call the shots together. To those trying to carry out reforms, this arrangement was opaque and baffling. One of the consultants tasked with redesigning the district said in a private conversation, “I’m not sure who our client is. The contract came through Bari Mattes’s office [Booker’s chief fundraiser], so that suggests Booker is the client, but he has no constitutional authority over education. The funding is from Broad, Goldman Sachs, and Zuckerberg, but they have no legal authority. I think Cerf is the client, because the state runs the district. But I’m not positive.” In other words, the consultants worked for the person who originally founded the consulting firm. Although Booker, Christie, and Cerf were emphatic about the need to impose accountability on a notoriously unaccountable bureaucracy, it was becoming apparent that no one of them was ultimately accountable for making it happen."No clear lines of authority, no one person responsible, and huge change needed. Not a recipe for success. For those thinking that only the "corporatist" reformers come off badly that is not so. The teacher unions get nicked as well, and the status quo is described for what it is, a failure for students. Complicated problems do not lend themselves to easy, or ideologically rigid solutions. When you read this outstanding effort by Dale Russakoff that will become apparent.

Reviewer: Pedro Demo
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Stupid educational reform
Review: Extraordinary book managing historical argument to show how stupid is American educational corporate and neoliberal reform. Zuckerberg made his debut as philanthropist in Newark, only to experiment his great deception and to discover that education is not just a funding problem. Two bad influences were there: first, that of funding people who always know better what is good for other people (money is not just power, is also knowledge and even wisdom!); second, technocrats who write education policy out of their heads and ideology, maintaining people as experiment objects. It is not so that population knows better, but it less probable that technocrats know better. Russakoff makes a clever historical reconstruction of facts and events, as basis for her argumentation against educational reforms managed from above and outside. It’s the art of worsening what was already bad. Reform without chance.

Reviewer: marlene
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: A very bleak view of the school system in the states.