Newark's fight for local school control.

• Author: Nathanson, Rebecca
• Position: New Jersey

On a sunny Wednesday morning at the start of the 2014-2015 school year, seven teenagers sat cross-legged in a line across Broad Street in Newark, New Jersey. PVC pipes locked them to one another, forcing the police to close the road for about eight hours. Behind them stood a crowd of their peers; in front of them, a series of banners.

The teenagers were members of the Newark Student Union, a high school student union formed in 2012, and the banners illustrated their protest's goals. A small one said, "Cami Must Go," a reference to then-district Superintendent Cami Anderson. A much larger one read, "Full Local Control," with the word "Full" in bright red letters.

At the time, the students' demands seemed like a long shot. The state has run the Newark Public Schools since 1995, when it took over the district, citing poor student performance despite high spending per pupil.

In 1987, New Jersey became the first state to pass a law allowing state takeovers of underperforming public school districts. Twenty-eight other states have since followed New Jersey's lead, creating their own versions of state takeover laws.

Newark was the third district to be taken over by the state, after Jersey City in 1989 and Paterson in 1991. The state's law provided no details on how local districts could reclaim control.

In 2011, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie appointed a new superintendent. He selected Anderson, a former executive director of Teach for America who had previously been the senior superintendent of New York City's alternative schools. Cory Booker, then Newark's mayor and now a New Jersey Senator, supported this decision.

Christie and Booker had already hatched a plan to drastically remake Newark's school system and turn the city into a model for large urban school districts across the country. They unveiled their plan on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2010. They brought along Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who announced that he was donating $100 million to support their efforts.

This collaboration is recounted in The Prize: Who's in Charge of America's Schools?, a new book by Dale Russakoff, a former Washington Post reporter. As Russakoff recently reflected on National Public Radio, the goal was to dramatically expand charter schools and use evaluations to get rid of bad teachers and reward the good ones.

"Mark Zuckerberg's intent was to go to more and more cities with this model and use his philanthropy to basically solve the urban education crisis," Russakoff said. "He's not trying to do that anymore."

Last fall, Anderson created "One...