The Prize: Who's in Charge of Americas's Schools?

• Author: Currie-Knight, Kevin
• Position: Book review

The Prize: Who's in Charge of Americas's Schools?

Dale Rusakoff

New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2015, 229 pp.

On September 24, 2010, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg went on the The Oprah Winfrey Show with New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Newark Mayor Cory Booker. There, Zuckerberg announced that he was pledging $100 million dollars toward the public school system in Newark, NJ. Zuckerberg, Christie, and Bookers collective aim was to bring public school teachers' contracts more in line with typical private sector contracts in order to incentivize good performance and penalize bad performance.

Five years later, the Newark school system had little to show for Zuckerberg's (and other venture philanthropists') donations. The number of charters did expand, but any moderate success they achieved was offset by a diminution of quality in the public schools. Public school teachers' contracts went through minor changes by way of some increased accountability measures, but their structure (and bloat) remained largely intact. Cory Booker left for the U.S. Senate, replaced as mayor by Ras Baraka, who won largely due to his opposition to Booker's educational plan. Chris Christie lost interest and turned his attention toward the U.S. presidency. Zuckerberg moved on to other philanthropic pursuits.

Dale Rusakoff tells the story of what happened between the Oprah announcement and late 2014 in her book The Prize. "The prize" refers to a name that, according to Rusakoff, "numerous politicians had actually taken to calling the district budget," which was built "around unions and large public bureaucracies [that reformers like Zuckerberg believed] were themselves an obstacle to learning." Make positive change in Newark, the idea was, and you can prove that positive change can happen anywhere. Zuckerberg and others were moved by the idea that, to see the kind of dynamic results his own company and those like it achieved, the school system had to allow for innovative schools--charters---that were largely free to operate the way they saw fit, and that teacher contracts had to be written in a way that would attract talented teachers and dissuade bad teachers. But, as The Prize demonstrates, Zuckerberg and other reformers may have overestimated how amenable the public education system would be to their desired reforms.

The story focuses primarily on Christie and Booker's attempts (as partly funded by Zuckerberg and other venture philanthropists) to bring charter...