college applications, telling herself, âThis is going to get me out of here.â She got into New York University, where she studied and graduated alongside the academic elite from around the country.
While there, she did a work-study program in the New York City public schools, tutoring struggling elementary school readers under the supervision of teachers she considered exceptionalâexperienced, nurturing, demanding of themselves and the children. She found herself imagining what her friends and classmates at West Side would have become with teachers like that all along the way.
âThatâs when I said I want to teach, and I want to teach in Newark,â she said. âI want to help cultivate those brilliant minds. I want to deposit in my hometown what people deposited into me. I want to teach in Newark because I love my city. I love it because thereâs so much promise here. I want to invest my lifeâs work in the city, because I believe in it.â
Â
Avon Avenue School, where Princess Williams saw so much promise, was 105 years old, an immense hulk of red brick rising three stories and filling almost a full square block. The grand scale reflected the schoolâs aspirationsâvery much akin to Williamsâsâwhen in the early 1900s Newark and public education were passageways to opportunity for hundreds of thousands of working-class immigrants and their children. The city was a national leader in manufacturingand retail. It had visionary civic leaders who built public institutionsâthe library, the museumâinto engines of democracy that spread culture and literacy to the masses. In heavily poor, immigrant communities like Avonâs, public schools remained open all summer to âcontinue the process of Americanizationâ of disadvantaged children and âgive the opportunity for a large number to advance rapidly,â in the words of Addison B. Poland, Newarkâs turn-of-the-century superintendent.
The Avon area in the early 1900s was mostly German immigrants, living in three- and four-family homes, working in factories, and sending their children to the neighborhood school. A century later, after economic decline, riots, and white flight, it was almost all black and poor. Nearly half of the children came from families who lived in what the government classified as âextreme poverty,â or fifty percent of the federal poverty level, approximately $11,000 a year for a family of four.The school had suffered along with the neighborhood. Nothing inside worked as it was supposed to, even the clocks, which each told a different time, all of them wrong. Barely one in six students in third through seventh grade had passed the most recent state literacy test, and the math results were even worse, especially in the middle school, where only four percent of seventh graders passed.
âA generous description of Avon Avenue students would be âsemi-literate,ââ wrote Gordon MacInnes, a policy analyst, summarizing the years leading up to the turnaround effort that drew Williams there. âThe results on the math test raise this question: was there any intentional effort to teach mathematics to Avon Avenue students?â
MacInnes emphasized that poverty posed an enormous barrier to learning in Newark and nationally. The pattern was consistent across the country: the poorer the children, the lower the test scores. Yet worse than the damage from poverty at Avon, he found, was the districtâs unconscionable and systematic neglect of the childrenâs needs. MacInnes wrote with outrage and astonishment, hurling aside the detached tone of most policy papers: âThere is no helpful explanationhow the Avon results could be overlooked for so many years without triggering intensive attention from NPS,â the Newark Public Schools administration.
Â
During the summer of 2010, the newly appointed leaders of Avon, Dominique Lee and Charity
While there, she did a work-study program in the New York City public schools, tutoring struggling elementary school readers under the supervision of teachers she considered exceptionalâexperienced, nurturing, demanding of themselves and the children. She found herself imagining what her friends and classmates at West Side would have become with teachers like that all along the way.
âThatâs when I said I want to teach, and I want to teach in Newark,â she said. âI want to help cultivate those brilliant minds. I want to deposit in my hometown what people deposited into me. I want to teach in Newark because I love my city. I love it because thereâs so much promise here. I want to invest my lifeâs work in the city, because I believe in it.â
Â
Avon Avenue School, where Princess Williams saw so much promise, was 105 years old, an immense hulk of red brick rising three stories and filling almost a full square block. The grand scale reflected the schoolâs aspirationsâvery much akin to Williamsâsâwhen in the early 1900s Newark and public education were passageways to opportunity for hundreds of thousands of working-class immigrants and their children. The city was a national leader in manufacturingand retail. It had visionary civic leaders who built public institutionsâthe library, the museumâinto engines of democracy that spread culture and literacy to the masses. In heavily poor, immigrant communities like Avonâs, public schools remained open all summer to âcontinue the process of Americanizationâ of disadvantaged children and âgive the opportunity for a large number to advance rapidly,â in the words of Addison B. Poland, Newarkâs turn-of-the-century superintendent.
The Avon area in the early 1900s was mostly German immigrants, living in three- and four-family homes, working in factories, and sending their children to the neighborhood school. A century later, after economic decline, riots, and white flight, it was almost all black and poor. Nearly half of the children came from families who lived in what the government classified as âextreme poverty,â or fifty percent of the federal poverty level, approximately $11,000 a year for a family of four.The school had suffered along with the neighborhood. Nothing inside worked as it was supposed to, even the clocks, which each told a different time, all of them wrong. Barely one in six students in third through seventh grade had passed the most recent state literacy test, and the math results were even worse, especially in the middle school, where only four percent of seventh graders passed.
âA generous description of Avon Avenue students would be âsemi-literate,ââ wrote Gordon MacInnes, a policy analyst, summarizing the years leading up to the turnaround effort that drew Williams there. âThe results on the math test raise this question: was there any intentional effort to teach mathematics to Avon Avenue students?â
MacInnes emphasized that poverty posed an enormous barrier to learning in Newark and nationally. The pattern was consistent across the country: the poorer the children, the lower the test scores. Yet worse than the damage from poverty at Avon, he found, was the districtâs unconscionable and systematic neglect of the childrenâs needs. MacInnes wrote with outrage and astonishment, hurling aside the detached tone of most policy papers: âThere is no helpful explanationhow the Avon results could be overlooked for so many years without triggering intensive attention from NPS,â the Newark Public Schools administration.
Â
During the summer of 2010, the newly appointed leaders of Avon, Dominique Lee and Charity
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