Read Online The Prize by Dale Russakoff - Free Book Online Page A

Haygood, along with Williams and other teachers, were intently studying the school’s academic results and developing a reform strategy rooted in supporting and strengthening the teaching staff. All of them had a personal journey that led them to teach in Newark. Lee, just twenty-five years old at the time, had spent most of his childhood in low-income housing developments in Pontiac, Michigan, with a single mother who was periodically on welfare. Then, as if by magic—in Lee’s view, by God’s grace—his father, who had been living in Texas, reappeared to care for him as he entered his teens. Having risen into management at Exxon, his father took a position in the Detroit area with ExxonMobil after the two oil giants merged. Lee moved in with his dad in suburban Bloomfield Hills but remained at his urban Pontiac high school. Accustomed to making B’s and C’s, he faced a new standard with his father: nothing below an A would do. Lee graduated at the top of his class, was admitted to the University of Michigan, and graduated with honors. He liked pointing out that he was a third-generation college graduate on his father’s side, first generation on his mother’s. “I should be a statistic,” he said. “I’m a black male with an uneducated single mother. ‘Amazing grace!’ God ‘saved a wretch like me.’”
    After college, when Lee arrived at Newark’s Malcolm X Shabazz High School to teach social studies and English, many of his students reminded him of his younger self—except that no one had saved them. They were often reading four or more years below grade level, couldn’t name the continents, and didn’t know the difference between a governor and a mayor. Angular and high-energy, a towering six feet five inches tall, Lee was irrepressibly positive, pushing his students and himself. After struggling for three years to teach basic skills in tandem with the Civil War, he felt compelled to confront the larger problem: four lower schools, all serving Newark’s poorest children, fed into Shabazz, and barely a quarter of their graduates were proficient in reading and math. His idea was to recruit a small group of highly motivated Newark teachers for each of those schools, to build a culture of excellence in which newcomers and veterans together would raise the quality of teaching and learning. He called his idea “a kind of naïve little dream to meet the neediest children’s needs.”
    His first call was to Charity Haygood, then a district assistant principal who had come to Newark thirteen years earlier with Teach for America and made it her home. They connected instantly. Haygood grew up in Denver, with a single mother who never finished high school but inspired her to work her hardest. She attended chronically low-performing Manual High School, which was closed soon after she graduated—later to be reopened—but she credited teachers and classmates in her college-bound classes with pushing her to aim high. She was admitted to Colorado College and, based on her family’s poverty, received a full scholarship.
    She also shared Lee’s religious conviction. For years, Haygood and her husband, a civil rights attorney, had led a weekly church youth group and had taken into their home children whose parents struggled with addiction and illness. “If you live in Newark and you’re going to do what needs to be done, you have to be brave enough to act in faith,” she said. “It’s not about being the boss, but being the servant willing to wash other people’s feet. More than anything, it’s about understanding you don’t have all the answers. This is so much bigger than me. It’s bigger than Cory Booker. It’s bigger than Barack Obama. It’s recognizing that you’ve got to be humble.”
    They began planning in earnest in 2009, recruiting four colleagues from other