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

Newark schools. Princess Williams was the only one of them to have been born and raised in the city. At dinner one night, they brainstormed a name for their organization and came up with Building Responsible, Intelligent, Creative Kids, or BRICK —an allusion to Brick City, Newark’s nickname from the 1940s, when brick housing projects stood at the heart of the city.
    They spent eighteen months reviewing research, consulting educators, and visiting high-achieving urban schools, including charter schools. The earliest charters were expected to serve as laboratories for innovative practices that district schools would adopt and spread. In fact, there had been little cross-pollination in Newark or elsewhere. The BRICK team, though, took it upon themselves to glean many lessons from the city’s best charter schools, and found charter school leaders eager to help. They organized themselves as a nonprofit agency through which they raised private money to purchase the rigorous, early-literacy program, developed at the University of Chicago for kindergarten through third grade, that was used in the two leading charter networks—the TEAM schools of the national KIPP organization and North Star Academy, a subsidiary of Uncommon Schools. This was the STEP program Williams now used with her kindergarten class.
    They envied the charters’ freedom to hire the best teachers and to set their schedules based on student needs—unconstrained by union contracts, tenure law, and the district bureaucracy. But BRICK ’s founders resolved to work in district schools. They were convinced that charters didn’t serve children from the most struggling families, with the greatest learning needs, the kind who came to Avon. They believed some charters deliberately avoided these students, or pushed them out. Even the TEAM schools, which went to great lengths to recruit the most disadvantaged children, faced a selection bias: the most motivated parents with the highest ambitions for children were applying in droves. The Avon teachers felt almost personally insulted by the notion that the district was too broken to fix. Princess Williams had turned away overtures to teach at TEAM and North Star, despite being impressed by their commitment to top-level instruction. “My calling is to fix the public schools,” she said. “If something is broken and we have the power to fix it, why would we abandon it for something else? It’s like saying, ‘Because so much negative is happening in Newark, we should just totally level the town and bring in new people.’” That was the message many in Newark took from Governor Christie’s call to “grab the system by the roots, pull it out and start over.” With morethan four out of five children in district schools at the time, that was where the BRICK teachers felt they belonged. “If you want to change public education, you have to attack the district buildings,” Lee said.
    Clifford Janey, then the Newark superintendent, encouraged the BRICK team to write a proposal for a school. They wanted to concentrate on the early school years to ensure students were reading proficiently by third grade. They proposed to open with only kindergarten, first, and second grades, and then to grow one grade a year. Most charters in Newark began with a single grade level, then added one a year as the founding class advanced. They also asked for a waiver from the union contract to hire teachers of their choice, another hallmark of charters. In April 2010, Janey named Dominique Lee and his team to lead Avon, but instead of only three grades, he gave them all nine, six hundred and fifty students, in kindergarten through eighth grade. He also assigned them the existing staff, under whom Avon students had failed for years.
    If they had a choice, Lee said, they would have rejected about a third of Avon’s forty teachers as subpar. But among the others they found capable