Podcast #108: Dale Russakoff on When Facebook Tried to Save Newark
Can Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg reform ailing public school systems across the country? In Dale Russakoff's book The Prize: Who’s In Charge of America’s Schools, she investigates how mayor Corey Booker, governor Chris Christie, and Zuckerberg attempted to join forces to transform Newark, New Jersey's underserved community. Russakoff is one of the incredible finalists for NYPL’s Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism. Each year the award is given to journalists whose books have brought clarity and public attention to important issues, events, or policies. This week, for the New York Public Library Podcast, we're proud to present Russakoff discussing what happens when one school district receives $200 million.
Russakoff describes her initial impulse to write The Prize as a project led by many questions about education, both about systematic failures and individual lived experiences:
"I saw it as just this incredible opportunity to investigate and explore what is going on in education. Why is it that charter schools, some of them, have these dramatically better results than the district schools? Is it just because they have better teachers? Is there something else going on? I was also eager to find what is it like inside a failing district school, just a school that twenty percent or fewer are reading at grade level? What is it? What is going on there? What do the parents in those schools think of it? I just wanted to know all of these things, and if you look at all the data on education, the kids who come from the poorest families have the poorest scores. How does that work? What happens day to day in a child's life, year by year, by the leads them to fail as opposed to succeed? What is it about poverty that's causing so much failure in education? I just felt like I wanted to know all of this, and I was fascinated by Booker and Christie. Both of them seemed like different kinds of politicians, and i really didn't have an opinion about them at the outset. Somebody who spoke to me after a book talk had read the book and she said, 'I just couldn't decide was I supposed to like Corey Booker, or was I not supposed to like Corey Booker?' I said, 'That's the question I have too!'"
What Russakoff believes Booker, Christie, and Zuckerberg missed was the need for schools to provide more social services aimed at addressing poverty:
"I think that they all felt that this was about the kids, but I think that they had a very fixed idea about how you serve the kids, and it didn't include dealing with the poverty the kids lived with and how do you support kids who come from these kinds of homes in the classroom and support the teachers so they can help them? Kids come in so far behind, and as the school years go on, they fall farther behind. They need, in some cases, two teachers in a classroom instead of one. They need more tutors in the school and social workers and counselors. They need more services. The whole idea of community schools that actually work involve social services, not just for the kids but for the neighborhood and the adults."
Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, pledged to continue their charitable giving over the course of their lifetime. This pledge was attended by six principles:
"They listed six principles that are going to guide their giving, and the first two come from what went wrong in Newark, in other words what they learned the hard way. The first was that they're not going to do anything short term... Short term thinking cannot solve the complicated problems of our times. The second thing they said was that they were going to engage the community and that they simply can't empower people if we don't engage them. He really learned something, and he was changed by it."
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