Im so thrilled to see all of you here in centennial hall. Also id like to welcome all of the people in the overflow area which is in the back of the second floor. And if any of you get tired of standing, there are seats Still Available there. Actually, i am just absolutely thrilled that Dale Russakoff chose the Newark Public Library to launch her brand new book, her muchanticipated, her absolutely fascinating, brand new book, the prize, with the subtitle, whos in charge of americas schools. This is the very first event that she will be doing. Shell be doing a series of programs and interviews as she travels across the country to introduce her book to the public, so we are really honored to be the first. And were also honored to be the venue where an extremely Important Community conversation will be taking place tonight. After all, a Critical Role of libraries as you know is to invite Community Members to engage in discussions of important issues to that community. There is no doubt in my mind that tonights discussion will deal with one of the most pressing issues facing our city. But not only our city, cities across the country. There will be many questions, there are many questions, but i would bet there will be some answers emerging from tonights discussion can as well. I want to thank two people in particular for organizing this program, and id like them to stand up. The first is our president of the Newark Public Library, dr. Timothy crist. Please stand. [applause] and the other person is a newer member of our board of trustees, rosemary steinbaum. Please stand up. [applause] and there are other members here on our board, i wish they would stand up too. I see sandy king in the back, trish, our Vice President are, jeremy johnson. Thank charles is here as well, and i thank you all for your tremendous support. [applause] and to our staff, because its really a job to pull Something Like this together. So i have to say thank you to heidi kramer, lita breaker and all of our npl staff who have had a part in making this program come together. [applause] and a very, very, very special thank you to the wonderful Victoria Foundation for their donation of 100 free be books as giveaways to newark residents and educators. [applause] some of you have asked if additional books would be available, and they will be available at the end of the program, and dale will be available to sign them. So you can line up after the program. As you know, this is the panel format tonight, and i have the pleasure of introducing Richard Roper who has agreed to moderate tonights panel. Few people know as much about or have been involved as long in public issues in newark and in new jersey as a whole as Richard Roper. A graduate of rutgers newark, mr. Roper has held government positions with the city of newark, the state of new jersey and the federal government. Hes also taught at princeton university. Here in newark, among his many, many roles, he has been a deacon at Bethany Baptist church. He also serves on the Rutgers University board of governors. So i will turn the program over to you [applause] thank you very much. I must begin by apologizing for holding you folk up for almost 20 minutes. Now that newark is revitalizing the traffic at this time [laughter] it is impossible. But thats a good thing, i think. So while i apologize, im also happy that i got caught up in newarks overflow traffic tonight. Its my role to lay out the ground rules for our conversation. We will begin with the author, dale russ cough Dale Russakoff, making a presentation. She will then be fold by the three panelists who have joined us to, in effect, comment on what dale has written and what she will say to us tonight. Dales comments will be about, about 15 minutes. That means that the panelists will each get about ten minutes to respond. Is that all right, panel . Okay. We can have ongoing conversation after those initial remarks have been made. After they have made their presentations, then we will open the floor for comments, questions from the audience, and i think we have a microphone here, we may have another mic somewhere in the room, but i dont see it. Im assuming then that folk who are interested in posing questions should approach the microphone, and your questions will be entertained by either the author or the members of the panel. So lets get into this conversation as quickly as we can given the time ive wasted getting here. Dale russakoff spent eight years as a reporter for the Washington Post covering politics, education, social did i say 8 28 or 20 years . [laughter] 20 years, forgive me, dale. Covering education, social policy and other topics. She worked for four years on the prize which is her first book. Jelani cobb, a frequent academic guest, says that with the prize, dale has brilliantly rendered the hopes, complexities, pitfalls and flaws of the efforts to reform american education. This is not simply the compelling story of a single conflictridden school system, it is a metaphor for the faming institutions failing institutions that have betrayed an entire generation of american children. With that, Dale Russakoff. [applause] thank everyone for coming tonight. I would like to start by telling you why writing this book became so important to me. It began for me literally the day that the zuckerberg gift was announced. I had seen an article in the star ledger saying this was going to happen on the Oprah Winfrey show. I had never watched oprah in my life. On september 24, 2010, i was absolutely electrified to see this 26yearold billionaire pledge 100 million to the Newark Schools and also to cory booker and Chris Christie talk about using the money to transform education in newark, Public Education work for the nations poorest children. To me, 100 million sounded like all the money in the world, and booker, christie and the reform leaders who praised them beginning with education secretary arne duncan on behalf of president obama sounded so sure of themselves. We know what works, was their phrase. They would take the best ideas of the education Reform Movement, bring them all to newark, and in bookers words, they would flip a district. I didnt believe they would achieve change on the miraculous scale they talked about, but i did expect to see dramatic advances, and i wanted to get as close to this process as i possibly could because this is exactly the reformers and their opponents [inaudible] this impassioned National Debate had a huge hole, and the majority in newark and and around the country were stranded in that hole. Ill give you two illustrations of this from my reporting early on. If you remember for most of the first year after the gift was announced, Cami Anderson had not arrived to become the superintendent. A group of consultants were calling the shots within the district which was being run by the state department of education. They did some very important work, in particular getting a handle on the tenure process, but the most public thing they did was to identify which of the absolutely worst District Schools to close to make way for expanding Charter Schools one of their primary goals. One school they identified was 15th avenue where for years barely 20 of children had been reading at grade level. Very little was going right for kids at this school, so they designated it to close, and North Star Academy one of the highest performing charters in the state was to move n. North stars model was starting with kindergarten and would grow one grade each year, so no one currently at 15th avenue would be eligible to go there. The consultants decided that the 330 children at 15th avenue from grades k7 would be transferred to a k8 school just across Westside Park. Now, if you were looking at a map, this made perfect sense because the Second School was gee graphicically close, and it was also underpopulated, so it had plenty of room. But if you knew the neighborhood at the ground level, which the consultants did not, you would know Westside Park is a hangout for be drug dealers and gang members and that children should not be walking through it every day to get to and from school. I attended a pta meeting at 15th avenue, and the parents were terrified. They wanted to know how people who professed such concern for their children would come up with such a plan. Moreover, the school where they were going wasnt much were betr than 15th avenue. It, too, was detz nateed as a failing school. One father said theyre just taking the problem and moving it across the park. So the reformers had a really powerful diagnosis for all that was wrong with the existing system, but they didnt have a formula for fixing it without causing stress on the schools where the majority of kids were still being educated. One thing i learned in cities in particular, its an ecosystem. Changes in one area have consequences in another, many of them unintended. Okay, scene two. I attended a public forum that was held one saturday morning on a new Alternative High School graduation test rlt for the past several years, students who failed the regular High School Test had taken an alternative test that was much shorter and easier and was graded by their own teachers, so almost everyone who took it passed. The state was proposing to use a new test that would raise the bar and be graded by a disinterested party. A number of civil rights organizations participated in the forum, and they argued strenuously against the new test. Some 3,000 students who would have passed the test under the old system would fail it under the new one. As they put it, one of the most consequential things you can do to students is to deny them a high schooldiploma. This is undoubtedly true, but i also found myself wondering how about denying them a High School Education . If students couldnt pass this very basic test, what did a High School Diploma mean . Again, here was a forceful, impassioned voice in the education debate talking past some of the biggest problems children navigated in newark and cities like it every day. It seemed clear this was an opportunity for journalism, to write a full story of how both the status quo and the reforms were affecting all Newark School children in Charter Schools and in District Schools. I wanted to see education from every perspective in the debate, but most importantly, from the eye view of children and the teachers who worked every day to reach them against incredible odds. If i could write a story, a book about education in newark that was indisputably true and thorough, essentially filling in the holes that existed in both sides of the National Conversation, i hoped that it could spur a more Honest Exchange about what children and schools in newark truly need to succeed. What should this conversation look like . I have a suggestion. Newark and cities like it desperately need to get more resources to classrooms to support children and their teachers. The Reform Movement has a mantra. It goes poverty is an excuse for failure in District Schools in newark and across the country. That is unquestionably true for some people in some schools. But poverty is also a root cause of failure for children who literally are traumatized from growing up amid violence, family strife and constant instability. Here is another example from my reporting. Avon Avenue School is located in one of the poorest areas in newark. I attended the kindergarten class there of whom 15 out of 26 had Child Welfare cases open; alleged neglect, exposure to violence and drugs. Some of the children in that class were already so angry at age 5 that they routinely would hit other children and throw chairs at them and the teachers s. So not only were these children unable to learn, they frightened some class mates to the point that they couldnt learn either. That class had one of the best teachers in any Newark Charter or District School, but on many days her extraordinary skills were not enough to overcome those challenges. She needed help. I also p spent time in spark academy, a kip elementary school. Spark had some students although not as many who were equally troubled. They also had way more resources to support them and their teachers. They had two teachers or in classrooms from kindergarten through grade three. They had a tutor for every grade to support children who couldnt keep up even with two teachers. They had three social workers who did therapy with a total of 70 children a week while avon had one social worker, one teacher per classroom, and if they had a tutor, they had one for the whole school. And spark had a dean of students whose job it was was to make sure there was an adult in every childs life to support the childs learning if not a parent, a family friend, a god parent, a neighbor. The principal of spark said there was no way the school could have had the academic results it did without those extra resources. In other words, avon couldnt possibly compete. Spark had these resources because kip gets more than 12,000 per student gives more than 12,000 per student to spark whereas the Newark Public School got less than 8,000 per student to avon. Have been used for generations to do more than educate children. They have been a patronage pick for local political bosses and also an Employment Agency to counter poverty and instability in the city. The district has jobs and sweetheart deals with contractors that no longer serve the schools or the education of the children, if they ever did. Every stakeholder in education from the state to unions to parents to politicians to local Community Organizations ought to figure out how to get as many of these resources to children and the teachers and principals who know their needs best. Secondly, as the state actively supports the expansion of charters in newark, it would share responsibility for the upheaval and stress which is placed on Newark Schools. A prominent education reforeman at the university of washington reformer at the university of washington actually said she believed there should be a pottery barn rule for the proponents of changing of existing School Districts. You broke it, you bought it. Id just like to touch on one more, and thats the role of private philanthropists. For generations the foundations of deceased early 20th century industrialists dominated education philanthropy, but since 2000 living billionaires have displaced them. Bill gates of microsoft be, the Walton Family of the wall mort fortune. Walmart fortune. They are making targeted, very large donations in hope of disrupting the existing Education System which they see as antiquated and unequal to the task of educating the next generation. Thats the context in which Mark Zuckerberg came to pledge 100 million to schools in newark, a city he had never visited. He was 26 at the time, the richest millennial on the planet, and he hoped to transform the education world. He came to the cause of education through personal experience. His girlfriend, now his wife Priscilla Chan had worked as a teacher for a year after college, and when they socialized with friends in silicon valley, he felt their contemporaries treated her as if she were doing charity work. Yet, in his view, teaching was one of the most important jobs in society. His hope was to create a teachers contract that would raise the status of Teachers First in newark and then in america. His hope was to pay very large bonuses to the very best teachers, up to 50 over and above their base salary. These were the kinds of rewards paid to facebook, and he believed a similar system would attract the best College Graduates in the country into teaching. Booker and christie added to this a plan to expand Charter School is the and radically restructure District Schools. They thought they would arrive within five years at a mold, a proof point that zucker berg with his philanthropy could take to cities across the country, solving the education crisis in all of urban network. As we all know urban america. As we all know, that did not happen. But Mark Zuckerberg did end up spending 100 million in newark, and Charter Schools have grown to serve more than 40 of newarks students. More than a third of the schools have been removed, repurposed, redesigned or taken over by charters. Most of this process has taken place without Public Participation because philanthropy, for all the good it