NEWARK — If you had a million dollars to spend on Newark’s public schools, how would you use it?
More teachers? Tutors? New books? Advanced classroom technology?
No, the correct answer — to the city’s mayor, at least — is "relentless outreach."
Relentless outreach means spending a million asking everyone in town—yes, everyone, including "neighborhood nannies" and those in homeless shelters — what their "values and principles" are so a report can be written that someday might — might — include those values and principles in drafting a reform plan for public schools.
"That sounds absurd," says Marion Bolden, the former Newark schools superintendent.
It might sound absurd to her, but it’s the first initiative of the Zuckerberg-Booker-Christie-Winfrey approach to reforming schools and making people forget past mistakes.
You remember the big Chicago rollout of Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg’s gift of $100 million in stock over five years to a foundation that may or may not, some day in the future, develop a reform plan for Newark’s schools.
That roll-out, part of a two-week Oprah Winfrey Show homage to charter schools and the billionaires who love them, included guest appearances by Gov. Chris Christie—who took time out from not running for president in 2012— and Mayor Cory Booker, labeled "the rock star mayor of Newark" by Winfrey.
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Timed exquisitely to help people forget Christie lost $400 million in federal school aid out of pique, that Booker lost a plan to avoid layoffs of cops and firefighters, and that Zuckerberg was portrayed as a spoiled, arrogant, misogynist brat in a good new movie.
Curious minds wanted to know exactly how Zuckerberg’s stock and the extra cash it attracts would be spent. At last, a partial answer: It created the oddly-spelled PENewark, an organization headed by Jeremiah Grace, 30, a former Elizabeth school board member, ACLU employee, local NAACP officer, and employee of Education Reform Now, a group headed by hedge-fund managers who like charter schools.
PENewark was launched with some fanfare in Newark the other day, but, Zuckerberg, Christie, and Winfrey could not make it. Booker was there and said the organization wanted "every Newarker’s input in every step of this process."
The money will go to, among other things, PENewark’s staff salaries, including Grace’s. He won’t say how much of the million he gets because, he says, "that would be a distraction."
Grace was cited in 2007 by the state School Ethics Commission for failing to file proper disclosure documents when he was a board member in Elizabeth. In fairness, it should be noted the Elizabeth board is made up mostly of closet Republicans who endorsed Christie; Grace is a Democrat and says he was ratted out by the people he ran against.
Relentless outreach apparently didn’t work with them.
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So Grace declined to run again and moved to Newark. Grace, despite his work for Education Reform Now and his Facebook profile picture with Geoffrey Canada, the guru of Harlem charter schools, denies the effort is aimed at promoting charters. He faces skeptics.
"It provides an opportunity to pretend community input was sought, but, you know, they’ll just go back to the ideas they had originally,’’ says Bolden. Booker, an early supporter of voucher and charter schools, says his aim is not to convert public schools into charter schools.
Clement Price, a history professor at Rutgers-Newark, says he doubts PENewark could, as promised, "knock on every door" in Newark and come up with a plan by January.
"There are a lot of doors in Newark," he says, "and the people behind a lot of them won’t want to open those doors to an organization like this."
Joseph DePierro, dean of Seton Hall’s education school and a chronicler of reform movements, says it’s "always a good idea to involve the community."
"It worries me because it sounds like no one knows what to do, so we are casting about about for something or someone to save us. It also sounds like a political campaign."
That man needs a good dose of relentless outreach.
Related topics: chris-christie, cory-booker, newark, oprah
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