The Vulnerable Young People Denied Access to What We Call the American Dream

As he promised during the campaign, President Donald Trump is cracking down on immigration—pledging to deport anyone who is caught without papers and creating chaos and injustice with an outrageous executive order late last week that suspends entry for all refugees for 120 days, entirely bans refugees from Syria and for 90 days bars immigrants from seven Muslim countries—Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen.

But so far, at least, Trump has done nothing about DACA.  DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, was established by President Barack Obama’s executive order to protect adolescents and young adults—brought here by their parents when they were small children—from deportation and to allow these young adults to obtain work permits.  The protection established by President Obama under DACA is for two years and is renewable.

These young people call themselves Dreamers, named for a bill introduced in Congress in 2001 by Senator Dick Durbin, a bill that has never been passed, the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Bill—the DREAM Act.  President Obama established DACA because Congress had never acted on the broader bill that would have expanded access to higher education by guaranteeing in-state tuition and access to federal financial aid and to scholarships at state colleges and universities.

In Sunday’s NY Times Magazine, Dale Russakoff published an extraordinary profile of one Dreamer, a young woman named Indira, who left Mexico with her parents when she was six years old.  Her parents, both medical doctors in Mexico but working in menial jobs in the U.S. ever since, brought their family to the United States on an immigrant visa and never returned to a Mexican city where relatives had been killed by violence.  Indira is now enrolled in college, thanks to a privately funded foundation that offers scholarships to Dreamers.

Let me explain here that I have really never been able to follow the thinking of those who have opposed the DREAM Act. I guess they believe that educational opportunity and the American Dream are a zero sum game?  That if your kid gets a good education, she might edge mine out of entrance to a particular college or out of a job later in life?  That children are responsible for the so called sins of their fathers?  How could any caring adult possibly want children to have to grow up living in the shadows, and if the children and their families manage to get along, how could anyone want the children to be denied the right to in-state college tuition or the right to qualify for a Pell Grant or college loan?  Opposing the Dream Act has always seemed to me a particularly punitive and cruel definition of fairness.

Thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court, undocumented immigrant children do have a right to a K-12 education, despite their problems accessing colleges and universities. Russakoff explains that in their 1982 decision in the case of Plyler v. Doe, the justices on the U.S. Supreme Court guaranteed the right for undocumented immigrant children to a K-12 public education.  Russakoff quotes the majority decision written by Justice William Brennan: “Already disadvantaged as a result of poverty, lack of English-speaking ability and undeniable racial prejudices, these children, without an education, will become permanently locked into the lowest socioeconomic class.”  In a concurring opinion, Justice Lewis Powell wrote: “The classification at issue deprives a group of children of the opportunity for education afforded all other children simply because they have been assigned a legal status due to a violation of law by their parents.”

Russakoff profiles Indira, whose family resides in the state of Georgia: “She was determined to go to college and medical school and fulfill her parents’ interrupted dream. In her junior year (of high school), Indira began researching college options… She was distressed to discover that Georgia barred undocumented immigrants from attending its top public universities and charged them out-of-state tuition at all others—triple the rate for citizen residents. She then turned to researching financial aid and learned that Congress barred her from accessing federal Pell grants, loans, scholarships, and work-study jobs—the most common forms of assistance for low-income students… At a college fair attended by representatives of numerous Georgia colleges, she asked admissions officers what kind of help was available for undocumented students. No one had any to offer her. She switched her focus to private colleges and was admitted to Atlanta’s Agnes Scott, which she says awarded her $20,000 annually in financial aid, less than half of what she needed.”

Her help came from TheDream.US, a private foundation that offers scholarships to Dreamers at Delaware State University. Russakoff follows Indira to college and profiles as well several of her classmate Dreamers who managed to discover this program, several of them learning about the help it could offer only after a number of years of manual work after high school graduation.  Russakoff estimates there are 2.1 million Dreamers, “who have grown up as Americans in almost every way except for their passports.”  Educated in public schools, these children are likely not able to remember much about life in their nations of origin. They may not even speak any language other than English.

President Trump’s threat to eliminate DACA during the campaign has terrified Dreamers all over the country.  For the students in Delaware, there was some reassurance: “A lifeline of sorts arrived the week after the election, when the students received letters from TheDream.US, Governor (Jack) Markel and the president of D.S.U., pledging to stand behind their scholarships no matter what became of DACA.”  Donald Graham, founder of TheDream.US, “lined up attorneys to represent them if anyone challenged their right to be in school.”

So far, President Donald Trump has taken no action to eliminate DACA.  Please read Russakoff’s profile of Indira and her Delaware State University Dreamer classmates to become more informed about the extraordinary challenges faced by the young people who are labeled “illegal” despite their exemplary academic records and their efforts to pursue what we call, perhaps erroneously, the American Dream.

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More on Arne Duncan’s Legacy

In her new book about Newark, New Jersey and the school reform paid for by Facebook CEO-philanthropist Mark Zuckerberg, Dale Russakoff captures the language of what we can call “corporatized” school reform.  Newark school reform was paid for by Zuckerberg’s $100 million grant, but the style couldn’t have happened without the movement promoted by Arne Duncan through I3 “innovation” money, School Improvement Grants and Race to the Top grants—a movement that has filled the public schools with consultants, many of them from the business schools and Eli Broad’s academy for superintendents, not from schools of education.  (This blog also posted an earlier piece on Arne Duncan’s legacy.)

Here is how Russakoff describes Cami Anderson’s “corporate reform,” leadership training sessions for school principals: “‘Every good and high performing coach and CEO has a game plan—a lean, focused, clear plan,’ she said… As part of this process, she said, principals should articulate something she called a BHAG (‘Bee-hag’). When no one appeared familiar with the term, Anderson explained that it stood for a Big Hairy Audacious Goal.  This, she said, was a clear and seemingly impossible objective around which everyone in a school could organize to achieve previously unthinkable progress. She credited the term to best-selling business author Jim Collins,whose many analyses of successful companies were treated as scripture across the school reform movement.  Several staff members said they felt that the district had been overtaken by a cadre of technocrats, most of them white and commuting from New York, whose vocabulary was rich in education reform buzz-words.  Besides ‘transformational’—never incremental—change, they also made it a priority to ‘move the needle,’ which meant to achieve measurable progress, usually in test scores.  To do this, they had to ‘pull the right levers,’ like allowing principals to choose their teachers.  They would ‘drill deep’ or ‘take a deep dive’ into complex issues.  They divided strategies into ‘buckets,’ such as the accountability bucket, the teacher-evaluation bucket.  They took liberties with parts of speech, changing nouns into verbs—as in, ‘Bucket those two ideas together’… Data had to be ‘robust.’  They worried about ‘optics,’ or how things would look to the public… Anderson shared the reform movement’s faith in business-style management and accountability.  The goal, she said, was to mobilize the bureaucracy around high performance rather than mere compliance with rules.” (The Prize, pp. 124-125)

The problem, of course, when it comes to the federal Department of Education is that one of the “levers” federal officials can push is compliance with rules, but Duncan’s department didn’t emphasize that, especially in the Office of Innovation and Improvement. Thanks to the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools, we know that the U.S. Department of Education’s own Office of Inspector General blasted the Department for failure to oversee more than $3 billion in federal grants intended to start charter schools and expand the charter school sector.  And we discovered last week that the Department of Education, in its most recent batch of charter grants, just awarded $71 million to Ohio, the largest grant to any state, to expand charter schools, even though Ohio’s legislature was locked at the time in a well publicized struggle to pass what most people in the state—Republican and Democrat—have deemed minimal and long-needed charter regulation.

Sherman Dorn and Amanda Potterton have described Arne Duncan’s legacy as shaped by the “growing influence of a network of private actors on public education.”  “These reformers have largely consisted of private actors, including leaders of education nonprofits, charter school founders, and other nontraditional school leaders whose essential resources for reform come from the private wealth of major foundations….”

Reminding us of the power of Jim Shelton, brought straight to the Department of Education from the Gates Foundation to run the Department’s Office of Innovation, and Joanne Weiss, the COO at the NewSchools Venture Fund who became Arne Duncan’s chief of staff, Dorn and Potterton direct us to Sarah Reckhow’s book, Follow the Money: How Foundation Dollars Change Public School Politics, for a definition of the “Boardroom Progressives” who were welcomed to Arne Duncan’s policy table:  “The policy agenda of the Boardroom Progressives has largely been drawn from the two dominant streams of policy ideas in education reform since the 1990s: accountability and markets… Boardroom Progressives are impatient with public bureaucracies and have focused their efforts on creating a broad network of private and nonprofit alternatives for developing and running schools… The Boardroom Progressive movement involves a diverse set of actors—charter school leaders, urban superintendents, and nonprofit founders. Yet private wealth has been an essential resource for supporting many of these leaders and their initiatives…. including charter schools, advocacy organizations, education consulting and research organizations, and countless nonprofits.” (pp.2-3)

Dorn and Potterton define Duncan’s pivotal policy as Race to the Top: “Members of Duncan’s reform network were partly the genesis and potentially the beneficiary of a grant program, Race to the Top, that required applicants to expand opportunities for charter school creation, eliminate firewalls between student test scores and teacher evaluation, and commit to so-called ‘college and career-ready standards.’… Once Duncan’s department announced the Race to the Top program, the (Department of Education staff’s) network connections were critical to promoting it… (T)he network was critical to directly or indirectly building state capacity in the Race to the Top years… The Gates Foundation provided US$250.000 worth of application consulting services to states that agreed with the foundation’s eight-point set of criteria.”  Duncan “acted as a ‘gatekeeper’ by bringing a private network to the fore in education, and further opening public education to privatized influences.”

Aaron Pallas, the Teachers College education sociologist, comments on the significance of Race to the Top as the centerpiece of Arne Duncan’s legacy:  “Arne Duncan’s signature initiative was Race to the Top arguably the most effective piece of federal education policy in the nation’s history in its success at changing the behavior of the 50 states that were its target. Effective policy is not necessarily good policy, however, because good policy depends on a well-developed and plausible theory of action.  The competitive priorities in Race to the Top—improving teacher and principal effectiveness based on student performance, the adoption of common… curricular standards, turning around failing schools, and creating a climate for the expansion of high-quality charter schools—were based on a wish and a prayer, not a body of evidence demonstrating that these strategies could fundamentally alter the equity and excellence equations in American education.”

Pallas concludes: “Viewing the education policy landscape from 30,000 feet—a Secretary’s-eye view—may suggest that the implementation of Race to the Top and related reforms has gone smoothly.  The problem is compounded when the administration seems not to hear opposing views…. The view is quite different closer to the ground.  From five feet, the uneven and thoughtless implementation of statewide teacher evaluation systems and Common Core standards in many states has—however unintentionally—undermined the legitimacy of our public school system.”

Patricia McGuire, president of Trinity Washington University, credits Duncan’s policies with widespread scapegoating of teachers and demonizing colleges of education:  “Teachers have been at ground zero of Secretary Duncan’s education reform movement, and the teaching profession has suffered extraordinary criticism, curtailment and even contempt from Duncan and some of his acolytes in school reform.  Now there is evidence of teacher shortages all across the nation.  Is it any wonder?… At the same time, the administration has proposed an extraordinary array of complicated rules for teacher education programs that would have the effect of further limiting enrollment in schools of education while imposing significant new costs for data tracking.  Ironically, for an administration that claims to care about teacher quality, the reform movement has also encouraged abandoning formal graduate education for teacher licensure in favor of short-term job training by storefront providers. Go figure.”

Diane Ravitch pulls together several of these strands of criticism in her reflection on Arne Duncan’s legacy: “This era has not been good for students; nearly a quarter live in poverty, and fully 51% live in low-income families. This era has not been good for teachers, who feel disrespected and demeaned by governors, legislatures, and the U.S. Department of Education.  This era has not been good for parents, who see their local public schools lose resources to charter schools and see their children subjected to endless, intensive testing.  It will take years to recover from the damage that Arne Duncan’s policies have inflicted on public education.”

Here is an alternative way to think and talk about education, from a professor in one of those graduate schools of education—Mike Rose at UCLA.  His language is so old-fashioned, so real, and so very refreshing: “What if reform had begun with the assumption that at least some of the answers for improvement were in the public schools themselves, that significant unrealized capacity exists in the teaching force, that even poorly performing schools employ teachers who work to the point of exhaustion to benefit their students?”

Jersey Jazzman: “The Prize” Is Strong on Politics, Weak on Policy

Mark Weber, who blogs as Jersey Jazzman, is a New Jersey public school teacher and a Ph.D. candidate in school finance at Rutgers University.  He read Dale Russakoff’s The Prize, about the five year experiment on Newark’s children by then-mayor Cory Booker, Governor Chris Christie, and philanthropist-Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and he explains, “As a literary work, I enjoyed The Prize. Dale Russakoff is a fine writer, and her detailing of the politics behind the effort to reform Newark’s schools is compelling and important.  But as a source for data points about Newark’s schools and the results of those reform efforts, The Prize comes up short.”  Weber has published his analysis, The (Mis-)Use of Data in Dale Russakoff’s The Prize, at the New Jersey Education Policy Forum.

Weber understands that as a writer, Russakoff used the stories of particular schools to illustrate her report on Newark’s schools, but he alleges that when she uses data to back up her analysis or generalize from the stories of two particular schools whose staffs she interviews at length, she elects not to use data from the state of New Jersey that is both verifiable and widely available.  Carefully analyzing the data that New Jersey provides about public schools across the state, Weber contradicts several of Russakoff’s themes: that Newark Public Schools (NPS) suffer from budgetary bloat due to poor allocation of funds while Newark’s charters are more efficient; that charter schools provide much deeper support for students by adding extra professionals like social workers; and that Newark’s public schools poorly serve the children due to a weak teaching staff.

Do Newark’s schools suffer from budgetary bloat while charters are more efficient?  Weber cites data from Bruce Baker the national school finance expert: “In 2010, Dr. Bruce Baker analyzed the relative per pupil spending of NPS with controls for differences in wage costs and poverty.  Newark is ranked at the 8.5 percentile nationally, and at the 12.4 percentile in New Jersey.”  After comparing data that is publicly available, Weber explains that, “NPS spends far more per pupil on education support services than any Newark charter school,” and “NPS has a lower per pupil administrative cost than any charter school in the city.” He adds that charters do not incur the same kind of costs as the district schools, because host school districts must cover “transportation, food services, tuition payments for out-of-district placements, debt service, and so forth.”  Weber compares costs for custodial services in Newark’s public and charter schools because, as he notes, “A running theme of The Prize is that a large portion of an urban school district’s budget goes to patronage employment, which leads to ‘bloated payrolls’ that divert funds away from instruction… The notion that inordinately high salaries due to patronage keep plant costs high is contradicted by the fact that NPS’s plant expenses are right at the median when compared to Newark’s charter schools.”

Do Newark’s charter schools do a better job of serving students and their families by hiring more support professionals? “Russakoff spends much of The Prize describing two Newark schools: BRICK Avon, a K-8 elementary school that is part of the Newark Public Schools (NPS), and SPARK Academy, one of the schools that is part of the TEAM/KIPP charter school network.”  Russakoff emphasizes the number of school social workers at the KIPP school and the lack of any social worker at the public school. Weber explains, however, that BRICK Avon’s lack of a social worker is an anomaly in the Newark Public Schools, and though it lacks a social worker, the school is staffed with a school psychologist and a counselor, while the KIPP school has neither.  The public school also has access to support professionals employed at the district level, professionals who move among several buildings.

Are Newark’s public schools staffed with weak teachers while the teachers at the city’s charters are more effective?  Weber charges that Russakoff simply failed to investigate this issue and instead relied on received wisdom from the people with whom she spoke in Newark.  “Many of the protagonists in The Prize believe that NPS schools suffer from poor teacher quality.  Russakoff dutifully reports their misgivings; what she doesn’t do is challenge them to show that the poorest performing schools in the system have the weakest teachers.  Nor does she explore how teacher characteristics changed following (Cami) Anderson’s ‘Renewal’ plan.  In my 2015 testimony to the JCPS (Joint Committee on Public Schools), I presented evidence on how the teaching staffs at the ‘Renew’ schools had changed following their reconstitution…. (S)taffs had become less experienced and had fewer black members following ‘renewal.’  Both teacher experience and teacher-student racial alignment (particularly for racial minority students) have been found to be beneficial for student achievement outcomes… Teacher quality is a central theme of The Prize, yet Russakoff spends little time exploring how teaching staffs have changed in Newark under the reforms brought about by the Zuckerberg donation.”

Weber concludes: “Russakoff presents too many figures out of their proper context.  She relies on single comparisons rather than looking at the entirety of the city’s public district schools and its charter sector.  Her use of proprietary data that cannot be vetted is unwarranted, especially when public data is available.  And she does not adequately challenge the assertions of the ‘reformers’ in her story, potentially leading her readers to conclusions that are not borne out by the available evidence… (T)he notions that NPS  is an unusually bloated system, or that charter schools divert more funds toward student instruction, or that Newark’s ‘reformers’ have accurately identified its poorest-performing schools, are simply not supported by the evidence… (W)hile The Prize is a worthy read for its political narrative, its misapplication of data renders it inadequate as an analysis of education policy.”

Russakoff’s “The Prize” Exposes Arrogance and Pride of Chris Christie and Cory Booker

The Prize is Dale Russakoff’s new book about the plan cooked up by then-Newark-mayor Cory Booker and New Jersey governor Cris Christie to transform the schools in Newark, New Jersey as a national model.  Booker’s view was that it was the perfect district for such an experiment because it is small enough that most of the variables could be controlled. Booker traveled to an elite conference in Sun Valley, Idaho to present the idea to Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, who would be asked to donate $100 million.  Booker and Christie’s plan was designed to be top-down, to be announced on the Oprah Winfrey show before the people of Newark knew about it:

“It called for imposing reform from the top down, warning that a more open political process could be taken captive by unions and machine politicians. ‘Real change has casualties and those who prospered under the pre-existing order will fight loudly and viciously,’ the proposal said.  Seeking consensus would undercut real reform. One of the goals was to ‘make Newark the charter school capital of the nation.’  The plan called for an ‘infusion of philanthropic support’ to recruit teachers and principals through national school-reform organizations, build sophisticated data and accountability systems, and weaken tenure and seniority protections.  Philanthropy, unlike government funding, required no public review of priorities or spending.  Christie approved the plan, and Booker began pitching it to major donors.  In those pitches, Booker portrayed the Newark schools as a prize of a very different sort: a laboratory where the education reform movement could apply its strategies to one of the nation’s most troubled school districts.  He predicted that Newark would be transformed into a ‘hemisphere of hope’ catalyzing the spread of reform throughout urban America.” (pp. 20-21)

Russakoff’s book is less about school reform really than about the hubris of Cory Booker and cruel arrogance of Chris Christie, despite that its focus is the imposition of corporatized school reform upon Newark.  Russakoff is at pains to take us into classrooms and to make us see the work of school teachers.  Her approach to portraying the schools through stories of excellent teachers leads to what I see as the book’s flaw—an adoption of “the school teacher as savior” myth.  Russakoff is won over by energetic young principals and teachers in KIPP charters who go to all lengths to save children—including even the creation of a carpool of teachers who pick children in one family up and deliver them home each day to a shelter—to help the children avoid the label “homeless.”  Such efforts, while laudable, cannot possibly be the building blocks of sustainable systems to educate the children of our nation’s poorest families.

Once Zuckerberg had bought in, Booker and Christie set about selling the preconceived plan to the community, and immediately things backfired. An early hire was Bradley Tusk, a New York consultant brought in to create a process to get the community to agree to the need for the plan that had already been adopted by city leaders.  “A senior aide to Booker privately deemed Tusk’s work ‘a boondoggle.’ According to a board member of the Foundation for Newark’s Future , which paid the bill (This agency was created to administer Zuckerberg’s gift and other grants that Zuckerberg specified must be raised to match his original $100 million), ‘It wasn’t real community engagement. It was public relations.'”  (p. 63)

Though she eventually promoted the expansion of charter schools as central to the plan that was later dubbed One Newark, Cami Anderson, the superintendent  hired to oversee the plan, is portrayed in The Prize as having understood the biggest danger of school reform based on rapid expansion of charters. “She pointed out that charters in Newark served a smaller proportion than the district schools of children who lived in extreme poverty, had learning disabilities, or struggled to speak English… In cities like Newark, where the overall student population was static, growth for charters meant shrinkage for the district. Newark charters now were growing at a pace to enroll forty percent of children in five years, leaving the district with sixty percent—the neediest sixty percent… Anderson called this ‘the lifeboat theory of education reform,’ arguing that it could leave a majority of children to sink on the big ship.” (p. 118)  By contrast, when teachers at a charter school co-located in the same building as a neighborhood school ask Mayor Booker how he plans to help and support the neighborhood school also operating in their building, he replies, “I’ll be very frank…. I want you to expand as fast as you can.  But when schools are failing, I don’t think pouring new wine into old skins is the way.  We need to close them and start new ones.'” (p. 132)

Despite what may have been her reservations, Anderson played the corporate game imposed by Christie and Booker.  She was supported by a succession of expensive consultants from New York.  “The going rate for consultants in Newark and elsewhere on the East Coast was $1,000 a day, and their pay comprised more than $20 million of the $200 million in philanthropy spent or committed in Newark.” (p. 71)  “Two of the highest-paid consultants were friends and former colleagues of Anderson, Alison Avera and Tracy Breslin, both senior officials in New York under Klein and Cerf and both fellows at the Broad Academy.  Both had worked for the Global Education Advisers consulting firm originally founded by Cerf, and Anderson asked them to stay on for about a year in two of her most strategic positions—Avera as interim chief of staff and Breslin, who had extensive experience in human resources, as interim director of a new Office of Talent… Avera and Breslin were married to each other; had they been public employees, nepotism rules would have prohibited one from supervising the other… Avera and Breslin had joined Global Education Advisers at $1,200 and $1,000 a day respectively, and they continued at those rates for Anderson; Breslin charged over-time on days when she worked more than eight hours, even though her contract specified that she be paid by the day, not the hour… In less than eighteen months working for Anderson… their combined pay exceeded $740,000.” (pp 126-127)

We keep on reading even when we know in advance how the story works out. One Newark crashed when Anderson couldn’t raise test scores despite replacing a large number of school principals and despite moving many experienced (and thought by Anderson to be ineffective) teachers into a pool who continued to be paid because they could not, by New Jersey law, be summarily laid off.  Booker, Christie and Anderson had sought and failed to break due-process protections, and the money ran short before Zuckerberg could establish the merit bonuses for teachers he believed were the key to transforming the district.  Anderson quickly alienated the community as well as the school staff, and she quit attending meetings of Newark’s largely toothless elected school board (Remember, Newark had been under state control for 20 years.) in January of 2014, over a year before Christie finally decided to terminate her.

Russakoff concludes: “For four years, the reformers never really tried to have a conversation with the people of Newark. Their target audience was always somewhere else, beyond the people whose children and grandchildren desperately needed to learn and compete for a future. Booker, Christie, and Zuckerberg set out to create a national ‘proof point’ in Newark.  There was less focus on Newark as its own complex ecosystem that reformers needed to understand before trying to save it.  Two hundred million dollars and almost five years later, there was at least as much rancor as reform.  Newark illustrates that improving education for the nation’s poorest children is as much a political as a pedagogical challenge.” (pp. 209-210)

If not a national model, One Newark and the Booker-Christie-Zuckerberg-Anderson style of school “reform” is a symbol of what’s been happening in cities like Bloomberg’s New York and Rahm’s Chicago and experiments like Bill and Melinda Gates’ failed national small schools initiative and their effort to get teachers rated by students’ test scores.  Philanthropists and tech-savvy entrepreneurs leap to the conclusion that their business acumen gives them an edge to solve social problems way beyond the ability of mere school teachers. For the philanthropists who are underwriting these projects, money and celebrity also provide the political connections that make it possible for them to experiment on communities and schools and children far from home.  There are few consequences for the philanthropists if they fail, apart from losing money; and they have so much money that the loss of a hundred million dollars doesn’t really matter very much.

The failure of the Newark experiment doesn’t seem to have taught today’s big money experimenters a lesson.  Just last week Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple’s founder Steve Jobs, bought a full page ad in the NY Times to announce XQ: The Super School Project,  her new $50 million endeavor described by reporter Jennifer Medina as “the highest-profile project yet of the Emerson Collective, the group that Ms. Powell Jobs uses to finance her philanthropic projects.” “(T)he campaign is meant to inspire teams of educators and students, as well as leaders from other sectors to come up with new plans for high schools… By fall next year, Ms. Powell Jobs said, a team of judges will pick five to 10 of the best ideas to finance.”

And in the Washington Post last Thursday, Valerie Strauss described an exclusive “Philanthropy Innovation Summit” being held later this month, “to give philanthropists space ‘to convene and discuss their giving in an intimate, non-solicitation environment.'”  Participants are invited to, “Come be inspired by information and insights that can only be learned at this event.  You will leave with new and actionable ideas and skills to help you as you think about your philanthropy moving forward in topic areas including: Seeding Innovation in Philanthropy, Nexus of Design Thinking and Strategic Philanthropy, Philanthropreneurship, (and) Philanthropic Investment for Scientific Advancement.”  Strauss comments: “If you are wondering what ‘philanthropreneurship’ is, it is a term that came into use about a year ago and refers to… ‘the idea that the skills which enabled people to make their fortunes are often the ones required to solve apparently intractable problems.’  In other words, billionaires who created computers, software, Internet browsers, retail stores, etc., are the people the country needs to solve societal inequity and other ‘intractable problems.'”

In Newark, the most encouraging development was the emergence of a skeptical community and strong leadership by Ras Baraka, the respected high school principal and city councilman who made opposition to the Booker-Christie-Zuckerberg-Anderson plan the centerpiece of his campaign for mayor. As Russakoff demonstrates again and again, the citizens of Newark understood from the beginning that Mayor Booker had brought in outsiders to impose a dangerous experiment on their children and their neighborhood schools. In a place where the schools have been under state takeover for twenty years and where the citizens have little power over the district, the citizens of Newark rallied together to throw out One Newark and Cami Anderson, and to elect Ras Baraka.  It will take considerable time, however, for the damage to be repaired.