Good Life Project - Zuckerberg, Booker and One Journalist’s Quest For the Real Story

Episode Date: September 22, 2015

The story of a lifetime only comes around once...Dale Russakoff spent more than three decades as a top news journalist, reporting for The Washington Post for more than 28 years.When Facebook co-founder, Mark Zuckerberg, announced a $100 million grant, teaming with then rock-start mayor, Cory Booker, to revolutionize the Newark schools and create a model for national education reform, she'd found a story worthy of her full attention and her first-ever book.Leaving her job, she spent four and a half years embedded in the lives, conversations and inner-most workings of what seemed, at first, to be positioned as a stunning transformational endeavor. What unfolded on the ground, though, was a profoundly different story. One that seemed straight out of a Shakespearian drama with a complex cast of players, each driven by their own personal and social agendas.At play wasn't just the lives of tens of thousands of kids, many living in desperate poverty and violence, but also a $1 billion budget and thousands of jobs.Russakoff tells this story in her riveting new book, The Prize: Who's in Charge of America's Schools?  In this week's conversation, we dive into this tense and complex drama, played out on both the highest levels of government and business and the most basic level of human interaction, one teacher, one kid, one life at a time.We also explore how growing up in the deep south, the child of an "outlier" family who never bought into segregation, cultivated Russakoff's lens on people and equality. We dive into her career as a journalist and how that world is changing and being largely dismantled. We talk about the good and the bad and explore how the new golden age of podcasting just might end up saving the field.Even if you have zero interest in education, you will love this conversation. Because it's about a breathtaking human drama. It's about power and corruption. It's about the desire to do the right thing and how that gets almost perversely "bent" to the will of too many interests along the way.It's about the need for access to truth, to stories not only well-told but also vigorously researched and validated. It's about one woman's quest to shine the light, even when those who've given her the batteries for her flashlight end up unhappy with what that light ends up illuminating. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

These are human beings and their flaws aren't evil, they're just flaws and we can all learn from them and I felt that there was nothing more important than learning from them when you think about what's at stake in the lives of the kids and newer. For a number of years now there's been a pretty raging debate, at least in the United States, about what to do about education. It seems like the system is broken, but everybody has a different idea of how to fix it. So when about five years ago, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced a $100 million educational grant to help remake the Newark school systems and create a national model that would change the game. Then journalist, longtime journalist, Dale Ruskoff, who'd been in the journalism game for more than three decades, saw it as an astonishing opportunity to go deep into this. So she talked to the players,

you know, Zuckerberg and Cory Booker, then mayor of Newark and Chris Christie, and gained really incredible levels of access and literally rode alongside them, gaining access to car rides, conference rooms, all sorts of private conversations deep inside this process as it unfolded. And all different factions did their best to try and make an astonishing change, a reform, a revolution in education happen. What unfolded was not what anybody thought. And she shares this story, this story of incredible heartbreak, incredible inspiration, incredible frustration in a really powerful new book, The Prize. It was eye-opening to me. In this week's conversation, I sit down with Dale and we talk not just about the education system,

but I'm also fascinated by the world of journalism, by what's happening to it, by the astonishing rate of change and where journalism is going. And we even have a conversation about how some journalism is now moving into audio and podcasts and what the future of that might look like. So I'm really excited to share this wide-ranging conversation with Dale. I'm Jonathan Fields. This is Good Life Project. There are so many places that I want to go with you. I'm fascinated by you and your career. And also the book that you've just come out with is, I wavered between being furious, being surprised, being choked up and emotional because I was just so moved by some of the stories. Really powerful. But I want to take a step back because this is a big provocative book and it tackles a just massively complex issue. But it sounds like the roots of this for you were really born from you growing up in the South in Alabama.

Definitely. Take me there a little bit. Well, I was a child in the final years of legal segregation, and I witnessed the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the Civil Rights Movement, and how that changed the world that I was living in. But when I was a child, everything was segregated. There were separate drinking fountains that said colored and white.

Black people couldn't try on dresses in the fitting rooms at department stores. I remember when the Civil Rights Act passed and restrooms had to be integrated. Our public library closed the restrooms. You had to go somewhere else to use the restroom if you used the library because initially they weren't willing to integrate their restrooms. So it was a time of incredible polarization, anger, even hatred among white people toward black people. And then all that changed. I'm not sure all the hatred went away, but all the separateness went away with the passage of the Civil Rights Act. And that was a result of the Civil Rights Movement and the passage of legislation in Washington. And just as a child, watching everything change like that, you know,

seeing restaurants integrate, even though they'd been so separate, and, you know, that suddenly there were just water fountains for everyone, not for colored and white people. And the thing that didn't change for me was I went to segregated schools all my life. I lived in an all white suburb. I went to very good schools, very, like probably the best endowed public schools in the state of Alabama, but it was an all white suburb and the schools were solidly white the entire time I went there. So, but it sounded like also from just a little bit that I read that even before sort of the legal shifts that your family was unique in terms of it seems like the ethic just within your family was they didn't really buy into. Yeah, my parents were very different. They were not from the South.

And they kind of taught me from an early age that everything around you is wrong. And they just encouraged me to ask questions about it and be aware of it and think about it starting as a child. And I think I thought about it in many ways on many levels from then on. And I still think back about integration and segregation and what my perceptions were as a kid and how that changed as I became more aware of things all around me. But I'll tell you a story. When I was, I think, like five or six years old, I was probably not really reading.

We went to the airport. One of our fun things to do on Sundays back then was to go just watch planes take off. That's great. And that's apparently the first time I encountered the separate drinking fountains. Because Birmingham was so segregated. I was just always going to white public places and not seeing these separate drinking fountains. Right.

It's like there almost wasn't even much opportunity to... Yeah. I mean, the separation was total. Right. And so my mother kept a book of things we said as children that she wanted to remember, and so she wrote that I had come home from

the airport that day and said, Mommy, do colored people taste things different from white people? And she said, no, why? And I said, well, then why do they have different drinking fountains? And she had written in the book, why indeed and i obviously i don't remember that um but i i just feel that that was part you know that was the kind of thing that they really encouraged my brother and me to pay attention to

think about but i mean i'm wondering you know growing up in that environment and really sort of having an outlier lens, did that manifest in any challenges? Or was it just something that was sort of more like a quietly a part of who you were? You know, I didn't see it as a challenge. It was just my life, my childhood. And I wasn't rejected. My parents, you know, I think in some circles, they were seen as a little bit different and controversial, but they weren't harshly rejected by anyone. And, you know, it was just my childhood. It was just, you know, that was just life growing up.

Right, it's just what you knew. Yeah, yeah. So at what point do you actually start to become interested in telling stories about what's going on around? You know, growing up in the South, I really, I was surrounded by storytellers. There were a lot of people who were kind of, you know, old kind of Southern storytellers. And I used to really like to just listen to people tell stories about, you know, what life used to be like when, you know, it was more rural around there. And, you know, I just really enjoyed hearing people spin those stories. And I think that just became, you know, another thing about, you know, how I related

to the world. I liked telling stories. I liked hearing stories. And I liked listening to people tell their stories. I think that really made me a reporter. Which would really be the creature, right, to the journalism side. Well, and also the asking questions, you know, the kind of looking at things around you and finding a question to ask about it. And of course, you know, the questions I would ask going back there today would be much bigger than I would have asked as a child or, you know, but it, you know, just that orientation of asking questions about what's around you. I think that that probably started me on my way to being a reporter before I even knew that people did that for a living. Yeah. So were you like sort of like, you know, like the school newspaper type of person

or not? You know, I was the yearbook person. I wasn't the school paper person. In fact, it was funny. I applied to be on the school paper and I wasn't accepted. So I tried to go the yearbook. Yeah. But I came back. I guess it was like, you know, I still wanted to be on the paper. So in college, I started.

So that's when it really took root in terms of more of like the reporter slash journalist side of things. That was the beginning for me, yeah. Yeah. And did you know at that point that this is something you wanted to turn into a career? You know, by the time I graduated from college, I definitely knew that. I was in college during the Vietnam War and during Watergate and during the Nixon landslide of 1972. Some of the biggest stories of our times, yeah. And I remember just being kind of overwhelmed by, you know, how out of whack things were in our country and not knowing what to do about it.

And yet every day after going to classes, I could go to the student newspaper offices and, you know, find a way to write a story about something I was interested in. And it just kind of kept me feeling like I could at least engage with the world around me and ask questions about it. It didn't mean I was figuring everything out, but it meant I got to, I mean, I saw journalism as a chance to get paid to learn. I think somebody actually said that. Some journalists came and spoke to us and said, you know, look, journalism is an opportunity to get paid to learn. It's like, you know, it's like, in fact, it was someone who had written books who said that I write a book every four years. So it's like going to graduate school constantly. And that really appealed to me.

Yeah, it's funny because I had a friend of mine said the same thing. I'm an author as well. And before, I think it was before I had written my first book, she had like a million books in print or something like that. She just, she cranks them out maniacally almost. And I said to her, I'm like, why, like what drives you? And she's like, look, I've got people lining up to pay me to go and like study the things I want to study anyway. It's the best job in the world. It is. It's an incredible opportunity. Yeah. So, so what was what was your actually first journalism gig? Well, I had a summer job between my junior and senior years of college, and that was at the Atlanta Journal in Atlanta, Georgia.

It was a separate afternoon paper at the time. It was the Atlanta Constitution and the Atlanta Journal. Yeah. So you've been in journalism for probably going on three decades now? More than that. Yeah. Where do I jump in here? I would love to just get a sense for sort of like what the day to day life of a journalist in the field was when you started. And, and then if we could build on that, because that career path, the trajectory, the entire field has had such profound disruption really in the last 10 years. I'm really curious what your early experience was and then sort of like what's been happening

in the last decade or so and how has it changed? Right. Well, you know, it's interesting. My first job was at the Alabama Journal in Montgomery. That was the afternoon newspaper in Montgomery, Alabama. Since I was from Birmingham, I wanted to go back to where I was from and just have a chance to... I mean, I felt that I knew more about places around the world almost than I knew about my own community, because now I was a journalist and I could go and really ask questions of everyone.

So I just really wanted to go back to Alabama. And, you know, things had changed a good bit. I finished college in 1974. And so, you know, this was, you know, another four or five years since the Civil Rights Act had passed. The South had really begun to change even more. Title IX had passed women, you know, the women's equity in sports. You know, there was just a lot more women's equality. And it was just very interesting to be a reporter, even at a very small paper. There were only six reporters there. I mean, there were some sports people and editorial writers, but there were six news reporters. And four of us were 24 years old. So we were just like, you know, just starting out. And, but what was interesting was there were lots of small daily newspapers around the country, just like that, where you could come out of college and get a job in journalism. And, you know, editors expected to teach you get a job in journalism and you know editors expected

to teach you and so we had you know editors who were probably i mean they looked old to me but they were probably 50 or something like that and they just really spent a lot of time editing our stories we had a copy editor who used to meet with the four of us the four 24 year olds once a week and we'd bring all our stories of the week and and he would go over them with us. And we would kind of, you know, look at each other's stories and make suggestions. And it was just a great learning experience. And now there's very few papers like that left, certainly not daily papers, maybe they're weekly papers. And I think the editors do very little mentoring. They just expect you to come in and do your work. And, you know, they're not they're not there to kind of develop you. And I think the assumption was, well, people started these very small newspapers, and they moved to medium sized papers, and then maybe regional

papers, and maybe major national newspapers, but everybody sort of brought you along. And the expectation was you were there to learn. And I just think that there's not that sense that, you know, of continuous advancement and mentoring anymore. What do you think is behind that? Well, I think it's the economic change in the industry, like you said, the disruption. There's just, you know, papers don't have the staffs they used to have.

They don't have the editing staff. They have so many fewer reporters. And now, of course, you know, they have people posting online as well as writing for the print publication. And at the Star Ledger in New Jersey, which is the Newark paper that I have really been familiar with for the last four years, just in the last couple years, reporters there say that 10% of their pay comes from how many clicks they get on their stories. And so, you And so instead of writing an in-depth story

about something that's kind of meaty and serious, they really do clickbait. I mean, that's not all they do, but there's a real incentive to do that. And that's really, really different from the incentive that we had. Yeah, I mean, it's gotta be such a struggle. I remember this was, I wanna say 2008-ish,

2008, 2009, a friend of mine who was then sort of an emerging social media, you know, like whiz kid type of guy, was brought into, I think it was Chicago Trib, one of the big Chicago papers, and to kind of like figure out, okay, where is the, you know, because he said when he got, you know, it was largely almost like, you know, it was like, you know, the new media, it was like, you know, almost like Bloods versus Crips, new media versus traditional journalists within the same organization, you know, and the new media slash bloggers were sort of like journalists are completely out of it.

They don't know what's going on. They're like plotting. And the journalists are like, you guys are complete and utter hacks. You don't check sources, like all you're concerned about. And it's really interesting to sort of see how those cultures have been forced almost to just try and figure out how to coexist and how, you know, I think less, and I'm actually curious whether this is your experience from the inside out. Are those two sides really kind of like merging where the distinction between the two is becoming less and less within sort of like the larger media organizations? You know, I would say probably at the New York Times and the Washington Post, those two sides are very much merging.

But in the larger world, I think there are bloggers and social media types and there are, you know, long form essayists. And those people really don't have much to do with each other at all. Although there are a lot of long form essayists who do, you know, tweet a lot. And they have very active social media lives. So some of them are bilingual that way. Yeah, it is. I mean, we're in such a, I think, just such a fascinating window. And I think nobody really knows entirely.

Right. It's just that you can't really get paid to write anymore. The value of the written word has plummeted. Talk to me more about this because I'm fascinated by this conversation too. Well, I can tell you what I earned when I started out. This was 1974, and I lived in Montgomery, Alabama. I think my rent was $120 a month, and I made $12,000 a year. And that was plenty. I saved money.

And so, honestly, I've never done the calculation000 a year. And that was plenty. I saved money, you know. And so I honestly, I've never done the calculation of what would that be equivalent to today. But it was a decent living for a 24 year old. And it's probably much more decent than you could get today working for a small newspaper. And there was a career path, you got a raise, you know, it was, I think you had an expectation that over time, you would actually be able to live a fairly comfortable life as a newspaper journalist. I was recently listening to somebody who was it was actually an interview and he was sharing how he was a guest teacher in a journalism class in a major university. And he said when he opened it up for questions, the vast majority of the questions from the students in class were around how to start their own thing. Ah, entrepreneurial. Yeah, because the assumption was just that.

We probably aren't going to have jobs when we get out of here, so we're going to have to figure out how to actually just create our own jobs. Yeah, I know so many reporters at regional newspapers. They're quite young, and they just always are looking for a job because they figure that this isn't going to last, and I better be ahead of the game. Yeah, which is, I mean, it's, I have such mixed feelings about this because I've operated on the side of blogging.

I've operated, I haven't done any traditional journalism. I've written articles for magazines, stuff like that, and I'm very much an entrepreneurial mindset. But I also know that, you know, a number of friends of mine who've been like very traditional journalists, I mean, they do phenomenal work. And the amount of effort it takes, I mean, you're a beautiful example. I mean, the amount of effort it takes to write like a really in-depth, thoughtful, you know, well-researched and documented piece, you know, it's an astonishing amount of work. And your average blogger or just an entrepreneur type

of person, they're not going to be willing to fund that, you know, and if we don't have organizations who will, what happens to our ability to actually, you know, like, really get deep into the stories that often define a generation? Yeah, I think about that a lot. Because the blogs and the websites that pick up the news from the major newspapers and then aggregate it and put it out there. And they have all of these readers, but they don't have any reporters, or they have very few. The in-depth work is coming from what's left of the great institutional newspapers. And for me, just the reason I was able to do this was,

I had been at the Washington Post for 28 years, and the Post was retrenching, and I was in the New York Bureau. They were about to close it. But because the Post was such a extraordinarily successful and solid institution, they had a very wealthy pension fund, very well managed and they very

generously bought out those of us who were over a certain age and I had enough money to live on for two years while I was writing the proposal and doing the initial research for my book. And then I did get an advance, which was enough to live on. And I'm lucky enough to be married to someone who actually works for the New York Times and has

an old fashioned newspaper salary that we can live on. So, I mean, all of those things, I've thought a lot about that had it not been for the, you know, solidity of the Washington Post Pension Fund and the solidity of the New York Times where my husband works, those are two unique organizations, increasingly unique organizations in the media. I couldn't have written this book. Yeah. that it seems like long-form storytelling and conversation and inquiry are actually making, it's really too early to tell, but there's really strong early evidence that it's actually making a leap into audio media. You know, like the biggest podcast, the thing that basically exploded podcasts into public consciousness this year was Serial.

Exactly. Right, which was this intense investigative, serialized, long form, essentially journalism, but done on audio. Yeah. Well, you know, it's so interesting. At the time that that happened, I saw that Don Katz, who is the CEO of Audible, he was quoted as saying that the battle for eyeballs is almost saturated, but the battle for the ears is a great frontier. And so there's just all kinds of creativity

and entrepreneurialism exploding there. Yeah, and so I wonder whether a lot of more traditional journalism is actually going to make the leap into audio, especially because we're so time-shifted now, and it's almost like the windows where everybody— now we have the ability to consume all of our in-between time with audio, which I have mixed feelings about also. Because we're kind of killing the pause that allows for us to just be—

Be quiet. Yeah. But to a certain extent, also, it is what it is. So if you can create media which tells those beautiful, in-depth stories in a window of time where people are commuting. And 2016, people are saying, is the year where every car is going to come out essentially with one button podcasting built into every car. And a lot of people are saying that's the year where this was a huge breakout year for audio. But next year, I think it's going to be the thing where it really just exponential growth is going to hit the big way. And I wonder whether, I'm curious what your lens is on this too,

because you come out of a world that I don't come out of, whether you feel like somebody who's been in journalism for years, you know, where you kind of feel like you love the questioning, you love the research, you love the storytelling, but your medium is really writing. Yes. Like could that same person, would they be interested in doing all the same work, but then telling the story itself through audio? You're asking me personally? Yeah, I would be.

I'm really curious. I would be. I mean, I think in a way, you know, what drew me as a kid to listen to people tell stories is just a human impulse. It wasn't just me. I think people love that, and I love that. And the most exciting thing for me as a journalist is interviewing someone and having them just tell me something

that's just their unique take on the world or their unique experiences. It would be just a much more direct way to share that is to let that person's voice, you know, reach the reader or the listener, instead of having me write the quote down. Yeah, yeah. It's like the quest for good tape. Right. Or, you know, they say somebody, they used to say, so and so makes good quote. Right, exactly. And there's also there's so much more nuance and information that gets delivered through the spoken word that gives texture and context. Right.

I mean, just hearing someone's voice, you feel as if you know something about them. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And rather than have a mediator like me tell you, well, this person is like this, you can just listen and draw your own conclusions. Right. No, I completely agree. I'm excited for the future. And I kind of hope that a lot of journalists who are at a point in their career where they want to keep doing what they're

doing for a long time and they're fantastic at it, really look to audio as potentially an evolutionary process in careers. Because I think it's kind of like it's ready for it right now. And if you're really in it for the investigation and the story, I think it would be pretty awesome. Let's shift gears a little bit. After 28 years or more, 28 years, I guess, just at Washington Post, right? So decades as a career. For the first time, you found a story where you said, this is a book. What happens? Because I'm sure that, you know, like in your career, there were many stories that

you stumbled upon that were fascinating and that could have made for like a book. Why this? I think part of the reason was that I was available. I wasn't working for a newspaper. I actually sat on my couch and watched the Oprah show and saw this announcement that Mark Zuckerberg was giving $100 million to the Newark schools and that Cory Booker and Chris Christie were going to try to use that money to change the reality on the ground in Newark. I just thought that sounded like the most fascinating story on so many levels. I think at one level it just spoke to what we were talking about, what I experienced as a kid and what education and inequality and race and all of those issues meant to me and how important I thought they were and how much I always wanted to explore them. And then you had this young billionaire, 26 years old, who had changed the world from his Harvard dorm room and now had all this money. And rather than wait to be my age or Bill Gates' age to start giving it away, he was going to start giving it away at age 26.

And that was just interesting to me. I wondered, geez, that's something that all of these young, very wealthy people are going to have an effect on society this way. I was really interested in both Booker and Christie. Interestingly enough, because I'd been in the New York Bureau for 14 years, the Washington Post's New York Bureau, I had covered Newark and I had covered New Jersey. And I knew both of them from stories I had done in the past. And I knew Newark. Newark had always just interested me. And I remember that night, I was saying to my husband, you know, this is so unfair. I have finally found the story that I could spend five years or more writing. I feel as if I could almost

write this for the rest of my career, and I don't have a newspaper to write it for. And, you know, I was feeling very sad. And he said, Dale, maybe this is your book. And I really hadn't thought that, I hadn't dared to think that because I had for years kind of in the back of my mind thought, gee, I'd really like to write a book, but I'd never found a story that I really was convinced that I could work with and live with and just immerse myself in for years.

I thought that there wouldn't be enough there or that maybe I would be enough there, or that maybe I would run out of interest or something. And it was just amazing that this was it. And I really did believe that that first day that this really is my book. There's actually another little piece of this. When you asked me about my career early on, when I was a reporter at the Atlanta Journal, I was like, I think 24, 25. I had a city editor who told those of us who covered the outer suburbs. I mean, I covered these really rural counties outside Atlanta that were going suburban very fast. And he said that everyone should take at least an hour every week and do what he called missionary work, which meant put away your notebook.

Just go out to the area you cover and explore something you've always been curious about. You know, if it's a person, it's a place, just go out and just, you know, experience it as a human being, not as a reporter. And, you know, every time I did that, that would be the best story I found that week because I wasn't looking, you know, and it was just curiosity. It wasn't like, oh, this vote is coming up in the city council, so I'm going to go cover it. No, it was just life. And so anyway, I found myself being drawn to things while I was writing this book. And because I didn't have a deadline, and I had, you know, what felt like a lot of time to figure out this

story, I would pursue them. So one of the things I pursued was I went to meet a man named Akbar Prey. He had been the cocaine kingpin of Newark and probably most of New Jersey in the 80s, which was the era of the crack epidemic. And he'd been arrested and gone to prison for life under a new racketeering statute. And while he was in prison, three of his sons had been killed on the streets in violent, you know, encounters. And he had started writing and issuing, you know, audio statements from prison to the children of Newark saying, get off the streets, the game is dead. You know, it's not, you know, it's not there for you to make money and change your lives, you're going to get killed, or you're going to end up in prison. So go back to school and learn.

And he said something at one point about how every day people with a second grade education come into prison who've been picked up for gun charges or drug charges. And what are the chances these people are going to end up back on the streets? And what are the chances they're ever going to have a life? They're going to be back in prison. And I'm worried about this, and I want the young people to wake up. Well, it turned out there was a teacher at one of the high schools who was getting kids to read what he was writing and listen to what he was saying, and these kids just felt this guy had

total credibility. He was really motivating them, and they felt like he cared about them, and some of them wrote letters to him. So I just thought, I really want to meet this man. And it took a long time to get cleared through the Federal Bureau of Prisons to go see him. But I did. And we spent a long time in the waiting, you know, in the visitors room talking. And there was this one moment when I was talking to him about his sons getting murdered. And I said, how many children do you have? And he said 25. And he had had like a lot of girlfriends. And I think that I just startled when he said 25. And he said, don't get too close to me or you'll miss your period.

And it was just like one of the funniest moments of the whole thing. But I was, I mean, that's an aside, that the man was so well read. He'd read just about every book that had ever been written. He wanted to talk to me about, you know, numbers of things he'd read, books he's read, newspaper articles, magazine articles. It was just like one of the best conversations that I could have had. But what really stuck with me was when I asked him, well, how did it feel to get these letters from these students? You know, he said it just meant so much because, you know, he could help somebody. It was too late to help himself, although he was trying

to get, you know, a pardon or, you know, released for time served, but that he really wanted to help kids, he said. So I had asked him, well, you know, did you ever care about education when you were not in prison? And believe it or not, he had run a slate for the school board. He had some legitimate businesses as well as his drug business, and so he had, as a businessman, run a slate of people to be on the school board. Why? It's a billion dollar budget. You could have given all of your friends. But then the last thing that happened, you know,

like I said, we were talking about the letters he'd gotten from the students and what they meant to him. He like leaned over to me and, you know, kind of, it was clear he wanted me to like come over so he could whisper something. And he said, those kids didn't write one complete sentence. What is going on in these schools? And just to hear that from, you know, a federal prison and a drug kingpin and a guy who had actually wanted to control the schools at one point, I just seemed to me like, my gosh, that's, that's the whole story right there. Yeah. And you spent four and a half, five years? Four and a half years. Yeah.

Right. So that's, I mean, a serious chunk of your life. Yeah, it is. And just to zoom the lens out for those who don't have sort of the broader context, you know, you mentioned, you know, we have basically three major players that start out or that really kind of like generated the initial line. Like we have the, you know, like Zuckerberg, who starts Facebook, who's looking to become a very young philanthropist, and Cory Booker, who was this massive rising star and the then mayor of New York, and then Chris Christie, who was the then governor. And also a rising star in the Republican Party. Right, exactly. And then a lot of people were talking about presidential run down the road. After less than a year as governor. Straight talking guy and people loved him.

And so it seemed like this dream team who were looking at the Newark school system and saying, we're going to effectively blow this up and create like the new model for not just Newark, but for the nation. Walk me through a little bit, like what's actually going, what's Newark on the ground like at that time? The thing that's overwhelming, I mean, the overwhelming reality of Newark is that it is a city with incredible poverty. And that underlies everything.

The very, very high unemployment, very poor living conditions, and tons of violence. I mean, children routinely witness violence. They think, you know, they think it's just something that happens. And, you know, like, like I saw, you know, colored and white signs on the drinking fountains. Well, kids see people shot. Kids have family members who die. You know, it's just something that happens. And there's a lot. So that means there's a lot of trauma. There was a statistic that I learned early on that just if a number could break your heart,

40% of babies born in Newark have had no prenatal care or inadequate prenatal care. 40%. So those kids, they're behind from when they draw their first breath. So the challenge of trying to have schools meet the needs of children is just enormous. At the same time, there has been a real movement toward charter schools in Newark, and Cory Booker had made that happen. He drew $20 million in philanthropy from Bill Gates and the Walton family from the Walmart fortune and the Dell family from the computer fortune and Steve Jobs' wife. Various, you know, very wealthy people gave money, and that money was used to draw charter schools to Newark. Actually, even there were already charter schools in Newark,

but that was used to draw more charter schools to Newark. And there were families that were flocking to them, basically saying that there was this sense that the schools weren't serving the kids. So there was a school system that was failing. I mean, the percentages of kids, I think it was fewer than 40% of kids in grades three through eight could read at grade level. And just a little bit over 50% of kids graduated from high

school. Just a tremendous inadequacy of the system to meet the needs of the kids. And there you have it. And that was what they were going to try to transform. Right. And it sounds like it wasn't just the schools that were just massively struggling, just socioeconomically, the entire city. The entire city. Largely decimated. Yes. Yes. There had been white flight throughout the 50s and 60s in Newark. And the population had flipped from being two-thirds white in the 50s to

being two-thirds black by the end of the 60s. And it just was, it was like apparently the fastest and most tumultuous racial turnover of any city except Gary, Indiana, in the whole country. What about in terms of representation? Because it also seems like one of the things that you research. And I was, by the way, my mind was absolutely blown at the detail of, like the depth and the detail of research. At one point I started wanting to almost map out the players because I was having trouble keeping track because you were so deep into so many conversations on so many layers. But also the political overlay and the political history adds this almost maniacal like situation. Take me into that a little bit.

Well, Newark had been a city kind of run by political bosses and political organizations forever. And, you know, there were periods when the Irish were in control, and then the Italians were in control. And then, you know, ultimately, African Americans reached a majority, and they finally had control of the political apparatus. But there was just, you know, and the school district was a reflection of that, because the school district had the biggest budget of any public agency, and it was the biggest public that because the school district had the biggest budget of any public agency. And it was the biggest public employer in the city of Newark, the only employer, private or public that has more workers as United Airlines. And so, you know, everybody who had power wanted

to have control over that budget. And that was that's really where the title of the book comes from, because the fight for control of the schools, schools meant that the schools were seen as the prize. Yeah. So it's really, it's like, okay, who gets control over a billion dollars? Right. Right. Whereas, you know, you would think that the real question was like, how do we best help our kids? Exactly.

But it's not quite that clean. No, it really isn't because the amount of politics and wheeling and dealing really meant that the school system was part patronage pit and employment agency and only part of it was there for serving the kids. And there were teachers and principals just giving their hearts to education, and meanwhile the system all around them was really corrupt. Yeah.

What was also going on as, you know, as you have, like, you know, the golden boy, you know, in big air quotes for you guys who can't see that, you know, triumvirate of, you know, like, Booker Christie and Zuckerberg come sweeping in from the outside with, you know the outside with potentially hundreds of millions of dollars of wealthy, white finance money to come in and save the city. Yes, it was a very missionary approach. It really was. And I think that that was a problem from day one. Because, you know, whereas I think the outside world thought, wow, the people of Newark must be so grateful that they're getting this gift. And the first thing you heard, if you just went to a restaurant or talk to people at a bus stop, it was just like, what do these people want from us? And what do they want from our mayor? And why are these rich white people always trying to do things in Newark? And, you know, the just immediate suspicion. And of course, that there's a history to that. You know, white flight is part of it. And, you know, even going back, you know, before most people today in Newark were born to urban renewal in the 1950s, when there was this great plan, all these well-meaning, liberal, white people in academia and in government were going to save the inner cities by bulldozing down all the slums and building these high-rise apartments and office buildings and plazas and bring the middle class

back at least during the day. People had left for the suburbs, so let them go home to their bedrooms at night, but let's have a city that everybody's going to want to come to during the day. People had left for the suburbs, so let them go home to their bedrooms at night, but let's have a city that everybody's going to want to come to during the day. And it really wasn't being done for the people who lived there. It was being done for the suburbanites who were commuting in and out. So this huge upheaval happened in Newark in the 1950s, and it made life worse for the poorest people, not better. Right. So you've got the people on the ground, the families, who ultimately, it should be all about serving the families and the kids. Right. They have a vested interest. You would argue the most vested interest because the future of their kids.

They don't trust outsiders because there's a long history of just people coming in and basically essentially using for their own purposes. Then you've got a layer of politicians, local on top of that, who have their own vested interests, kind of battling and fighting things out. And then you have this new super team coming in from the outside and then their funders on top of that. I think you said it in the book at one point. If not, then it bounced out. I'm like, this is straight up Shakespeare's like, it's, it's, I think you said it in the book at one point. If not, then it bounced out. I'm like,

this is straight up Shakespeare. Yes, it is. It really is. So it was interesting. You start out telling this story. Um, I,

I, I'm, I'm getting the feeling like, well, you know, these three guys are on a mission and they're going to do some really good work. And then there's the thing.

Yeah. They had this great idea that they, they thought was a great idea, but the people of Newark didn't find out about it until Oprah's national television audience found out about it. Right. So talk to me about this. It literally, like, you know,

people said we'd have to turn on Oprah at 4 o'clock to find out what's going on in our children's schools. Which becomes a repeated theme. Yes. And, you know, which, you know, it sort of fits with the sense that Newark is a city that is always acted upon. It never gets to be, you know, the instigator or the actor. It's acted upon by outside forces that have money and power. The people of Newark don't. And so there was immediate

suspicion of like, well, so why weren't we told? Why weren't we brought to the table? Cory Booker had just been reelected and he never mentioned in his campaign that he was planning to revolutionize the schools. And so people said, you know, aren't elections supposed to be mandates? And, you know, why wasn't this something that we were told about? So there was just a lot of resentment.

And I would say that the word that you hear the most on the streets in Newark is disrespect. People feel disrespected. They feel disrespected by history. They feel disrespected by white people. They feel disrespected by Governor Christie. And they felt disrespected by this effort, as generous and well-meaning as it was. People felt extremely disrespected. Yeah. And at the same time, you also tell the story of some people who are coming up out of Newark and in the school systems who are trying to make change from the ground up, doing extraordinary work. Tell me a little bit about some of those.

Well, and interestingly, those people exist throughout the Newark School District. And they were not at the table when this grant was conceived or the plan was conceived. And again, there are people throughout the community who very much want change. And had they been consulted, might have actually been partners. So it's not that people are disagreeing that it's a bit of a disaster. It's the way that it was served up to them. Exactly. Not to say that it would be easy to win everyone over to what would be fairly disruptive for a lot of people. But there is, there's just a lot of energy on the ground. And these are people who actually know a lot about the schools and a lot about the children and a lot about the city. And if you're not consulting them, you're just not being smart. You're not learning what the possibilities are. But anyway, so you were asking about the people coming up. Yeah, there were three. Share a little bit of that story because it really touched me.

Oh, the school that- The brick- Yeah, yes. There was a group of youngish teachers, not all brand new, but younger teachers who had all come to Newark, except for one of them had come from somewhere else, and had come kind of, you know, unlike a lot of Teach for America teachers who do leave after the two-year commitment, they had decided to make their lives in Newark. One of them had been there for 13 years and to make careers as teachers and principals in Newark. And so they had gone to the superintendent. This was the superintendent before the Zuckerberg gift was given. He was, you know, dispatched soon after that. But they had gone to him and said, you know, we want to take

over the school in the poorest catchment area in Newark, where children are not, you know, passing the state test. I think 4% of the seventh graders had passed the state math test. I mean, it was just like a place, you know, that was devoid of learning. And we want to make a difference in this school. And we want to be able to get kids ready by the end of elementary and middle school to go to high school at high school level. And so they wanted to start with this one school. And their vision was to just bring a core group of very motivated and talented teachers to that school to become kind of a center that would spread out. And that they would work on motivating and training all of the teachers in the school to do their best work. There had not been a culture in the Newark schools,

except in some schools with some principals, of really developing teachers to reach all kids and to be the best teachers they could be. Teachers came into the classroom and they were just, you know, into the frying pan, basically, and there wasn't a lot of development at all. And so there was a lot of talent that was just lying completely, you know, fallow and undeveloped in the district.

It seemed like also that there was, because of the way that sort of like, you know, teachers were rotated around, that it wouldn't be unusual for some of the least skilled or least trained or least capable teachers to end up in the toughest schools possible, which is like, you know, disaster waiting to happen. Right. And that happens everywhere, but it was even more so in this particular school because, you know, I don't know if we talked about this, but the state had taken over the New York schools in 1995 because of the corruption and the total neglect of education and kids. But the state had done nothing to

improve the situation except to basically clean up a little bit of the financial corruption. But the educational situation didn't change at all with the state in charge. And so at this particular school, it had become a dumping ground for teachers other principals didn't want. So there were so many teachers there that were just, you know, really the least prepared to teach challenging kids. And they had the most challenging kids. And what this group found, because they really did work teacher by teacher to try to develop, you know, a culture of, you know, just high performance among the teachers and of, you know, constant self, youallenging oneself and reflecting on your teaching and getting better every day. And what they found was that even though overall this was a dumping ground,

that two out of three teachers at that school were teachers they wanted there. They were smart, they knew their material, and they had strong relationships with their students. And they felt if you had those things, you could develop that teacher. And there were already some good teachers who they thought could be exceptional. And there were some kind of mediocre teachers who they thought could be really good. And then there was the other third that they weren't so happy with. But they really set about trying to transform that school from the bottom up.

Yeah. And it seems like they were able to, I mean, with almost no resources and a brutal sort of circumstance, they were able to do some really extraordinary work. And it seems like one of the awakenings also, one of the things that I got from the conversation was that it's not just about academics, that there's a bigger social context that you really need to understand what these, like, you need to understand their lives. And to the extent that you can somehow help them beyond what happens in the classroom, some of the stories you told about teachers going above and beyond kind of blew my mind and just like, you know, almost broke my heart open. It was really extraordinary the extent that teachers get bashed a lot. You know, especially I think in underperforming schools. And you hear about good teachers and bad teachers, you know. You hear less about teachers who would love to be good but have never actually been given the training and the support. And then you hear about, you know, the extraordinary lengths

that some of the teachers that you talk about would go to take care of the kids, you know, like setting up carpools among like eight teachers or something like that to make sure that one particular kid whose family is struggling gets there. Yes, yes. It's beautiful. Yeah, and really what I learned is that that's necessary, you know, because of what we were talking about, just the context of Newark and how much dislocation there is in that's necessary, you know, because of what we were talking about, just the context of Newark and how much dislocation there is in children's lives

and, you know, literally the trauma that they suffer. If a school isn't set up to go beyond the limits almost, there's a lot of kids who definitely will fall through the cracks. Yeah, talk about that dislocation because the number on that is staggering, about the amount of change in any given year. Oh, well, it's like over a three-year window or something like that. Yes, exactly. Like this particular school, the same one we're talking about, which does have the poorest catchment area in Newark, every year over 30% of the kids move either because of homelessness or because they're afraid of the violence, it's gotten too

threatening, or just because, you know, they, they had a grant for housing that ran out, and they can't stay where they are anymore. But there's like, and in fact, a kindergarten teacher who I spent a lot of time with, who was the most extraordinary kindergarten teacher I've ever seen, and people in charter schools and in district schools agree that she was just, you know, in a class by herself. She had a class of kids in the fall of 2010, which was the first year that this group of teachers had taken over this school that they were trying to turn around. Their thinking was, if we can start kids in kindergarten with great teaching and have the early years covered by great teachers, by the time these kids get to third grade,

they will be fluent readers. Well, her class of 26 kids that she had in kindergarten in 2010, four years later in 2014, there were only five of them still at the school. So those third grade teachers were starting from scratch with kids who had come from elsewhere. And just the transience in the district is such a challenge. And that's something that, you know, pedagogy and curriculum and high expectations and, you know, a sort of a culture of achievement and all of these things just don't address. Yeah, and therein lies another part of where you move from heart-opening and heart-warming to just pure heartbreak. Yes.

Because it's like you have these kids for the shortest amount of time, and even if you do the most extraordinary work possible, the nature of their lives outside of that, like the fact that most of them won't be there in a couple of years, and they're very likely going to move to another place where you won't have the same level of care. In fact, you tell a story towards the end of the book about a young man who was amazing at basketball. What was his name again? Alif. Alif.

Yes. Which starts out beautifully. And can you share a bit of that story? Alif was also at Avon School, the same school we were just talking about. And he was one of those kids who had gone through the early years before this new team came in. And he had had almost uniformly very weak teachers, with one exception. And he had one year in which he did well. But in every other year, even as a very little boy, as a kindergartner, he was getting Fs. He was a terrible behavior problem. And he said, I don't know what was wrong with me back

then. I was just not acting right. But it sounded like there were a lot of kids running in the halls back then, a lot of kids talking in class. And he said if somebody was talking, he would join in. If someone was cutting up, I would cut up. So he basically, he got to seventh grade, and he was reading at a second grade level. And he had continued to be a terrible behavior problem. And so there was this sort of unique coalescing of teachers who came around him and supported him. What happened was there was an assistant principal of the middle school who thought that this kid, you know, that he was a good kid underneath all this.

He had just gotten terribly off the track. And so she asked a special ed teacher to spend a lot of one-on-one time with him in seventh grade. This teacher was going through a training program in a whole new teaching approach for children who had failed to learn in a regular classroom. And she wanted to work with one student one-on-one and just start getting familiar with this new program. So the assistant principal gave her a leaf. And interestingly, this was a teacher who'd been in the district for 21 years. She wasn't like a young, bright and shiny teacher

from Teach for America. She was like a real tried and true Newark school teacher. And she was an amazing special ed teacher. And she developed a relationship with a leaf that was amazing. And whereas a leaf, at first, he didn't want to go to her classroom. You know, he started going every day and getting there early,

and she related so amazingly to him. But it all began when she said to him, Look, I know your reputation. I know you get in trouble. I'm not going to judge you for it, but I just want to know in your own words, why are you always getting in trouble? And he said, Well, if I act up and I get thrown out of class, nobody knows I can't read.

And she was just blown away. It's so rare, she said, for kids who have been failing for that long to be able to put into words what's really going on emotionally. Now, I've heard that really kids will do that readily if they have a teacher who they think isn't judging them and who believes in them. And he did have that in her. So anyway, he just started coming every day. And on the days that she was absent, she had to go to a seminar and she missed, where were you? I was here and you weren't here. And anyway, he started to make progress. And by the middle of the year, he was reading at a third grade level. It was one semester, he progressed a year. But at the same time, he was having a remarkable year as a basketball player. And he was one of these kids that was an

amazing basketball player. He'd been playing on the courts since he was a little kid. And even, you know, the grownups who played out there always had an eye on him. This kid has a future. But in the past, the basketball coach at the school said he had, like, been a kid who had some brilliant, you know, runs on the team. But he would just kind of disappear sometimes. He just didn't. He wasn't consistent. And he would play around. But something was happening to him that year.

And I think it was all caught up in him realizing that he could learn and people believed in him. And so the basketball coach said he was, like, he was an amazing player. He was on all the time. And he was, you know, he was almost like the quarterback and he was doing whatever he said. And he was a real team player. And the team elected him captain. And while this learning process was going on in his reading, the basketball team was having just, you know, like a storybook season, and they were undefeated. And they ended up going to the championship game for middle school throughout the city of Newark, and they won. And Alif was named the most valuable player. And after that, he had, it was almost the end of the year, and he had to take his end of year test,

you know, to see how far he had come in his reading ability. And when the test results came back, the special ed teacher called me and she said, I'm not going to tell you what he did, but I want you to come tomorrow at 7.50. I'm going to present the results of the test to him. So he was there, the teacher was there, the principal and his, you know, vice principal were there. The basketball coach wasn't there, but he knew it was happening. And Alif came wandering in, rubbing his eyes like he was sleepy and didn't want to be there. And she put this PowerPoint presentation up, and it said Alif's reading scores. And it showed that he had gone from a second grade reading level to a fifth grade reading level in one year.

He had gained three years. And not only that, in various categories of reading, like the ability to sound out words, he had gone from second to eighth grade. And he was just in heaven. And I had never seen a look on his face like that, because I don't think he'd ever succeeded in school. And he was just savoring this experience. And he just covered his mouth, and he said, oh my God, I worked really hard, and I'm so proud of myself. And now I'm going to have to come back and do this next year, because I'm really going to make it. And he was talking about how all these years he thought he could never play college basketball, because he would say, I'm dumb. And,

you know, a coach doesn't want a dumb player, they want a smart player. But in this case, you know, he thought maybe he could be smart enough that a coach would want him to. Fast forward, Alif goes to high school, and the high school he attended was closed at the end of the year as a result of, you know, all of the school closings and upheaval that the reform effort was pursuing in the district. And he went to a different school where he kind of got lost. And he flunked. And he was no longer able to play basketball because his grades were so bad. And I saw videos online of him with his friends smoking marijuana when he was supposed to be in school.

And you just have this fear that here's this kid. He's 16, turning 17. He's out on the streets in Newark. And he's in maximum peril right now. But I have to tell you, I saw him the other day and we were talking. And he said he's really going to double down and try to make it work this school year because he really wants to be able to play basketball again so there's hope right yeah i mean he crossed like every finger and toe you know and just yeah um but it is i mean i think it also just speaks to the the individual human stories i think we

can get really swept up in a in a in a book and a story like this with all the big players and the systemic change and the unions and the bosses. But fundamentally, we're talking about the lives of people, of kids, in some of the worst scenarios ever. Right. And for every child, every day is high stakes. And a lot of the teachers realize that and teach that way. Yeah.

But the schools have to have enough resources to support, you know, the teachers when the kids need more than they can give them. Yeah. And what became just so obvious through your just stunning investigative work is that you get the feeling that even though there's a billion-dollar prize at stake in terms of the budget, at least I'd like to believe everybody really wanted to do the right thing at the end of the day. They just really disagreed on how to do the right thing right. And at the same time, there are also other people who want something for themselves from the process, not just for the kids. Right. for themselves from the process, not just for the kids. And, yeah, I mean, it's so complex and so layered that, and at the end, you know, there's no bow, you know, on this gift. It's just this is a really complex problem.

And the dream team that, you know, sort of like started off the narrative has largely all moved on now. Yes. Yes. They're gone and the kids are still there. Yeah. You seem to get such an astonishing level of access during this entire four and a half year window. Tell me a little bit about that and what that was like. Well, initially I had a lot of access and was allowed to go to a lot of, you know, behind the scenes meetings. And I just told Cory Booker and Chris Christie and Mark Zuckerberg that I wanted to watch this process unfold. And I thought that, you know, I thought that good would come of it. I thought there would be setbacks. And I thought that,

you know, it would be fascinating to see what they learned from setbacks, because setbacks are inevitable when you're trying to do something big and complicated. And so I just said, I wanted to be able to watch that and chronicle it. And initially, you know, Cory Booker and less so Governor Christie, because he really wasn't the person on the front line, you know, was allowing me to go to a lot of meetings and the philanthropists who were involved, like the CEO of Zuckerberg's philanthropy and some of the people who gave money to match his gift, the leaders of their philanthropies allowed me to come to their meetings. And so I was basically really given an amazing chance to see how extremely wealthy people and extremely powerful politicians go about getting things done. And then I also got very close to, you know, principals and teachers in particular schools and some of the families in those schools and

tried very hard to stay super close to them too, because I felt that knowing what the people, you know, at the top level were doing was really important, but knowing how it was affecting or wasn't affecting the lives of the kids in Newark was extremely important. So I wanted to see it from both angles. Do you feel like investigating and writing this book has changed you? That's a great question. I think it has in a way just because, you know, the people that I followed, who in many cases were very generous to me, I'm talking about, you know, the people at the top of the effort, I ended up writing things about them that they didn't feel good about, and they didn't like. And I don't like to do that, even though I'm

a journalist, and I should be comfortable doing that kind of thing. I just don't like to do that, even though I'm a journalist and I should be comfortable doing that kind of thing. I just don't like to do that. But I ended up feeling that if I just told the truth and the whole truth in the way that I saw it, that it would be clear these are human beings and their flaws aren't evil. They're just flaws. And we can all learn from them. And I felt that there was nothing more important than learning from them when you think about what's at stake in the lives of the kids and newer. So, I mean, I think it made me

just much more comfortable with that, which is something so basic to journalism, but it's always been a very hard thing for me. Apparently, some journalists are human. Yeah, quite a few, actually. Just kidding. So, yeah, I mean, it was really just fascinating for me to read it. And I'm always curious when somebody spends so much time and goes so deep into such a moving and complex story, like, what does it do?

Like, not just the people in the story, but the person who's in the process of investigating and telling the story. Well, it's funny because, you know, the longer I spent, the less adequate I felt to tell the story. Because you realize how deep it is and how many people just have such, you know, incredible stories in them. And, you know, you're the outsider. You may have immersed yourself in the story and you may have learned everything, but you just, you know, you're still not one of them. And I didn't want to be seen as another person coming to Newark, you know, telling Newark what the story was. I wanted to try to tell the story from the perspective of everybody involved, the people of Newark, the reformers themselves, the teachers, the administrators. I just wanted to try to see the whole court and not have anybody feel that I had been some outsider telling them what to do.

Yeah. Just another outsider. Just another one, yeah. In a long line, right? Yeah. No, I could imagine that's sort of like an interesting voice just to be planted in your head while you're doing this. So I want to come full circle. The name of this is Good Life Project. So if I offer that phrase out to you to live a good life, what bubbles up? You know, I was thinking about that when you told me the name of your organization, like, what is a good life? I feel that a good life involves having people you love around you and having really meaningful work that allows you to keep meeting and relating to people and keep you very much in the world. And of course,

it involves a lot of luck because it also involves good health. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thanks so much for joining in this week's conversation. You know, I'm just thinking, if you actually stayed till this point in the conversation, I'm guessing there's a pretty good bet that you've gotten something out of this episode, some nugget, some idea. If that is right and you feel like sharing, then by all means, go ahead. We love when you share these conversations and get the word out. And if you wouldn't mind, I would so appreciate if you would just take a few seconds, jump onto iTunes or use your app, and just give us a quick rating or review.

When you do that, it helps get the word out, helps let more people know about the conversations we're hosting here, and it gives us all the ability to spread the word and make a bigger difference in more people's lives. As always, thank you so much for your kindness, your wisdom, and your attention. Wishing you a fantastic rest of the week. I'm Jonathan Field, signing off for Good Life Project. Thank you.