I. The Pact

Booker said, “It’s destiny that we become the first city in America that makes its whole district a system of excellence.” Illustration by Cristiana Couceiro / Photographs by Eduardo Munoz / Reuters; Lucas Jackson / Reuters; David Ramos / Getty

Late one night in December, 2009, a black Chevy Tahoe in a caravan of cops and residents moved slowly through some of the most dangerous neighborhoods of Newark. In the back sat the Democratic mayor, Cory Booker, and the Republican governor-elect of New Jersey, Chris Christie. They had become friendly almost a decade earlier, during Christie’s years as United States Attorney in Newark, and Booker had invited him to join one of his periodic patrols of the city’s busiest drug corridors.

The ostensible purpose of the tour was to show Christie one of Booker’s methods of combatting crime. But Booker had another agenda that night. Christie, during his campaign, had made an issue of urban schools. “We’re paying caviar prices for failure,” he’d said, referring to the billion-dollar annual budget of the Newark public schools, three-quarters of which came from the state. “We have to grab this system by the roots and yank it out and start over. It’s outrageous.”

Booker had been a champion of vouchers and charter schools for Newark since he was elected to the city council, in 1998, and now he wanted to overhaul the school district. He would need Christie’s help. The Newark schools had been run by the state since 1995, when a judge ended local control, citing corruption and neglect. A state investigation had concluded, “Evidence shows that the longer children remain in the Newark public schools, the less likely they are to succeed academically.” Fifteen years later, the state had its own record of mismanagement, and student achievement had barely budged.

Christie often talked of having been born in Newark, and Booker asked his driver to take a detour to Christie’s old neighborhood. The Tahoe pulled to a stop along a desolate stretch of South Orange Avenue, where Christie said he used to take walks with his mother and baby brother. His family had moved to the suburbs in 1967, when he was four, weeks before the cataclysmic Newark riots. An abandoned three-story building, with gang graffiti sprayed across boarded-up windows, stood before them on a weedy, garbage-strewn lot. Dilapidated West Side High School loomed across the street. About ninety per cent of its students qualified for free or reduced-price lunches, and barely half of the freshmen made it to graduation. Three West Side seniors had been shot and killed by gangs the previous school year, and the year before that, on a warm summer night, local members of a Central American gang known as MS-13, wielding guns, a machete, and a steak knife, had murdered three college-bound Newark youths, two of them from West Side. Another West Side graduate had been badly maimed.

In the back seat of the S.U.V., Booker proposed that he and Christie work together to transform education in Newark. They later recalled sharing a laugh at the prospect of confounding the political establishment with an alliance between a white suburban Republican and a black urban Democrat. Booker warned that they would face a brutal battle with unions and machine politicians. With seven thousand people on the payroll, the school district was the biggest public employer in a city of roughly two hundred and seventy thousand. As if spoiling for the fight, Christie replied, “Heck, I got maybe six votes in Newark. Why not do the right thing?”

So began one of the nation’s most audacious exercises in education reform. The goal was not just to fix the Newark schools but to create a national model for how to turn around an entire school district.

The abysmal performance of schools in the poorest communities has been an escalating national concern for thirty years, with universities, governments, and businesses devoting enormous resources to the problem. In the past decade, a reform movement financed by some of the nation’s wealthiest philanthropists has put forward entrepreneurial approaches: charter schools, business-style accountability for teachers and principals, and merit bonuses for top performers. President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan created Race to the Top, a $4.3-billion initiative to induce states to approve more charter schools and to rate teachers based on student performance.

Christie’s response to Booker—“Why not do the right thing?”—reflected the moral tone of the movement. Reformers compared their cause to the civil-rights movement, aware that many of their key opponents were descendants of the old civil-rights establishment: unions and urban politicians determined to protect thousands of public jobs in cities where secure employment was rare. Decades of research have shown that experiences at home and in neighborhoods have far more influence on children’s academic achievement than classroom instruction. But reformers argued that well-run schools with the flexibility to recruit the best teachers could overcome many of the effects of poverty, broken homes, and exposure to violence. That usually meant charter schools, which operated free of the district schools’ large bureaucracies and union rules. “We know what works,” Booker and other reformers often said. They blamed vested interests for using poverty as an excuse for failure, and dismissed competing approaches as incrementalism. Education needed “transformational change.” Mark Zuckerberg, the twenty-six-year-old head of Facebook, agreed, and he pledged a hundred million dollars to Booker and Christie’s cause.

Almost four years later, Newark has fifty new principals, four new public high schools, a new teachers’ contract that ties pay to performance, and an agreement by most charter schools to serve their share of the neediest students. But residents only recently learned that the overhaul would require thousands of students to move to other schools, and a thousand teachers and more than eight hundred support staff to be laid off within three years. In mid-April, seventy-seven members of the clergy signed a letter to Christie requesting a moratorium on the plan, citing “venomous” public anger and “the moral imperative” that people have power over their own destiny. Booker, now a U.S. senator, said in a recent interview that he understood families’ fear and anger: “My mom—she would’ve been fit to be tied with some of what happened.” But he characterized the rancor as “a sort of nadir,” and predicted that in two or three years Newark could be a national model of urban education. “That’s pretty monumental in terms of the accomplishment that will be.”

Booker was part of the first generation of black leaders born after the civil-rights movement. His parents had risen into management at I.B.M., and he grew up in the affluent, almost all-white suburb of Harrington Park, about twenty miles from Newark. Six feet three, gregarious, and charismatic, Booker was an honors student and a football star. He graduated from Stanford and went on to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and then to Yale Law School. Ed Nicoll, a forty-year-old self-made millionaire who was studying law at Yale, became one of his close friends. He recalled Booker telling inspirational stories about his family during abstract class discussions, invariably ending with a point about social justice. “He got away with it and he enchanted everyone from left to right,” Nicoll said. “In a class where everybody secretly believed they’d be the next senator or the next President of the United States, it was absolutely clear that Cory had leadership written all over him.”

Instead of pursuing lucrative job prospects, Booker worked as a lawyer for Newark tenants; he was paid by a Skadden fellowship in 1997. He lived in low-income housing in an area of the Central Ward that was riddled with drugs and crime, and he got to know community activists and members of the national media. Later, CBS News and Time featured him staging hunger strikes to demand more cops in drug corridors. He ran for city council with enthusiastic support from public-housing tenants. Nicoll took time off before going back to finance to help Booker raise money. His advice was simple: tell wealthy donors your own story. Over lunch at Andros Diner, Booker told me that Nicoll taught him an invaluable lesson: “Investors bet on people, not on business plans, because they know successful people will find a way to be successful.”