Their five-year plan gets off to a rocky start. Initial funds go to a bevy of consultants, most of them white, most of them well connected, some of whom are getting paid $1,000 a day. One educator labels them the “school failure industry.” Moreover, it quickly becomes apparent that this is a top-down effort, with politicians and the well-to-do setting the agenda. When Booker sets up a local foundation to handle Zuckerberg’s gift, the seats on the board go only to donors of at least $5 million. You can begin to see where this story’s headed. Booker shows more interest in his own political career than he does in running his city. Christie hires an ideologue as his point person on the Newark schools. And Zuckerberg, a newcomer to philanthropy, seems frustrated by the inability to negotiate a union contract that would quickly raise the salaries of promising young teachers and pay substantial merit bonuses for high performers.

Moreover, they bring in a superintendent, Cami Anderson, from the New York City schools, whose unbending management style only affirms teachers’ and parents’ worst fears. To be fair, she’s a complicated figure. She doesn’t simply line up behind Booker, Christie and their moneyed backers in their ideological furor to create more charter schools, which as we’ve seen in city after city leaves behind an eviscerated public school system. Anderson, Russakoff writes, “called this ‘the lifeboat theory of education reform,’ arguing that it could leave a majority of children to sink on the big ship.” But Anderson, like the other main characters in this effort, seems tone-deaf to the demands of the community to be involved in the process. It’s the irony of ironies. Public education is the bedrock of democracy — and yet when it comes to repairing our schools the democratic process is too often ignored. What ultimately derails this grand experiment is the unwillingness of the reformers to include parents and teachers in shaping the reforms.

“The Prize” is paradoxically a sobering yet exhilarating tale. For alongside the stories of those calling the shots, Russakoff tells the stories of those most profoundly affected by their decisions: teachers, students and their parents. It’s here where rhetoric, politics and grand plans meet reality. I repeatedly found myself writing in the margins, “Wow,” either because of the heroic efforts by teachers and staffers or because of the obstacles facing their students. Russakoff writes of three siblings whose mother is badly beaten by her boyfriend. The principal goes to court with the mother and helps her file charges while other staff members create a car-pooling schedule to get the kids to and from school each day. Another student, Alif Beyah, continually disrupts his classroom. With unusual self-awareness for a sixth grader, he tells a teacher, “If I get thrown out of class, nobody finds out I can’t read.” So the school assigns a teacher to meet with him in one-on-one sessions, and over the course of the year he jumps three grades in his reading levels. In a school that had one social worker for 612 students, teachers create a special class for children suffering from trauma, offering tai chi, yoga and breathing techniques. But what becomes clear is that these are exceptions rather than the rule. In fact, when Beyah enters high school, most of his support disappears.

“The Prize” may well be one of the most important books on education to come along in years. It serves as a kind of corrective to the dominant narrative of school reformers across the country. I’m not giving anything away by telling you that this bold effort in Newark falls far short of success. Most everyone moves on. Booker is elected to the Senate — and his nemesis, a high school principal deeply critical of his school reform efforts, becomes the city’s next elected mayor. Christie gets caught up in the bridge-lane-closure scandal, and of course is now running for president. Anderson recently announced her resignation as superintendent. The one individual who appears changed by the experience is, somewhat surprisingly, Zuckerberg. Last year, along with his wife, Priscilla Chan, who as a pediatric intern cared for underserved children around San Francisco, Zuckerberg announced a gift of $120 million in grants to high-poverty schools in the Bay Area. This time, though, they declared their intent to include parents and teachers in the planning process. But more to the point, a key component to their grants includes building “a web of support for students,” everything from medical to mental health care. Zuckerberg came to recognize that school reform alone isn’t enough, that if we’re going to make a difference in the classroom, we also need to make a difference in the lives of these children, many of whom struggle against the debilitating effects of poverty and trauma. Here is where this story ends — but also where the next story begins.