Newark—The Prize

In the early 1970s, Newark, New Jersey, fell into a rapid decline. Industries closed or relocated to safer and more dynamic places. Then, as the social fabric ripped apart, Newark became a war zone. Ultimately, in 1995, the state government stepped in to take control of the schools.

Dale Russakoff, in her book, The Prize, told the story that began in 2010 when Cory Booker, then mayor, Chris Christie, governor, and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg partnered to turn Newark schools around. The effort, called One Newark, invested $200 million and installed an “A team” of leaders. According to Russakoff, “What Booker, Christie, and Zuckerberg set out to achieve in Newark had not been accomplished in modern times—turning a failing urban school district into one of universally high achievement.”¹

Their general on the ground was a young, aggressive, hard-nosed Teach for America zealot, Cami Anderson. She came in with “an insular and uncompromising management style.”²

Sadly, the project unraveled, all the money got spent with little effect, and the community was left wounded and cynical. In fact, as has so often been recorded in the history of military occupations, the whole project created a deeply resentful insurgency.

Anderson herself summarized the story very succinctly and candidly: “Here is the inconvenient truth: Education, including education reform, is part of the problem. We have not made a dent in the problem, and in some cases we've made it worse.”³

What Institutions Can and Cannot Do

Few things help an individual more than to place responsibility upon him and let him know that you trust him.

—Booker T. Washington

By design, institutions can deliver services, but they cannot care. It seems that care is always expressed more purely in more intimate relationships—marriage, family, and friendship. But those small societies cannot do everything. The need for efficiency and collective strength pushes certain activities and dynamics “up” into larger, corporate, even governmental structures. Individuals within those institutions—like doctors, nurses, and teachers—can certainly demonstrate care for those they serve. But the need for efficiency and accountability necessarily constrains the caring impulses. Those same doctors and nurses and teachers are always under pressure to serve greater numbers, manage a larger caseload, complete more paperwork, and master ever-changing procedures and policies. At some point, everything and everyone in the institution gets forced into bureaucratic behavior.

Every institution contains a “shadow culture.” That culture grows naturally as reinforcement of what the institution was designed to deliver. It keeps people in line. There will always be the unique and delightful Patch Adamses of the world, or Sally, your pharmacist who seems to care that you get the right meds.

The machine trains you and the shadow culture conditions you to “manage” your caseload, your patients, or your classroom. But, often before we realize what is happening, our school, hospital, prison, or other institutions can quickly become an update of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. And anyone can turn into Nurse Ratched. The shadow culture can train perfectly nice people into using their positions to manipulate and humiliate the inmates into models of obedience and order.

You remember Jack Nicholson, as Randle McMurphy, in the film version of Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest? He was a criminal, but he was not crazy. So when he had to take a psychological evaluation for his crime, he gamed the evaluation. He assumed that time in the mental institution would be easier than prison. But he quickly learned that the system was designed to remove his soul. His resistance ultimately ended in the system judging him crazy and dangerous. The system won.

One of Ken Robinson's chief complaints is that our schools are reverting to diagnosing and medicating any active, precocious kid with ADHD. He says, “Our children are living in the most intensely stimulating period in the history of the earth. They're being besieged with information and calls for their attention from every platform—from computers, from iPhones, from advertising hoardings, from hundreds of television channels and we're penalizing them now for getting distracted. From what? Boring stuff at school, for the most part.”⁴

Robinson sees a correlation between the rise of standardized tests and the rise of ADHD.

Of course, medications have helped many kids focus and manage their behavior. But I also know from experience and from many parents with kids diagnosed with ADHD that many children feel as though the medication takes away their soul; they don't feel like themselves and they don't like it. The kids who resist and try to hold onto their own identity are judged as being troublesome. The spirit of Nurse Ratched is the shadow inside many institutions.

Iatrogenic Medicine

In the 1970s an increase in medically related deaths launched several investigations. A shocking discovery emerged: at some tipping point in size and complexity a system develops a perverse logic and begins to produce the opposite of its intended mission. “As our means dramatically improve, the number of patients who die or become worse is skyrocketing—so much that the condition has its own term, iatrogenic, meaning an illness that the doctor (iatros) induces (genic). New laws enacted to correct the problem actually exacerbate it, solving a problem in one area creates five more in other places, and new innovations (inserted instead of integrated) bring with them a whole list of side effects.”⁵

That process is the third leading cause of death.⁶ Imagine a 747 crashing every day; that's the number of iatrogenic deaths! In 2013, the number of “doctor-caused” deaths was estimated at 143,000 a year. One of our friends, a nurse, told us about “death by decimal.” That is when a nurse gives a 1-millimeter dose when it should have been a .1-millimeter dose. She also said that when a nurse needs to be hospitalized, she or he will recruit a small team of nurse-friends to help out.

The Greek word for school is “schole.” So should we call school-induced maladies “scholegenic?”

Humanizing the Education Machine and taming the shadow beast of reform must begin by recognizing that learning is fundamentally human and humans are unique. Institutions become beasts when they grow beyond human scale and human comprehension (see Figure 10.1). Our job throughout the remaining chapters of this book is to show you how to tame the beast and humanize the machine.

Ferguson and Jennings: Four Miles and a World Apart

Jennings, Missouri, lays nine miles northwest of St. Louis and four miles southeast of the now infamous Ferguson. Jennings' median household income is less than $29,000 a year. The town's politics are tumultuous; the mayor and the city council can't seem to get along. In late 2015, the mayor tried to issue an executive order to investigate two council members; at the same time there was a petition to impeach the mayor.

However, a disruptive force in this little universe is creating a groundswell of hope and opportunity for the kids in this city. Education is working! In December 2015 Jennings became the first unaccredited school district in Missouri to regain full accreditation. Tiffany Anderson was the pleasantly tenacious superintendent responsible for that turnaround. Her strategy was aimed at reversing Lower Expectation Syndrome by systematically removing constraints and excuses and engaging the community.

Her formula:

• Build social capital (trust, community engagement and goodwill).
• Raise expectations with kids and parents.
• Hire and develop motivated teachers.

She fights a daily battle for the hearts and minds of the community and her kids. She understands Maslow's pyramid of needs; her kids can't learn if they are hungry, inadequately dressed, and feel unsafe. The most powerful weapon in her arsenal is social capital. Anderson knows that building social capital must be at the center of any community transformation.

Jennings is bordered by the only two remaining unaccredited school districts in Missouri: Calhoun and Ferguson. Michael Brown, the young man killed by the police in Ferguson on August 9, 2014, graduated from Normandy High. You could say that Brown overcame the odds and graduated, just like Jaime Casap. But, when you graduate from a school that has been at the bottom for 13 years, you have escaped more than graduated. The landscape of low expectations is the only view most kids have.

On graduation day Michael Brown put on one of the two gowns the school could afford. The gowns were handed from one student to the next as they graduated.⁷

His graduation was just eight days before he stole a box of Swisher cigars from a convenience store. The officer on call responded to the report of a robbery in progress and the incident ended in a tragic shooting and Michael's death. His death erupted into more than a year of protests and national debate over police violence, discrimination, and systemic poverty. The Black Lives Matter movement began in Ferguson and expanded to other cities. On the anniversary of the shooting, a friend of Michael's, Tyrone Harris Jr., graduated from Normandy. When protests broke out he took shots at an unmarked police car. In response police critically wounded him.

The cycle tragically continues. Tyrone's girlfriend, Qunesha Colley, reflected, “He didn't want to be one of those African Americans that's known for going to jail and getting a GED,” Coley said. “He made it through, and I salute him so much for that.”⁸

A Surge Opportunity for Ferguson

The war in Ferguson spilled into the streets because there was no social capital left to spend. In fact, the town faces a desperately deep deficit. At this point, no amount of money, new policies, or swapping out “bad people” for “good people” will help Ferguson experience what is taking place four miles up the road in Jennings. Those four miles may as well be 4,000 miles.

But, perhaps there is hope for Ferguson. In the spring of 2015, Dr. Joseph Davis was appointed Superintendent of the Ferguson-Florissant school district. His address to the audience announced his ground war for building social capital:

“For me, it's about building relationships, being in schools and in the community, and letting people see me. . . . What I will do is work on building those relationship so we can work even more so as a team.”⁹

A Human-Scaled Solution Penetrates the Chicago Public Schools

In his book How Kids Succeed, Paul Tough gave an in-depth look into the concerted effort of some education superstars to rescue one Chicago school, Fenger Academy. Although Fenger was part of a broader effort, it became the poster child for the mayor and future leaders. This story sounds very similar to Newark, and it should. High profile institutional interventions have often created “scholegenic” conditions for students and their families.

Fenger Academy is on the South Side of Chicago, in the Roseland area. Famed crime fighter and leader of The Untouchables Eliot Ness graduated from Fenger. Until the 1960s, that community was a predominately Italian Catholic neighborhood. Today it is 98 percent African American.

The Chicago Public Schools (CPS) were taken over by the city in 1995 (similar to what happened in Newark). Over the next 20 years a string of high profile educators—like Paul Vallas, future Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, and Elizabeth Dozier—tried to turn things around for the CPS. In 1999 Vallas received a $500,000 NASA grant for Fenger, and turned it into a Magnet School. But nothing touched the culture or the neighborhood.

Beginning in 2004 The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation started giving what would eventually total more than $80 million to the CPS.

In 2006 fewer than 6 percent of 400,000 CPS kids could expect to graduate from college.

In 2008 only 4 percent of Fenger kids met standards.

In 2016 the aggregate ACT scores were 14.5.

After six years, in 2015 Elizabeth Dozier resigned. When Paul Tough interviewed her she sounded a lot like the humbled Cami Anderson.

When I came into this job, I discounted questions like, “what families do kids come from,” and “what effect does poverty have on children?”

The reality is that at Fenger, we're a neighborhood school, so we're just a reflection of the community. And you can't expect to solve the problems of a school without taking into account what's happening in the community.¹⁰

Until 2006 Jeff Nelson was a motivated young teacher inside Chicago's Education Machine, also on the South Side. He believed that many of his kids had a chance to graduate and go to college. He then read a report that said only 6 percent of kids in the Chicago Public Schools would go on to attend college. That meant that in his class of 32 kids, only 2 would beat the odds.

Seeing how well his sixth-graders were doing, he decided to see if he could replicate his approach. So he launched One Goal, with a focused mission: One Goal teaches highly effective teachers to deliver a 40-minute class every day to low-performing kids who seem to have potential. It is an accredited class and runs through a student's junior and senior years of high school. One Goal is also a highly personalized program to help a student develop study skills and life skills. It provides personal coaching, and builds an awareness of what it's like to go to college.

Benito, a high school student in an at-risk zip code in Chicago, was one of those low-performing kids. But he had a teacher who felt he was smart enough to beat the odds, even though no one in Benito's family had ever gone to college, and he didn't even know anyone who had gone to college. His world thought college was a fantasy. So, naturally, Benito was a victim of Low Expectation Syndrome. Like so many others, he didn't try to succeed in school, or anywhere else. But one day, a One Goal–trained teacher who believed in Benito asked him if he wanted to go to college. He gave his usual brush-off. But she pressed him further, telling him about One Goal classes.

He signed up. Over his junior and senior year Benito connected with his own education. From that spark started a fire, and Benito became a leader in school. By the time he graduated, he had been accepted into several colleges.¹¹

One Goal has now expanded to Houston, Texas, and enrolls more than 2,500 kids per year. The cost is $1,500 per student. The program has an 85 percent college acceptance track record.¹²

Because Jeff took a human-scaled approach to the problem, he hasn't drawn the wrath of the Chicago Teacher's Union. In fact some One Goal teachers belong to the union. They come because they see it works and they see that it protects them from their Union Machine and makes it less likely they will be eliminated.

Two Billionaires—Two Different Outcomes

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg famously provided the $100 million to launch the One Newark initiative. But I want to tell you about another billionaire that you probably haven't heard of: Atlanta real-estate developer and philanthropist Tom Cousins. Tom is responsible for the transformation of East Lake Meadows, a community that once seemed destined to be another story of failure.

Tom was born in 1931. After military service and graduation from the University of Georgia in 1958, he started building and developing homes with his father. Today, he owns the Atlanta Hawks, Cousins Properties, and other commercial and sporting properties. Tom is widely considered one of the men most responsible for the remaking of Atlanta in the 1970s and 1980s.

A man of strong faith, Tom has always been particularly moved by a Bible passage that captures a conversation between Jesus and his disciples:

“I was in prison, and you visited me.”

“. . . When did we ever see you sick or in prison and visit you?”

“I tell you the truth, when you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters you were doing it to me!”¹³

In the 1980s, as that biblical passage continued to burn in his heart, Tom began wondering how to help people before they fall into the judicial system. A short time later, Atlanta's Police Chief told Tom that 75 percent of all crimes in Georgia came out of five communities in Atlanta.

Tom pounced: “Which one is the worst?”

“East Lake Meadows; we call it little Vietnam. Believe me, Tom, you don't want to drive through there after sundown!”

But, Tom wondered, what if the most dangerous place in Atlanta could improve, even turn around? That could create strong ripple effects and present new methods in tackling crime. Tom wanted East Lake Meadows!

One additional factor made East Lake Meadows even more attractive. The old Bobby Jones Golf Course was also in that community. It was run down and neglected, but surely represented an untapped (and high profile) asset. The vision started coming together; Tom would buy the golf course, redevelop the public housing, build a new school, and provide the social services that could give the community a new future.

After some pieces fell quickly and easily into place, Tom learned that nothing would move forward without the support of Eva Davis.

Eva was the larger-than-life matriarch and president of the East Lake Tenant Association. East Lake was her kingdom and she was its queen bee, having lived there since 1971. Former President Jimmy Carter, who had his own history with Eva Davis, let Tom know his skepticism of making any progress. “The President told me that in all his negotiations he had never met someone as stubborn and difficult as Eva Davis. She was tougher than Begin or Sadat.”

As it turned out, the drama featured four key players: Eva Davis represented the tenants, Carol Naughton and Renee Glover came from the Atlanta Housing Authority (AHA), and Greg Gironelli spoke for Tom's group, the East Lake Foundation.

Renee Glover, the head of the AHA, vividly described the situation:

The public housing program had become the “devil's bargain.” That is, in exchange for a social, financial, and housing arrangement—with no or low standards and without personal accountability or responsibility—one could live in a compromised, dangerous, and dysfunctional housing development. Because it was the only affordable option available to them, families needing assistance with paying their rent found themselves in environments where, over time, they were exploited and destroyed by the chaos that resulted from concentrated poverty and low expectations and standards.

The unintended but predictable consequence of these environments was that society's criminals and predators were empowered, and the vulnerable, law-abiding, very low-income families who found themselves trapped in these no-win situations were imperiled.¹⁴

Renee's comments unmask, again, the true logic of a system unconstrained by human volition and conscience.

Renee saw the details of how the status quo had become a “devil's bargain.” So, in defiance of HUD's mandate for how the funds were to be used, she eagerly partnered with Tom Cousins and his East Lake Foundation. This was her heroic reach to have a good effect on a crumbling system.

Because of all the confusion, politics, turf battles, and racial suspicions, it took six years for Tom and the other leaders to gain Eva Davis' trust. She even filed a lawsuit to stop the process. Greg and Carol made the trip every Friday over that six-year period to participate in the planning committee meetings. Greg estimated it took over 200 meetings to win trust and begin to gain traction.

The process was unlike any other redevelopment process the players had ever seen. The residents met with their attorneys first for a few hours and then would open to the public, the Housing Authority, and the East Lake Foundation. Most meeting started with Ms. Davis yelling at everyone; her anger and vitriol reflected a hard life. She would call them liars, cheats, thieves, honkies, crackers, and more. Racism and classism were thrown in every direction; the meetings turned into mud fights. Greg and Carol remember several meetings that were so emotionally jarring that they needed the long drive time to decompress on the way home. Their mission and recognizing that their role was simply to serve this community helped them return to the table.

In one meeting, Eva launched a very personal attack on Carol. In doing so, she crossed a line. The meeting ended on a very sour note. But Eva circled back and called to apologize. In that call, she also expressed her genuine appreciation for what Carol and Greg were trying to bring to her world. This opened the door for Carol to get to know some of Eva's story.

Eva was born in a small Georgia town. When she was a child, her parents gave her to the local sheriff as a playmate for his daughter. She slept on a pallet in the girl's bedroom. But she could not eat with the family. Eva's mix of anger and affection toward this family, and her sense of abandonment from her own, created the context for Eva's distrust and vigilant protection for her residents.

Eva faced a new reality at the end of this process. She was caught between wanting a redeveloped community for her residents on one hand, and losing her authority and stature on the other. She would be accused of being an Uncle Tom and a sell-out. The residents were being asked to give up their homes and, not only that, but to give them up to a government that had consistently let them down and abandoned them. They also had to trust that a white billionaire real estate developer would do the right thing.

But, of course, everyone had a story. And everyone had been shaped by his or her own story. All the stories—formed in abuse, neglect, exploitation, distrust, and more—had left wounds. Then, in the reactions, salt was added to wounds. That process became a vicious cycle, destroying hope and possibilities. That has happened over and over in every community development in the country.

But, sometimes, a spark, the breeze from a butterfly's wings, or something miraculous happens that pulls all the disparate parties into some kind of cohesion.

And so it was that East Lake was a partnership between a billionaire and politicians, similar to Newark. There was strong opposition from the community, similar to what occurred in Newark. But, there was a common mission to restore human dignity, and the redevelopment always stayed in its proper position—a means to that end, and not the other way around.

When they reach a certain scale, grand initiatives and institutions cannot seem to avoid flipping means and the end goal. As the means become the goal, test scores override learning, and “improved schools” come at a cost to communities. Fear and insecurity drive these systems.

However well intentioned, the institutionalized applications of “care” all assume that people are incapable of helping themselves, that people are the problem, and that everyone needs the institution's help. And, of course, that help will be on the institution's terms. The system isn't doing this for people out of a sense kindness. It is, to paraphrase Gandhi, doing it to you, not for you. The system resents that it has to do anything at all. It is, as Renee said, a “devil's bargain.”

One of my lessons from East Lake is how belief in the mission to restore dignity will require that we remain patient when the Eva Davises of the world spew the distrust and betrayal out of their systems. All of that is part of “doing life together.” It may not be efficient, but it turns out to be highly effective.

The common thread between Alyssa, Tiffany Anderson, Jeff Nelson, Tom Cousins, Carol Naughton, Greg Gironelli, and Eva Davis is this: They all saw the vital catalyst as “doing life together.” They didn't have a short-term or romantic vision. They knew that the very hard work of building community requires time! And time is the one thing that systems based on delivering service efficiently do not like and do not have. When we don't have time then we fall into roles (and roles by themselves are fine and provide frameworks). But when roles have to be protected or feel threatened they produce masks. That is when shadow culture dormant in the system turns to serve itself instead of the mission.

Getting beyond the roles and masks is messy, off-script, unapproved, sometimes vulgar, and unpredictable. When you do unmask the roles and begin doing life with others, then the timelines, processes, and procedures give way to a relational flow and rhythm. Newark was thwarted by an artificial timeline and institutional arrogance. East Lake Meadows took six years and two hundred meetings just to launch. It was anything but efficient.

Social Emotional Literacy

The American Psychological Institute defines socioeconomic status as, “. . . the social standing or class of an individual or group. It is often measured as a combination of education, income, and occupation.” Reform attempts to improve the plight of children with low socioeconomic status have exposed a deep chasm in the Gutenberg model. Its focus on the mind and academic learning has overlooked or marginalized noncognitive learning and emotional health.

The next two chapters bridge this chasm. In particular we will explore the central role of social and emotional literacy as vital for at-risk children. It is also key to the kind of internally motivated learning that educators believe is essential to developing twenty-first-century survival skills.