The Prize Quotes

“Almost all philanthropy is by definition undemocratic, its priorities set by wealthy donors and boards of trustees, who by extension can shape the direction of public policy in faraway communities.”
― Dale Russakoff, The Prize: Who's in Charge of America's Schools?

“Movements that don’t include beneficiaries are doomed to fail,”
― Dale Russakoff, The Prize: Who's in Charge of America's Schools?

“every side in the education debate had its eyes on a different prize.”
― Dale Russakoff, The Prize: Who's in Charge of America's Schools?

“Education reform comes across as colonial to people who’ve been here for decades,” he said. “It’s very missionary, imposed, done to people rather than in cooperation with people.”
― Dale Russakoff, The Prize: Who's in Charge of America's Schools?

“It was a window onto why teachers consistently tell researchers that, given the choice, they would opt for a good principal and supportive working conditions over merit pay. Indeed, research had found no correlation between merit pay and student achievement, although reformers and venture philanthropists were fighting hard to make it a staple of new teacher contracts.”
― Dale Russakoff, The Prize: Who's in Charge of America's Schools?

“A lot of high-stakes accountability has become self-defeating—focusing solely on the identification of bad schools, the bad teachers, as opposed to creating a signal and involving teachers in processes that lead to investigations and changes,” he said.”
― Dale Russakoff, The Prize: Who's in Charge of America's Schools?

“Children with more than one traumatic experience—violence, severe poverty, family breakup, or substance abuse in the home—were more than twice as likely as others to fail at least one grade.”
― Dale Russakoff, The Prize: Who's in Charge of America's Schools?

“As Booker had suggested, the reform movement’s prescription for failing schools was to close them and replace them with charter schools or schools based on models that had succeeded in other cities and states. But if charters or new models could succeed, why couldn’t a failing district school be revived, thereby sparing children the dislocation of having to leave teachers and classmates they had come to know and trust?”
― Dale Russakoff, The Prize: Who's in Charge of America's Schools?

“Education reform is not about its leaders and their prerogatives. It’s about communities,” Michael Lomax, president of the United Negro College Fund and an ardent reformer, wrote on The Root, an online magazine. “Education reform doesn’t have to be—indeed, cannot be—force-fed to communities of color . . . We can be equal partners in ensuring what is best for our children and all children. It won’t work any other way.”
― Dale Russakoff, The Prize: Who's in Charge of America's Schools?

“My calling is to fix the public schools,” she said. “If something is broken and we have the power to fix it, why would we abandon it for something else? It’s like saying, ‘Because so much negative is happening in Newark, we should just totally level the town and bring in new people.”
― Dale Russakoff, The Prize: Who's in Charge of America's Schools?

“As Councilman Ron Rice Jr. had said in 2010, soon after the Zuckerberg gift was announced, Newark suffered from “extreme xenophobia,” particularly toward white outsiders who sought to change the city’s direction.”
― Dale Russakoff, The Prize: Who's in Charge of America's Schools?

“Voter backlashes against education reformers in mayoral elections in New York City in 2013, in Newark in 2014, and in Chicago in 2015 revealed the tenuous nature of disruptive changes made without buy-in from those who have to live them.”
― Dale Russakoff, The Prize: Who's in Charge of America's Schools?

“Budgets tell you a lot about values,”
― Dale Russakoff, The Prize: Who's in Charge of America's Schools?

“Betebenner said the system, known as Student Growth Percentile, was designed to measure student gains or losses, not to assign blame or credit for them. “Simply focusing on teachers as being the only potential cause of growth of students is pretty obviously myopic,” said Betebenner. The data would be more useful, he said, as a starting point for discussions with teachers on the reasons individual students are improving or losing ground, which could include many factors in and out of school.”
― Dale Russakoff, The Prize: Who's in Charge of America's Schools?

“Zuckerberg’s document laid out similar goals: “Restructure pay scale to increase base salaries for new hires . . . Abolish seniority as a factor in all personnel decisions and incentivize the removal of poor performers.” He also wrote that he wanted the best teachers to receive bonuses of up to fifty percent of their salary, the kind of incentives paid to top workers in Silicon Valley.”
― Dale Russakoff, The Prize: Who's in Charge of America's Schools?

“The ethos when I went through Teach for America was that good teaching and good leadership could solve the problems of poverty,” said Dominique Lee. “That’s part of the pie, but that’s not all of the pie. Our most dynamic teachers were burning out—the need and anger in the children, the mental health issues, the absenteeism, the transience.” They were witnessing the effect of what researchers call adverse childhood experiences, multiple traumas that, studies have shown, significantly interfere with learning and focus in children in the most disadvantaged communities.”
― Dale Russakoff, The Prize: Who's in Charge of America's Schools?

“Research had shown that children in the lowest-income families heard only a fraction of the words or conversations that were the daily bread of the more affluent. By age three, the difference was an astonishing twenty million words.”
― Dale Russakoff, The Prize: Who's in Charge of America's Schools?

“Moreover, decades of research had shown that experiences at home and in neighborhoods had far more influence on children’s academic achievement than classroom instruction.”
― Dale Russakoff, The Prize: Who's in Charge of America's Schools?

“The following Monday, NBC began a week of heavily promoted television programming called Education Nation, sponsored in large part by the Gates and Broad foundations—an arrangement that drew some criticism because the coverage dovetailed closely with the venture philanthropists’ views.”
― Dale Russakoff, The Prize: Who's in Charge of America's Schools?

“There was significant public debate over the merit of these strategies. Research scientists questioned the validity of using test score data to measure teacher effectiveness. Moreover, decades of research had shown that experiences at home and in neighborhoods had far more influence on children’s academic achievement than classroom instruction.”
― Dale Russakoff, The Prize: Who's in Charge of America's Schools?