Newark's Mayor Cory Booker

City Journal has the story of Newark's Mayor Cory Booker and the daunting task he faces. From crime and corruption to poverty and poor education, Booker has probably the toughest job of any mayor in America. Oh to have such a challenge though. If he succeeds even a little, it will be a major triumph.

On schools, in particular:

What may be Booker’s greatest challenge is waiting in the wings: reviving Newark’s atrocious school system. Right now, Booker doesn’t have control of the schools; the state took over the Newark system after a damning 1994 investigation found widespread mismanagement and corruption in the elected board of education. Since then, the state, under a court order, has poured billions of dollars into the city’s schools, so that Newark now spends nearly $17,000 per pupil a year—about 75 percent more than the national average.

Yet the money has done little good, since the state has pursued few educational innovations and hasn’t taken on entrenched educational interests (above all, the teachers’ union), which still control much of the system. Student performance has continued to plummet. “High school achievement rates have virtually flipped, from almost 70 percent of graduating Newark kids passing the state’s high school proficiency exam when the state took over, to only about 30 percent passing it now,” says Richard Cammarieri, a member of the Newark schools advisory board. E3 executive director Dan Gaby bluntly describes the system as “in crisis,” estimating that it spends an astonishing $1.3 million for every qualified student it manages to graduate from high school.

Booker’s first order of business if he gets control of the system, which remains an open question, will be to appoint a strong chancellor, along the lines of the Chicago schools chief or New York City schools chancellor. He wants to bring to Newark many of the promising education reforms he sees around the country: closing and replacing chronically failing schools (Newark has some 30 of them), letting parents choose which schools within the system to send their kids to, and inviting more operators of successful private schools into the city to run charter schools. “I have stopped going to lotteries for admission to charter schools because I was so saddened to see parents who have run out of options for their children,” Booker says.

Booker has thrown his weight behind a state bill, sponsored by Democratic legislators, that gives tax credits to companies that contribute to a scholarship fund for Newark students who want to attend private schools or jump to public schools in better-performing districts. Critics, especially the state’s powerful teachers’ union, have branded the scholarship money a surreptitious voucher program that will eventually harm public schools, and the state’s governor, Jon Corzine, has yet to endorse the legislation. But Booker responds: “Who can object to a pool of money that will give poor children the same opportunities as middle-class kids?”

Booker could have even tougher education battles to come, especially in ending seniority rules that allow veteran teachers to pick where they want to work, regardless of performance, and rewriting bureaucratic regulations that make it tough to fire bad educators. “If you can’t change those things, you will fail in any effort to fix this system,” says Gaby.