Free The Prize by Dale Russakoff Page A

for ordering her five-year-old students to line up and punch a classmate in the back for tearing up her lesson plan. In 1998, two men were charged with selling heroin and cocaine from an apartment next door.
    The disconnect between rules and reality was hardly limited to education. Down the hill from the Avon school, a city sign for years had warned, “No Littering $1,000 Fine.” No one in the neighborhood had $1,000 to spare, so the seemingly harsh consequence was a joke, as the broken liquor bottles, crushed beer cans, and candy wrappers strewn in all directions made clear. As school board member Marques-Aquil Lewis once put it: “This is Newark. Rules were made to be broken.”
    Against this backdrop, the new leaders of Avon fanned across the neighborhood in the summer of 2010 to knock on every door and talk to parents about working together to change the school. They gained credibility when they persuaded the district to light Avon’s playground, which led to a blossoming of nighttime hoops. And Dominique Lee successfully fought the district to have the aging school’s interior repainted with a trim of bold, primary colors, as opposed to the default hues of beige and brown. In late summer, four hundred men, women, and children from the neighborhood turned out for a barbecue—the best attendance anyone could recall at a school event.
    Yet doubts kept surfacing in the form of a recurring question: Are you turning Avon into a charter school? Charters had become a codeword in parts of Newark for rich, white outsiders who hid self-interest behind a veil of altruism—a narrative of distrust going back to urban renewal days.
    Lee patiently batted away the rumors, affirming BRICK ’s solid commitment to district schools. But the question rankled. Why vent so much anger and fear on charters while excusing the district for failing Avon students for so long? One day, in response to yet another question about the rumor, he blurted out: “No, we are not a charter school. But what is it about charters that’s scarier than four percent proficiency in math?”
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    A life-sized casualty of the long decline arrived in sixth grade on the opening day of the rechristened BRICK Avon Academy, three weeks before the
Oprah
announcement. His name was Alif Beyah, and he had been promoted year after year despite failing basic subjects. He also was a discipline challenge, forever getting thrown out of class for refusing to do his work.
    â€œHe acted—excuse my French—like an ass to me in the hallway one day and I suspended him,” said Melinda Weidman, the assistant principal for the middle school grades.
    But the next morning, she said, Alif returned and apologized, pleading to be allowed to go back to class. Another time, she gave him detention and noticed that he arrived precisely on schedule to serve his time. When she called him out for being disrespectful, she said, he was quick to own up to it, showing genuine remorse.
    Weidman, a former high school social studies teacher, was small, with blue eyes, long blond hair, and a voice like a drill sergeant’s. The rowdiest eighth graders straightened up when they saw her coming, in part because they knew she’d risk her safety to protect them if a fight broke out. They’d seen her do it.
    Weidman built a relationship with Alif’s mother, Lakiesha Mills, who confided that she and her boys’ father had recently split up. She worked from noon until midnight at concession stands at various arenas and rarely was home to make dinner or supervise homework andbedtime. She was terrified that Alif would fall increasingly behind and slip into a brutally familiar spiral: failure in school, leading to anger and eventually expulsion, with nowhere to turn but the streets. She was desperate for help.
    Weidman began to conclude that this wiry stringbean of a troublemaker with large, dark eyes and a shy smile was in fact a good boy. But