The Prize Read Online Free PDF Page B

course and a stream. They shared a table with Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and media executive Michael Eisner, among others. Afterward, Zuckerberg invited Booker on a walk and explained that he was looking for a city poised to upend the forces impeding urban education, where his money could make the difference and create a national model. Booker responded with a pitch that showcased what made him such a dazzling fundraiser.
    The mayor of Newark understood well that venture philanthropists were looking for a “proof point,” a city where they could deploy multiple initiatives and demonstrate measurable improvement in poor children’s achievement. He already had pitched Newark to many of them as fertile ground for charter growth, emphasizing its proximity to a huge teaching talent pool across the Hudson River and its manageable size in contrast to New York, where then chancellor Joel Klein, a hero of reformers, had shaken the school system’s foundations but hadn’t begun to reach all 1.2 million students. In raising $20 million for the Newark Charter School Fund in 2008, Booker had emphasized the success of some of Newark’s earliest charter schools and New Jersey’s generous school-funding formula—more than twice the amount per pupil as in California, for example. Now, he was pitching Zuckerberg on the next stage of the vision—Newark as a proof point for turning around an entire school district.
    Walking side by side with Zuckerberg, Booker began, “The question facing cities is not ‘Can we deal with our most difficult problems—recidivism, health care, education?’ The real question is ‘Do we have the will?’” Why not, he went on, take the best models in the country for success in education and bring them all to Newark? “There’s no way we can’t count to forty-five thousand [Newark children of school age] and get all of them into high-performing environments,” the mayor later recalled. The former Stanford football player, big of build, with shaved head, hazel eyes, and overpowering optimism, added, with the confidence of a born winner: “You could flip a whole city!”
    â€œI just thought, this is the guy I want to invest in,” Zuckerberg would later tell reporters. “This is a person who can create change.”
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    Zuckerberg was disarmingly open about how little he knew at the time about philanthropy. He recently had joined Bill Gates and Warren Buffett in pledging to give away half of his fortune in his lifetime, but unlike older billionaires, he had little time to devote to a foundation. “Running a company is a full-time job,” he explained, somewhat unnecessarily. He said his goal, in addition to helping the Newark schools, was to learn from his experience and become a better philanthropist in the process.
    While his personal experience in public education was limited—he’d started out in public schools, graduated from the elite prep school Phillips Exeter Academy, and dropped out of Harvard as a sophomore—Zuckerberg was drawn to the cause by the experiences of his wife, Priscilla Chan, then his girlfriend, and her passion for children. They decided to embark on philanthropy as a couple, and when they began talking about it, early in 2010, she was in medical school, preparing to become a pediatrician in community medicine to care for underserved children. She had no more time for active philanthropy than he did.
    Sitting beside Zuckerberg in his glass-walled meeting room at Facebook, Chan said her own life experiences drew her to the challenges facing inner-city children. She came from a “disadvantaged” family, as she described it, in which her Chinese-Vietnamese immigrant parents worked eighteen hours a day to build a better life for their three daughters, her father running a Chinese restaurant, her mother working two jobs. Her grandparents lived with them and helped care for her.