The political pile-up around efforts to improve schools in Newark, New Jersey, could have come from a Tom Wolfe novel: An aggressive conservative governor teams with a distressed city’s progressive but ambitious mayor in wooing a $100 million, five-year gift from a tech giant.

Newark saw what no other district in New Jersey saw. It was able to drive growth in market share in better schools. The real question is, what do the results imply for what Newark does next?

They hire a white New Yorker to run the school system in a city where 85 percent identify as black or Hispanic, that has a history of racial discord, and whose distrust of outsiders has sharpened in a fight to regain local control of its schools, which the state took over in 1995.

Administrators in Newark public schools, among the city’s largest employers, were habitually corrupt. Barely half of Newark public school students graduated. Nearly all were poor.

We also now have the first substantial study of results from the ambitious package of reforms implemented in the years that followed the announcement.

Read the full article by David Cantor at The 74