On a fall afternoon in 2010, the unlikely trio of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, then-Newark Mayor Cory Booker, and Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg took the stage of the Oprah show to declare their plan to remake American urban education. The scene, which turned ecstatic with the announcement of Zuckerberg’s $100 million pledge to Newark public schools, was the culmination of a pact between Christie and Booker to woo the nation’s top philanthropists into staging an intervention in one of the most dysfunctional education districts in the country.   

As it says on the book jacket of The Prize, “they got an education.” Penned by former Washington Post reporter Dale Russakoff, the book is a behind-the-scenes narrative of the deeply flawed effort by outsiders to blow up the Newark school system in hopes of exporting their success nationwide. The engaging work is replete with vignettes of teachers’ and students’ progress and setbacks along the way. Russakoff manages to be a fly on the wall of every important meeting and encounter in the Newark experiment.