Mark Zuckerberg and Cory Booker want to show you how to fix your school district. The Facebook CEO and the Mayor of New Jersey’s largest city have heard the troubling statistics about America’s failing schools. They know about the math and science test scores that trail other countries, the racial achievement gaps, and the low graduation rates. Newark, Booker’s city, has these problems and more. Only about half its students receive a high-school diploma. A large proportion of students who do get one will still need remedial classes in college.

Zuckerberg and Booker believe they can turn the tide. They have a head start thanks to Zuckerberg’s $100 million donation to the city’s schools, announced in September, and support from Gov. Chris Christie, whose administration calls the shots in Newark’s state-controlled school district. Now, if only Newark citizens will get on board.

Money alone won’t solve Newark’s problems. It already spends about $20,000 per student, more than twice the national average. And when education reformers like former Washington, D.C., superintendent Michelle Rhee made radical changes, a public backlash undermined their efforts.

What Zuckerberg and Booker don’t have, at least for the moment, is the one ingredient they know is essential: the support of thousands of the city’s residents who buy into a long-term reform agenda with their votes, their voices, and their time. Rhee faced community meetings full of angry teachers and parents opposing her decisions. Newark’s reformers are trying to turn out hundreds of angry parents and teachers supporting the changes on the table. If they succeed, the growing line of hedge-fund philanthropists and wealthy private foundations taking an interest in America’s schools may well follow their lead.

Of course, leaders promising reform in Newark have tried to find that kind of community support for years. The state took over the city’s public schools in 1995, vowing higher student achievement. But despite the efforts of three superintendents since then, Newark students have yet to show test scores high enough for the state to consider giving up the reins. This past January, Superintendent Clifford Janey proclaimed a “New Day” for the city’s schools as he outlined a 48-page strategic plan. Nine months later, Christie declined to renew his contract, stopping that plan in its tracks and leaving it to a fourth leader to attempt a turnaround when Janey leaves next year. In Newark, “we get education reform like we change our underwear,” the leader of a local parents’ group, the Newark Secondary Parents Council, recently told the city’s local newspaper.

Booker is trying to convince Newarkers that this time will be different. In October, he ventured to a place where he’d never been before as mayor: the offices of the Newark Teacher’s Union. He met with Joseph Del Grosso, the union president. The two men had not spoken in five years, in part because the union had publically bashed Booker’s policies. But Del Grosso now says “we’re really on the same page with patching up our differences.”

Booker also sought and received the support of Shavar Jeffries, president of the local school advisory board, even though Jeffries’s political popularity in the city is growing and might some day rival the mayor’s. That’s in addition to Booker’s alliance with Christie, the Republican governor whom the mayor, a Democrat, could conceivably challenge in the next gubernatorial election.

Though these officials have not proposed specific changes yet, they talk generally about evaluating teachers’ performance and renegotiating union contracts to include more accountability for teachers—issues on which Del Grosso says he’s willing to negotiate because “if you’re not at the table you’re on the menu.” They discuss longer school days, expanded charter schools, and revised curricula to better prepare students for careers. But so far, none of Zuckerberg’s money or the roughly $43 million raised to match it has been spent on any of that.

Instead, the first $1 million will fund an ad-hoc coalition of community groups called the Partnership for Education in Newark (PENewark), the stated goal of which is to ask all of Newark’s nearly 280,000 residents about their priorities for education reform, even if volunteers have to knock on all 91,000 doors inside the city limits. The team has developed a survey it wants to give every Newarker. Focus groups will follow. It has hired a public-relations firm headed by Bradley Tusk, a former campaign manager for New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg (and a top aide to former Illinois governor Rod Blajogevich). The coalition is placing ads on billboards and bus stations; it’s buying T shirts, hats, handouts, and a new Web site. In a formerly vacant furniture store on Market Street, a paid but sleepless staff is planning community forums, organizing volunteers for phone-banking, coordinating media appearances, and mapping out routes for door-knocking.

If it all sounds like a political campaign, that’s exactly what organizers had in mind. On the surface, PENewark’s purpose is to hear from every resident. But its real goal is to build the foundation of a grassroots campaign. Booker wants the outreach to produce “the best e-mail list of parents and community members that our city has ever had.” Jeffries, the Newark Schools Advisory Board president, hopes for a “database of 15[,000] to 20,000 parents, mobilized when we need them. That’s how we’re going to get to the next level.”

Next year, the district will hire a new superintendent, renegotiate union contracts and begin implementing the plan that they’re now asking the community to help develop. The new top administrator will need support. “Any superintendent worth his or her salt, after about 3 to 6 months” will start making tough choices, Jeffries says. Among the challenges ahead: “there are certain people who have to be fired,” he says. “It’s going to get very dicey real quick when those tough decisions get made.”

In building a coalition that pushes reform through “dicey” times, Newark is trying to succeed where other reformers have fallen short. After Rhee ended her tumultuous, Time-cover-earning tenure as D.C.’s superintendent of schools, she acknowledged a major mistake. Despite reaching major goals, like a union contract that tied teacher pay to performance, “when it came to ensuring broad support for our work, we fell short,” Rhee wrote in a recent op-ed. Broader community support might have allowed her to remain superintendent longer, but teachers and parents screamed as Rhee made changes, and she eventually decided to leave the job after her biggest patron, Mayor Adrian Fenty, failed to win reelection in September.

Right now, Newark’s reform effort, in the form of PENewark, counts parents, teachers, business leaders, and other groups among its partners. But it also hasn’t proposed anything yet.

Once specific reforms are on the table, Newark’s leaders will have to balance competing priorities. Zuckerberg has formed a foundation called Startup: Education to work in Newark. Jeffries is in the process of creating a separate grassroots group that will push for teacher accountability and other reforms. Meanwhile, Booker is the governor’s “point man,” but it’s unclear what will happen if the mayor, Christie, and other key players disagreed on, say, who the next superintendent will be.

Booker and Zuckerberg also want to bring in the best talent possible. “Don’t blink, let’s get the best of the best,” the mayor says Zuckerberg told him. But privately some working on the project worry that the initiative will alientate Newark residents by relying too heavily on experts from outside the city (like the firm that ran Bloomberg’s campaign and is now steering the PENewark outreach). The decision to announce Zuckerberg’s donation on Oprah’s show in Chicago fueled those concerns. “This is a problem that the mayor has,” says a person who is closely involved with the PENewark effort but did not want to publicly criticize it. “He tends to prefer to have national folks who don’t have an understanding of what’s going on locally.”

And there’s another way Newark could end up with too many cooks in the kitchen. Following the publicity around Zuckerberg’s gift, Booker says he has been contacted by a slew of philanthropists and education reformers. He heard from one American couple in England, for instance, who believed Newark’s students would benefit from owning their own textbooks and was willing to pay to make it happen. The city is “in play,” the mayor says. “Everybody with a proven program is reaching out to us now.” But being a magnet for too many programs might not do Newark any good. “A district that has 10 priorities has none,” says Tony Wagner a scholar at Harvard and author of The Global Achievement Gap who has studied school districts’ efforts to change themselves.

Eventually, reformers in Newark will have to stop listening and start driving the conversation, says Wagner.

He argues that communities need to be told what’s wrong before they decide on their priorities. After a recent community outreach effort in Virginia Beach, Va., for example, the district invited 800 residents to a meeting, gave them handheld remotes, and asked them to rank priorities for education. The key component, Wagner says: Virginia Beach gave the audience information about the schools districts’ problems before they voted. “You can’t make the hard choices or sustain the change process without an informed understanding of what the problems and tradeoffs are,” he says.

For now, Newark’s leaders are still in listening mode. On a recent Saturday afternoon, Booker attended one of the 10 forums on education arranged this year by PENewark. He sat in a classroom chair made for a kindergartner as a Newark woman raised concerns about charter schools sapping talent from public ones. “What do you do with the kids left in the system?” she asked a circle of 15 parents and teachers. A PENewark volunteer took notes.

In the gymnasium of the same school building, Jody Pittman broke down in tears due to frustration while speaking to another group. She drives her 12-year-old son 45 minutes across the city each morning to reach a school in Newark’s North Ward because the schools in her part of the city are “terrible,” and district policy be damned. Later when all the forum’s participants have assembled, Shareef Austin, the coordinator of a local youth basketball league, grabs the microphone and bellows, “We can’t teach our children when our homes are broken down!” Pittman lets out a cry and raises her hand to the sky. A crowd of about 150 applauds. Then Austin reminds them that “the ones who need to be here” are the parents who are not in the room. Years from now, if Zuckerberg and Booker have manged to solve that problem, the world will be taking notes.

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