It’s a short drive from the well-known Palo Alto to the less well-known one—a trip Laurene Powell Jobs has been making for more than 20 years. “It won’t take long,” she tells me as she pulls her Tesla away from her education-reform organization, Emerson Collective. She named it for the famous Transcendentalist, in large part because she has a thing for the Transcendentalists, Ralph Waldo Emerson in particular. “So there’s Emerson’s idea of self-reliance,” she says as we turn onto University Drive, heading north. Self-reliance is a big theme for her, given how she grew up, in rural New Jersey; given how far she’s come. “I’ve always had this idea that you have to make the most of things,” she says. “And then collective because I wanted the idea that you achieve your goals with people, because good ideas come from a lot of places.”
The well-known Palo Alto is the one where you can’t throw a flash drive without hitting the offices of numerous Silicon Valley stalwarts—Facebook, PayPal, Google—and it’s also the home base of Stanford University, the place where, as an M.B.A. student, Powell Jobs met her late husband, the innovation icon Steve. The downtown is bustling with kale-rich restaurants and Arts and Crafts homes, and the trees! “Aren’t they beautiful?” she says. Languorous Southern magnolias, sky-aiming tulip trees, as well as the redwoods that Palo Alto is named for (Palo Alto means “tall tree”).
It turns out Powell Jobs knows a lot about trees. The 52-year-old is also an avid outdoorswoman, a small-plot farmer, a beekeeper who sends out honey with handmade labels at the holidays, as well as a huge Halloween enthusiast. If people thought the Halloween blowouts at the Jobs home would stop when Steve passed away, they were wrong. She is a mother to Reed, Erin, and Eve, their ages ranging from 24 to seventeen, and she has a stepdaughter, Lisa. “Excuse me one second,” she says, to take a quick call from Eve, who is home from high school, sick with a cold. She tells her she’ll be back for dinner. Powell Jobs prefers not to speak with reporters about her husband, but he comes up, naturally, and they were always big on family meals. “It was an inviolate rule; we would always eat dinner together,” she says, “and Steve would always be home.”
As we cross the highway and enter East Palo Alto, the trees disappear, and the houses become markedly smaller. East Palo Alto is one of those American places that have experienced the downside of cities’ being sorted by race and class: a prolonged disinvestment; its sole public high school closed in 1976 and demolished two decades ago. Since then, students—first predominantly black and now increasingly Hispanic—have been bused to other neighborhoods. “We used to be right there,” Powell Jobs says, meaning College Track, the college-preparatory nonprofit that she cofounded in 1997 as a storefront operation in a down-and-out neighborhood called Whiskey Gulch, which is now full of sparkly office buildings and a Four Seasons. It was on that site that she and a team of tutors and counselors helped about two dozen local teenagers not just get into college but find a way to pay for it, and work their way to a degree.
In another mile, we pull up to the current College Track location, a gorgeous new mural-covered building that, inside, feels more like a very nice community college than a place to go after school to do your homework. Powell Jobs is clearly in heaven in the stream of young people, taken up in a cloud of hellos and hugs. They know her right away, but not as a member of the board of Stanford or as a major Apple shareholder, or as one of the wealthiest women in the world. “Laurene was an older sister,” says Marlene Castro, a College Track alum and U.C. Berkeley graduate who still visits the center. “She was the principal of this place that was going to get me into college.”
Since 1997, Powell Jobs has opened seven more College Track centers in three states even as she built Emerson Collective into a charitable force in its own right. Throughout the afternoon, I watch her focus intently on each young person she’s talking to, both serious and naturally at ease—even kind of silly and fun. She needs to get home but encourages me to stay and suggests we meet again the next day. Just then two more students grab her, and she hits me with a warm smile: “I mean, this is why I get up in the morning.”Powell Jobs is looking for a moon shot and has given the competition a name reminiscent of the Apollo program—XQ: The Super School ProjectUnless you live in one of the Palo Altos or are intimately involved in education reform, you likely have not heard a lot about Laurene (rhymes with Marine) Powell Jobs. Of course, as Steve Jobs’s wife, she could sometimes be seen at his side, and at the Apple memorial service in 2011, CEO Tim Cook mentioned her before anyone else: “Laurene not only brought Steve great strength but also us as well, particularly over the last couple of weeks.” She is not by nature a public person, a trait she shared with her husband, who was a rock star when presenting Apple products but took a vow of silence when it came to the machinations of his company and his own life.
For a while after his death, Powell Jobs ignored the pressure to speak, concentrating, of course, on her kids. Her friends describe her as a devoted mother. “You know, parenting them is one of her most important spiritual tasks,” says the writer and critic Leon Wieseltier, whom Powell Jobs has known since 2011 and with whom she is starting an as-yet-unnamed journal. “She had a really great mom, and she has terrific brothers and sisters, and so she knows the benefits of good family,” says Carlos Watson, her College Track cofounder and a former MSNBC anchor. When Jobs died, her brother Brad Powell moved with his family to Palo Alto. (He now manages investments at Emerson.) “With Steve being gone,” Powell Jobs says, “it was just me and my kids, and they came out to be with me.” To say they helped seems to be an understatement. “We’re really tight,” she says.
As time passed, a question arose: How would the Silicon Valley power woman use her reported $17 billion fortune? Would she become more of a charitable force, a political player, or, well, how would she proceed? Now we are beginning to see the answer. She has scaled up College Track, and via the Emerson Collective, she’s taken a deep interest in immigration reform, bankrolling efforts to push for the Dream Act—a bid to legalize undocumented minors. She has also become a major donor to Ready PAC, supporting Hillary Clinton, and recently showed up at a White House conference on education policy.
And finally, starting last fall, she assembled a group of people to launch a national competition calling on teachers, students, communities, groups of any kind to reimagine the American high school. At least five ideas will be chosen by Powell Jobs’s team and $50 million divided among them. Powell Jobs is looking for game-changing thinking, a moon shot, she says, and has given the competition a name reminiscent of the Apollo program—XQ: The Super School Project.
I go with her to visit the XQ offices on a bright Friday morning, crossing the San Francisco Bay under a soft blue sky, the corduroy hills dry from drought. We park in downtown Oakland, a city known for its radical politics (the Black Panthers were founded here), its tremendous ethnic diversity, and its educational dysfunction. Almost half of the graduates from Oakland Unified School District are not eligible for state college upon graduation; proficiency in reading and writing among Oakland’s Latino and African-American high school students is only 17 and 14 percent, respectively. Powell Jobs already has a busy College Track facility on Jack London Square. A few blocks away she has set up her XQ offices.
In the beautiful open loft, with raw wood–beamed ceilings and windows as tall as sequoia, I meet XQ’s CEO, Russlynn Ali, a former Education Department official. Ali and Powell Jobs show me a video of young people and teachers brainstorming about what high schools could be. Powell Jobs says she hears students everywhere lamenting rote learning, speaking disdainfully of skills that seem of little use; they long for mentors and classes that speak to their passions, as opposed to test scores. And not surprisingly, people with the least resources feel as if they are getting the least from the current system.
The concept behind XQ, say Ali and Powell Jobs, is to create change without forcing a single vision, to support ideas that perhaps already exist, that are struggling to see the light of day. So far some 10,000 applicants have submitted ideas. Many have already come in—and Ali and Powell Jobs are feeling hard pressed to stick to five awards. They expect around 400 semifinalists to move on to the development phase by spring. Meanwhile, XQ offers webinars for groups to cultivate their ideas. “We want to help them infuse rigor and add data and measurements to their thinking,” says Ali, “but the ideas themselves are phenomenal.”
There is no shortage of high-profile educational investments that have come from Silicon Valley, most recently Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million donation to Newark’s school system (widely judged a disappointment). Nor is XQ the first national competition to push education reform: 23 years ago, Walter Annenberg gave $500 million in an attempt to transform American public education. Only a few efforts flourished, one of them being Expeditionary Learning, or EL Education, with 152 schools in 39 states. Ron Berger, EL Education’s chief academic officer, is leery of scaling up ideas. “When we talk about scale, we often talk in terms of franchising, like building more Starbucks, and that kind of scale doesn’t work. Our program is small. It’s not like you’d put one of our schools on every corner. I don’t want to be cynical. The grant helped us starting out. But I don’t think that money always aligns with impact.”
“The bottom line is if you are willing to take the long view—that one out of eleven ideas may work—then it’s worth doing,” says Howard Gardner about XQ. Gardner is a renowned professor of cognition and education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. “But the notion that there are any quick fixes in education is nonsense.”
Powell Jobs says the XQ team is prepared to be patient (and to share all of XQ’s ideas online). “We don’t actually claim to have the solutions,” she says. “This is such a deeply difficult issue. It requires nuance and perseverance and problem solving at a very complex level, but ongoing, and XQ is going to continue to evolve.”
“It’s hard when people die,” she continues, “but there’s something about when people die suddenly. . . .” She pauses for a moment. “I remember thinking that you have to take advantage of things. I felt very lucky knowing that.”
Her mother kept the kids focused on school through a second marriage that apparently wasn’t as happy as the first. “We weren’t that close,” Powell Jobs says of her stepfather. Nonetheless, she remembers vacations in the car, and exploring the backyard woods with her siblings, and Springsteen-esque summers at the Jersey Shore, on Long Beach Island. She also recalls trying to figure out how to get financial aid for college and then, when she got to the University of Pennsylvania, going for two degrees, in business and economics. “I really milked it,” she jokes.
After graduating, she worked on Wall Street for a few years, at Merrill Lynch and as a fixed income–trading strategist with Goldman Sachs, and then went west to get her M.B.A. at Stanford. That was where she met Jobs, in 1989. Late for a lecture he was giving, she sat down in the front row, next to the lecturer himself. I was warned not to ask her about him, but most of what’s written points to a guy being immediately impressed with a sharp, outdoors-loving Easterner, somebody who looks you in the eye and tells you what she thinks. They met and, as she said to me, “That was that.”
The two were married in Yosemite, in 1991, and she had their first child, Reed, that fall. By this point she had started the natural-food company Terravera, and begun tutoring in East Palo Alto with Carlos Watson, then a consultant at McKinsey & Company. Previously, Watson had presented Powell Jobs with a business idea. She liked him but not his idea. “She’s a daughter of working-class people,” he says, “and is not afraid to tell you that your idea is not a great one. She’s not a shrinking violet at all.”
Around the time her second child, Erin, was born, Powell Jobs had handed over the reins of Terravera so she could put more energy into tutoring. It wasn’t long before she and Watson had founded College Track. “I mean, Laurene is a very formidable person,” says Leon Wieseltier. “She’s smart and she’s serious about the very important things. There is something completely undecadent about her. She has a first-class mind and a progressive heart and she’s lively, funny, attractive, and all that’s clear, but the thing about her is that she is an unreconstructed idealist, an idealist without any irony about her idealism.”
“Look!” says Powell Jobs. I’m looking. I don’t see it yet. “Look!” Then I do—a hawk, a big, beautiful red-tailed hawk, sitting on a fence post, watching her as she passes happily by. We are out walking the Dish, a Palo Alto–famous trail, which takes its name from the big 1960s-era radio dish situated in the foothills behind Stanford University. “I really like to walk and talk,” she says, a trait, it turns out, she shared with her late husband.
“This is a place I go three times a week,” she says. She waves to friends, points to her favorite old trees, and as we make it to the first crest, with a forever view, we see the trench of the San Andreas Fault. She recalls moving to California and experiencing her first earthquake. She also remembers the feeling of openness that attended the move west. “You start to take off cloaks that you didn’t know you had on.”
She’s moving fast. “She’s one of those people who can just go and go and go,” says Kathy Smith, an old friend from Powell Jobs’s Goldman days—they quit together and studied art history and Italian in Florence before sharing an apartment in San Francisco, during grad school. “She is also just so much fun to be around, which is why people are drawn to her.” Powell Jobs stops to chat with a friend, who shares her child’s early college-acceptance news. “That’s great!” Powell Jobs mentions that her daughter Eve—she is an equestrian—is not applying early decision. “Too much pressure!” Few things, she says to me, agitate seventeen-year-olds in America today more than the college personal essay, something Powell Jobs knows firsthand after all her years at College Track. I ask her if practice readied her for her own kids. Big laugh. “You know what that answer is!” she says. “As a parent, you have to be good coach and bad coach, and I think in the college-application process, I didn’t want to be bad coach. ‘This is amazing! I’m so proud of you!’ That’s the role I wanted with my kids.”
We pull into the final stretch, and she finds her car, and on the way to her house, I ask her if she is dating (as has been reported in the press). “Yes,” she says—Adrian Fenty, the former mayor of Washington, D.C., who now works at the law firm Perkins Coie and at Andreessen Horowitz, a venture-capital company in adjacent Menlo Park. “It’s really, really nice,” she says. “And you know what? Given how charged it could be going out on a date, it’s actually just as fun and comfortable as it could be.”
At the house she’s lived in for more than two decades, the kitchen is cozy, brick-walled, warm, a Wayne Thiebaud landscape presiding over a long table. The living room is filled with Ansel Adams photographs, a contemporary Navajo tapestry, and various beautiful Native American baskets from the Southwest. I hang out for a while, and hear all about her high school career from her brother Brad and sister-in-law Tracey, who were set up by Laurene. Afterward there’s a quick tour through the garden, which Powell Jobs has just replanted. She stops to take a call from her son, Reed, on his way home from Italy. “Bellissimo!” she says. And then notes the lavender, olives, persimmons, and the bees. She has lots of bees, six hives, and, not surprisingly, she knows a lot about them, how one hive can pollinate a whole neighborhood, and it’s hard not to think of this as a metaphor for education. “Bees punch above their weight in terms of pollination,” she says.
She loves her bees. She loves her garden. She talks about the change she’s facing with her youngest nearly ready to leave home—and it could be a melancholy idea, but Powell Jobs is energized about the future. “I have more time to work; I just do. Because once your kids are up and running, that frees you up a good 20, 30, hours a week. All of the thinking and the work and the caring and the practice and the discipline and really everything that we didn’t know we were developing for the last 30 years is being brought to bear now,” she says. “As in—now, really get to work!”
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