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Thursday, January 23, 2014

New Report: An Empirical Critique of “One Newark” « New Jersey Education Policy Forum

New Report: An Empirical Critique of “One Newark” « New Jersey Education Policy Forum:





New Report: An Empirical Critique of “One Newark” « New Jersey Education Policy Forum





 Our new report is too long to post in its entirety in blog form.

The report can be downloaded here: Weber.Baker_OneNewark_Jan24_2014
Below is the executive summary of the report:

Executive Summary

On December 18, 2013, State Superintendent Cami Anderson announced a wide-scale restructuring of the Newark Public Schools. This brief examines the following questions about One Newark:
  • Has NPS identified the schools that are the least effective in the system? Or has the district instead identified schools that serve more at-risk students, which would explain their lower performance on state tests?
  • Do the interventions planned under One Newark — forcing staff to reapply for jobs, turning over schools to charter operators, closure – make sense, given state performance data on NPS schools and Newark’s charter schools?
  • Is underutilization a justification for closing and divesting NPS school properties?
  • Are the One Newark sanctions, which may abrogate the rights of students, parents, and staff, applied without racial or socio-economic status bias?
We find the following:
  • Measures of academic performance are not significant predictors of the classifications assigned to NPS schools by the district, when controlling for student population characteristics.
  • Schools assigned the consequential classifications have substantively and statistically significantly greater shares of low income and black students.
  • Further, facilities utilization is also not a predictor of assigned classifications, though utilization rates are somewhat lower for those schools slated for charter takeover.
  • Proposed charter takeovers cannot be justified on the assumption that