The Race for the Future of Newark Public Schools
Monday, 12 May 2014 09:22By Owen Davis, Truthout | News Analysis |
Newark mayoral candidate Ras Baraka with Assemblywoman Sheila Oliver, who endorsed his candidacy, at Essex Sports Cafe in Newark, N.J., May 7, 2014. (Photo: Christopher Gregory / The New York Times) |
The forces behind free-market education reform have never preferred their revolutions quiet. By their political calculus, money trumps subtlety.
That pattern will be tested on Tuesday, as residents of Newark, New Jersey, elect a new mayor and help determine the fate of Newark Public Schools. A spate of dramatic education reforms has reconfigured the district in recent years, shifting masses of students and resources from public to privately managed schools. An intensifying mayoral race between two veteran Newark politicos will prove a referendum on those reforms.
Civil rights attorney Shavar Jeffries plays the free-market education reform candidate. A former charter school board chair, he’s benefited from nearly $1 million in campaign donations from Education Reform Now, an advocacy group composed of Wall Street executives.
In the opposite corner is Councilman Ras Baraka, a former high school principal and son of the late poet Amiri Baraka. Backed by labor unions, Baraka has advocated community-based approaches to school improvement, especially in bolstering support services. "We have the capacity to turn schools around," he told Truthout. "We don’t have to close them down. We don’t have to give up on the public schools system."
Despite Newark’s parochial politics, election watchers can’t help peering over the Hudson to New York City, where Bill de Blasio won the mayoralty, in part, by repudiating his predecessor Michael Bloomberg’s imperious tenure. Bloomberg’s pro-charter and test-heavy policies, as well as many of his former staff members, have been imported wholesale to Newark.
Baraka hopes to ride De Blasio’s progressive wave. "There’s no evidence that the things we’re doing work for anybody," he says of current reforms. Meanwhile, Jeffries has assumed the mantle of the "reform" candidate - meaning substantial continuities with the current regime.
The eventual mayor-elect will draw a tough hand, though. The district runs a deficit exceeding $50 million, stemming largely from an exodus of district students to the exploding charter school sector. The proportion of Newark students attending charters - privately managed, publicly funded schools given latitude in discipline and instruction - will rise from 25 percent to 40 percent by 2016.
Meanwhile, the most recent district reorganization plan, One Newark, would close or turn over 17 schools, while expanding the charter sector, potentially impacting thousands of students in neighborhood schools.
"It would be disastrous," Baraka says of the plan. "This is drastic and radical. It disrupts families'lives."
Reform Years
With the fifth-poorest student population in the United States, Newark has long posted unflattering test scores. But its schools showed glimmers of promise in the late 2000s. Legal battles secured equity-based funding, and grassroots initiatives were burgeoning. At Central High School, where Ras Baraka was principal, graduation rates increased from around 50 percent in 2007 to over 80 percent today.
But in 2010, Chris Christie took hold of the governorship, and with it Newark’s schools (they’ve been under state control since 1995). A subsequent $100 million donation from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, coordinated by Gov. Christie and Mayor Cory Booker, opened Newark’s gates to an army of free-market school reform The Race for the Future of Newark Public Schools:
