Feds Investigating Civil Rights Implications of School Closures in Newark
If you are middle class or rich, you are not likely to discover that anybody is planning to punish your child’s school by closing it. School “reform” via “turnaround” happens in school districts like Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Newark, but it doesn’t happen in Winnetka, Grosse Pointe, Bryn Mawr, Chagrin Falls, or Montclair.
That is because the test-and-punish mechanisms of our federal testing law No Child Left Behind and newer policies designed around its philosophy—School Improvement Grants, for example—impose sanctions (like closing the school, turning the school into a charter school, or replacing the principal and the staff) on schools where the students persistently score in the bottom 5 percent of public schools nationwide. Such schools are virtually always in the neighborhoods of our big cities where poverty is concentrated—which means that virtually all the children are extremely poor. In our society we blame the test scores on the school without figuring out how to ameliorate the poverty. As the editorial board of Rethinking Schoolsmagazine has brilliantly stated: school reform based on high-stakes testing “disguises class and race privilege as merit.”
In a situation like Newark, New Jersey, where the school district has been under state control for two decades and where the state overseer school superintendent, Cami Anderson, reports to Governor Chris Christie instead of the locally elected school board, citizens are using every avenue provided by the democratic process to protect and improve their public schools. They elected school principal and strong defender of public education Ras Baraka mayor in May, even though they knew the mayor can’t control school policy, and they filed a complaint about Cami Anderson’s One Newark school reform plan this spring with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR). This despite Chris Christie’s rude rebuke: “And I don’t care about the community criticism. We run the school district in Newark, not them.”
New Jersey Spotlight reports that the OCR complaint was “filed in May by parent advocates Feds Investigating Civil Rights Implications of School Closures in Newark | janresseger: