Newark Public Schools: Let’s Just Close the Poor Schools and Replace them with Less Poor Ones?
This week started with several individuals from the Washington DC area asking if I would address a school closure/turnaround report produced by an outside consulting firm on contract with the DC Public Schools (as I understand it). That consulting firm basically made a map of the locations of the schools around the city, identified which schools had higher and lower proficiency rates, and where proficiency rates had changed over time, and then basically listed the lowest performing schools by these deeply flawed metrics suggesting their closure and alternatives for “turnaround,” essentially focusing on conversion and expansion of charter schools. Thankfully, before I even got a chance to dig into the report, two other bloggers took it to task. As Steve Glazerman explains here:
Student proficiency rates have long been discredited as a school performance measure because
