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
