David Kirp, a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, has a smashing article in the New York Times comparing the failure of corporate reform in Newark and the success of incremental, collaborative reform in Union City, New Jersey.
Newark is a paradigm of all the bad reform ideas: Schools closed against the will of parents and students. Charter schools opened, some of which skimmed the students they wanted. Mark Zuckerberg, egged on by then-Mayor Cory Booker and Governor Chris Christie, put $100 million into the reformer dream that every student in Newark would achieve proficiency if every school were turned into a charter school. Zuckerberg’s $100 million disappeared down the rabbit hole, and Newark continues to struggle.
Meanwhile, Union City made real progress, without the help of Zuckerberg’s millions.
Kirp writes:
No one expected a national model out of Union City. Without the resources given to Newark, the school district there, led by a middle-level bureaucrat named Fred Carrigg, was confronted with two huge challenges: How could English learners, three-quarters of the students, become fluent in English? And how could youngsters, many of whom came from homes where books were rarities, be turned into adept readers?
Today Union City, which opted for homegrown gradualism, is regarded as a poster child for good urban education. Newark, despite huge infusions of money and outside talent, has struggled by comparison. In 2014, Union City’s graduation rate was 81 percent, exceeding the national average; Newark’s was 69 percent.
What explains this difference? The experience of Union City, as well as other districts, like Montgomery County, Md., and Long Beach, Calif., that have beaten the demographic odds, show that there’s no miracle cure for what ails public education. What business gurus label “continuous improvement,” and the rest of us call slow-and-steady, wins the race.
Two points to be made based on this article:
- Why does anyone expect politicians to know how to fix schools that struggle?
- Does anyone still believe that charters and vouchers and high-stakes testing will improve education for the nation’s poorest children?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
FINALLY the New York Times is starting to get it!
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Don’t worry, they’ll soon “unget it” when the phone call comes in.
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Their commenters certainly get it, and the number of commenters outnumbers the number of editorial board members by the thousands.
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It’s difficult to acknowledge the truth when your job depends on not acknowledging it, or somesuch.
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It is interesting that Union City has made strides through community outreach and much maligned bilingual education. Bilingual education has never been popular among most policymakers, but it can be very effective with the right staff and model. The problem for impatient school leaders is that it may take a few years to reap the benefit. Today few are willing to invest the time in such an approach; leaders expect teachers to wave a magic wand, and the students will come out proficient in English. http://www.ericdigests.org/1997-3/bilingual.html
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In Dallas, kids are trapped in “bilingual” classes and tested in Spanish until 5th grade if at any point in the past the parents checked a box that said Spanish was spoken at home.
They test in Spanish and the Spanish tests are easier.
This is all done to make the district’s test scores look a bit better.
It’s nearly impossible for the students, even the ones who are clearly fluent in English, to escape the “bilingual” classes, which are taught by teachers who rarely speak enough English to offer a “bilingual” experience.
It’s a racket.
In middle school, the students must make the switch to all-English testing. And then the middle school teachers are blamed for low test scores.
It’s so unfair to the students. The SAT and ACT are not in Spanish. We need to flip the kids in school to English ASAP if they are to compete. Too many of our poorest, weakest, least advantaged kids are thrown into English years too late and they sink.
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It’s surprising to me that ELL’s and ESL has just come on the radar of so many, and that so little of instruction for these kids is founded on research. It takes about 2-3 years for kids to acquire social English skills, but between 5-7 years to gain mastery in academic language skills. Since a kid’s education can’t be put on hold while they acquire language, instruction should continue in the native language to support their academic advancement. Imagine that your parents move you to Germany in 9th grade and you have to pass a graduation exit exam in the 11th grade, while studying your core classes in German. ELL’s have to pass HST’s after one year of instruction.
I was a bilingual teacher back in the ’70’s. We instructed in two languages and mainstreamed kids to regular ed classes for a part of every day, beginning with gym classes, music and art and shops like sheet metal and cooking. As kids gained proficiency, we re-did their schedules so that they could move into academic classes like math and social studies. I’m talking middle school, so we had three years to support and monitor their progress. It worked, and well. Today, bilingual students spend their days being prepped in English for math and ELA exams, and music, art, shops and gym have disappeared from the schedule.
One thing folks miss, too, is that in a public school setting, kids arrive -all through the year – with various levels of schooling and previous English-language experience. The difference among kids can be enormous – think of a child sent to live with extended family after the Haiti earthquake vs a child of professional parents who previously attended a private school in Chile, for example.
I hope, but doubt, that school systems along the east coast are preparing for an influx of Puerto Rican kids, citizens, who will be showing up in greater and greater numbers and the island’s economic system worsens – thanks, hedgies! School in Puerto Rico is taught in Spanish, so there will be lots of challenges ahead for these kids and for the public schools they will attend.
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While the research on bilingual education is positive, there have been many problems with implementation. There is a shortage of qualified teachers, and some programs like the one described in Dallas have not been implemented correctly. I taught ESL in a stand alone program for many years in New York. One year I had a fourth grade transfer student that had been in a bilingual program from kindergarten in California. While she had some receptive English, she had little expressive English, and she couldn’t read in English at all. Clearly, the “bi” in bilingual requires instruction in both languages, and this student was not getting appropriate English instruction. Her report card grades that were sent were blank for English!
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Union City spends about $9,000 less per student than New York City and $5,000 less than Newark, yet not a day goes by without traditional public school advocates in those two districts crying about being “starved of resources.”
Maybe the folks who run Union City’s schools could show ’em how it’s done.
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Check your facts, Tim: Newark spent $1400 more per student in 2013-14… and I think Union City DID show the way… and it didn’t involve “market forces”, crushing unions, or replacing veteran teachers: http://www.nj.com/education/2015/04/nj_schools_how_much_is_your_district_spending_per.html
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Union City probably doesn’t have as many students who live with low-income parents. Ask yourself why the parents are low-income. It’s usually because they don’t speak English, and/or they are uneducated, and/or they are addicts, and/or they are mentally ill…etc.
Of course districts who serve the children of low-income adults are going to need more money per child.
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That was an approximation; are you going to dispute whether Newark outspends Union City by a not-insignificant margin every year?
In 2015-2016, NYC DOE schools will spend $26,151 per student. Newark’s traditional district schools will spend $20,428. Union City will spend $17,375: http://www.union-city.k12.nj.us/UserFiles/Servers/Server_4470852/File/downloadable_forms/business/Budget%202015-16%20Bd%20of%20School%20Estimate.pdf
Again, I would hope that Newark and (especially) New York look to Union City for lessons that don’t involve a constant plea for more money.
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Cupcake, per the official NJ enrollment numbers for 2014-2015, Union City’s student population is 96% Latino. 83% qualify for a free lunch, 10% for reduced price. 24% are ELLs.
Newark is 8% white, 47% black, 44% Latino. 76% qualify for a free lunch, 5% for reduced price. 11% are ELLs.
http://www.nj.gov/education/data/enr/enr15/district.htm
Demographics do not explain the difference (if anything, Union City has the tougher row to hoe), and money certainly doesn’t either. Urban districts and educators who complain about being “starved of resources” and having challenging student populations should pay a visit to Union City, it would seem.
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Tim,
You seem to think the point of Kirp’s article is that resources don’t matter.
I think the point of his article is quite different: the “reforms” imposed on Newark are not necessary, waste money, and don’t work.
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Multiple lessons can be taken away from Kirp’s writings on Union City. It is noteworthy that they have been able to get great outcomes without charters or what you generally refer to as “corporate reform.” It is equally as noteworthy that Union City has accomplished this while spending a lot less money than nearby districts with similarly challenging student populations.
New York City is spending $9,000 more than Union City, yet typically opponents of reform here say that any improvements are virtually impossible unless the DOE is given even more funding. Even when children living in New York City likely have better access to wraparound services, and when Union City has arguably a more challenging student population.
Let’s have the take-away from Kirp be a full 360 degrees. If reformers can learn from Union City, so too can advocates for traditional district schools.
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Tim, maybe NYC and Newark pay far more per student because the public school students are charged for ALL the costs for a system where the charter school students get to be free riders.
As this study shows, if you simply cherry-pick the cheapest to educate students, you can do quite a lot with your “per pupil” allocation that is MORE than the allocation that public schools get to educate the kids the charter schools don’t want.
But there are costs to maintaining a system that are about accountability. The reasons there is so much corruption in so many charter schools is that they cheap out on oversight! Of course they do – why would an operator want to pay for oversight that might cut into all the profits?
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@Tim, Demographic info can be misleading. % free lunch includes a huge range–from destitute children to children who barely qualify.
Same with racial and ELL percentages.
Even within a district, 2 schools have demographics that look similar on paper but actually be at 2 ends of the spectrum.
The bloated bureaucracies imposed on urban districts don’t help the stats, either; all those bureaucrats are usually requiring a million different initiatives to take place in the schools with no thought for the price tag.
They often sign kids up for all sorts of needless but expensive programs and mandates so that they (the bureaucrats) get kickbacks from the vendors.
Wake up, Tim. Have you ever worked in an urban district?
It’s not the teachers buying all the programs and equipment. It’s not the teachers getting the kickbacks.
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Finally, some encouraging news!
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I cannot say to Diane “Thank you!” enough blogging this NYT article. It is unbelievably timely, for tomorrow I shall call upon the Atlanta Board of Education to fire their superintendent, Meria Joel Carstarphen, Ed.D. She is hell-bent on replicating “Newark’s big mistake” in Atlanta and either does not know it, does not want to know it, or knows it but does not care.
“Newark’s big mistake was not so much that the school officials embraced one solution or another but that they placed their faith in the idea of disruptive change and charismatic leaders. Union City adopted the opposite approach, embracing the idea of gradual change and working within existing structures.”
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I was amazed it was in the NYTimes, frankly.
I would just like to point out that local leaders did this- they managed to resist the allure of “disruption” and the ed reform recipe.
Public school leaders don’t have to buy the hype. Obviously they have to follow the state law that is drafted by (primarily) ed reformers so they may have to do work-arounds, but they CAN do what they think is best even without the official stamp of approval or any national recognition. Chris Christie didn’t laud these people in campaign speeches and they weren’t written about endlessly as “rockstars”- they did it anyway.
The people who run our schools don’t have to go along. They can take a principled position on “reform” that is different than the prevailing narrative and succeed at it WITHOUT the support of ed reform politicians.
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I was heartened and maddened at the same time… because I think Kirp overemphasized the role of deregulation. He talks about how “…charters have nearly a third more dollars to spend on each student, $12,650 versus $9,604, which buys additional teachers, tutors and social workers”, which he attributes to the fact that the charters were “freed from the district’s bureaucracy”…. but he fails to explain HOW this saved $3000+ per student. He later emphasizes Christopher Cerf’s conviction that charter schools are working “…because they have substantially more discretion” but doesn’t provide any data to substantiate this claim. Maybe these are nits to pick… but every time someone repeats the meme that deregulation is the salvation of public education it reinforces the idea that “bureaucratic government run schools” can’t work…. and that’s not true.
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wgersen: thanks for catching these.
Rheephorm thinking excels in trying to reduce everything to proof by [self-aggrandizing] assertion and proof by [self-serving] invention.
This shallow approach has a tendency to infect everything in the ed debates.
😎
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Politicians “fix” the “failing schools” like a veterinarian “fixes”, neuters animals.
With the same intentions.
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It’s good to have models of success, whatever the ambiguities. This MAY be (I’m not familiar with it) another:
With regard to expenditures per student: one needs to break down the totals. Costs in some areas, esp. large cities, can be significantly different from those in other areas. The question really is INSTRUCTIONAL costs.
For example, a Harvard economist recently wrote a NYTimes piece claiming that a major factor contributing to increasing college tuition was the increased salaries of professors. But the real question is whether INSTRUCTIONAL costs have risen substantially, and the fact of the matter is that while some professors have good salaries (as I did before retirement), a majority of courses almost everywhere are taught by “adjuncts” who get maybe $3500/ course, with NO benefits. So in many colleges actual instructional costs have probably (it’s virtually impossible to get reliable data) gone DOWN, not up.
It’s just one instance of the need to get inside numbers like general per-student expenditures. You can spend a lot of money per student, but that doesn’t mean the dollars are going to educate them. They can go for rent and profit, as in some FL and OH charters, not to speak of bloated administrative salaries, as in many colleges. . . and elsewhere.
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The instructional spending for all three of the districts I mentioned is proportionally in line with national averages, a little lower in in NYC, which has astronomically high capital debt and pension expenses.
Focusing on only instructional spending isn’t helpful, anyway. Those extra-instructional costs can’t be wished away; they are part and parcel of operating a modern traditional school district, and the taxpayer is on the hook for all of it.
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Just to be clearer–the ratio of instructional spending to total spending in those districts is comparable to national averages. They spend much, much more than the national averages not only in instructional spending, but in every other category as well.
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Here is the focus point:
Two points to be made based on this article:
Why does anyone expect POLITICIANS to know how to fix schools that struggle? (ex: Chris Christie and Cory Bookers)
Does anyone still believe that charters and vouchers and HIGH-STAKES TESTINGS will improve education for the nation’s poorest children?
It is besides money, resources, teaching quality, there are LOCAL caring, sharing, co-operation, and determination to nurture young generation becoming future civilized and conscientious citizens who will preserve and maintain America as the best country where American are the ultimate compassionate and intelligent people of the world. Back2basic
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You cite Long Beach, CA as a district making improvements in an appropriate manner. I don’t know much about Long Beach’s methods, but I do know that Fresno Unified’s superintendent has formed a relationship with Long Beach in its effort to “improve”.
I do know something about Fresno Unified. When the current superintendent arrived 10+ years ago, he declared to management that test scores were the “game”, and that the district would definitely playing. He has kept his promise. Along the way, he purged pretty much all experienced administrators and has had teachers targeted for lack of any other term – harassment. Accordingly, many fine people who were good for kids have left early. I should mention that Fresno Unified encompasses some of the poorest students in the country.
My point is, since I know Fresno Unified has been bad for kids and teachers, and it seems to be working in some ways with Long Beach, I find myself skeptical whe I see Long Beach held up as a positive example. I need to know more about Long Beach; perhaps the “partnership” is simply a ruse on the part of Fresno Unified.
*If you’d like further insight into the inner workings of Fresno Unified’s administration, check out this website of award-winning author, Mark Arax:
http://mark-arax.com/thearaxfile.htm
Your chin may just drop in disbelief.
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