Whenever anyone mention an education “miracle,” scoff. We had the “Texas miracle,” the “New York City Miracle” (that lasted only as long as MIchael Bloomberg was Mayor), and countless others.
Now that Cory Booker is running for President, we will hear about the “Newark miracle.” Don’t believe it.
To understand the statistical legerdemain, read Jersey Jazzman’s explanation here about Newark.
JJ is a teacher who became so frustrated with false claims that he went to Rutgers and earned a doctorate so he could master statistics and put paid to lies.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
That is good analysis. I didn’t realize they could “create” a higher percentage of “better” schools simply by shuffling students, but that makes sense.
I was looking at this stat they use:
“In the 2018 data, 47 percent of black Democrats supported charters with 29 percent opposed; similarly, 47 percent of Hispanic Democrats backed charters while 35 percent opposed them. (The remainder neither supported nor opposed charters.) Opposition has held steady among black Democrats since 2016, but ticked up among Hispanics. The biggest jump in opposition has been among white Democrats, though, going from 37 to 50 percent.”
I think 47% is really low. They have marketed charters heavily for 20 years and the last three Presidents have enthusiastically endorsed them as superior to public schools. Too, there are hundreds of full time paid charter promoters and one huge company, Wal Mart, who operate a think tank that does nothing BUT promote charters. The BEST they can do is garner 47% support? After 20 years? Shouldn’t it at least be over 50%?
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Here’s an ed reformer bemoaning the fact that their “movement” has become 100% about promoting charters and vouchers:
https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/commentary/secretary-school-choice
They criticize DeVos, but the truth is they never had anything to offer public school students other than tests. They still don’t.
Betsy DeVos has not offered public school families or students anything the entire time she’s been showing up for this job, other than budget cuts. Duncan didn’t offer than anything either, other than testing and teacher measurement schemes and periodic scolding.
They aren’t a public education movement. They’re a charter and voucher promotion organization. Without testing and budget cuts they would be completely irrelevant to public school students. No added value. None.
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Newark Miracle
Walk on water
Birth to virgin
Booker fodder
That’s for certain
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Chiara,
We must not call them “reformers,” because they don’t want to reform. They want to disrupt and destroy.
They are Disrupters.
In my new book, that’s what I call them.
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may this catch on
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Chiara link: “To be clear, I’m a huge fan of both choice and competition, but I believe they are ultimately insufficient without the needed boost provided from a wide-angle approach” (she says, wondering where the cheers are for pension reform & holding kids back in 3rd-gr cuz they couldn’t pass a reading test). Doh.
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I live in Davis, California, (next to Sacramento) which is home to UC Davis, probably the third largest UC campus after Berkeley and UCLA.
Our local school district often likes to tout how its standardized test scores have African-American and Latino students scoring above the state average for those demographic cohorts. What almost never gets mentioned, however, is that in Davis it is much more likely that an African-American or Latino student will have college-educated parents.
Nevertheless, as elsewhere, non-college-educated families are also disproportionately represented among Latino and African-American families. If one assesses those same standardized test scores for students from non-college-educated families in Davis, we actually score below average for that cohort, statewide.
If one can concentrated the percentage of Latino and African-American students who come from college-educated families, then it’s possible to work “miracles.”
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While JJ may make a valid point in regard to that individual statistic, the Newark Public Schools claim a rather broader range of advances:
https://www.nps.k12.nj.us/press-releases/harvard-study-adds-growing-body-evidence-progress-newark-schools/
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Too bad Newark is not included in NAEP. Then we could see how the “miracle” is doing.
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Oops! Spotted this in your link: “Finding 5A: Black students in Newark are three times more likely to attend a school with test scores above the state average today than they were in 2009.”
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bethree5 “Oops! Spotted this in your link: “Finding 5A…”
JJ’s valid point is that a district can “improve the likelihood of students attending a ‘good’ school without actually improving student achievement.”
So it makes sense, as he suggests, that the 5A you quote would not, in isolation, be convincing.
But, then again, 5A is not offered in isolation. It is quite closely accompanied by 5B:
“Finding 5B: Controlling for poverty and ELL status, Newark students show significant gains in math and ELA scores between 2009 and 2017.”
JJ’s article does nothing to invalidate the success claimed in Newark.
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Stephen, I am responding here to a specific talking point that has been made repeatedly about Newark and, in my opinion, is not valid. I’m not offering a comprehensive overview of Newark in the post.
That said, I direct you to:
Most of the gains in Newark around this period appear tied to a switch in tests (NJASK to PARCC). Gains in nearby districts that did not implement Newark’s “reforms” appear to be similar.
MW
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Thanks, MW. If I come across any Johnny One Note who trumpets that assertion without adequate context, I’ll encourage him or her to expand understanding via material like this from the Harvard study:
“As noted in Figure 2, Newark was not the only low-income district in New Jersey that witnessed an increase in achievement growth in 2015 and 2016. To the extent that the gains reflect policy shifts that Newark and other districts adopted, the improvement is encouraging. However, because the rise coincided with the introduction of a new assessment, there is some risk that the change is an artifact of measurement—a change in test scaling or testing procedures that disproportionately benefited students attending high poverty schools. We have tested a number of possibilities: the effect of accommodation policies on students with disabilities; floor or ceiling effects on the PARCC; a boost in scores for English language learners created by better text-to-speech options on the computer-based exams; changes in the treatment of incomplete items in the scoring of NJASK and PARCC. None of these hypotheses can account for the rise in achievement by many low-income districts in New Jersey. Nonetheless, even if a skeptic were to attribute the 0.07 gain in ELA achievement in the Abbott districts between 2014 and 2016 to some unspecified measurement artifact which also benefited Newark, the change in achievement growth in Newark was still twice as large as the other Abbott districts.
“Still, the most distinctive element of the Newark reforms started in their first year (before the change in assessments) and continued through 2016: the steady shift in student enrollment toward higher value-added schools (both charter and district schools). That shift was helped along by the closure of some of the district’s lowest value-added schools—which essentially forced parents to choose from among a set of schools with, on average, higher value-added scores (there may be room for further improvement using this strategy given some of the lowest value-added schools remain open). There was also steady expansion of the charter sector over this time, with an emphasis on expanding enrollment at the high-value-added charters. As a result, even in English where there was sharp increase in achievement growth within existing schools, over sixty percent of the improvement was due to between-school reallocation of students.” https://cepr.harvard.edu/files/cepr/files/newark_ed_reform_nber_w23922_suggested_changes.pdf
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This is an excellent analysis.
It should be read by every white reporter who overly praises charter networks with “99% passing rates” in their charters because their schools have mostly African-American and Latinx students.
When you have a large city where anywhere from 25% – 30% of African-American and Latinx students are proficient and a charter networks is willing to teach 1 or 2% of them as long as they are given total freedom to suspend and humiliate and replace students, then only a racist would believe that is a miracle. And the reason racists believe it is a miracle is because they truly believe that there are no African-American or Latinx students who can perform at grade level except at charters. The students in public schools who do well are invisible to them.
What is the true miracle is that public schools starved of money who have so many severely disadvantaged students are also teaching higher performing students without demanding that all the other students who are too tough to teach be forced out so they can be someone else’s problem.
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VERY WELL said: “charter networks is willing to teach 1 or 2% of them as long as they are given total freedom to suspend and humiliate and replace students, then only a racist would believe that is a miracle….”
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Gotta love Jersey Jazzman. He just revealed what will indubitably be one of Booker’s stump claims to be a shell game. I’m gonna guess that that’s the case w/most of the positive study results coming out of charter la-la-land. Just keep shuffling those ‘proficient’ students around until the numbers support your sponsor’s thesis.
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It’s heartening to see that, at least according to polls, Democratic voters are not falling for Booker’s saccharine, insipid and dishonest claims. The man is a fraud, as is the kind of Democratic politics he represents.
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