Bob Braun, the veteran investigative reporter who has covered New Jersey politics for many years, describes an astonishing ripoff of taxpayers.
Archives for category: New Jersey
One way that charter schools get high test scores is to get rid of students with low scores. The Education Law Center called out one of New Jersey’s High-flying charters for excessive disciplinary tactics imposed on students with disabilities. That’s a prelude to expulsion or “encouraging” these students to leave.
ELC SUPPORTS COMPLAINT OF EXCESSIVE DISCIPLINE OF STUDENTS WITH DISABILITIES BY NORTH STAR CHARTER SCHOOL
A complaint filed by Rutgers Education and Health Law Clinic (Rutgers) with the NJ Department of Education (NJDOE) on August 17, 2018, alleges that the North Star Academy Charter School in Newark has engaged in a pattern and practice of imposing discipline without regard to students’ disability status, resulting in the inappropriate suspension and retention of students with disabilities and a denial of a free and appropriate public education.
Education Law Center, in a letter to the NJDOE on August 17, is supporting the Rutgers complaint.
Rutgers filed the complaint under a procedure requiring the NJDOE to investigate systemic violations of special education law by districts and charter schools. Rutgers’ clinical law fellow, Deanna Christian, Esq., prepared the complaint based on the Clinic’s representation of individual North Star Charter students and families, an examination of North Star’s discipline policy, and NJDOE data regarding suspension rates.
North Star Academy Charter School is managed by the Uncommon Charter network based in New York City. Under a single charter granted by the NJDOE, North Star actually operates 13 separate charter schools in Newark, enrolling approximately 4,000 students.
To manage classroom behavior in its Newark charter schools, North Star relies heavily on a “paycheck” system in which a student’s loss of dollars or points, and his or her ultimate detention or suspension, may result from minor infractions, such as poor posture, off-task behavior, or incomplete work or homework. Many of the infractions may be related to a student’s disability.
The NJDOE data examined by Rutgers revealed that, during the 2016-17 school year, North Star suspended 29.1% of students classified as eligible for special education and related services, placing it among New Jersey public schools with the highest discipline rates for students with disabilities. During that same period, all other K-12 charter schools in Newark suspended less than 9% of their special education students, while Newark Public Schools (NPS) suspended only 1.3% of those students.
“Some parents of students with disabilities who attend North Star have reported more than thirty out-of-school suspensions in a year, resulting in loss of instructional time and retention,” said Ms. Christian. “North Star’s use of the paycheck system, without modification for students with disabilities, has a disproportionate and discriminatory impact on those students and must be revised.”
The data presented to the NJDOE by Rutgers is consistent with complaints ELC has received from North Star parents. ELC also noted that North Star’s high suspension rate for students with disabilities was accompanied by a low enrollment rate of those same students: during 2016-17, only 7.3% of North Star’s students were classified, compared to 15.48% of NPS students.
“We applaud the Rutgers Clinic for requesting that the NJDOE investigate an apparent pattern at North Star of imposing excessive and inappropriate discipline on students with disabilities,” said Elizabeth Athos, ELC senior attorney. “A 29.1% suspension rate for students with disabilities is shockingly high, as is North Star’s low enrollment rate of classified students. North Star, like every other New Jersey charter, is obligated to ensure its discipline policies support, and do not undermine, the right of students with disabilities to a free and appropriate education under state and federal law.”
Education Law Center Press Contact:
Sharon Krengel
Policy and Outreach Director
skrengel@edlawcenter.org
973-624-1815, x 24
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Ever notice how many times Reformers push for a state takeover of majority black and brown districts? Ever notice that the state takeover is the prelude to privatizing the public schools, on the presumption that people of color can’t be trusted to run the schools in their district? Better bring in the smart white entrepreneurs who run charter chains and think they know what kind of discipline children of color need.
Domingo Morel, a political scientist at Rutgers University, has written a book about Takeovers and examined the racial dynamics behind them.
The article and interview are by Chalkbeat’s Matt Barnum.
“In a new book, “Takeover,” Rutgers political scientist Domingo Morel concludes that the prevailing logic for takeovers is indeed tainted with racism. That’s based on an examination of data from every school district taken over by a state over a 30-plus year period, and case studies of the takeovers of Newark, New Jersey and Central Falls, Rhode Island.
“Predominantly black school districts are more likely to be taken over, Morel documents, and those takeovers are more likely to fully remove the elected school board. He also finds that cities with a greater share of black city council members are more likely to face takeovers, with state leaders arguing they must wrest control of chaotic local politics.”
A chart from Morel’s work shows that in the rare event that a majority white district is taken over by the state, 70% keep their elected school board.
In a majority Latin district, 46% keep their elected board.
But when a majority black district is taken over, only 24% retain their elected school board.
I think people don’t pay enough attention to how political education is — that education in the country is a political project. I think that’s the most important thing that I think we need to understand. And so if education is a political project, when we think about reforms, we need to think about them as political objectives as well. And so if we’re going to take over a school district, it just doesn’t seem consistent with what the literature says about improving schools that you just remove a community from the entire decision-making process. Because what the literature tells us in education is — and it’s just very intuitive — if you look at school districts across the country who are doing well, everybody has a stake in the school district.
Source: Takeover, by Domingo Morel. Graphic: Sam Park
But then we get still the expansion of takeovers. It suggests that there’s something else there. And this is where I come in and say that we need to understand historically role that education has played in communities and what type of power it gives a community.
If we look at education as a political problem and we see how important the schools are to communities’ political empowerment, then we can start to see how how takeovers make sense for two major reasons: Conservatives had consolidated within the Republican Party by the 1970s and blacks became an important part of the Democratic coalition by the 1970s. Moreover, the schools served as the political foundation for black political empowerment. This provided the context for increasing political tension between increasingly conservative state governments and cities. The schools were a major part of this political struggle.
Second, cities began to win court cases to secure more school funding from state governments, which led to further tensions.
[Barnum asks]: Reed Hastings, the Netflix founder, charter school advocate, and education reform funder, has said that “the school board model works reasonably well in suburban districts” but that the politically ambitious “use the school board as a stepping stone to run for higher office” in cities. And I take your argument to be, yes it’s true that the school board can be a stepping stone, but that has proven crucial for the political empowerment of communities of color. Can you speak to that?
“Let’s think about that comment and put it in perspective. So what he’s saying is democracy works for certain communities but it can’t work for others. Yes, you have ambitious people, but you also have people who are just interested being school board members. But even if you have ambitious people who want to be city council people, mayors, and so forth, why is that a justification for saying that school boards are not important?
“And so the message that sends is that democracy is worth fighting for and worth having in certain places and not in others because it may seem like it’s more messy in big cities and urban areas. And I say it “may seem” like that because I don’t think there’s any evidence that you find more corruption or people are not as prepared to be school board members in urban localities compared to suburban or rural — there’s just no research to support that…”
[Barnum asks:] Let’s talk about the research on academic gains from state takeovers. I know that’s not the focus of your book, but advocates for state takeovers could point to studies of New Orleans and in Newark, after three years, to say look, it has been successful in boosting test scores in some contexts.
“My response to this is multi-level. The first is that it’s contested to what degree these academic scores actually improved. But I spend very little time on this because as a political scientist, I’m interested in the politics of this mostly. What I will say is, OK, so let’s just agree that test scores have improved. What has been the cost of test scores’ improvement in New Orleans for example?
“In New Orleans, 25 percent of the black teachers lose their jobs. Seven thousand people lose their jobs. The school board was removed from the political process. The school governance was based on a two-tier level: one is the state-created board made up of people that are not from New Orleans and the second is actual charter school governing bodies, 60 percent of which have white members although 67 percent of the community is African-American. And so all of that is the price that the city of New Orleans — that black New Orleans — has to pay for contested improved test scores.”
This is an important article and book.
This is a thoughtful and important article by Mark Weber (aka Jersey Jazzman), who teaches in public school in New Jersey and is earning his doctorate in statistics at Rutgers.
He notes that both the New Jersey Star-Ledger and the New York Post were outraged–outraged!–that NJ Governor Phil Murphy plans to abandon the PARCC exam, which is aligned with the Common Core. They accuse Murphy of kowtowing to the lousy teachers’ unions and trying to dumb down the test.
But he points out that PARCC and NJ’s previous standardized test (NJASK) produced the same results.
This is worth your while to read as you will learn a lot about standardized testing and its limitations.
Governor Chris Christie did his damndest to harm the public schoolsin New Jersey during his eight years in Office. Its public schools are among the best in the nation outside of the so-called Abbott districts, a group of highly segregated, impoverished school districts that Christie determined to hand over to private charter chains.
The Education Law Center provides an update hereon Governor Phil Murphy’s efforts to reverse Christie’s foul legacy.
At the end of June, the New Jersey Legislature passed the FY19 State Budget and several other bills impacting the state’s 1.4 million public school students.
“Over the last eight years, lawmakers did little to prevent former Governor Chris Christie from cutting school funding; imposing PARCC exams as the high school exit test in violation of state law; and rapidly expanding charter schools, depleting resources and fueling student segregation in Newark, Camden, Trenton and other districts.
“With Governor Phil Murphy’s election, legislative leaders had the opportunity to reverse course by taking bold steps to restore equity, adequacy and opportunity for public school children, especially those at risk and with special needs.
“So did legislators heed the call for change?”
“Here’s a recap of the major actions taken by the Legislature on public education:
“School Funding: The FY19 Budget contains a $340 million increase in K-12 funding, with much of those funds allocated to districts spending below their constitutional level of adequacy under the SFRA funding formula. Yet other districts, including many below or slightly above adequacy, will have their state aid reduced by a total of over $600 million in seven years under changes to the formula pushed by Senate President Stephen Sweeney. While some last minute changes may mitigate the full impact of the cuts, many districts are facing the grim prospect of laying off teachers and support staff and eliminating needed programs as the reductions in state aid accelerate in the coming years.
“Preschool: The FY19 Budget includes $57 million in SFRA preschool education aid, providing the first increase in per pupil funding for existing preschool programs since 2013-14. It includes $32.5 million to address years of flat funding and adds $25 million for expansion of high quality preschool to low-income students across the state, as promised in the SFRA formula.
“School Construction: In passing a bill to authorize $500 million in school construction funds targeted to county vocational school districts, lawmakers did nothing to address the urgent need for school construction funding in all other school districts across the state. Legislators turned a blind-eye to the stark fact that the state school construction program has run out of money for 381 health and safety, capital maintenance and major projects recently identified by the NJ Department of Education for urban districts, as well as for grants for needed facilities improvements in hundreds of “regular operating districts.”
“Camden Charter School Expansion: Lawmakers bypassed the education committees in both chambers to rush through a bill to allow three out-of-state charter chains – KIPP, Uncommon and Mastery – to continue to expand across the city and, in the process, pave the way for these private charter operators to close and replace most or all of Camden’s public schools.
Private School Vouchers: Legislators decided to table a bill to use public funds to pay the salaries of science and math teachers in private schools. The bill would have added millions more to the over $110 million in public funds already allocated to private schools for textbooks, security, nurses and remedial programs. Lawmakers failed to take action to reduce the millions in taxpayer dollars diverted to private schools and to redirect those dollars to the state’s chronically underfunded public schools.
“The Legislature completely avoided other pressing issues, such as the looming high school graduation testing crisis, the need to reform the state’s charter school law, and the consolidation of K-6 and K-8 districts into unified K-12 districts across the state.
“The scorecard on the Legislature’s actions on public education is decidedly mixed. But one lesson is clear. Advocates for our public school students and their schools must redouble efforts to hold elected officials to account for advancing, and not threatening, the right of all children to a thorough and efficient education, as guaranteed under our state constitution.
“David Sciarra is the Executive Director of Education Law Center and lead counsel for the plaintiff school children in Abbott v. Burke.”
Education Law Center Press Contact:
Sharon Krengel
Policy and Outreach Director
skrengel@edlawcenter.org
973-624-1815, x 24
I have never met Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey. I probably never will. I only know him as a politician who did his best to turn Newark into another New Orleans, without a hurricane. He became the best buddy of the horrible Governor Chris Christie, who together persuaded billionaire Mark Zuckerberg to put up $100 million to open charters in Newark, an effort that was chronicled in Dale Russakoff’s “The Prize.”
He has been honored by any number of rightwing groups, like the conservative Manhattan Institute. It was funny to watch him fulminate Against Betsy DeVos’ nomination, since he shares her agenda, including vouchers.
Here is his description of the deferred American Dream.
In his account of his life, he stresses his ties to Newark but does not mention that he attended one of New Jersey’s fine suburban high schools, which prepared him for entry to Stanford University, then a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford, then Yale Law School. He is not a humble Newark guy. He is part of the elite, which need not be hidden. He succeeded, and a great public high school set him on the road to success.
If he plans to run for President in 2020, he has to own his entire history and break his ties with the DeVos ideology.
I posted earlier today about Chris Christie’s poison pill for Newark, having approved in advance of his retirement an additional 7,000 charter spaces on the basis of a long waiting list.
Rutgers Professor Julia Sass Rubin explains that the current charter schools have openings, and the wait list is a myth:
If current patterns hold, many of the Newark charter school seats approved by Governor Christie are unlikely to be filled by Newark residents because there appears to be an oversupply of charter seats for the level of demand in Newark.
Over the last four years, Newark residents have filled only about 80% of the approved seats in Newark charter schools. This may have been a factor in the Christie Administration’s decision to close several Newark charter schools last year, as doing so would create more demand for the remaining charter schools.
This pattern of weak demand for charter schools is also seen in other New Jersey cities with large charter enrollments.
The data showing a gap between supply and demand throws into question the claims of a 35,000 student waitlist that the NJ charter industry has used to push back against any slow down in approvals. The 35,000 figure is self-reported and unverified. It is created by the charter school trade association. If a student’s family applies to 10 charter schools, the waitlist would count her as ten students. Analysis of specific individual charter waitlists also confirms that they may include students who have moved away or who applied in prior years and are no longer interested.
Mark Weber and I will be releasing a second charter school research report next month that goes into greater detail on these and related issues.
When Corey Booker, then Mayor of Newark, and Chris Christie, then Governor of New Jersey, persuaded Mark Zuckerberg to give them $100 million to transform the schools of Newark, they told him that Newark would become the New Orleans of the North and that it would become one of the highest performing districts in the nation. Hahaha. As Dale Russakoff explained in her book The Prize about Zuckerberg’s millions, most of the money went to consultants and to pay off debts to the teachers’ union.
Nonetheless, Christie delivered on his end of the bargain. Newark is on track to have more than 40% of its students in charter schools. Ten years ago, less than 10% were in charter schools.
The state has signed off on nearly 7,000 more charter seats to be available by the 2022-23 school year, according to state data compiled by Sass Rubin, who teaches at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning & Policy. If all those seats are filled and district enrollment stays flat at about 34,200 students, then the share of students who go to school in Newark and attend charters could climb as high as 44 percent.
No one knows whether the demand will meet the supply, but that doesn’t matter. The supply will be there thanks to the Christie administration.
Some said it made sense to stockpile extra seats during the charter-friendly Christie administration, under which the number of charter students doubled. “While the getting is good, and Christie is approving just about anything that sounds stable, why don’t we just go and apply for additional charters so we can have those in our pocket?” asked one charter leader, describing the thinking of some of his school’s board members.
So now we must eagerly await the results to see whether Newark becomes a model for the nation, as Booker and Christie said it would be. Or do we have to wait for Newark to become 100% charter? Apparently the goal is to prove that poverty and segregation don’t matter, and that charters can succeed despite those factors. Let’s see.
But the problem with Newark becoming 100% charter is that then the charters would have no place to send the kids they don’t want. As this report by Mark Weber and Julia Sass Rubin shows, the charters systematically under enroll students with disabilities and English language learners. If charters must take all of them, it might drive down their test scores.
Maybe that’s one reason Chris Christie became the most unpopular governor in the state. He constantly bashed teachers and public schools.
As Daniel S. Katz says, good riddance to Christie.
New Jerseys want to support their public schools, not privatize them.
Mark Weber, aka Jersey Jazzman, worked with Bruce Baker at Rutgers University to review the progress of the “reforms” (aka privatization and disruption) in Newark. This post is the first in a series that will summarize their findings.
The National Education Policy Center published a lengthy report written by Dr. Bruce Baker and myself that looks closely at school “reform” in Newark. I wrote a short piece about our report at NJ Spotlight that gives summarizes our findings. We’ve also got a deep dive into the data for our report at the NJ Education Policy website.
You might be wondering why anyone outside of New Jersey, let alone Newark, should care about what we found. Let me give you a little background before I try to answer that question…
In 2010, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO and founder of Facebook, went on the The Oprah Winfrey Show and announced that he was giving $100 million in a challenge grant toward the improvement of Newark’s schools. Within the next couple of years, Newark had a new superintendent, Cami Anderson. Anderson attempted to implement a series of “reforms” that were supposed to improve student achievement within the city’s entire publicly-financed school system.
In the time following the Zuckerberg donation, Newark has often been cited by “reformers” as a proof point. It has a large and growing charter school sector, it implemented a teacher contract with merit pay, it has a universal enrollment system, it “renewed” public district schools by churning school leadership, it implemented Common Core early (allegedly), and so on.
So when research was released this fall that purported to show that students had made “educationally meaningful improvements” in student outcomes, “reformers” both in and out of New Jersey saw it as a vindication. Charter schools are not only good — they don’t harm public schools, because they “do more with less.” Disruption in urban schools is good, because the intractable bureaucracies in these districts needs to be shredded. Teachers unions are impeding student learning because we don’t reward the best teachers and get rid of the worst…
And so on. If Newark’s student outcomes have improved, it has to be because these and other received truths of the “reformers” must be true.
But what if the data — including the research recently cited by Newark’s “reformers” — doesn’t show Newark has improved? What if other factors account for charter school “successes”? What if the test score gains in the district, relative to other, similar districts, isn’t unique, or educationally meaningful? What if all the “reforms” supposedly implemented in Newark weren’t actually put into place? What if the chaos and strife that has dogged Newark’s schools during this “reform” period hasn’t been worth it?
What if Newark, NJ isn’t an example of “reform” leading to success, but is instead a cautionary tale?
These are the questions we set out to tackle. And in the next series of posts here, I am going to lay out, in great detail, exactly what we found, and explain what the Newark “reform” experiment is actually telling us about the future of American education.
Diane Ravitch's blog 