One Newark: "Choosing" Segregated Schools?
Last week, I released a new brief at the NJ Education Policy Forum about One Newark, the one year-old school choice plan in New Jersey's largest city. I think this subject is important enough -- not just for Newark, but for education policy in general -- that it's worth my doing some wonk-to-English translating here to explain what I found.
A little background: last year, State Superintendent Cami Anderson, over the objections of many, implemented a "portfolio" system in Newark that calls for families to choose from a menu of both charter and district schools. The district's role in this system, called One Newark, is supposedly to be both a facilitator and an impartial arbiter, providing necessary information for families so they can make an informed decision.
As I wrote last year, economic theory suggests that consumers need high-quality information to negotiate a market, and that the state-run Newark Public Schools' role in One Newark should be to provide that information. The district does give both charter and district schools ratings under One Newark: "Great," "On The Move," and "Falling Behind."
The problem is that these ratings are tied to test scores, which have enormous biases against schools that serve more students who are in economic disadvantage, or have special education needs, or have more black students, or who even have more boys. Here's the breakdown on student characteristics and One Newark ratings:
This is, to my mind, the central question in whether One Newark will actually help improve the city's education system: What are Newark families actually "choosing"? Are they opting for "better" schools, or merely schools that have differing student populations?
Bruce Baker* has been on this for a while: see here and here. Given the unequal distribution of both students and resources across Newark's schools, it's both unfair and unhelpful to rate schools by test score outcomes. You can't ask a school with more students in disadvantage to compete with a school with fewer of those students, especially if they don't have similar resources.
And we shouldn't be surprised that schools with less challenging students and better resources are more "popular" in a choice system. In fact, given the preliminary release of the results of the initial One Newark applications, that seems to be exactly what happened. Here are the results released by NPS as reported at NJ Spotlight:
Most popular schools under One Newark are "Great" according to NPS. Again, that
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