How to Fix the Country’s Failing Schools. And How Not To.
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QUARTER-CENTURY ago, Newark and nearby Union City epitomized the failure of
American urban school systems. Students, mostly poor minority and immigrant
children, were performing abysmally. Graduation rates were low. Plagued by
corruption and cronyism, both districts had a revolving door of
superintendents. New Jersey officials threatened to take over Union City’s
schools in 1989 but gave them a one-year reprieve instead. Six years later,
state education officials, decrying the gross mismanagement of the Newark
schools, seized control there.
In 2009,
the political odd couple of Chris Christie, the Republican governor-elect, and
Cory Booker, Newark’s charismatic mayor, joined forces, convinced that the
Newark system could be reinvented in just five years, in part by closing
underperforming schools, encouraging charter schools and weakening teacher
tenure. In 2010 they persuaded Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, to
invest $100 million in their grand experiment. “We can flip a whole city!” the
mayor enthused, “and create a national model.”
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.
Slow-and-steady
was anathema to Mr. Booker and Mr. Christie, who had big dreams for Newark. But
as Dale Russakoff writes in her absorbing account “The Prize,” the politicians’
optimism proved misplaced. What went wrong had as much to do with their top-down
approach as with the proposals themselves.
The mayor
pledged to involve the public before making any decisions, but efforts at
community engagement, orchestrated by out-of-town advisers, proved shambolic.
The only recommendations that got traction — closing 11 public schools, opening
charters and themed high schools — were advanced by consultants, who gobbled up
more than $20 million in fees.
In 2011, Mr. Christie appointed 39-year-old Cami Anderson — a Teach for
America alumna — superintendent. She introduced some solid ideas, like
replacing the weakest performers with “renew schools” and persuading charters
to enroll more poor kids. But she ran into trouble with parents when she did
away with neighborhood schools and laid off hundreds of workers to pay for her
initiatives.
Her
hurry-up style made matters worse. “She didn’t listen,” contends Ms. Russakoff.
“She said her plan — ‘16-dimensional chess’ — was too complex for parents.”
After repeated heckling by teachers and parents, Ms. Anderson stopped attending
board meetings.
One of Mr.
Booker’s goals was to make Newark the nation’s “charter school capital,” and he
largely succeeded. While these schools have recorded higher test scores and
graduation rates than the traditional schools, money explains much of that gap.
Freed from the district’s bureaucracy, the 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.
The push to
expand charters angers activists like Junius Williams, director of the Abbott
Leadership Institute at Rutgers University. “Charters have drained resources
necessary to teach most Newark students,” he told me.
In 1989,
with one year to shape up Union City, Mr. Carrigg, with a cadre of teachers and
administrators, devised a multipronged strategy: Focus on how kids learn best,
how teachers teach most effectively and how parents can be engaged. Non-English
speakers had previously been expected to acquire the language through the
sink-or-swim method. So the district junked its old approach. Instead, English
learners are initially taught in their own language, mainly Spanish, and then
are gradually shifted to English. The system started hiring more teachers who
spoke Spanish or had E.S.L. (English as a Second Language) training.
The
bilingual approach went beyond the classroom. Even though many parents speak
only Spanish, meetings had been conducted and written information prepared only
in English. In the new era, bilingualism quickly became the norm. Parents, made
to feel welcome in the schools, were conscripted to help with their children’s
homework and reinforce the schools’ high expectations for them.
To get students excited about reading, the schools became word-soaked
environments, with tons of reading and daily writing assignments linked even to
subjects like art and science that traditionally don’t require as much writing.
The Union
City reformers opted to focus initially on the youngest children, whose
potential for improvement was greatest. When New Jersey began to fund preschool
for poor urban districts in the late 1990s, the district seized on the
opportunity to devise a state-of-the-art program that enrolled almost every 3-
and 4-year-old in the community.
Teachers
rethought skill-and-drill instruction, instead emphasizing hands-on learning
and group projects. Help came, in the form of coaches — veteran teachers —
working side by side with newbies and time set aside for teachers to
collaborate. Students were frequently assessed, not to punish teachers but to
pinpoint areas where help was needed.
Stable
leadership proved essential. In the years preceding the state’s near-takeover,
superintendents were hired and fired based on their politics; during the past
quarter-century there have been just three superintendents, all of them
products of the district. Nationwide, the average tenure of a city schools
chief is only three years.
“The real
story of Union City is that it didn’t fall back,” Mr. Carrigg told me.
“It stabilized and has continued to improve.” Recent changes include the
introduction of Mandarin Chinese from preschool on, a STEM-focused elementary
school and a nursery for young parents in high school.
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.
Newark is
beginning to do the same. Since the appointment in 2015 of Christopher Cerf,
formerly New Jersey’s education commissioner, as Newark’s superintendent, more
attention is being paid to the positive side of the school district ledger.
While charters remain controversial in Newark, Mr. Cerf emphasizes helping the
public schools achieve similar results. “Charters are succeeding,” he told me,
“because they have substantially more discretion. We need to level the playing
field.”
Mr. Cerf
and Raz Baraka, who succeeded Cory Booker as mayor, recently announced that up
to $12.5 million of the Zuckerberg gift will be invested in a network of
“community schools” — sunrise-to-sunset schools that offer health care and
social services, located in the city’s most troubled neighborhoods.
“Mark
Zuckerberg’s $100 million gift isn’t a lot of money in a district that spends
$1 billion a year, but it sparked the conversation,” Dominique Lee, the
executive director of Brick, which runs two Newark schools, told me. “People
are angry now at what’s been going on, but it’s ‘good angry,’ not ‘bad angry,’
like before. They’re asking: ‘What do we need to do to save traditional public
schools?’ ”
David L. Kirp is a professor of
public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, a senior fellow at the
Learning Policy Institute and a contributing opinion writer. “Improbable
Scholars,” his most recent book, focuses on Union City’s schools.
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