Horrifying statistics for Newark's high schools

I attended a conference yesterday hosted by E3 and the Coalition for Educational Freedom, which are doing highly effective work to promote school choice in New Jersey for low-income families in cities with failing schools. There were some great speakers, highlighted by Newark Mayor Cory Booker, and when I find the time, I'll share some of what I heard.

But first I wanted to get these mind-boggling statistics off my chest. They were presented by Dana Rone, who served on the Newark School Board and recently won a seat on the Newark City Council on Cory's slate. Here's what she said:

There are 42,000 children in Newark's public schools. There are 15 elementary schools, of which 11 are failing -- defined as 80% or more of the children at least one year below grade level. There are 13 high schools in Newark: four magnet schools and nine "comprehensive" schools (read: dumping grounds). Here are the statistics for the typical comprehensive high school (these statistics are not for the worst school):

- 500 students enter 9^th grade, of which 350 of them are testing below the 6^th grade level -- on average, at the 4^th-5^th grade level.

- Only half of these students make it to 10^th grade -- a 50% dropout rate in one year!

- By the time senior year starts, the class is down to only 150 students.

- Of these students, 75% make it to the end of the year, but only 27 (18% of those who begin the year and 5.4% of those who started 9^th grade) pass the High School Proficiency Assessment, an 8^th-grade-level test.

- Of these 27 students (85% of whom are female, by the way), most go to two-year community colleges, where 90% of them require an average of two years of remedial work (essentially repeating 11^th and 12^th grade), so that it takes the few who graduate about four years to receive a two-year degree.

So what do you think the bureaucracy claims is the graduation rate? 75%. I am not making this up!

I suspect most people would assume that Newark's schools are underfunded, thanks to heartless, uncaring, wealthy white voters and politicians. Nothing could be further from the truth. Newark spends $1 billion annually on its schools, more than $20,000 per student per year, the highest of any school district in the nation! (Average K-12 public school spending nationwide is about $9,000 annually per pupil.)

The average teacher salary in Newark is $77,000, among the highest in the nation (plus no doubt platinum benefits and, of course, iron-clad job security). Yet teacher quality is dismal and the union contract excuses teachers from any lunch room or hall duty or any obligation to communicate with parents – in short, anything that would involve contact with the very people they're supposed to be serving: the students and their parents.

The contract also says teachers don't have to show up until THREE minutes before class starts (imagine the chaos before class!) and can't be asked to stay more than seven minutes after class ends. Teachers are also prohibited from teaching students using textbooks that are appropriate for the actual level students are at -- in other words, if there's a class of 9^th graders, all of whom are reading at the 5^th grade level, the teacher cannot use 5th grade reading textbooks. Again, I am not making this up!

Combining this massive spending and such awful outcomes reveals the following shocking statistics: Newark spends $1.3 million per high school graduate and $10 million per college graduate!!!

Anyone ill-informed enough to think that pouring more money into a broken and dysfunctional school system will lead to improvement needs to look no further than New Jersey to see how wrong this is. If anything, more money without reform simply empowers and entrenches the catastrophic status quo.

To be clear: I am not advocating funding cuts for our schools. Precisely the opposite, in fact: our schools do need more money if it is properly spent in ways that truly benefit children. In addition, the practical reality is that additional funding is almost always necessary to grease the wheels of reform.

Lest you think massive failure is limited to Newark, it may be worse in Camden (if that's possible). There are 15,000 students in the system, approximately 3,000 of whom are 1^st graders. Guess how many high school graduates there were last year? 118 – that's 3.9% of the 1^st graders!!!

Nor is this limited to just a few cities in NJ: statewide, there are 32,000 first graders in the 30 Abbott districts (see the note below on these districts). Of these children, 24,000 – 75% – will never graduate from high school and are highly likely to lead lives of misery, violence, prison and early death.

I really struggle for words to describe what's going on here in Newark, New Jersey and in major swaths of every major city in America – there's not a single exception: horrifying, embarrassing, outrageous and tragic come to mind, but they just don't fully capture the ongoing crime – a crime committed by this nation against its most vulnerable children – that is taking place every day of every week of every year. This is so profoundly, deeply wrong and un-American. It is a stain on the fabric of our great nation.

But where is the outrage?! Why isn’t this story regularly on the front page of every newspaper in America and on the television evening news? I think there are two primary answers. First, the victims of the current system are among the most powerless people in our society – low-income minorities. I know with certainty that if the children of middle- and upper-class white parents had to attend such schools, things would change fast! Second, it’s easy to blame the victim – in other words, the failure of the children is their fault (they’re lazy, badly behaved, don’t care about education, etc.) or the fault of their parents (don’t care about their children in general and education in particular, fail to discipline children, etc.).

While low-income, minority children and their parents do indeed face many challenges in life that puts a greater burden on schools, that simply means that the schools have to step up to this challenge. Schools that serve the most disadvantaged, difficult-to-educate children need to be better funded, have better leadership (e.g., principals) and have better teachers. Yet, while these schools, nationally, are slightly better funded (contrary to popular perception), numerous studies show that they have the worst leadership and the least effective teachers.

Many schools nationwide – mostly charter schools, which are public schools, but function outside the bureaucracy and union work rules – are demonstrating what is possible if these students are in schools with great leaders and teachers. To read a great NY Times Magazine article about them, What It Takes to Make a Student, see: http://edreform.blogspot.com/2006/11/what-it-takes-to-make-student-cover.html.

I visited five of these schools in Newark last September – to see the web page I posted after I visited them, you can go to: www.tilsonfunds.com/Personal/Newarkcharters

Also, don't miss the three-minute video with four clips from my visit, which I've posted at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=fl0Xl9rqoks. The first minute is especially powerful (from North Star Academy, which incidentally Mayor Cory Booker was on the board of until he was elected).

By the way, these highly successful schools only receive $7,000 per student per year, a fraction of what other public schools get, and, even after raising some money philanthropically, are only spending roughly half what the average Newark public school is spending, but are delivering phenomenal results.

The most exciting news – a small silver lining to a gigantic very dark cloud – is that these schools are expanding rapidly and are playing particularly meaningful roles in New Orleans, Houston, and increasingly New York City and Newark. The election of Cory Booker as mayor of Newark is a critical step toward fixing the city’s schools. He is planning revolutionary, groundbreaking changes, including the expansion of the highly successful schools I visited.

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More on Abbott districts in New Jersey from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:New_Jersey_Abbott_Districts):

Abbott Districts are school districts in New Jersey covered by a New Jersey Supreme Court ruling that found that the education provided to urban school children was inadequate and unconstitutional. The Court in Abbott II and in subsequent rulings, ordered the State to assure that these children receive an adequate - and constitutional - education through implementation of a comprehensive set of programs and reforms, including standards-based education supported by parity funding; supplemental programs; preschool education; and school facilities improvements. Over 30 districts are included in the ruling, out of over 600 school districts statewide.

Thus, New Jersey essentially has two school systems: the non-Abbott districts, with spending around $13,000 per student per year, in which 75% of students graduate from high school, and the Abbott districts, which spend nearly $20,000 annually, with maybe 25% actual graduation rates.