This week, I was surprised and disappointed to read a story filed by a leading news organization that mischaracterized the community engagement and response to the Partnership for Education in Newark (PENewark). In an effort to provide full transparency for the PENewark progress, what follows is a community update from Newark, New Jersey.
Last September marked an unprecedented time in the City of Newark. Faced with the historic opportunity to break the cycle of failure and low expectations in public education, we created a bi-partisan coalition among all levels of government and community leaders to launch the most comprehensive community outreach and engagement effort to solicit input from every voice within Newark.
In December 2010, PENewark succeeded in hosting 11 large-scale community forums, 25 mini-forums, knocked on 66,000 doors, received more than 20,000 surveys, and contacted 45,000 community members in total. Newarkers from every corner of the City shared their ideas, concerns, hopes and expectations on how to make Newark Public Schools the best in the nation.
The voices of our City were loud and clear. Our community meetings, forums and focus groups included teachers, activists, principals, parents, elected leaders, and clergy among others. There was surprising unanimity around many critical ideas and change strategies from extending the school day and learning time, to creating more robust efforts to fully engage parents in the process. More than this, as I personally participated in and led many meetings, people seemed tired of divisive rhetoric and strongly committed to bold community action.
I am so grateful that many of our higher education partners went even further to document our community's sentiments in extensive surveys. Reflected below is a summary of these survey results, excerpted from a report released on May 12, 2011, by Rutgers University and New York University:
• 82.5 percent of our residents rated the city's schools as "fair" or "poor."
• 82.4 percent of our residents supported giving Principals greater control over their schools.
• 74.3 percent supported replacing principals at low-performing schools.
• 69.2 percent were in favor of giving good teachers additional pay.
• 64.4 percent of residents favored replacing half the teachers at low-performing schools.
Our City's residents are actively and passionately involved in the education reform mission. While there will always be debate and even detractors, it is clear from every community forum that we must make bold change. This is my commitment: to embrace the community demand for bold and determined action. We as a community reject an education system that does not serve the genius of our children. We will, over the coming months and years, through numerous new strategies -- born from best practices and community input -- achieve excellence in public education outcomes for Newark students.
As we continue to make progress toward this goal, I also pledge to keep Newark's residents and especially parents, educators and our children at the center of this work, as it is the only way we can ensure our success. Everyone in our community will not always agree on every reform measure, but our cause is too critical to shut out any voice. In Newark, we understand that what happens in our schools has broad implications for our nation and, thus, we must keep the national education community closely and carefully informed about our progress.
The greatest threat to the future of our country is what is happening at present in our schools. Too much is at stake for us not to pull together for the cause of our children.
It is the de facto municipal administration of prisons without walls in Newark and Camden, etc. by surrounding "communities" that empowers the bloods, crips and Mex Mafia recruitment drives among kids and the smartest kids see their limited options earliest and get into the most trouble for themselves and their non-nuclear extended families.
9. Use the standardized tests with abandon: not to promote teachers but to invest in scholarships good for any college for students that beat the odds at home by making it in school. Teach kids with results THEY can see by giving them a chance to get into real schools and out of their own histories WITHOUT the need for affirmative action quotas and watered down double and triple standard remediation at the higher ed level. Don't teach to the minimum: brave teaching AP levels ad nauseum inner city so that the troubled schools routinely kick bu*t on televised "Challenge" game shows and the like. Make the magnet schools unnecessary and the private school alternatives will dry up for lack of paying parents.
In other words: get real about schooling means getting tough with parenting. Getting tough with parents means removing the obvious relative disparities in the street, not just the classroom. Getting tough with parents means getting real at the higher end of inner city education: it's a circle.
4. waive a commensurate percentage of state income taxation for adoptive parents that take in and adopt products of the foster system rather than pay stipends for running foster mills. This includes hitting grandparents with financial penalties where their single teen children make babies that hit the streets unless they actively participate in recovery, removal and rehabilitation.
5. Cut welfare completely for sibling cases where baby mothers produce more than 2 wards of the state to get rid of the temptation to back door dads.
6. Fund ESL de rigeur for adults regardless of citizenship status on the state level to stop transient cases from killing inner city schools without home support and threaten INS involvement if they DON'T participate in ESL rather than if they do.
7. Shut down NJEA complaints about charter schools off: they protest too much, with personal fines for disturbing the peace if necessary. If a charter school works, let it work. But do not allow charter schools to advertise with any tax dollars: they should not be able to compete for talent or kids that way at the expense of the line schools.
8. Most important: integrate the schools. Only way to do this without busing and other madness and without the Abbott tragedies is to switch from property tax to state income tax for the burden required and combine districts over and above municipality lines. The ivory towers must fall or the black and hispanic dungeons will continue.
Part 1.
Improving schools in inner city moving tragedies needs so much more than concentration on academic budgets and tinkering. Among the most important unsaid needs in NJ:
1. amendment of the compulsory education laws and student ethics laws to redefine delinquency to include academic insufficiency or classroom performance failures (absenteeism, etc.) to allow teachers and principals to slow-track, fast-track, suspend, tutor, intervene and expel students at all ages without the insane complex rules now used to avoid taking responsibility for failing students. Unless we learn to trust our teachers and principals more we will always get the result of advancing or graduating illiterate and hopeless kids into basket cases. Bring tech and alternative education back into schools to avoid stigmatizing schools and kids with alternative tracks at "failure factories".
2. revamping foster care to make it work so that failed parents can get help they need to stay in touch with kids where possible and make sibling cases work. Really reward good foster care and really punish foster care horrors on both sides without moving kids along just to teach them despair with "relative income" disparity. Crush the tendency to place kids within the same racial environments as if that helped prepare anyone to live together.
3. Smash gang activity in middle and high schools early and hard by extending delinquency interventions to hit the parents and guardians harder: stop punishing just the young for being traumatized.
"Top down" reform and teaching will not work with todays students, especially High School students. Students need to be given input to their education (after all it is THEIR education), and for Jr. and Sr. High School students, we need to invest in programs that get them out of the classroom and interacting with the real world in business, work, and social situations.
There was a good article in the last month in one of the major papers titled "Transformation, not Tinkering". What I read above was "tinkering" and that will not provide the reform that our schools need.
When your car needs a new engine your don't buy new tires, slap a wax job on, and talk about how fast it can coast downhill!
How will teachers afford to teach in Newark now that your colleague, Governor Christie, has destroyed collective bargaining rights and most teachers will now be out-of-pocket approximately 10% more of their income per year? How will retired public employees live in Essex County with no COLA on their pensions?
How much will all of this cost Newark in terms of crime, emergency room medicine, homelessness and flight?
Those of us who have been committed to education and the Newark community remain willing to partner with this Administration and look forward to working with our new Superintendent, but I fear that the Mayor has been trapped in an echo chamber far too long and has come to believe his own hype. Authentic collaboration and engagement can only be realized when those involved are willing to be humble, recognize their strengths and weaknesses and play their position on the team accordingly. The Mayor is a tremendous champion of the City and has the ability to be a great "tackler and blocker" (as he's fond of saying) on many low-hanging (read: less controversial), but meaningful policy issues. Sir, there are many of us that desire to "stand with you" but sometimes you make it *darn* hard to do.
"...The long and short surveys imperfectly reflect the population of Newark. Therefore, inferences about Newark public opinion concerning the Newark schools must be viewed with caution. Additionally, a large proportion of respondents in the survey samples have little direct knowledge about the Newark schools. Therefore, many of the opinions expressed in the surveys likely reflect general impressions of the Newark schools and not actual experience."
Acknowledging that few will read the comments here or the report--even just the executive summary-- and that my sentiments will doubtfully make much of an impact on the perceptions of Mayor Booker and his $1M PR stunt/effort to engage the community, I do hope though that for the few who may read this you will reconsider how community is engaged in the future and remember that Mayor Booker is a politician through and through.
(Continued...)
• The long survey, created by the Newark Schools Research Collaborative (NSRC) at Rutgers-Newark and Metro Center at NYU --the most substantive the results of which Mayor Booker references above-- yielded 1,043 long survey responses that were collected by Metro Center/NSRC with a total of 669 surveys analyzed from those who could clearly be identified as residents.
• The short survey designed and collected by PENewark yielded 23,058 responses of which only 16,920 surveys from those who could clearly be identified as residents were analyzed by Metro Center/NSRC. This survey was more about perceptions and was only 5 questions long. (NOTE: both surveys can be read in the appendix of the report.)
(Continued...)
Some schools are failing but they are the exception not the rule. So, before we all jump on the "failing schools" bandwagon we must look in another direction, one we refuse to do anything about. Consider this. Last week a published story from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) concluded that when all students are assessed in the US we rank lower than we would like to rank. However, analysis of the data seems to indicate that schools, per se, are not the problem. American schools with 10% or lower poverty rate ranked number one in the world. That's correct. Did your advisors read this report? When the poverty rate went as high as 25% the ranking dropped only to third, behind Hong Kong and Finland. (Finland's national poverty rate is a meager 4%) The conclusion is obvious: Attack poverty not schools, teachers and administrators. I notice that when you report the percentage of criticism of various aspects of your schools you don't report the percentage of parents who criticized themselves and the amount of time they spend with their own children learning. Poverty and all the associated problems connected with it is where our efforts should go in order to make any real and lasting difference.