Jersey Jazzman

Dear NJ Teachers and Their Families: You MUST Not Vote For Jack Ciattarelli

2025-11-02T04:42:00.000-08:00

To all NJ public school staff and their families:

You must not vote for Jack Ciattarelli. He will do serious, lasting damage to you personally, and the students you serve.

No, I'm not being overly dramatic. You may or may not like Mikie Sherrill for any number of reasons. You may like Jack because... well, I don't know why you would, but it doesn't matter. If you vote for him, Ciattarelli is going to harm you, your family, your colleagues, and your students.

Hear me out:

Jack Ciattarelli will do whatever he can to freeze, and maybe even cut, your salary.

Ciattarelli has made it his top priority to give a huge tax cut to the wealthiest people in the state. He can only do this by either:

1) Raising more revenues through sales taxes, which will hit you harder than the very wealthy (sales taxes always fall harder on working people than the rich because they take away a bigger chunk of your income than they do for the very wealthy).

2) Cutting state spending.

Ciattarelli has made clear he's going to do both, and guess what? The biggest item in the state's budget is aid to schools -- the place where you work. Four out of every five dollars spent on schools are spent on personnel, so when those cuts come, they will inevitably be aimed at you.

Your job is on line... but even if you manage to keep it, your board of education is going to be under enormous pressure to cut costs, which means keeping your salary as low as possible. You are going to make less money than you otherwise would under Governor Ciattarelli.

Jack Ciattarelli will do whatever he can to defund, and maybe even eliminate, your pension.

After years of neglect and abuse, New Jersey is finally on the path to fiscal responsibility by making substantial payments to its underfunded pension systems. But Jack doesn't care; he wants your money for his wealthy friends. There is no doubt he will slash pension payments, and try to get away with it by degrading, and maybe even eliminating, your pension benefits.

Ever since I started this blog, I have kept Chris Christie's biggest lie at the top: "I will protect your pensions. Nothing about your pension is going to change when I am governor." He said that just before he was elected, and we all know what happened next. Do you really believe Ciattarelli is any different?

Jack Ciattarelli will do whatever he can to slash your health care benefits.

Health care costs are out of control. What is Jack's plan to rein them in? He won't say, because his plan is to pass the cost on to you.

Those benefits are the reason many of you chose to work in a public school: you knew your salary would be bigger if you worked somewhere else, but you were willing to take less so long as you got decent health insurance. But, once again, Jack needs money for his rich patrons, and he wants to get it by Jack-ing up your health care costs.

I'm also talking to school staff families here, because what happens to your relative who works in a school also affects you. When your parent brings home less pay, you will feel it. When your spouse gets their pension slashed, that will degrade your retirement. You can't afford to have your family's vote split when the stakes for you are so high.

Folks, I understand you may have some hot-button issue that motivates you. You may have strong feeling about guns, or abortion, or transgender women in sports (that's your big thing?), or whatever. I won't debate you on these, but ask yourself this: "What's more important than my family's finances? What's more important than making sure my spouse and I have a retirement with dignity? What's more important than making sure my loved ones can go to the doctor without breaking the bank?"

NJ school staff, your family is more important than any other issue in this election. Which is why you must not vote for Jack Ciattarelli.

My fellow teachers, and paraprofessionals, support staff, and administrators: we had eight long, terrible years in New Jersey of being punched in the face. Let's not do that again, OK?

Vote Mikie Sherrill on Tuesday.

Jack Ciattarelli is my kinda guy!

Dear Haters: No, NJ's Schools Don't Suck

2025-11-01T07:30:00.000-07:00

The New Jersey gubernatorial election is right around the corner. I have a whole bunch of reasons why teachers and their families, despite whatever you may think about Mikie Sherrill (D), should never, ever vote for Jack Ciattarelli (R). I'll get to those in a bit, but let's talk about what seems to have emerged as the number one education issue in the race: Do New Jersey schools suck?

If you follow the news, this will seem like an absurd question. Time and time again, New Jersey's schools are highly ranked. But Jack Ciattarelli thinks New Jersey has much to learn from low-ranked states in the South:

In response to a Chalkbeat question during last month’s Newark Today episode on WBGO radio, the Republican candidate said he would implement a “high-impact curriculum,” a set of research-based teaching strategies and learning practices that align with state standards and help boost student achievement. He pointed to Louisiana and Mississippi’s high-impact reading curriculum that has gained national recognition for improving state test scores, particularly in literacy. [emphasis mine]

Mikie Sherrill responded in one of their debates that emulating southern states was a bad idea for New Jersey:

“He keeps citing places like Louisiana and Mississippi, I think some of the worst schools in the entire nation.

If that’s where he wants to drive us to, I think voters should be aware of that.”@RepSherrill, in the NJ gubernatorial debate with @Jack4NJ.

Who wants to tell her? pic.twitter.com/Lwgu1mPICP
— Karen Vaites (@karenvaites) October 18, 2025

“He keeps citing places like Louisiana and Mississippi, I think some of the worst schools in the entire nation.

If that’s where he wants to drive us to, I think voters should be aware of that.”@RepSherrill, in the NJ gubernatorial debate with @Jack4NJ.

Who wants to tell her? pic.twitter.com/Lwgu1mPICP

— Karen Vaites (@karenvaites)

You'll note that the X user I quote here is skeptical of Sherrill's claim. That's because there is a vocal (and in many cases, well-funded) group of education "reform" advocates who have latched on to the idea that there is a "Southern Surge" in school outcomes, driven by changes in literacy instruction loosely termed "The Science of Reading."

I'm not going to weigh in on SOR; if you're interested, Paul Thomas has an excellent review of the debate at the National Education Policy Center. Instead, I'll turn to a blog post by Chad Aldeman that I see being passed around on social media. Aldeman weighs in on the Sherrill-Ciattarelli debate, taking the side of those who don't think New Jersey schools are doing a very good job:

But I want to double back on Sherrill’s casual slams on Mississippi and Louisiana. Do they have some of the “worst schools” in the nation, as Sherrill claimed? And by implication, is New Jersey doing better than these states? The answer to both of those questions is no.

Sherrill’s confusion may stem from the fact that New Jersey does have pretty high student achievement scores, but this could be largely because New Jersey is a relatively wealthy state that spends a lot of money on its schools. Does that mean its schools are good? What value are the schools adding? [emphasis mine]

Again, there are lots of well-funded folks around these days making this same argument: New Jersey's schools aren't as great as the data appears to show. The implication is that the Garden State is coasting, because it's a wealthy state, and it's easier to get high test scores when you have lower levels of poverty and higher household income.

Of course, no one disagrees that income and test scores correlate. I've been pointing this out for years: socio-economic status is the strongest predictor of test score outcomes, and comparisons between states (or schools) have to acknowledge this. Aldeman, however, thinks he's found a way around this problem (the scores he refers to are from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), generally considered the most valid way to compare states):

I started with just one subject, one grade, and one student category (income), but the Urban Institute has taken this one step further. They factored in all the measurable forms of advantage and disadvantage to try to calculate “adjusted” scores by state. As you might anticipate by now, New Jersey looks much better on its raw scores than it does after you control for its advantages. Across 4th and 8th grade math and reading, New Jersey’s raw scores are higher than those in Mississippi and Louisiana, but once you dig in, those advantages start to disappear.

Remember the raw 4th grade math scores? They looked like this:
New Jersey: 240
Mississippi: 239
Louisiana: 235

But once adjust them for the state’s demographics, here’s what they look like:
Mississippi: 249
Louisiana: 245
New Jersey: 235

A slight advantage turns into a big disadvantage once you look under the hood. In fact, this same pattern appears in all the tested grades and subjects. New Jersey looks good on the unadjusted scores. Here are the raw 8th grade reading scores:
New Jersey: 266
Louisiana: 257
Mississippi: 254

And here’s where things stand after the demographic adjustment:
Louisiana: 265
Mississippi: 263
New Jersey: 259

Those "adjusted" NAEP scores are publicly available from the Urban Institute. I actually have quite a lot to say about how these adjustments were made and their validity for certain purposes, but that's for another time and forum. Right now, let's recap Aldeman's argument: New Jersey may have high test scores (or, in the case of Grade 4, not even that high), but that's only because its students are wealthier than in other states.

To which I reply: Yes, that's right -- and it's an indicator that New Jersey has good schools that are doing exactly what they were designed to do.

Let's bring up the data so we can examine it:

I'm using Grade 8 data because the students who take this test have been enrolled in their state's public education system for a longer period, likely better reflecting the actual effects of their schooling.* When Urban's adjustments are applied, NJ clearly has a disadvantage, while LA and MS surge ahead. Again, the argument is that this is "fair" because test scores shouldn't just reflect economic advantage.

I use the math scores to make the point here, but reading scores yield the same result. NJ is a low-poverty state; it has less than half the poverty rate of either MS or LA. It is easier to get high test scores when you are educating fewer kids in poverty, so it's arguably not "fair" to compare states without accounting for this.

In the same way household incomes are much higher in New Jersey. But why?

Because New Jersey is a well-educated state.

New Jersey has a much higher college attainment rate than Louisiana or Mississippi. Everyone knows college grads earn more than non-grads; that explains New Jersey's high income. And higher income means more money to spend... on schools! Which get higher outcomes and prepare kids for college, which leads to higher incomes, which leads to more school spending, which...

Despite the skepticism of many, a clear research consensus has emerged that higher spending on schools leads to better outcomes. But I'd argue much of New Jersey's school spending doesn't actually translate into higher NAEP scores; instead, more affluent schools spend on broad curricular offerings, extracurriculars, student support, and other things that help boost college enrollment but don't necessarily boost scores.

We can argue whether this is fair (notice I didn't put it in quotes this time); publicly funded social replication is highly problematic.** What we shouldn't do is argue that New Jersey's schools are bad when they are doing exactly what they are designed to do.

When Urban "adjusts" its NAEP scores, it is wiping away one of the primary outcomes of good schooling that public education advocates want: higher incomes.

Here's a thought experiment: suppose Mississippi enters a period of sustained educational success, due to Science of Reading or higher school spending or whatever. College-going rises for Mississippi, so incomes go up and poverty goes down. Consequently, Urban "adjusts" the state's scores so they go lower. Then advocates claim Mississippi isn't really doing that well, because its "real" test scores are low.

Does that make sense?

We have a lot to do to make New Jersey's schools more equitable, more effective, and more efficient. But let's be clear: relative to other states—especially in the South—New Jersey's schools don't suck. Quite the contrary.

Next: teachers and your families, if you care about your salaries, benefits, and pensions, you simply can't vote for Jack Ciattarelli.

Technical notes: The NAEP data all comes from Urban, both the adjusted and actual scores. Poverty, income, and spending data are from the School Finance Indicators Database, which uses NCES and Census Bureau data. All are based on data at the school district level; I get the state averages by weighted means, weights are student enrollment. NAEP data is 2024; SFID is 2022, the latest year available for the income data. College attainment data is from the Census Bureau, 2023.

* I often notice that advocates for the "Southern Surge" cite Grade 4 statistics all the time, but often stay away from Grade 8. It's worth asking why...

** I'd also challenge anyone to make an argument that Mississippi and Louisiana's school systems are paragons of social equity. New Jersey's got real problems with equitably funding its schools, but it's not like the South is all that great itself.

Wake Up Call NJ's Bizarre Smear Against Public Education

2025-10-13T07:32:00.000-07:00

One of the reasons I brought this blog back (for the moment, at least) is that I'm starting to see the same bad arguments surface that I regularly debunked back in the day. Take, for example, the latest "reformy" group to emerge here in the Garden State: Wake Up Call NJ.

Funded by an extremely wealthy ex-wife of a hedge fund manager, WUCNJ appears to have a lot of money to spread around in the service of casting doubt about public education. The group has been taking out TV ads, sending out mailers, and, weirdly, posting flyers in local businesses (more in a minute), all on a mission to convince parents that public schools are not only failing, but actually lying to them about their children's education.

There's a lot to unpack here, starting with the notion that "grade level" is a fixed concept that can be validly and reliably measured by a single administration of a single standardized test. There's also the strange idea that report card grades can somehow be validated by the outcomes of these same tests, as if grades didn't have other valuable functions.

I'll get to a more thorough critique of WUCNJ's view of public education—and why it's, at best, stunted—at some point. Right now, I'll focus on what I think can be fairly described as a bizarre smear of one of the top-performing school districts in the state.

Folks, I've been looking at NJ school data for quite a few years; so when I saw this, I had to take a closer look. West Windsor-Plainsboro is acknowledged across the state as one of its highest-performing school districts. Year after year, the district resides at the top of the lists that rank districts by various metrics. By any standard—graduation rates, college attainment, test scores, AP scores and participation—WWP is a school district other districts strive to emulate.

Why would WUCNJ go after one of the highest performing districts in the state? Especially when their allegations are clearly wrong?

Look, I'm the first to say even high-flying districts like WWP aren't perfect. And a sad truth is that there are kids, even in districts like WWP, who are not well served by their schools. This isn't to make excuses, but it's to acknowledge that public education is ongoing work, and even the best schools can and should strive to get better.

But "failing" is a strong word. WUCNJ alleges that WWP hasn't developed a plan for improvement and doesn't regularly communicate with parents about their students' progress. In a comprehensive response, Superintendent Dr. David Aderhold shows that just isn't true.

Let me take a minute to talk about Aderhold. I've communicated a few times with him over the years; once, I spoke to a group of administrators at the WWP central office, in an event sponsored by WWP. I have found the man to be a thoughtful and impressive education leader; I've also come away with the sense that he has a finely-honed BS detector, and that he is fiercely loyal to his staff, his students, and his community.

Aderhold understands that school leaders have a critical role in developing education policy, and that they should speak plainly and without fear about these policies. I suspect his willingness to challenge received wisdom about public education was one of the reasons WUCNJ decided to target his district. I would, however, hold him as an example for other school leaders: don't let outsiders bad-mouth your teachers, students, and parents simply to sell a story not based in reality.

And make no mistake: the idea that WWP is a "failing" district is a fairy tale. In his response, Aderhold goes through many, many data points that show WWP is a high-performing school district. But let me add one more:

See, WUCNJ bases the entirety of their argument on proficiency rates from statewide tests. As I've written before, proficiency rates should be approached with great caution. But I'll set aside that for the moment and ask: how do students in the "failing" West Windsor-Plainsboro school district do on proficiency as they move through grade levels?

It turns out they do very well:

What I've done here is follow a single cohort, the Class of 2027, through each grade as they took the NJ statewide test. Grade 5 and 6 are missing because of the pandemic and the suspension of testing, but the remaining grades show a trend: As WWP's Class of '27 has moved from grade to grade, it's proficiency rate in English Language Arts has improved. As of the latest data, 9 out of 10 WWP students meet the 9th Grade ELA state proficiency standard.

Again, I'm not saying WWP doesn't have things to improve. Aderhold says that; I'm sure his staff says it. I'll bet even the students believe they can get better. But, c'mon man—what more do you want from a school district? Are you seriously telling me it's reasonable to call this "failure"?

Let me note something important: yes, WWP has its challenges, but it is a school district set up to succeed. It has a strong tax base and a community of parents who move to the district specifically for the schools. It doesn't have nearly the problems with poverty and homelessness as many other NJ districts. There is certainly language diversity, but it's not as extensive as many other communities.

I don't doubt WWP has many caring, capable educators. But we have to acknowledge its "success" is due, in no small part, to its students' living conditions and the capability of the community to raise the funds it needs.

If Wake Up Call NJ really wants to help "failing" schools, it should start there: making sure all schools have the resources they need to educate their particular population of students. That's especially important in places that don't have the socio-economic advantages of WWP, including the tax base: those communities need even more resources than WWP has now.

Instead of doing this work, however, WUCNJ is apparently using its vast resources to undermine confidence in WWP schools within its own community.

"And just with respect to their campaign: I have now gone to several businesses about the flyers on their buildings. Every single company I spoke to, when I asked them why did they choose to put that up? 'Well, someone came and asked if they could put that up about the schools.' They had no idea what was really in front of their stores, what it stood for, and what it represented. And every time I asked them, 'Why would you put something up that is misleading and is an incomplete story, the immediate response is: 'Would you like me to take it down?' To which I said: 'Yes, I would. Because I think it sends an incomplete and incorrect message to our community.' And they all took it down."

School leaders, this is how you fight back against the casual, misleading, pernicious garbage that gets hurled at public schools every day. And get used to it: there are plenty of very wealthy people willing to spend their money to do things like putting up flyers in local businesses that bad-mouth the local schools.

It seems very weird, I know, but this is the world in which we now live. More on Wake Up Call NJ's war on public education in a bit.

Jack Ciattarelli's Tax Plan Is a Disaster For Schools AND Taxpayers

2025-10-13T06:08:00.000-07:00

Once again, here's the Republican candidate for governor of New Jersey, Jack Ciattarelli:

Our property taxes are the highest in the nation, not necessarily because of municipal and county budgets, upon which [a governor has] no real power. Where I could have real influence is the school tax, and that’s because of state aid. So, we need a new school funding formula. The current one is nefarious. It’s arbitrary and violates the equal benefit clause of our state constitution that says no community is supposed to suffer at the expense of another. So, with a more equitable distribution of state aid, we can lower property taxes. The cost per pupil in a place like Newark is $37,000, while the state average is $16,000. No one can justify to me that a particular student needs $21,000 more per year to educate them. That makes a compelling case why the current formula is unfair. Does that mean I will leave a community or student behind if that school district isn’t performing well? No. I believe in a voucher system, like we’ve seen in Arizona, Ohio, and Florida. I also believe in school choice, and charter schools to achieve that objective. [emphasis mine]

Ciattarelli's mention of Newark is telling. The Republican line in New Jersey has, for years, been that districts like Newark have been taking too much state aid for schools—at the expense of suburban districts, which have to raise their property tax rates to make up for the lack of state funding. As NJ.com writes:

Republicans have long claimed that many of the school districts that have seen reduced funding under the state funding formula are in areas that elect GOP representatives.
During the September debate Ciattarelli blamed a large portion of the state’s high property taxes on the school funding formula.
“We need a new school funding formula,” Ciattarelli said. “A more equitable distribution of state aid to our schools will help lower the property tax.” [emphasis mine]

This was the premise behind Chris Christie's disastrous school funding plan from 2015; the Fairness Formula. That plan went nowhere, because everyone who knew anything about school funding knew it made no sense and would never pass muster with the courts. But it's fair to say Ciattarelli is reviving the ideas behind the Fairness Formula—and they're as bad now as they were back then.

Property taxes for schools are based on the total value of a school district's taxable property. Some districts have high property values; some have lower property values. It's important to understand that districts with low property values must have higher tax rates than districts with high property values just to raise the same amount of funding for schools.

Here's a hypothetical example:

We've got five school districts here. We' gathered all the taxable property in the district, add together the value, and divide it by the number of students, giving us the "property value per pupil."

The least-affluent district has a total of $500,000 of property value for each enrolled student; in contrast, the most-affluent district has $2.5 million. All five districts want to raise $10,000 per pupil for their schools. Who pays the higher effective tax rate?

The answer (and you'd be surprised how many people who should know better get this wrong) is the least-affluent district pays the highest tax rate. Why? When your district's property values are low, you have to have higher tax rates to raise revenue. Note how the tax rate goes down as the property value per pupil goes up: the wealthiest districts pay the lowest tax rates.

Let's see how this plays out in real life New Jersey. Here are the effective tax rates for the most- and least-affluent school districts in the state. (I have a technical explanation of how I did this below.)

Each bar represents a group of school districts with varying amounts of property value per pupil. The far left bar represents the 54 NJ districts who have less than half-a-million dollars in property value per pupil. The next bar to the right represents the 177 districts with between $500,000 and $1 million in property value per pupil. This continues until the far right bar: that's the 92 districts with more than $2 million in property value per pupil.

Let's save the leftmost bar and look at the next four. As property values go up, effective tax rates go down. Again, this makes sense: wealthy districts don't have to tax themselves at as high of a rate as less-wealthy districts. Districts with property values per pupil between $500K and $1 million pay twice as high an effective property tax rate as districts with over $2 million in property value. In New Jersey, wealthy districts pay a much lower effective tax rate for their schools than working-class and middle-class districts.

But what about the far left districts, the ones with the lowest property values? They pay an average rate slightly higher than the wealthiest districts; how is that possible?

This is the NJ school funding formula at work. These districts—which still have property tax rates that are, on average, more than the wealthiest districts—don't have sky-high property tax rates because they get state aid for their schools. The New Jersey school funding formula keeps average effective school property tax rates for the poorest communities at rates equivalent to those in the wealthiest districts.

But what about those middle three bars? Why isn't the school funding formula helping them? That's a great question, and it speaks to how the formula is not nearly as equitable as it should be. Working-class and middle-class school districts need more help—but Ciattarelli's plan, like all other NJ Republican plans before his, would not provide it.

Back in 2016, Ajay Srikanth and I wrote a research brief about the Christie "Fairness Formula." What we showed was that, if Christie's plan went through, tax rates would drop for the wealthiest districts and soar for the least-affluent districts, but would change little for the "working class" districts that need property tax relief.

It's hard to assess exactly how Ciattarelli's plan would affect tax rates, because he hasn't released any details. But if he follows the same basic idea as Christie—and it's clear, to me at least, that's exactly what he intend to do—then watch out. Ciattarelli's ideas mean sky-high tax rates for the least-affluent communities, and tax breaks for wealthy communities that already have relatively low property tax rates.

We can do better.

Technical note: The "effective tax rate" or "effort" is the amount a district raises in revenues divided by the total value of its taxable;e property. For the revenue amount, I use the NJDOE's User Friendly Budgets. FY2023 is the latest audited year, so that's what I use. The property values come from the same year's state aid notices, which I got through an Open Public Records Act request. Averages are weighted by resident student enrollment.

Debunking David Brooks on Education

2025-10-11T08:15:00.000-07:00

Let's give Jack Ciattarelli a break for a bit and talk about NY Times columnist David Brooks (link to gifted article).

When Democrats are at their best, they are performing one job: reducing inequality and making American life more just. That’s what Franklin Roosevelt did with the New Deal and Lyndon Johnson tried to do with the war on poverty. That’s what Bill Clinton and Barack Obama did with their education reform policies. Both Clinton and Obama ran as education outsiders and change agents. In between those presidencies, Democrats worked with George W. Bush on the No Child Left Behind Act, which passed with a majority of 384-45 in the House and 91-8 in the Senate. No Child Left Behind was all about bringing accountability to America’s schools.
Because of those reform efforts, student achievement test scores in reading, math and most other academic subjects shot upward between the mid-1990s and about 2013.... [emphasis mine]

OK, stop right there. Even Brooks himself, in this very article, admits that test scores rise and fall due to many factors, including many that are outside of school: "Student outcomes are rarely just about what happens in the schools." So how can he possibly make such a sweeping causal claim about the effects of No Child Left Behind?

I won't try to write a comprehensive summary of the research on NCLB here; suffice to say there's a good bit of work on the subject, and the conclusions present a complicated picture. Yes, there's some evidence of gains due to NCLB in some subjects, but not in others. And those gains might have to do with "teaching to the test," which is problematic. Schools did seem to change some of their practices in the wake of NCLB, but some of those changes may not be desirable.

My point here isn't to make a claim about whether NCLB is good or bad; it's to remind us that changes in test scores are not, by themselves, good barometers of whether or not a particular policy was effective. Brooks, however, seems to be uninterested in such cautions:

George W. Bush had earlier warned of the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” but in the age of equity, schools moved to ease rigor and standards for poorer kids. Many schools stopped assigning whole books and started assigning short passages. What the education writer Tim Daly calls the education depression had begun.

Is it true? Did, sometime shortly after 2013, schools and, by extension, states move to lower their standards?

We can test this empirically—again, with some cautions. But let's talk about how accountability works in our schools first.

Under federal law and since NCLB was enacted in 2001, all states have had to test their students in Grades 3 through 8 in math and reading. The tests, however, vary from state to state, so there is no common scale on which to assess average student performance. However, the National Center for Education Statistics "maps" the results of state tests on to the "gold standard" national test: the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

In the simplest terms: NCES looks at the percentage of students a state deems "proficient" on their own test. They then look at the NAEP data and determine what that test's score is for the same percentage of students who took the NAEP. That allows us to look at the differences in proficiency between states: which states set the bar at a relatively high NAEP score, and which set the bar lower.

Because NCES does this every time the NAEP is administered, it also allows us to assess how standards have changed over time. I took this data and averaged it across all states for each year of the NAEP (weighted by student enrollment). There are some cautions involved in this: for one, state tests might emphasize different content at different times, so increases in mapped scores might not reflect more "rigor." We're also assuming the NAEP is a consistent measure of student learning across time (a pretty reasonable assumption, IMO). But I'd argue this is our best estimate of whether state standards have, on average, moved higher. Have they?

Over the last two decades, the definition of "proficiency" on state tests has, on average, become more rigorous, not less.

This shouldn't surprise anyone who remembers that decade and the Common Core wars. By 2015, most states had moved to more difficult tests, and proficiency rates, as defined by those state tests, had decreased. It wasn't that the kids were performing worse; it was that the tests were harder because the standards were more challenging.

So, no, Mr. Brooks, states did not move "to ease rigor and standards for poorer kids." If anything, they did exactly the opposite.

I could spend a week rebutting everything in Brooks piece, but I'll confine myself to one more thing:

We’ve now had 12 years of terrible education statistics. You would have thought this would spark a flurry of reform activity. And it has, but in only one type of people: Republicans. When it comes to education policy, Republicans are now kicking Democrats in the butt.
Schools in blue states like California, Oregon and Washington are languishing, but schools in red states like Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee and Louisiana, traditional laggards, are suddenly doing remarkably well. Roughly 52 percent of Mississippi’s Black fourth graders read at grade level, compared with only 28 percent in California. Louisiana is the only state where fourth-grade achievement levels have returned to prepandemic levels. An Urban Institute study adjusted for the demographics of the student bodies found that schools in Mississippi are educating their fourth graders more successfully in math and reading than schools in any other state. Other rising stars include Florida, Texas and Georgia.

One of these days I'll get to why those Urban Institute adjusted scores need to be approached with great caution.* But let's focus instead on Brooks's claim about red vs. blue states, and go back to the NAEP scores. Here are Grade 8 reading scores for the seven states Brooks cites.

Remember: Brooks's claim is that, sometime around 2013, Democratic states abandoned accountability and saw their scores "languish," while Republican states resisted and saw their students "do remarkably well."

Well, that's certainly not true for Alabama. The "miracle" state of Mississippi, which pundits claim has shown massive gains due to its use of the "science of reading," actually has a worse score than it had in 2003. California was always a laggard, but has moved up in relative position since 2003. There's no doubt Oregon and Washington have seen declines since 2017, but much of that is post-pandemic: it is quite possible different states were affected in different ways by Covid-19.

Which is the point here: even Brook's cherry-picked example is full of caveats; the data just doesn't support his sweeping statement. And yes, I do mean "cherry-picked." Does it strike you as odd that Brooks chose three Pacific coast examples to represent all blue states? What if, instead, he chose New Jersey, Connecticut, and Massachusetts?

It's quite a different picture now: even with pandemic learning loss, these blue states maintain their relative position. Of course, I'm just looking at one grade and one test... but, again, that's the point. You can't make sweeping generalizations about the efficacy of particular policies by cherry-picking the examples you want.

Do I think the NAEP has its place in education policy debates? Yes, I do. But what Brooks is doing here is really no better than HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. "making the proof" that links Tylenol to autism. Pundits who wade in education policy should do better.

* For now, I'll just say that the definition of "poverty" should change when the cost of living varies so much between states. This is especially true when your poverty measure (free and reduced-price lunch eligibility) is becoming increasingly unreliable. Urban's adjusted scores do not take this into account. It's a problem, admittedly a complex one. More later.

When It Comes To School Finance, Ciattarelli Doesn't Know Jack: Part 2

2025-10-10T13:18:00.000-07:00

Can anyone explain Jack Cittarelli's plans for school funding in New Jersey if he becomes the governor? Because he can't.

Take, for example, this from his website:

Jack will reform the state school funding formula, set a statewide standard on per-pupil spending and then allow that money to follow the student, while instructing the State Department of Education to get off the backs of higher-performing districts while concentrating on under-performing districts. [emphasis mine]

What, exactly, does it mean to "set a statewide standard on per-pupil spending"? If we're to believe this story from InsiderNJ, it means, believe it or not, a spending cap:

Replace the current school funding formula with one that standardizes and caps per pupil spending and rewards – not punishes – high-performing school districts that have seen funding slashed, schools closed, and extracurricular activities cut under S2. Also, make the state pick up 100% of the cost of special education.

I've been busting on Ciattarelli for the past few posts, but it's fair to say many politicians and pundits, both in and out of New Jersey and on both sides of the political aisle, have adopted this same framework. In their world, "high-performing" school districts are suffering from slashed budgets while "under-performing" districts spend like bandits but get bad results.

Of course, it just so happens the "high-performing" districts are majority white and Asian, while the "under-performing" districts are majority Black and Latinx/Hispanic. But folks like Ciattarelli will never mention the very well documented history of systemic racism that created the segregation that plagues New Jersey and other states. And they will never admit that this is why communities of color need more state funding for their schools.

These school districts are educating the most disadvantaged children—but they have the smallest property tax bases. So they can't raise adequate local funds without sky-high property tax rates, which is why the state has to step in and provide funding. This is basic stuff, folks: School Finance 101. If you're going to be governor, you've got to understand it.

But if you listen to what Jack Ciattarelli says, it's clear he just doesn't get it. Or maybe he does—but he's too scared of his Republican base to tell them the truth. Instead, he continues to parrot right-wing nonsense like this:

Our property taxes are the highest in the nation, not necessarily because of municipal and county budgets, upon which [a governor has] no real power. Where I could have real influence is the school tax, and that’s because of state aid. So, we need a new school funding formula. The current one is nefarious. It’s arbitrary and violates the equal benefit clause of our state constitution that says no community is supposed to suffer at the expense of another. So, with a more equitable distribution of state aid, we can lower property taxes. The cost per pupil in a place like Newark is $37,000, while the state average is $16,000. No one can justify to me that a particular student needs $21,000 more per year to educate them. That makes a compelling case why the current formula is unfair. Does that mean I will leave a community or student behind if that school district isn’t performing well? No. I believe in a voucher system, like we’ve seen in Arizona, Ohio, and Florida. I also believe in school choice, and charter schools to achieve that objective.

As I noted last time, the data say Ciattarelli is full of it.

District	Total Current Spending, FY2023	Pct. Poverty, 5-17 yer-olds (2023)	Pct. English Language Learners (2023)
Newark City	$28,631	30.0%	21.6%
All other NJ districts	$25,408	11.2%	8.3%

According to valid federal data, Newark does not spend $21K per pupil more than other NJ districts. But let's take this another step...

Because that figure for "all other NJ districts" is an average. Which means some districts spend less, but some districts spend more. Given Ciattarelli's worry about the "nefarious" school funding formula, it's worth asking this question: Are there any affluent, suburban, majority-white districts that spend more per pupil than Newark?

Yes. Quite a few, in fact.

The table below uses the NJ Taxpayers' Guide To Education Spending. The figures are for the school year 2022-23: this is the latest year of data showing actual, not budgeted, spending.* I use the "budgetary spending" figures, because as NJDOE itself notes: "These costs are considered to be more comparable among districts, and may be useful for budget considerations."

The districts I compare to Newark are all relatively affluent, as judged by the NJDOE's District Factor Groups (DFGs). I only include those districts in DFGs "GH,""I," or "J," the highest categories of socio-economic status. This also excludes vo-tech and charter schools.

There are 92 affluent New Jersey districts—almost all majority white—that spend more per pupil than Newark. Yet Newark's students are far more likely to be in poverty and to speak a language other than English at home.

I've included some other data (coming from school aid notices I obtain through Open Public Records Act (OPRA) requests). The last column shows the total property value for each school district, divided by the number of enrolled resident students. Notice how small that figure is for Newark compared to the suburbs. This is a legacy of racist housing practices that continue to suppress property values in communities of color, making it far more difficult to raise funds for schools.

See, property taxes are based on property values: the taxes are based on some percentage of the value of the property in a school district. When property values are low, it's hard to raise funds; the property tax rate has to be set higher than in district with relatively high property values just to raise the same amount of funds.

Because of systemic racism, communities like Newark have lower property values than majority-white communities. It is, therefore, much more difficult for them to raise money locally for their schools. This is why they MUST have more state aid.

The NJ courts have ruled on this over and over and over again: Communities of color need more help from the state because 1) their tax bases are low, and 2) they serve more children in poverty. The NJ Supreme Court sent the NJ Legislature back to the drawing board three times before it said the state finally had a school funding formula that acknowledged this reality.

And now Jack Ciattarelli wants to blow the whole thing up. He wants much higher taxes for Black and Hispanic/Latinx towns and cities. He wants less help for the schools that enroll the most vulnerable students. And, apparently, Ciattarelli wants to cap school spending for almost 100 relatively affluent districts that spend more per pupil than Newark -- that is, of course, unless he is a screaming hypocrite.

Is he?

In addition, instead of real help, he offers communities of color school "choice." More on why that's such a horrible idea next.

District	Pct. White	Pct. Free or Reduced-Price Lunch	Pct. Multilingual Learner	DIstrict Factor Group	Budgetary Spending per pupil	Equalized Housing Value per pupil
Newark Public School District	7%	74%	29%	A	$20,026	$263,176
Northern Highlands Regional High School District	68%	1%	0%	J	$20,031	$1,642,773
Montclair Public School District	51%	16%	3%	I	$20,043	$1,428,397
Alexandria Township School District	85%	9%	2%	GH	$20,140	$1,273,521
Manasquan School District	83%	13%	2%	GH	$20,159	$3,609,315
Woodcliff Lake School District	76%	1%	2%	J	$20,163	$2,125,023
Lafayette Township School District	74%	6%	1%	GH	$20,172	$1,346,024
Holmdel Township School District	67%	3%	2%	I	$20,265	$1,579,862
Rumson Borough School District	91%	0%	0%	J	$20,378	$3,222,648
Chester Township School District	70%	6%	3%	J	$20,448	$1,524,677
Lenape Regional High School District	68%	17%	1%	GH	$20,471	$986,472
Hillsdale School District	69%	9%	2%	GH	$20,491	$1,240,179
West Morris Regional High School District	75%	1%	1%	I	$20,571	$1,384,446
East Hanover Township School District	66%	3%	2%	GH	$20,638	$2,647,735
Wayne Township Public School District	67%	12%	5%	GH	$20,648	$1,474,833
Somerset Hills Regional School District	64%	19%	9%	I	$20,651	$2,375,537
Clinton-Glen Gardner School District	70%	19%	4%	I	$20,676	$1,012,442
Montville Township School District	56%	3%	4%	I	$20,706	$1,560,431
Freehold Township School District	71%	17%	2%	GH	$20,813	$1,410,221
West Essex Regional School District	78%	4%	1%	I	$20,922	$2,230,018
Rumson-Fair Haven Regional High School District	89%	1%	0%	J	$20,967	$2,406,670
Millstone Township School District	76%	9%	1%	I	$21,042	$1,400,088
Roosevelt Borough Public School District	61%	1%	1%	GH	$21,057	$876,496
Bethlehem Township School District	84%	3%	1%	I	$21,148	$1,218,865
Lebanon Township School District	86%	16%	3%	I	$21,224	$1,290,504
Florham Park School District	68%	1%	3%	I	$21,250	$2,876,537
River Vale Public School District	74%	1%	1%	I	$21,272	$1,484,848
Delaware Township School District	78%	5%	2%	GH	$21,286	$1,846,088
Mendham Borough School District	80%	4%	3%	J	$21,300	$1,952,166
Watchung Hills Regional High School District	52%	3%	2%	I	$21,425	$1,961,343
Fredon Township School District	79%	13%	0%	GH	$21,437	$1,250,363
Rockaway Township School District	54%	20%	4%	I	$21,448	$1,406,942
Readington Township School District	72%	15%	2%	I	$21,534	$1,690,847
Hunterdon Central Regional High School District	67%	19%	5%	I	$21,535	$1,368,175
Upper Saddle River School District	63%	0%	2%	J	$21,601	$1,784,885
Ringwood School District	74%	11%	1%	GH	$21,646	$1,173,707
Essex Fells School District	76%	0%	0%	J	$21,647	$2,297,446
Green Township School District	81%	11%	0%	I	$21,677	$866,980
Union Township School District	74%	6%	2%	GH	$21,760	$1,451,621
Morris Plains School District	67%	13%	4%	I	$21,799	$1,997,659
Paramus Public School District	43%	17%	4%	GH	$21,824	$3,062,844
Lenape Valley Regional High School District	65%	18%	4%	GH	$21,846	$842,850
Oceanport School District	89%	7%	1%	GH	$21,857	$2,100,984
Hanover Township School District	62%	6%	4%	I	$21,863	$2,521,053
Island Heights School District	86%	2%	1%	GH	$21,917	$1,934,654
Delaware Valley Regional High School District	82%	13%	1%	GH	$21,960	$1,232,068
Haworth Public School District	62%	0%	5%	I	$22,033	$1,582,638
East Amwell Township School District	77%	16%	4%	I	$22,044	$1,783,920
Boonton Township School District	77%	2%	0%	I	$22,060	$1,659,659
Mendham Township School District	83%	0%	0%	J	$22,088	$1,748,643
Oakland Public School District	76%	9%	3%	I	$22,133	$1,426,568
Wall Township Public School District	83%	12%	2%	GH	$22,135	$2,271,707
Princeton Public School District	45%	14%	4%	I	$22,331	$2,378,670
Monmouth Beach School District	91%	0%	0%	I	$22,460	$6,720,665
Morris Hills Regional School District	49%	22%	5%	GH	$22,509	$1,245,248
Teaneck School District	11%	46%	5%	GH	$22,606	$1,696,591
Branchburg Township School District	62%	12%	2%	I	$22,618	$2,107,581
West Orange Public Schools	18%	39%	7%	GH	$22,741	$992,920
Clinton Township School District	72%	13%	3%	I	$22,746	$1,367,529
Mahwah Township Public School District	60%	14%	3%	I	$22,813	$2,400,283
High Bridge Borough School District	70%	22%	2%	GH	$22,897	$857,159
Hopewell Valley Regional School District	68%	6%	2%	I	$23,092	$1,539,715
Franklin Township School District	74%	18%	5%	I	$23,141	$1,442,577
Mount Arlington Public School District	43%	25%	8%	GH	$23,735	$1,776,232
Ramsey School District	76%	7%	3%	I	$23,898	$1,560,248
Colts Neck Township School District	87%	3%	1%	I	$23,955	$2,322,403
Midland Park School District	71%	8%	2%	GH	$24,440	$1,569,577
Park Ridge School District	70%	9%	2%	I	$24,472	$1,581,949
North Hunterdon-Voorhees Regional High School District	82%	5%	0%	I	$24,544	$1,426,421
Bloomsbury Borough School District	69%	23%	0%	GH	$24,580	$870,182
Tewksbury Township School District	77%	4%	1%	J	$24,584	$2,434,475
Bedminster Township Public School District	53%	13%	6%	I	$24,593	$3,638,079
Mountain Lakes Public School District	67%	2%	1%	J	$24,681	$1,258,570
Ramapo Indian Hills Regional High School District	81%	2%	1%	I	$24,826	$1,894,171
Bay Head Borough School District	90%	0%	0%	I	$24,912	$27,834,838
South Hunterdon Regional School District	64%	30%	8%	I	$24,980	$1,936,377
Hanover Park Regional High School District	72%	4%	3%	GH	$25,378	$2,668,784
Shore Regional High School District	82%	15%	2%	GH	$25,576	$3,267,537
Warren Township School District	53%	9%	4%	I	$25,577	$2,086,300
Cranbury Township School District	50%	10%	5%	J	$25,711	$2,890,144
Monmouth Regional High School	46%	35%	6%	GH	$25,995	$2,205,552
Lebanon Borough School District	76%	16%	0%	I	$26,020	$1,748,372
Northern Valley Regional High School District	51%	1%	2%	I	$26,406	$1,546,869
Franklin Lakes School District	76%	3%	1%	I	$26,548	$2,774,823
Califon Borough School District	76%	0%	0%	I	$26,616	$1,419,963
Avon Boro School District	88%	14%	4%	I	$26,624	$11,656,592
Pascack Valley Regional High School District	68%	2%	1%	I	$27,574	$1,603,043
Englewood Cliffs School District	26%	0%	9%	I	$28,747	$8,177,879
Harding Township School District	83%	3%	1%	J	$29,506	$5,917,159
Sea Girt Borough School District	80%	0%	0%	I	$29,592	$21,036,642
Alpine Public School District	56%	0%	4%	I	$30,229	$9,597,392
Spring Lake Borough	95%	4%	0%	I	$32,099	$28,190,916
Saddle River School District	64%	0%	0%	J	$43,763	$8,091,611

* Yes, this matters. I have been working with this data for some time, and I will tell you there are always significant difference between what districts budget to spend in a year, and what they actually spend. I always use the latest "actual" spending figures, and not the "budgeted" figures, because the actual figures are audited and represent real, and not projected, spending.

When It Comes To School Finance, Ciattarelli Doesn't Know Jack: Part 1

2025-10-09T16:43:00.000-07:00

Jack Ciattarelli is running for governor of New Jersey. You would think that, in a highly-educated blue state, a Republican would take the time to educate himself about two of the biggest issues facing the voters: education and taxes.

But as his campaign has unfolded, it's clear Ciattarelli doesn't know jack:

What are your plans for lowering property taxes? Will it include revising the school funding formula?
Our property taxes are the highest in the nation, not necessarily because of municipal and county budgets, upon which [a governor has] no real power. Where I could have real influence is the school tax, and that’s because of state aid. So, we need a new school funding formula. The current one is nefarious. It’s arbitrary and violates the equal benefit clause of our state constitution that says no community is supposed to suffer at the expense of another. So, with a more equitable distribution of state aid, we can lower property taxes. The cost per pupil in a place like Newark is $37,000, while the state average is $16,000. No one can justify to me that a particular student needs $21,000 more per year to educate them. That makes a compelling case why the current formula is unfair. Does that mean I will leave a community or student behind if that school district isn’t performing well? No. I believe in a voucher system, like we’ve seen in Arizona, Ohio, and Florida. I also believe in school choice, and charter schools to achieve that objective.

We'll get to the false promises of school "choice" soon enough. What I'd like to focus on instead is that "$37,000" per pupil spending figure from Newark. Where does it come from? Is it accurate?

I'm tempted to let Ciattarelli off the hook here, because there is an ostensibly reliable source for the claim. The National Center for Education Statistics lists the per pupil spending for Newark as $36,862 in 2021-22. But there's a well known problem with this data: it often includes charter school payments in its expenditures but excludes charter schools students in its enrollment counts. This can—and in Newark's case, does—inflate the per pupil spending figures for districts with lots of charter schools.

(If you really want to get into this, see my note below.)

So Ciattarelli is using a figure from an otherwise reliable source, but one that isn't valid for comparisons. I'd let him slide... except there are plenty of other ways to verify the claim, and it's obvious he didn't care to (which I think says a lot about how he would run things as a governor).

Let's use the best national data source available: the Annual Survey of School System Finances (F-33) from the Census Bureau. (These are average sweighted by enrollment.)

District	Total Current Spending, FY2023	Pct. Poverty, 5-17 yer-olds (2023)	Pct. English Language Learners (2023)
Newark City	$28,631	30.0%	21.6%
All other NJ districts	$25,408	11.2%	8.3%

Yes, Newark spends more than the average New Jersey school district—but not $21,000 more. But there's something else...

I've included the childhood poverty rate and English Language Learner rate for Newark and the rest of New Jersey.* Newark's poverty rate is nearly three times as much as the rest of the state. Its ELL rate is also nearly three times the rate found in other NJ districts.

We know for a fact that schools enrolling more children in poverty and English Language Learners need more resources to provide those children with equal educational opportunity. Newark and other cities need more funding for their schools because they serve the most disadvantaged children.

Now, there's very good reason to believe the state is not providing the extra funding these schools need. I'll say more on this in a bit, but for now, let's acknowledge that Jack Ciattarelli has his facts wrong: Newark does not way outspend other districts in the state, especially given the challenges facing its student population.

If Jack is going to run the state in the slipshod way he runs his campaign, New Jersey ought to take a hard pass. We already had a Republican governor who played fast and loose with the truth when it came to public education, and it didn't work out so well.

A note about federal school finance data and charter schools: States have all sorts of ways of funding charter schools. In New Jersey, the funding for each student enrolled in a charter is "passed through" the student's resident school district to the charter school; in other words, the local tax revenue and state aid for the district goes through the district to the charter.

In the NCES data, these payments are counted as expenditures for the district. But the charter school students aren't counted in the total number of students enrolled. This means the spending on a charter school student's education gets added when calculating the per pupil spending figure for a district, but the student themselves is not included.

The upshot is that per pupil spending is inflated. That's the problem with Ciattarelli's figures.

Again, I could almost forgive this: it's an obscure point and it would be easy for someone to make this mistake... IF they didn't bother to check their work against other sources. Ciattarelli clearly didn't. I want better from my next governor, don't you?

* Source: The School Finance Indicators Database.

NJ Governor's Race and Education, Part 2: Should NJ Become Mississippi?

2025-10-05T14:30:00.000-07:00

Here's Part I of this series.

We're in the middle of a governor's race here in New Jersey, and the Republican candidate, Jack Ciattarelli, is saying some highly questionable things about NJ's schools.

Jack Ciattarelli: We do have the most segregated schools, but I wonder if we would be having this discussion if the performance of schools with predominantly black student populations were outperforming schools with predominantly white populations. We need to get back on day one to improving all of our schools, and I intend to do that with a high-impact curriculum. New Jersey recently slipped from two to 12 on the national report card. Most of that’s because we haven’t made up for all the learning lost when Phil Murphy and the Democrats shut down our schools for two years. We opened up our nursing homes, and we closed down our schools. Louisiana and Mississippi have moved significantly—Louisiana from 48 to 32 with a high-impact curriculum. What is that exactly? If your child is behind a grade level in any of the critical life skills, like reading, writing, or math, that child will spend the next marking period and the one thereafter doing nothing other than reading, writing, and math to get them on grade level. The data is clear. I’m a data-driven guy as an MBA and CPA. If the child is not on grade level for reading and writing by the end of eighth grade, more than likely, they will be underemployed their entire life. So while that lawsuit proceeds, let’s pick the schools on day one with a high-impact curriculum. [emphasis mine]

"The" national report card? What is that, Jack? Whose report card? Whose ranking? What year are we talking about?

An unfortunate fact of our nation's conversation about education is that politicians like Ciattarelli will regularly repeat questionable, unverified talking points like this, and no one—no one—from the media will ever ask for specifics or sources. (To be fair, neither will their political rivals; does Mike Sherrill's staff fact check Jack's claims?)

Ciattarelli's claim is a variation on the "Mississippi Miracle" trope, which, in turn, finds its roots in the "Science Of Reading" movement. Basically, recent boosts in some of Mississippi's scores on national tests (more in a sec) have prompted pundits to claim that the state's embrace of a certain type of reading instruction has transformed the state's schools. As a consequence, politicians of both parties have held up Mississippi as a role model for other states -- including high-performing states like New Jersey.

I'll leave a full discussion of the Science of Reading to experts like Paul Thomas. For now, it's enough to note that many of the claims advocates make about SoR are way, way overblown, and that a lot of people have embraced phonics instruction as if it was abandoned for years, which it was not. But put that aside... let's instead focus on Mississippi—as well as Louisiana and Florida, two other states Ciattarelli has lauded. Have they seen their test scores rise while New Jersey's fell?

Before answering, we first have to understand that each state has its own accountability tests, aligned to different learning standards and testing different content. There are very few ways to directly compare test scores in one state against another, because there aren't any tests given to all children in all states.

The closest thing we have to a national test that allows comparisons between states is the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often called the nation's report card. The NAEP is not given to every child in the nation, but to a representative sample of students in 4th, 8th, and 12th Grades.*

The two main tests are in math and reading. We'll start with the Grade 4 reading test: how is Mississippi doing compared to New Jersey? In fact, Mississippi is catching up:

There's no doubt that Mississippi, and Louisiana, have seen significant growth in Grade 4 reading scores. There's also no doubt New Jersey has seen a decline over the past several years. Of course, so has Florida, another state often touted as an educational "miracle." For that matter, the nation overall has seen declining scores since 2015.But did you note where NJ stands as of 2024? NJ is still above the nation, and above Ciattarelli's preferred states, on Grade 4 reading scores.Pundits often cheer for the "growth" Mississippi has shown in its 4th Grade scores. But go back to 2003—see how low the state was? This is a key point that gets lost: It's much easier to grow your test scores when you start off low, because you literally have no where to go but up!Now, unlike some others, I'm not prepared to completely dismiss Mississippi's test score rise in Grade 4, especially because there's also growth in math scores.

This is interesting, because I've yet to hear anyone talk about the "Science of Math." It could be better reading ability helps students perform better in math. It could be Mississippi made changes in math instruction. It could be that Mississippi was so bad back in 2003 that simply changing standards to better align with the NAEP led to gains that were fairly easy to achieve. It could also be that demographic changes in student populations had an effect.

In a typically sober and fair article, Matt Barnum looked at a variety of potential courses for the gains, including Mississippi's Grade 3 retention policy. Matt's more skeptical about retention's potential effects than I am, but OK, there's certainly room here for discussion.

What there is no evidence of, however, is that Mississippi has been taking kids out of every class but math and reading and writing when they don't read on grade level—which is Ciattarelli's plan.

Where did Ciattarelli even get this insane idea? He's says he's a "data-driven" guy; OK, where's the data to support this? Are we seriously thinking of denying kids music and art and PE and science and social studies and tech and all sorts of other mandated subjects because "data-driven" Jack believes that's what they do in southern states? Where is his evidence? Isn't it fair to ask?

Furthermore, if Jack is so "data-drive," why hasn't he looked at the NAEP results in Grade 8? Because they tell a very different story.

The highly-praised 4th Grade test score "growth" in Mississippi is almost completely missing in Grade 8. And, yes, New Jersey has seen declines since 2017—but so has the rest of the nation. And yet New Jersey still sits at the top of the heap.

Same story in math: test score losses post-pandemic across the board, but New Jersey is still a top performer.

Think about it this way: Suppose you are offered a brand new house anywhere you want to live in the US. The catch is you have to send your kids to public school. Which state are you going to choose, based on these scores?

As I said in the last post, New Jersey has a lot of work to do on its "opportunity gap." But it has been, and remains, a relatively high performing state. We should be extremely cautious about throwing that advantage away by emulating states that may have had a few gains, but continue to struggle in many other ways.

Let's talk about Jack and school taxes next.

* Most researchers put little stock in the 12th Grade tests as 17-year-old students have no incentive to perform well on them.

NJ Governor's Race and Education, Part I: Should NJ Become Mississippi?

2025-10-04T13:21:00.000-07:00

Is this thing still on?

I've got some thoughts I want to share about the NJ governor's race and education over the next few weeks, so I'm firing up this blog again. Hopefully, advocates for NJ's public schools will find these posts helpful.

Let's start this by examining a claim by the Republican candidate, Jack Ciattarelli:

Jack Ciattarelli: We do have the most segregated schools, but I wonder if we would be having this discussion if the performance of schools with predominantly black student populations were outperforming schools with predominantly white populations. We need to get back on day one to improving all of our schools, and I intend to do that with a high-impact curriculum. New Jersey recently slipped from two to 12 on the national report card. Most of that’s because we haven’t made up for all the learning lost when Phil Murphy and the Democrats shut down our schools for two years. We opened up our nursing homes, and we closed down our schools. Louisiana and Mississippi have moved significantly—Louisiana from 48 to 32 with a high-impact curriculum. What is that exactly? If your child is behind a grade level in any of the critical life skills, like reading, writing, or math, that child will spend the next marking period and the one thereafter doing nothing other than reading, writing, and math to get them on grade level. The data is clear. I’m a data-driven guy as an MBA and CPA. If the child is not on grade level for reading and writing by the end of eighth grade, more than likely, they will be underemployed their entire life. So while that lawsuit proceeds, let’s pick the schools on day one with a high-impact curriculum. [emphasis mine]

We'll leave aside several other... questionable claims here and focus instead on Ciattarelli's comparison between New Jersey and two southern states: Louisiana and Mississippi. The clear implication is that they are doing something right, and NJ is doing something wrong.

I'll get to trends in a future post; for right now, let's instead look at where these states are today. I'll throw in Florida as well, because I've heard Ciattarelli make similar claims about it. I'll also add national averages for context.

The source for comparisons here is the National Assessment for Education Progress, generally considered the gold standard national assessment. The NAEP is given to a representative sample of Grade 4 and Grade 8 students in all states; the tests are in math and reading.

We'll start by looking at the state-level average outcomes in these four exams for all students. The data is from 2024, the last administration of the NAEP.

	NAEP: All Students, 2024
	Gr 4		Gr 8
	Math	Reading	Math	Reading
Florida	243.4	218.2	267.2	252.9
Louisiana	234.5	216.0	266.8	256.5
Mississippi	239.2	218.5	269.1	253.5
National	237.5	215.0	273.8	258.0
New Jersey	240.1	221.6	281.7	266.0

To help interpret these tables, I've put the states that beat NJ in green, and the ones that lose to NJ in light red. What do we see? In nearly every exam and grade level, New Jersey outperforms Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and the national average.

It's difficult to convey the scope of the performance differences, but let's try this: Typically, a standard deviation on the NAEP is between 30 and 40 points. A standard deviation is also around the difference in test scores found between the highest- and lowest-income students. So the gap between the FL and NJ average in Grade 8 reading is roughly one-third to one-half of the difference between the least-affluent and most-affluent students. That's significant.

Note that the gap in scores is wider in Grade 8 than in Grade 4. We have to be cautious about reading too much into that, but we should at least consider the possibility that as students get more schooling, the differences between NJ and the southern states gets larger. That's a good thing for the Garden State.

Let's consider two other student populations. Here are the scores for students who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch (FRPL), a proxy measure of poverty.

	NAEP: Economically Disadvantaged Students, 2024
	Gr 4		Gr 8
	Math	Reading	Math	Reading
Florida	234.7	209.6	258.4	244.8
Louisiana	227.6	208.8	257.6	249.6
Mississippi	233.8	211.9	262.4	249.0
National	225.9	202.0	257.5	244.6
New Jersey	221.9	201.8	259.2	247.4

New Jersey doesn't do nearly as well in the Grade 4 tests... but the gap closes, and even reverses a little, in Grade 8.

How the NAEP measures "economic disadvantage" is a complicated topic I'll get to some time. For now, it's enough to say that the level of relative economic disadvantage for FRPL students in different states is not the same; for that reason, it's difficult to compare states on this measure without some transformation of scores (and even then...).

There also an issue about grade retention and its effect on test scores. But let's set that aside and concede that NJ has work to do to close its opportunity gap. That begs a question: how do the students who don't qualify for FRPL fare on the NAEP?

	NAEP: Not Economically Disadvantaged Students, 2024
	Gr 4		Gr 8
	Math	Reading	Math	Reading
Florida	252.9	229.7	277.0	262.5
Louisiana	253.7	236.0	288.9	274.2
Mississippi	256.0	238.2	287.7	265.3
National	251.1	229.2	288.0	269.5
New Jersey	254.1	236.5	295.2	277.0

Only Mississippi beats New Jersey in this category in Grade 4; however, by Grade 8, NJ is blowing the doors off the others, especially in math.

Does New Jersey have problems with its education system that manifest in NAEP scores? Unquestionably, yes: the opportunity gap in this state is too big and needs to be addressed (Ciattarelli's state aid plan will make that gap worse, but let's talk about that in another post).

But should New Jersey, on the basis of its NAEP scores, be looking to these southern states as models for reform?

You tell me.

More soon, including a discussion of "growth."

Student "Growth" Measures Are STILL Biased

2024-08-12T06:47:00.000-07:00

This caught my attention:

New Jersey school districts may soon be evaluated differently, with a greater emphasis on student growth as compared to student achievement.
The Department of Education is proposing changes to the New Jersey Quality Single Accountability Continuum, known as NJQSAC, which is used to evaluate the effectiveness of school districts every three years. The accountability system looks at five areas: instruction and programs, fiscal management, governance, personnel and operations.
Several school superintendents pitched their concerns with the current evaluation system at a State Board of Education meeting on Wednesday. Speakers said they support putting a greater emphasis on growth but noted this is just a start, as other issues remain that make it difficult for low-income and high-diversity school districts to earn passing scores. [emphasis mine]

I'll be the first to say that QSAC does need an overhaul -- or, at the very least, a serious review, particularly the "instruction and programs" component. There are always going to be problems when you are trying to assess the behaviors of school districts by assessing the behavior of students, which is what QSAC does. At the very least, we should acknowledge those problems.

For example: Yes, student performance is certainly going to be affected by the performance of school districts. But district operation is certainly not the only thing that causes student test scores to rise or fall. If a school district has proportionally more students in poverty, its test scores will be lower; that doesn't mean it's doing a "bad" job, it's just enrolling more students who are at a disadvantage.

School leaders in New Jersey get this:

Springfield School District Superintendent Rachel Goldberg said NJQSAC is inequitable and unreliable. She compiled NJQSAC data from the last 18 months and found instruction and program scores are directly correlated to the economics of an area.
“What this means is we are not measuring school quality, we are measuring socioeconomics,” Goldberg said.

This is exactly right; let's look at some examples.

Here are the New Jersey school districts for which we have data* on their child poverty rate and their mean (average) scale score in the statewide 6th Grade math exam. Clearly, as poverty rates go up, test scores go down (it's the same in other subjects and grades). The "R-squared" tells us that half of the variation in test scores can be statistically explained by poverty rates. Yes, districts with the same poverty rate can vary in their test scores: some score higher than predicted, and some lower. But the overall trend is clear: as poverty rises, test scores fall.

Here are Grade 6 math scores against median household income. As we would expect, scores rise when income rises. When Dr. Goldberg says, "...we are not measuring school quality, we are measuring socioeconomics," this is what she means. This isn't fair to school districts, and it needs to be fixed.

The problem is this: what if the proposed solution is also not measuring school quality, but students' socioeconomic conditions?

Under the proposed changes, progress in math and English Language Arts would be worth more points than achievement in math and English Language Arts in K-8 and K-12 schools. Progress would be measured using student growth percentiles, which measure the relative year-to-year performance changes of students compared to other students with similar prior test scores.

The assumption under which this proposal works is that "progress" is not biased the way that "achievement" is; districts with less-affluent populations would have an equal chance with districts that have more-affluent populations to show "progress."

But when you look at the data*, it's clear that this isn't the case.

Here are growth measures -- known in New Jersey as Student Growth Percentiles, or SGPs -- plotted against poverty rates. Compared to the graph above that plotted test scores against poverty, it's evident that the explanatory power of poverty on growth isn't as great as poverty on achievement -- but there is a correlation, and it's significant. As poverty rises, SGPs fall -- and while the correlation isn't as strong as above, it's still statistically significant (that "p=0.000" note is telling us this). On average, if the child poverty rate in a school district goes up by 10 percentage points (say, from 10% to 20%), SGPs drop by a little more than 5 points.

We can see this also when plotting income and SGPs. Again, the correlation isn't as strong as with income and test scores, but the correlation is there, and it's significant (p=0.000). On average, if district median income goes up $50,000, SGPs rise 3.5 points.

Now, at first glance, that may not sound like a lot. But you've got to remember that SGPs are a relative measure. SGPs rank and order districts (or schools, or students) compared to each other, and not to some objective standard of growth. It is conceivable that all school districts in New Jersey showed some level of growth in test scores, but some districts grew more than others. So some districts are going to get dinged under QSAC, even if their students made progress. Somebody's got to be at the bottom of the distribution.

When SGPs were first introduced into the state, then-Commissioner of Education Chris Cerf assured everyone that SGPs :"...fully take[s] into account socio-economic status..." It wasn't true then, and it's not true now, which is why I and others strongly objected to including them in teacher evaluations.

Why are SGPs still biased? It's complicated (I try to break it down here). The short answer is that test scores are measured with error: sometimes scores from the same student in the same subject vary because of a host of factors that have nothing to do with their abilities (or their teacher's). That error leads to the SGP model understating the predictive power of prior tests on later ones. Again, it's a complex problem -- which just serves to highlight how unfair it is to hold school districts (or teachers, or students) accountable using a metric only a scant few people who are highly conversant in statistical methods and psychometrics understand.

Am I saying we can't use student test scores at all to help evaluate and oversee school districts? Not necessarily. The inventor of SGPs himself has noted that they may not show a causal relationship between district quality and student outcomes, but as a descriptive measure, they could help to identify districts that may be in need of remediation. With appropriate training, the NJDOE might consider using SGPs as a way to better allocate their limited time, using them as a sort of early warning system to point to districts that may need to improve their instruction and programs.

What New Jersey absolutely should not do is come up with some hard-and-fast formula that weights SGPs by some amount, then tag districts that don't come up to a particular threshold. Remember, the core rule for using test outcomes in any sort of accountability system is that there must be a convincing validity argument made for using them in this way, and that higher stakes demand stronger arguments. That has not happened with using any test outcomes as a part of QSAC, let alone SGPs.

A final thought: As we emerge from the pandemic and get back to "normal," we're going to be revisiting a lot of issues in education policy, such as the appropriate use of high-stakes testing. I believe this actually affords us an opportunity to clear up some of the misconceptions and misunderstandings that dogged us for years during the "reform" era. Let's not miss that opportunity.

More to come...

* Poverty and income measures are from the School Finance Indicators Database, which gets the data from the American Community Survey of the US Census Bureau. SGPs and test scores are from the School Performance Reports published by the NJDOE.

Is This Thing Still On?

2024-08-10T07:32:00.000-07:00

Hello?

It's been a while. And as it turns out, I've still got a few things to say.

Stand by...

On Remote Teaching and Learning In an Ongoing Pandemic

2021-08-27T12:15:00.004-07:00

Some recent stories I've been thinking about (all emphases mine). Tennessee:

Gov. Bill Lee’s administration is getting pushback in Memphis on new Tennessee restrictions that make it harder for district leaders to close school buildings and shift students to remote instruction as pediatric COVID cases climb.
Meanwhile, school board members with Shelby County Schools held a moment of silence Tuesday to remember two students, two teachers, and one young alum who recently died. School officials did not release the cause of death for any of the five.
“We must stand together during this difficult time,” Superintendent Joris Ray said.
A day earlier, district officials encouraged families to direct their complaints to the governor’s office as a petition circulated demanding a virtual option that allows students to stay with their teachers. More than 13,000 people had signed the petition by Tuesday afternoon, and a small group of parents also protested outside the district’s headquarters on Monday.
“We hear your concerns and understand your frustrations regarding options for remote learning,” said a statement from the district. “Stand for safety with us by contacting Governor Lee and state legislators.”
The call to action reflects the ever-growing divide between the Republican governor and Tennessee’s largest school district over the best way to teach while protecting the health of children too young to be vaccinated. COVID’s delta variant has returned Tennessee’s case numbers to levels not seen since the pandemic’s wintertime peak.
Shelby County leaders said their hands are tied on remote learning options beyond enrolling in Memphis Virtual School. They cited new rules and criteria passed recently by the Tennessee State Board of Education for closing schools and remote learning.
Those rules allow individual students to switch temporarily to remote instruction if they’re sidelined by the virus, either because of illness or exposure. But districts can’t toggle back and forth with remote learning without an executive order from the governor, according to state officials. School systems that have to close entire schools because of COVID outbreaks must use days usually stockpiled for inclement weather, flu outbreaks, or staffing problems.

New Jersey:

As students head back for a third school year impacted by the pandemic, COVID-19 continues to complicate the education landscape and the impact of remote learning has yet to be fully assessed. As achievement gaps have emerged, many districts are planning to return fully in person learning in hopes of restoring traditional learning, even as safety concerns mount around the highly contagious delta variant.
But remote learning will remain a part of students' lives for the foreseeable future, experts say, with tens of thousands of students in quarantine just weeks into the school year for some. How schools approach remote learning is varied: While some view it as a Zoom extension of the classroom, others are taking novel and holistic approaches to try to improve the quality of instruction.
For now, in-person learning is the only option for students like Cosby's daughter, a rising senior, as New Jersey's governor was among several leaders to require full-time, in-person K-12 instruction this school year. Other large school districts, like New York City, are starting the year without a remote option.
In recent days, however, the New Jersey state education department has issued guidance that "strongly encouraged" schools to provide remote instruction for students during quarantine, NorthJersey.com reported.

Atlanta:

(ATLANTA) — A few weeks into the new school year, growing numbers of U.S. districts have halted in-person learning or switched to hybrid models because of rapidly mounting coronavirus infections.
More than 80 school districts or charter networks have closed or delayed in-person classes for at least one entire school in more than a dozen states. Others have sent home whole grade levels or asked half their students to stay home on hybrid schedules.
The setbacks in mostly small, rural districts that were among the first to return dampen hopes for a sustained, widespread return to classrooms after two years of schooling disrupted by the pandemic.

When the school year ended last year, I was sure we were going to be going back to something relatively close to "normal." But then came Delta, with Lambda and who knows how many others on the horizon. Combined with vax resistance that is, infuriatingly, larger than I expected, and an anti-mask movement fueled largely by inanity on social media, it's clear this year will be anything but "normal."

Which means we've got to come to terms with remote learning; it's not going away any time soon, if ever. For all its faults -- and they are many -- remote learning is a schooling option that can and should be deployed if necessary as a public health measure.

But the patchwork approach we're taking to remote learning isn't smart policy. We need to start delineating when and why we need remote learning, and then set standards for what it should be. We also need a clear-eyed acknowledgment of the challenges inherent in implementing remote learning, including an accounting of what resources will be necessary to make it work.

I propose we start by laying out some scenarios for when schools will need remote learning:

1) The all-out emergency. This is the Spring of 2020 scenario all over again: a new health threat emerges that is so grave and/or uncertain we have no choice but to fully close down all schools. I think most of us acknowledge the chances are quite good this will happen again sometime in the not-too-distant-future.

What was lacking in early 2020 when we tried this for the first time? Universal broadband connectivity for all students and staff. Devices of high enough quality that instruction could be delivered. Curricular materials suitable for remote learning. Staff training in remote instruction. Student training. Parent training. Support infrastructure. Time flexibility to meet parent/student needs.

I'm leaving out a host of other things that aren't under the control of schools: adequate space for students at home, time off for parents, social services, etc. Remote learning doesn't work without them, but these are issues outside of education policy. And, arguably, so is broadband connectivity. It's clear the internet is now as indispensable to modern life as electricity, and high-speed access should be seen as a necessity.

Getting students devices is probably the easiest challenge to overcome: it's a matter of money and will, although supporting all those devices will require adequate staff. Developing high-quality instruction is another matter. I can see teacher prep programs developing entire courses on the subject, and on-going professional development for teachers will inevitably be focused on improving remote instruction.

You can probably guess my feelings on this: we already ask an awful lot of teachers. Now we want them to be able to turn their practice on a dime, always ready to jump to another mode of instruction immediately and seamlessly. This means teachers will not only have to add remote instruction planning to their already jam-packed days; they will need to develop skill sets similar to the ones already in demand in other parts of the economy.

If we're going to have a school system that is able to transition to remote learning in an emergency, we're going to have to pony up. We need more resources, we need more staff, and we need to pay teachers for their extra time and the skills they will develop. There's just no way we do this on the cheap.

2) The local response. In this scenario, a local outbreak requires a temporary transition to remote learning for all students in a class, a school, or a district. In some ways, it's similar to the scenario above, except the participants are limited: other classrooms or schools carry on as usual.

The biggest difference I see between the local response and the all-out emergency is that totally going remote may not be the only option. A district or school may opt instead to implement a hybrid schedule, where students rotate their in-school and at-home days. Maybe all students attend in-school part of the day and learn remotely during another part. This was the case for many districts through the last school year, and I believe it's the most likely scenario for a local response to a pandemic.

The "good" news is that at least some of the preparation and planning for the all-out emergency can be transferred to the local response: broadband, devices, training, planning, etc. But, as I discuss below, there is a big difference between teaching everyone on-line and teaching some on-line, some in-person.

Again, adequate resources will be essential in providing accepted local responses. There is an obvious and clear connection between a school district's ability to provide hybrid instruction and its funding. Districts will not be able to provide acceptable remote learning models unless they have the resources to plan and implement them.

3) The individual response. Like everything else, America is divided on whether children should be back in school. Context matters a lot: people who might be comfortable sending their children to a school with mandatory masking may not want their child in a school without it. But even with strict mitigation in place, some families may see the risk to their child -- or other members of the family who are immunocompromised -- as too great.

In addition, a student who is exposed to the virus outside of school might need to quarantine for a while, even if they don't contract Covid. What sort of schooling should they be offered?

I see three possible responses. First, regular classrooms are set up to accommodate remote learners, essentially joining a regular class synchronously via Zoom or Google Meet or whatever. Second, separate schooling is provided to students that is entirely on-line and run by a teacher who only does on-line instruction. Third, some sort of combination of the two.

Each of these has its pros and cons. Teaching some students in-person and some on-line is really, really difficult. The classroom has to be set up to accommodate both sets of students. Lessons have to be planned so that everything students need at home is provided, and so delivery can take place simultaneously to remote and in-person kids. Some subjects -- PE, art, music, lab science -- are almost impossible to imagine being taught with both sets of students in sync. But in this model the students who are remote stay with their classmates and current teacher, which, if they return to live instruction, would make things easier.

Moving students to a separate class might work for those who make a long-term commitment to stay at home. One big advantage is that teachers who are immunocompromised, or who had family who were, would still have a place to teach. It's very difficult to imagine, however, a student who needed to quarantine for a short while benefitting from being temporarily placed into an entirely separate class with a teacher who had no prior experience with that student.

It's also worth noting the structure of school districts may make fully on-line classes harder or easier. Large districts may be able to set up and staff these classes more easily than smaller ones. Small districts may need to pool their resources to reach a critical mass where they can offer these classes.

Finally, it might make sense to have some sort of combination of the two. But no matter the mode of instruction, I believe there are several changes that would have to be made to make them work. Among them:

Class sizes will have to be lowered. You can't expect a teacher to give kids getting remote instruction the attention they need in a hybrid setting if the class is already too large. The cues teachers observe and react to during in-person instructions aren't available in remote learning. During hybrid instruction, their focus can't be distributed in the same way it is during in-person learning. Lowering class sizes is the best way to make sure teachers can respond to all of their students' needs in a mixed-mode setting.
Staff will need more planning time. If it's coordinating across classes or simply planning lessons with two modes of delivery, teachers can't be expected to add this to their plates without additional time to figure out how to make it work.

I'm not arguing here that remote instruction can't or shouldn't become a regular part of K12 schooling. I am laying out the challenges -- and I'm sure there are many more I haven't thought of -- to make the point that this will not be easy, more resources will be needed to make it happen, and this will take time.

No one who knows how schools actually work could possibly think we can just rearrange a few schedules and buy a few more laptops and schools will be all set for remote instruction. But if this has to happen -- and I think it does -- we'd better start making plans for it now.

Lakewood, NJ: Where Public Schools Are Left To Whither, Part IV

2021-05-15T05:48:00.002-07:00

In the decade I've been writing this blog, I've seen some really horrible behavior towards teachers (a prime example here). But I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like this:

This is from last September, when the Lakewood Education Association (LEA), the local teachers union, was, like all other local unions in the state, advocating for the health and safety of its members while districts made opening plans.

Maybe you sympathize with the teachers; maybe you don't. But the truly obnoxious behavior of Michael Inzelbuch, the district's attorney, is remarkable. Inzelbuch wound up apologizing, as he should have, although as far as apologies go this one is awfully weak:

Now this 👉statement from Lakewood School Bd Atty, first apologizing for accosting the Union President, then thanking her for 'finally' meeting w/ the board "after well documented efforts that have been rebuffed by Union leadership for more than 4 months" @ReporterJim @News12NJ https://t.co/hgaay3BITX pic.twitter.com/zrLWiuuRmJ
— Eric Landskroner (@ericlandskroner) September 2, 2020

We'll talk later about how Lakewood's school district has responded to the pandemic. For now, let me restate that I believe at least three things will happen when public schools are left to wither, as they have been in Lakewood:

When a large part of a community abandons its public schools, chaos ensues and accountability dissolves.
Segregation is the inevitable consequence of school privatization.
Educators will be disrespected in a community that does not support its public schools.

#3 is precisely what's happening in Lakewood: a climate of disrespect for teachers working in public schools -- teachers who are educating only a small fraction of the community's children.

Again: Lakewood has highly segregated schools. The majority of residents send their children to private religious schools, mostly yeshivahs.

The Hispanic minority in the community, however, sends their children to the public schools.

When your child attends a public school, and you actually see what teachers do for students, you're far more likely to appreciate their work and value it. But when the majority of a town's residents don't attend public school, they miss out on that perspective. It's not that they necessarily have disdain for public school teachers so much as they don't have a personal connection; they can't see the value of teachers through the eyes of someone whose own children were affected by them. Teachers might teach other people's kids, but they don't teach their own.

That manifests itself through things like Inzelbuch's embarrassing behavior. But it also may manifest itself in how well teachers are paid. Let's unpack this a bit:

When the majority of a town's children attend the public schools, there are at least two big reasons why residents will care about the quality of those schools. First, they care about the education their own children receive. They'll want good teachers, good facilities, and good administrators, and they'll be willing to pay for them, at least up to a point.

Second, the value of their homes will depend on the quality of the schools. The perceived quality of schools is a major driver of property values, so homeowners have an incentive to make sure that perceived quality remains high. To be sure, there are many negative consequences to this reality, especially because education is a "positional good," but there's little doubt concern about property values is a driver of concern about school quality.

In Lakewood, however, both of these drivers are switched off. The majority of parents in the town don't have a personal stake in the public schools; consequently, home buyers won't pay more for property in Lakewood if the quality of the public schools improve. I'm sure people in Lakewood who have opted out of the public schools don't want them to be "bad," but they have little personal incentive to make sure the those schools are "good" either.

A community like Lakewood, therefore, isn't going to have the same incentive to recruit and retain teachers for its public schools. And teacher salaries will reflect that lack of incentive.

This is a salary model I've used before. Basically, I take every full-time teacher in the state and predict their salary based on things like experience, labor market, job category, and so on. I then compare what the model says they should make to what they actually make; in this way, I can compare Lakewood teachers' salaries "apples-to-apples" with teacher salaries in the rest of the state.

Consistently, year after year, Lakewood teachers make less than what the average teacher makes in New Jersey, holding other factors constant. This is consistent with recent testimony in a trial about Lakewood school funding, which found Lakewood salaries were the lowest in the state compared to similar districts.

I'll write more about this trial in a bit. For now, let me conclude with this: in both their interactions with district officials and in their pay, Lakewood's public school educators are being disrespected. But this is an inevitable consequence of what happens when a community largely abandons its public schools.

More to come.

ADDING: A recent and telling story from this past March:

Most recently, eight Clarke teachers and staff were infected with the virus, including four who were hospitalized, according to Kimberlee Shaw, president of the Lakewood Education Association (LEA), which represents nearly 900 employees.
But instead of closing the school and switching to all-virtual classes, the district chose to suspend Assistant Principal Madaly Rodriguez-Jones and moved an administrator from another school to temporarily take her place.

“They should have closed it for two weeks and given everyone the 14-day quarantine,” said Shaw. “They claimed they did put in purifiers, but that was after.”
The Rodriguez-Jones paid suspension, originally set to end March 30, was extended this week to April 30, according to Shaw and the board agenda. District officials did not respond to requests for comment or explain why the move was made.

[...]

“I don’t know what the district thinks they know, but this is an ever-changing situation and I felt like my staff members were being blamed for getting COVID,” Shaw said. “And they felt that way, they were upset that it was looking like the district was blaming the teachers.”
But the Clarke situation is just the latest concern for teachers in the 6,000-student district, which is among the few that have remained open for all students since the beginning of the 2020-2021 school year.
Shaw said that has resulted in 371 positive tests, 214 students and 157 staff, since July 2020, but no school closings or even partial shutdowns.
“It is taking its toll, our staff is tired, they are covering classes because they are short of staff, they are worried about the virus,” Shaw said. “Right now staff is doing their job and trying to stay safe and we are hoping that if another outbreak occurs that the district will reconsider and shut that building, it worries the staff, they feel they are not being notified.” [emphasis mine]

I ask you: does this sound like a district where teachers feel respected?

ADDING MORE: This should come as no surprise:

LAKEWOOD - More than 30 school district teachers are being let go at the end of the school year without clear explanation or cause, according to teachers’ union leaders who say the move is occurring at a time when the district faces a teaching shortage.
“We had staffing shortages before the pandemic and the pandemic only exacerbated it,” said Lakewood Education Association President Kimberlee Shaw, whose local represents more than 700 teachers and staff in the 6,700-student district.

[...]

“It’s chaos for our students,” added Shaw. “They crave routine and stability. They never know who their teachers are going to be from one month to the next. It’s stressful for all of us and makes me worry about our students’ safety and continuity of instruction.”
In a release, the LEA stated that more than 100 staff members had left the district since June 30, 2020. “The district has a history of firing non-tenured teachers without cause,” the union release added. “Most of these teachers and staff members report being ‘blindsided’ by their non-renewals since they had positive evaluations and no history of disciplinary issues.”
“Meanwhile, they’ve had little to no support from the district through mentoring or professional development. The district also lost nearly its entire guidance department and Child Study Team at the high school at a time when student mental health is at crisis level and the district is implementing a new Social-Emotional Learning initiative.”

COVID and "Learning Loss": Test Scores Should Not Be Our Immediate Concern

2021-03-31T09:39:00.001-07:00

I'll get back to Lakewood in a bit, but I want to take a minute and talk about a new report out yesterday from JerseyCAN and others about learning loss and COVID-19.

Regular readers know I've had my issues with JerseyCAN over the years: too many times, their analyses have missed the mark, often because of a lack of understanding about things like what test scores actually represent and how they should be used to direct K-12 education policy.

I might make similar complaints about this latest report. Using a convenience sample's outcomes on one test to extrapolate outcomes on another for an entire population is inherently problematic. Further, changes in proficiency rates on the same test are often artifacts of the process of setting those rates, and not indications of any changes in actual student learning. There's also a whole problem of equating "proficiency" across grade levels that tends to get pushed aside in these discussions. Plus the easy way we accept "grade level" as some sort of absolute when it's really a social construct...

But in the end, none of that really matters, because what the report is showing is almost certainly correct: student learning has suffered during the pandemic, and the losses are almost certainly greater for students of color and those in economic disadvantage.

How could this be otherwise? There is a clear digital divide along racial and ethnic lines in this country; when learning moves on-line, the effects will reflect that divide. And, as I've shown repeated, access to in-person schooling has also been racially unequal, a reflection of the inequalities in New Jersey's school funding system. These factors are undoubtedly combining to disadvantage students of color and students in economic disadvantage.

I suppose there may be some value in presenting these losses as changes in test outcomes, as there are plenty of policymakers in the state who act as if test scores are the only measure by which we can evaluate the quality of schooling. But in all honesty, the report is telling us something we already knew: the pandemic has been bad for students, and worse for some than others.

So if JerseyCAN had stopped there, I'd really have very little problem with their report -- at least, the problems I'd have would be confined to technical details. But they took upon themselves to tell the state what it must do given their findings:

JerseyCAN recommends that stakeholders and policymakers consider the following solutions to help accelerate student learning for our students.
Urgently prioritize the adoption and statewide implementation of extensive summer programming so that we can stem the COVID slide now and further stop more students from falling behind;
Adopt and implement personalized, research-based solutions for accelerating student learning like high-dosage tutoring;
Allow parents to exercise their choice to retain or hold back their child, if desired, to provide additional time to students for learning and the provision of social and emotional supports;
Incentivize all districts to adopt high-quality instructional materials that are aligned to statewide assessments, which canprovide teachers and parents with ongoing information about student academic growth and that can project proficiency on NJSLA; and
Administer statewide assessments in Spring 2022 that are comparable to those administered in Spring 2019 to establish a new baseline from which to measure student growth moving forward and to also enable comparisons to pre-pandemic statewide proficiency.

Let's take these one at a time.

I am all for high-quality summer programming. Summer slide is a real issue, especially for economically disadvantaged children. But if our metric for determining that "loss" is test scores, we're running the risk of creating programs that sit students in front of screens all summer long doing test prep. As an educator, it is my opinion that this is the last thing kids need after this very difficult year. How about a lot of physical activity and socialization, music, art, free reading, exploratory learning -- what those of us in the education research field refer to technically as "fun"! In fact, we could do that, and add access to counseling and health services, family engagement programs, early childhood education... golly, if only there was a model of schooling that did this...
Tutoring can be good -- but you have to remember a few things. Tutors need training. Good tutoring is not cheap. Tutoring is a supplement for high-quality curriculum and instruction, not a replacement. Again, if all we're doing is getting lower-paid workers to sit in classrooms with kids while they drill on test-prep instruction, we're missing an opportunity to help kids address the trauma they've experienced this past year.
Expanded grade retention is probably one of the most overhyped policies that has been pushed over the past couple of decades. There is good evidence that the games Florida has played with retaining kids was behind its unearned status as an educational "miracle." While I am certainly sympathetic to the idea of giving parents more of a say in the decision to retain their child, and while I do believe there are times when it is warranted, pushing retention immediately after a cohort has shown learning losses doesn't make a lot of sense: if everybody suffered, why hold only some kids back? Besides, are our schools really ready for a mass mixing of age groups?
Everyone is for high-quality materials. But if the primary goal of those materials is to increase test scores, they will run the risk of emphasizing only those skills needed to pass the test, which can narrow the curriculum and constrain instruction. I am not against using test scores judiciously as a data point in helping to assess a child's learning, but state tests are simply not a practical, nor particularly useful, way to inform student instruction -- especially when teachers can't see the exam.
There are always items put in different administrations of standardized tests to help equate scores. And, to the extent possible, proficiency rates should be equivalent between different years. So, sure, we can use test outcomes to help determine where we stand. But what really matters is this: What are we going to do with those results?

This gets to the heart of my concerns about the premise behind JerseyCAN's report, which I see manifesting in the statements of other education policy stakeholders. We are coming through an unprecedented crisis in modern American history. Children are hurting. Families have been traumatized. Schools have suffered losses in their staffs. We haven't faced this kind of trauma since World War II. So what are these folks proposing to help kids?

Testing. Analyzing test scores. Instruction based on test outcomes in two areas of the curriculum. Tutoring in support of that test-centered instruction. Then... more testing.

Look, I like a good run at the data as much as the next guy. I've said consistently testing has its place. But our kids are hurting, and the last thing we should be doing is trying to recreate the test-obsessed pedagogy we were using before the pandemic. Further, we shouldn't be going back to the test-and-punish systems we used to hold schools and educators "accountable," which was doing nothing to address the root causes of unequal educational opportunity, like inequitable school funding.

We should instead be focused on getting kids to love school -- especially if they weren't loving it before the virus hit. We should get kids and families access to the health and emotional supports they need so students can arrive at the schoolhouse door ready to learn. We should be investing in our school infrastructure to make our buildings safe and healthy. We should be expanding things like arts education, a proven strategy for boosting student engagement and learning.

A less stunted, more comprehensive view of schooling is required at this time. Testing can be part of it, but students, not test scores, should be the focus.

Now, back to Lakewood...

Lakewood, NJ: Where Public Schools Are Left To Wither, Part III

2021-03-18T17:13:00.001-07:00

Here are the other parts of this series:

- Part I

- Part II

What happens when a majority of citizens rejects its own public schools? We need look no further than Lakewood, NJ -- a town that I contend is an object lesson in the consequences of school privatization. Again, I believe at least three things will happen when public schools are left to wither, as they have been in Lakewood:

When a large part of a community abandons its public schools, chaos ensues and accountability dissolves.
Segregation is the inevitable consequence of school privatization.
Educators will be disrespected in a community that does not support its public schools.

Regarding point #2: in the last post I showed definitively that Lakewood's public and private school populations are highly segregated. In this post, let's spend some time discussing point #1.

I'll note first that, as I've written before, there are plenty of examples of corruption and malfeasance in districts where the majority of children attend the public schools. And the problems with private schools enrolling special needs students in New Jersey have been well documented.

But one of Lakewood's private schools had, according to the verdict of a jury, taken things to a new level (all emphases mine):

2/27/19: NEW BRUNSWICK - The founder of a Lakewood special education school is guilty of money laundering and misconduct by a corporate official, but not guilty of corruption involving public funds, a jury said Wednesday after deliberating for about 20 hours over four days.
The jury's mixed slate of verdicts expose Rabbi Osher Eisemann, founder of the School for Children with Hidden Intelligence, to possible prison time of five to 10 years, according to prosecutors. He was acquitted of three charges, including the most serious count brought against him: First-degree corruption of public resources, which carried a prison term of at least a decade.
Eisemann left a courtroom Wednesday afternoon surrounded by supporters and family members, who have occupied courtroom benches throughout the trial. He smiled as he thanked his defense team, which declared victory shortly after the verdicts were announced.
"The reason you saw the defense team is enthusiastic overall about the verdict is this case is not about money laundering or misconduct by a corporate official," said Eisemann's lawyer, Lee Vartan. "This was about theft of public funds. The state made that clear in its multiple press releases, at every court appearance, in their opening statement, in their closing statement. And on theft of public funds, he was completely vindicated."

It turns out the defense team had reason to be optimistic:

4/29/19: NEW BRUNSWICK - The founder of a Lakewood special education school will not go to prison, but will serve 60 days in jail and two years on probation for laundering $200,000 from the school, a judge here ruled Monday afternoon.
Rabbi Osher Eisemann, who founded the School for Children with Hidden Intelligence, must also pay a $250,000 fine, according to the sentence handed down by state Superior Court Judge Benjamin Bucca, sitting in Middlesex County. Eisemann will begin the jail term on July 1.
[...]
"The defendant is many things," Deputy Attorney General Anthony Robinson said. "He is a builder, a nurturer and an educator. But he is not a victim. ... The defendant has led a great life but that does not exempt you from the law.”
But Bucca found even the minimum prison term, six years, would be a "serious injustice" in part based on Eisemann's work in special education. More than three dozen letters were sent to the judge in support of Eisemann, many of them outlining Eisemann's dedication to students at the school he started to help his own son.

The prosecution was not happy with this ruling, however, and appealed the original sentence. The appellate judges, according to the Asbury Park Press, "...issued a scathing opinion saying the judge who sentenced him to probation for money laundering and misconduct ignored the law and a jury’s verdict." At last report, Eisemann's sentence is on hold as his attorneys appeal the latest ruling.

It's worth noting that this would not be the only time SCHI found itself in trouble:

4/19/19: LAKEWOOD — A high-cost school for special-needs children, whose founder and director was recently indicted on charges he stole hundreds of thousands of dollars in public money, overcharged the township's impoverished public school district and other schools by at least $340,000 in one year, the Asbury Park Press found.

The School for Children with Hidden Intelligence overbilled the districts by paying uncertified teachers; paying certain employees more than permitted by state law; and buying items deemed unnecessary for the school, according to an audit by the state Department of Education of the 2011-2012 school year. Some of those items were purchased at Costco, Staples and from merchants on eBay and mailed to the home of an employee not named in the audit. A large-ticket item, a power generator, was ostensibly purchased for the school's summer camp, but it could not be located by auditors.

The school also failed to do background checks on 71 of the 77 employees it hired that year, the audit found.

Rabbi Osher Eisemann, the school's founder and current director, was indicted earlier this month for allegedly stealing more than $630,000 in public funds and laundering much of the money. He was not blamed for the overbilling in the state's audit.

Now, I will confess that when I started following this story, my first reaction was: "Where was the oversight? Why wasn't the Lakewood Board of Education aware of this?" But the more I've thought about it, the more obvious it became to me that it's unreasonable for a board of education to oversee the proper use of monies when so much of those monies are spent by entities that are not regulated by that board.

Look at these figures again:

The rest of New Jersey has to keep watch over less than one percent of its students who are placed into private schools. Lakewood, however, has to oversee the placements of nearly six percent of its students.

The amount of spending on private schools is, on average, six percent of a New Jersey district's budget. But nearly sixteen percent of Lakewood's budget is spent on private schools. How can a local board of education keep track of this much money if it is given to entities out of their control? Local districts have enough to do keeping track of their own finances, let alone audit the accounts of private schools.

Eisemann's jury found he engaged in a complex financial scheme to evade the law. It took years for prosecutors to develop the case and win a conviction. It's not reasonable at all for any school board to be expected to catch a private entity in this kind of act. But if that's true, it stands to reason that bad faith actors will see an opportunity and try to game the system. And when there is a lack of accountability, bad things inevitably happen.

Should New Jersey completely eliminate private schools for special education students? That's a question on which reasonable people can disagree. In my own career I've worked with people who run these schools, and they were all decent, committed professionals who had the best interests of their students at heart. There are much easier ways to make a living than running a school for kids with the most profound special needs, so I give anyone who enters the field the benefit of the doubt.

But public policy can't be run on faith. And the more public revenue that is doled out to nongovernmental entities, the more oversight is required. Lakewood gives out a lot of money to private interests, but it clearly hasn't figured out how to hold all of those entities fully accountable. How could it? Boards of education were never designed to be overseers of private schools... but, in this case, it's precisely what the situation requires.

But now imagine if we expanded the subsidies so all students, not just those with special needs, could attend private schools. Who would provide the necessary accountability? Boards of education clearly aren't up to the job. Who instead would protect the public's interest? Who would be in place to make sure public monies were being spent responsibly? For that matter, given how much support Lakewood provides to private schools right now...

... who's making sure that those private schools are spending it properly?

Point #3 on my list mentions disrespect for teachers. Let's talk about that next...

Lakewood, NJ: Where Public Schools Are Left To Wither, Part II

2021-03-13T08:21:00.007-08:00

Here's Part I of this series.

In this series, I'm taking a look at Lakewood, NJ, with an eye toward what might happen if more communities abandon their public schools and, instead, embrace the idea of school "choice." Lakewood, in a state by some accounts with the highest ranked public schools in the nation, is a town where the vast majority of families choose to send their children to private schools.

The Star-Ledger explained what's driving this phenomenon back in 2017:

Lakewood has more than 6,300 students registered in its public schools and another 30,000 mostly Orthodox Jewish students enrolled in the town's 130 private schools. Under state law, towns must fund buses for students attending private schools more than two miles from their houses.

In the upcoming school year, Lakewood expects to spend $27 million on busing alone, more than it spends on classroom instruction, according to the school budget.

Town leaders say Lakewood is severely underfunded by the state, which does not consider the busing of large numbers of private school students when calculating how much state aid the district receives. A permanent source of school funding for busing and special ed would ease many of the town's problems, said Rabbi Aaron Kotler, one of the leaders of the Orthodox Jewish community.

"It would also make Lakewood a place where you wouldn't have people feeling that your children's future is at risk due to a budget problem," Kotler said.

As we'll see throughout this series, the argument that Lakewood is "severely underfunded by the state" is open to debate. For now, let's do what regular readers know always comes next: take a data dive into Lakewood's schools.

Remember: the data I'm using above, given a very conservative estimate, suggest private schools students outnumber public school students by at least 4-to-1; the Star-Ledger's report suggests the real ratio is even higher. Let's start by looking at the population in the public schools.

Overwhelmingly, Hispanic students make up the population of the Lakewood Public School District -- far more than the rest of Ocean County, and far more than the rest of the state. It's worth noting that, as Bruce Baker and I point out, one of the best predictors of whether a school district in New Jersey is underfunded according to the state's own law is whether that district enrolls an inordinately high number of Hispanic students.

Lakewood's public schools students are also overwhelmingly in economic disadvantage, as measured by eligibility for free or reduced-price lunches.

Given this population, it's not surprising that Lakewood Public School District's Limited English Proficiency (LEP) rate is very high: over five times the state average.

To recap: the public schools in Lakewood enroll students who are overwhelmingly Hispanic and disadvantaged, with many who do not speak English as their first language.

Now, we don't have the same data for the private school students. But looking as the religious affiliations of those schools gives us much of the information we need.

The vast majority of private schools students in Lakewood go to Jewish schools. As I said in the previous post, the religious denomination of the private schools students isn't important: what's important is that the majority of the town's families have opted out of sending their children to the public schools. This is, for many in the school "choice" movement, exactly what they'd like to see: a large number of a community's families choosing not to send their children to local public district schools.

There are at least two consequences to the majority of Lakewood's families rejecting public education. First, the student population of the public schools is very different from the private schools. Second, the majority of the town's families do not have a personal interest in the public schools' success. Let me be clear: I'm not saying they want the public schools to fail; rather, whether those schools fail or succeed does not impact them personally.

This has profound effect on the Lakewood Public School District's budget. The local school board is elected by a citizenry that is not invested in the public schools in the same way as is found in most other towns and cities. Whose interests, then, will the district's budgetary decisions serve?

As I've written before, New Jersey must, by law, provide funds for all sorts of supports to private schools attended by local resident children: technology aid, security, nursing, textbooks, handicapped services, and so on. In general, it's a very small amount of the overall K-12 school budget – except in Lakewood. A huge part of the Lakewood school district's budget is spent supporting the needs of students who do not attend its schools.

The Star-Ledger also points out the district spends a lot of money on transporting private school students. The state data doesn't allow us to separate out that cost from the cost of bussing public school kids, but clearly there is an effect: Lakewood's transportation budget is very large.

There's another expense Lakewood incurs far in excess of other New Jersey school districts: private school tuition for special education students. Back to the Star-Ledger:

Lakewood expects to spend nearly $32 million on tuition this year to send special education students -- including hundreds of members of the growing Orthodox Jewish community -- to private and out-of-district schools. The bill is among the highest in the state and one of the reasons the booming Ocean County town is facing a school funding crisis.

Why do taxpayers pay private school bills?

Under federal law, all children with disabilities are entitled to a "free appropriate public education." So, if a school district does not have the staff, programs or facilities to accommodate a child's specific disability, parents can request that the district pay for a more appropriate private school.

Many parents turn to lawyers and education consultants for help. Their cases often end up before a state Office of Administrative Law judge, who rules where a student should be placed.

In Lakewood, an estimated 361 current and new special education students will be placed in private schools at the district's expense during the upcoming school year, according to the school district's budget. Another 17 students will be sent to other school districts.

Lakewood sends more than a quarter of its special education students to private or out-of-district schools, according to the data.

If you look at the percentage of all students on-roll who attend private schools, the figure is, once again, far in excess of the rest of the state.

Lakewood's private school placement rate is nearly ten times that of the rest of Ocean County. Again, this has a powerful effect on the public school district budget.

Lakewood spends more than twice what the rest of New Jersey's districts spend on tuition to other schools.

So, given the data, what can we surmise about Lakewood?

The majority of the population has opted out of sending their children to the public schools.
That majority is ethnically separate from the minority that sends their children to the public schools.
The budget of the public school allocates inordinately large sums in support of the private school population.

Let's be clear before we continue: these are facts. We can debate the cause, but the data are unambiguous on what is happening right now in Lakewood, NJ's schools.

The question we must address next, however, has greater consequences for the larger conversation on education policy: What happens when a community abandons its public schools? Again, I contend there are at least three consequences:

When a large part of a community abandons its public schools, chaos ensues and accountability dissolves.
Segregation is the inevitable consequence of school privatization.
Educators will be disrespected in a community that does not support its public schools.

The data clearly support point #2. In the next post, we'll further explore point #1.

ADDING: I'm using 2017-18 data as that is the last year for which we have audited, actual figures for the Lakewood Public School District, as opposed to projected or revised data. Lakewood is not included in the latest NJDOE fiscal dataset (User Friendly Budgets) for 2020-21.

Lakewood, NJ: Where Public Schools Are Left To Wither, Part I

2021-03-08T13:27:00.003-08:00

If you follow K12 policy, you've probably noticed that the school privatization crowd has recently become reenergized. The folks from right-wing think tanks and the professional school "choice" promoters have been pushing the idea of school vouchers hard, certain that the pandemic has created widespread dissatisfaction with our current system of public school districts.

Many times I've seen these people make the argument that private schools are fully open, and the only reason public schools are not is the intransigence of teachers unions and fecklessness of school boards. Of course, it's hardly that simple: consider that many "no excuses" charter schools -- free of both unions and BOEs -- remain closed. We also really don't know how many private schools are open, or to what extent, or with what consequences.

Nonetheless, the privatizers see an opening. And considering the number of wingnuts out there who think COVID isn't a serious threat that requires extraordinary actions to secure schools, they may be right. School privatization was, to my mind, always a secondary part of the overall conservative agenda, but that may have changed, if only in the short term.

Given the renewed focus on vouchers, I think we're justified in taking some time to really think about what it would look like if we embraced the idea of privatized schools in a "choice" system. What would it look like? If they still existed, what would the public schools do? Which students would go where? How would it affect the community? How would it affect the taxpayers?

In the upcoming series of posts, I'm going to argue that we don't need to speculate; we already have at least one example, right here in New Jersey, of what will happen if a community largely abandons its public schools.

Welcome to Lakewood*:

An administrative law judge has determined the public school district cannot fulfill its constitutional mandate to provide students a "thorough and efficient education," but stopped short of determining that the state funding formula is unconstitutional.
In a non-binding decision Judge Susan Scarola recommended that the New Jersey Commissioner of Education conduct a needs assessment of the school district's ability to meet its obligations and make "appropriate recommendations to the district."
The decision scarcely binds the Acting Education Commissioner Dr. Angelica Allen-McMillan to do anything; the recommendation may be adopted, modified or rejected by Allen-McMillan. But the harsh assessment — that the school district cannot meet its constitutional mandate — puts fresh focus on the troubled school district and pressure on the state's top education official to intervene.
The 6,000-student district faces chronic budget gaps, owing in part to a state school-funding formula that fails to account for the fact the district must also pay transportation costs for 37,000 Lakewood students attending private schools.

Yes, that's right: only a small fraction of Lakewood's students attend the public schools. And, yes, that is very unusual -- especially for a state like New Jersey.

Private school data in the United States is at the mercy of survey methodology; in other words, it's very easy to make an incomplete count of private schools students in a community, because it's hard to get to every school, especially the small ones. The Private School Survey from the National Center for Education Statistics is, however, the best data source we have on private schools. When combined with state data, it shows a remarkable story about private schooling in Lakewood. Across the state, a little under 10 percent of students attend private schools. But four in five Lakewood students are in a private school, way more than the state and way, way more than any other town in Ocean County.

A few years ago, the Star-Ledger did an extensive series of reports on Lakewood, dubbing it "N.J.'s most controversial town." The first report gives some background:

Lakewood is booming. Thanks to an influx of Orthodox Jews, it has been New Jersey's fastest-growing town over the last 20 years. It has one of the highest birth rates in the world. Housing is going up at an unprecedented pace.

Why are there so many Orthodox Jews in Lakewood?

Lakewood had long been a popular resort for Jewish vacationers when a refugee rabbi fleeing Nazis in Lithuania arrived in the 1940s to start Beth Medrash Govoha, a higher education institution where men could study the Talmud, one of the religion's sacred text.

The yeshiva, known as BMG, grew over the years into one of the largest schools of its kind in the nation, with more than 6,500 students. A thriving Orthodox Jewish community grew around the yeshiva, which included many Jews from Brooklyn's Orthodox community looking for less costly housing and a more suburban setting to raise their families.

Who else lives in Lakewood?

The population exploded from 45,000 in 1990 to more than 100,000 now, making it New Jersey's fifth-largest city.

The town is 84 percent white, 17 percent Hispanic and 4 percent black, according to the U.S. Census. There is a growing Mexican immigrant community and a large community of seniors in sprawling retirement communities, including Leisure Village. The African-American community has been shrinking in recent years.

This last paragraph is perhaps the key to understanding Lakewood's schools: while there is a large and growing Orthodox Jewish community in Lakewood, it is not the entirety of the town's population. The Hispanic and Black students in Lakewood are not being served by the town's large network of yeshivas; instead, they are enrolled in the public school district.

Now, it's clear that very few communities in the United States are exactly like Lakewood. But that doesn't mean there aren't lessons about school privatization to be learned. I have three:

When a large part of a community abandons its public schools, chaos ensues and accountability dissolves.
Segregation is the inevitable consequence of school privatization.
Educators will be disrespected in a community that does not support its public schools.

It's going to take several posts to tell this story, because it's big and complex. Fortunately, there has been some excellent reporting on Lakewood's schools, particularly from the Asbury Park Press; I'm going to lean heavily on them as I work through this series.

But in spite of the story's many twists and turns, I think it's an important one to tell it. Lakewood is a cautionary tale, and the ethnicity of the characters in it really doesn't matter much. What's important is that we understand what happens when public schools are left to whither in a community that has largely abandoned them.

I'll dig into the data next.

* All emphases in this post are mine.

We Don't Need Standardized Testing In a Pandemic

2021-02-22T18:36:00.012-08:00

UPDATE: Just as I was finishing this post, I caught a glimpse of this news:

The U.S. Department of Education extended flexibility to states today in how and when they administer mandated end-of-the-year assessments, including allowing shorter tests that can be given remotely and, in the summer, or even in the fall. The federal agency advised states to blunt the impact of the tests, suggesting the scores not be used in final grades and grade promotion decisions.

However, despite the disruption to schools from the pandemic, the federal agency did not liberate states from administering standardized tests; it will continue to require statewide assessments. Some states, including Georgia, requested waivers that would allow them to forgo standardized testing altogether this year.

As I argue below, this is a bad idea. I really hope the Biden administration can be persuaded to reconsider.

* * *

A notable bit of education policy news in New Jersey last week:

New Jersey will apply to the federal government to waive standardized testing for the current school year as districts across the state continue to cope with the constraints of the coronavirus pandemic, Gov. Phil Murphy announced Friday.

Murphy said the state has not yet received word from President Joe Biden’s administration as to whether it will accept its application to waive the federal testing requirements.

“We also recognize the importance of statewide assessments to gauge where our students’ learning,” the governor said during his latest COVID-19 briefing in Trenton. “But given the need to ensure our students’ instructional time is maximized and the levels of stress on them, our educators, our school administrators, and our families are minimized, we are putting forward this waiver request.”

The state is hardly alone, as several others have also applied for waivers from the federal mandate for testing. But there's plenty of pushback, as it's become an article of faith among certain education reformers that we must have tests, and that in a time of crisis testing is more important than ever. In Florida, for example, students will be required to show up to take their tests in person, even if their parents have been keeping them home during the pandemic. Why?

State Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran signed an order this week requiring the tests. The order said the tests are more important than ever because many struggling students are learning at home and falling behind.

Test results will “ensure that each student is given the services and supports they need to succeed in life,” the order says.

If you take Commissioner Corcoran at his word, he's going to use the tests to make sure students get what they need. But that's coming from a state that chronically underfunds its schools. If students weren't getting the supports they needed before the pandemic, what would make anyone think they'll get them now -- but only if they take a test?

Corcoran is engaging in the typically facile thinking that has become the hallmark of many who espouse the virtues of standardized testing. I have a set of questions I like to ask whenever anyone says students must take a standardized test:

- What are you going to do with the test results?

A core concept of assessment is that tests must be shown to be valid for the purposes in which they will be used. In other words: you should make a separate argument for every proposed use of a test. A test that may be valid to use for, say, determining whether there are enough overall resources in the education system isn't necessarily valid for the purpose of determining whether a student should pass to the next grade.

Psyshometricians often speak of making a validity argument in favor of the use of a test for a particular purpose. That argument should touch upon the relevancy of the outcomes to a specific use, the consequences of making decisions based on these outcomes, the opportunity to learn the content in the test, and other factors.

One of the biggest failings in our current testing system is that we use statewide standardized tests for many purposes -- even if no one has presented an argument for those uses. Some lawmakers have argued that these tests should be used as a graduation exam or to determine grade promotion, even though most have never put forward an argument that the test is valid for that purpose. Some say test outcomes run through a statistical model should be used to evaluate teachers, again without making an argument against the many reasons that's a bad idea.

That's especially true this year. The fact is that too much of what is happening in schools is out of the control of teachers, administrators, or students. Students have had wildly uneven opportunities to learn during the pandemic, and it's not fair to visit consequences on them or their teachers based on outcomes in this year's tests.

One implication those who argue for standardized testing make is that teachers need the data to help students make up for the learning they've lost over the past year. But these tests provide little meaningful information for teachers. First, the results take a long time to come back, so they aren't useful in real time. Second, teachers aren't allowed to see the questions, which makes them mostly useless in informing instruction. Third, there usually aren't enough items in each area of content knowledge to provide reliable data. Teachers need to assess their students and get to work quickly; these tests weren't designed to help with that task.

So, if the tests aren't going to be used for teacher evaluation, or promotion/graduation, or allocating resources, or informing instruction... why do we need to give them? For what purpose, exactly, should they be used? No one should advocate for administering tests unless they can give a specific answer to this question.

- What is the cost of administering the tests?

I'm not just talking about dollar costs, although those can be significant. But the truth is that we have known for a good long while that administering standardized tests in math and English has extracted a price on students, educators, and the K-12 education system aside from mere dollars.

Testing has narrowed the curriculum, especially in districts with high levels of student poverty and, consequently, relatively low average test scores. The pressure on students to perform on these tests has been well documented. Several major cheating scandals highlight the pressure adults also feel, leading to moral compromises that would likely be absent in an environment without such high-stakes attached to the tests.

Add this to the current worries about contracting COVID-19 in school and it becomes clear that the cost of administering these tests this spring will be very, very high. Which leads me to ask...

- Is the cost of testing worth it?

What, exactly, will statewide standardized test outcomes tell us that we didn't already know, or that we couldn't find out some other way? That students didn't gain as much learning as they would have without the pandemic? We already know this; and again, it's not like the tests will give educators data they couldn't get other ways that are much faster and more detailed.

Will we learn that students who are economically disadvantaged need more resources to equalize their educational opportunity? We already knew that before the pandemic. And does anyone really think that otherwise reluctant politicians will be persuaded to dole out more funds when they see this year's test scores? Really?

It's worth noting that all tests are subject to construct irrelevant variation, a fancy term that means the outcomes can vary based on things other than a student's knowledge. Students who take tests in less-than-optimal conditions, for example, are more likely to do poorly than they would if they were in better circumstances.

This year, the differences in the testing environments will be more stark than ever. Students in districts that remain fully remote will take their tests in widely-ranging home environments. Students who take their tests in school may be in smaller cohorts, or crammed together in full classes. The COVID mitigations they face during the tests varies widely, as does the technology available to take the tests.

Variations in test-taking conditions has always been great, but now those conditions will very even more than before. How, then, can we trust that the test is measuring what it's supposed to actually measure?

Normally, I believe that test data can be useful for research and policymaking purposes -- although I think we could get data just as good as we have now for a lot less cost and bother by cutting back the amount of testing and removing unvalidated attachments to high-stakes decisions.

But the more I think about it, I the more I come to the conclusion that the data this year isn't going to be of much use. Why, then, go through the bother of testing kids when the cost is so high and the value of the results is so low?

The tests can wait a year. Give everyone a break.

ADDING: Honestly, this makes no sense to me:

“To be successful once schools have re-opened, we need to understand the impact COVID-19 has had on learning and identify what resources and supports students need,” Ian Rosenblum, acting assistant education secretary, wrote in a letter to state education leaders.

What decisions exactly are you going to make based on those scores? If you can't answer that, you don't need the data.

Identifying the resources and supports students need is the job of schools. The government's job is to get schools the extra money they're going to need so schools can provide resources and supports. Go work on that and leave the educational decisions to educators.

The Fiscal Impact Of Charter Schools on School Districts: Thoughts on My New Report

2021-02-16T13:38:00.007-08:00

If you follow me on Twitter, you probably noticed a few comments about a new report I have out with the Fordham Institute: Robbers or Victims? Charter Schools and District Finances. I'm putting my thoughts here so you know they are mine and mine alone. Hopefully, I can shed light on what the report finds and what I believe that means.

Let me start by saying I don't think a have a false sense of my place in the ongoing debate about education policy: I'm a teacher and blogger who went and got a PhD in the field, who continues to teach K12 (but also teaches grad students in education policy part-time), and has a bit of following on social media (although not nearly as large as others). My blog is full of posts that call out what I believe is bad research in support of education "reform" -- especially charter schools. I also put out reports now and then for a variety of groups that have cast doubt on charter school "success" stories.

Given this, it was a surprise to me when I got an email last year from Fordham, asking about a working paper based on my dissertation. Fordham is well known as a supporter of charter schools, and regularly produces research supporting their expansion. Why would they want to work with me? Did they know who I am and what I've done?

It turns out they did. They were considering doing a study very similar to what I had done in my dissertation, assessing the impact of charter school growth on the finances of "hosting" public school districts. In other words: what happens to district finances when charter schools start proliferating within a district's boundaries?

What I had found – and what I still found in this latest report – is that as charter schools grow, per pupil spending in school districts increases. This is in contradiction to what some charter critics have suggested: that spending in host districts schools goes down as charters grow. To be honest, it was contrary to what I thought I was going to find,,, until I started digging further into the data.

I'll go into that in a minute; first, let me explain why I took the gig.

Working With Fordham

We are obviously in a time of intense polarization along ideological lines -- and that includes education policy. For myself, I draw a distinction between those who I think are arguing in good faith, and those who aren't. I'll admit it's not always a bright, clear line; however, I am trying to be open to the possibility that people can disagree on things like charter schools but still have meaningful and productive dialogue.

Before I agreed to working on the report, I did take a second look at Fordham's body of work. Some I think is just wrong -- not so much in its methods as in the conclusions they come to based on their findings. But some I think is valid and worthwhile. I disagree with Fordham's president, Michael Petrilli, about any numbers of questions around education policy. But I also acknowledge he's been one of the few charter school supporters who's willing to concede that "no excuses" charters do not enroll similar populations as public district schools (a point I find so obvious that I don't believe I can have a good faith discussion with anyone who doesn't agree).

I also knew that if I turned down the gig, someone else would do it, and I wouldn't get a chance to further my work in this field. Yes, I got paid... but it's hardly a fortune, especially considering the amount of time I've put in (and I understand my fee was substantially less than many other better-known researchers who have written reports for them).

There was always the agreement that there would be an introduction that would not be under my name. So long as everything else met my approval, I thought that was fair. I suppose I could have asked for a "rebuttal," but I didn't want it subjected to their editorial review; hence, this post.

Let me say one other thing that readers can take or leave depending on whether they want to trust my word: this was one of the most rigorous review processes I've been involved with. That's not to say the work couldn't be improved; as I say below, rereading after getting reactions this week, I do wish we had made some revisions.

But I was allowed to suggest my own reviewers, and considered myself lucky to have two of the best researchers working in this field, Paul Bruno and Charisse Gulosino, agree. David Griffith at Fordham was also quite demanding, and insisted on having me spell out in great detail nearly every decision I made in creating both the dataset and the models.

Again: this report is hardly the last word on whether and how charter school growth affects school district finances. There are several very big limitations on what I found, and the approach I took does not at all lead us to a definitive answer as to whether charter growth is helpful, harmful, or neutral to district finances. That said, I hope, at the very least, the report helps frame the question in a way that is useful. Because, until now, I don't think many charter supporters (like Fordham) or skeptics (like myself) have been viewing the problem the right way.

Fixed Costs and Charter School Growth

Let's set up an example with numbers that are easy to work with. Imagine a school district with 5,000 students in 10 schools, each with 500 students. Each of those schools has 20 classes of 25 students each. That means 20 classroom teachers –– but it also means one principal, one librarian, one guidance counselor, one nurse, etc.

The salaries and benefits paid to the classroom teachers in this example are instructional spending: spending that goes directly to the instruction of students. The principal, librarian, counselor, etc. salaries are support spending: spending that is for the support of students but not directly related to instruction. This is an important distinction to keep in mind.

Next, a charter school comes to town and begins drawing students away from the district. Let's say it takes away five percent of the enrollment, or one classroom's worth of kids.

We'll assume this happens across the district: every school loses 25 students to the charter.

What happens across the district? Well, each school now has the equivalent of 19 classrooms, not 20. To maintain the same instructional cost per pupil, the district will have to let one teacher go at each school. This might be through retirement and hiring freezes, or through outright firing of teachers. Obviously, the district will have the ability to shuffle teachers around as needed between buildings, so the teacher reductions can play out in various ways.

But the support personnel are another story: it's unlikely, especially in the early stages of charter growth, that the district can or will get rid of support personnel in a way that parallels enrollment losses as easily as it can shed instructional personnel. A principal, for example, is needed for every building: it isn't likely the district will close a building and get rid of a principal when it's only lost a few students in each building.

In this scenario, after enrollment losses to charter schools, instructional personnel (teachers) to students remains 25-to-1. But support staff to pupil goes from 500-to-1 to 475-to-1. This is an increase in spending per pupil: fewer pupils per staff member will raise the cost per pupil of that staff member.

This is an example of what we'll call a fixed cost. Scholars of school finance have, in fact, noted this for decades: some spending in schools is easier to adjust than other spending when enrollment falls. The question I tried to ask in this report is: does the data reflect this trend?

Spending, Revenues, and Charter Growth

It turns out that, in many states, we see what I'm showing above. Here's the graph from the report showing how charter growth correlates with instructional spending:

And here's the graph for support spending:

The correlation for support spending is significant in many more states than instructional spending; further, the effect measured is larger for support than for instruction spending. I believe this is fairly solid evidence that there are differences in the ways different types of spending respond to charter growth, something economists refer to as elasticity.

Now, an important question is why the spending is allowed to rise. Don't school districts have a limited amount of funds available to them? Wouldn't they just have to deal with the enrollment losses and fixed costs by adjusting their spending as best as they could?

Not necessarily. First, it could be that other areas of spending are being cut, possibly to the detriment of the district, that don't show up in the data. The spending I'm tracking is current spending, which excludes things like debt service and capital outlays. It could be that districts are holding off on facilities spending, or other types of spending not included in my dataset.*

But there's another possibility: that more per pupil revenue is actually being put into the system to help address those fixed costs. It could, in fact, be the same amount of revenue but spread out over fewer students.

My analysis shows evidence that's happening -- but the type of revenue, like the type of spending, seems to differ. School districts get revenues from three main sources: the federal government, the state, and localities. Federal revenues average less than 10 percent of the total, although that varies from district to district. The rest is some combination of state and local revenues.

The report shows a significant difference in how state and local revenues correlate with charter growth. Here, for example, is the correlation between charter share and state revenues:

And here it is with local revenues:

In many states, local revenue increases correlate more significantly with charter school growth. Why would that be? Part of the reason may be that, in states where charter schools receive funding directly from the state, local revenues don't decline when students leave local districts. The local school taxes, in other words, don't necessarily go down as enrollment declines. The same amount of revenue spread out over fewer students will lead to higher revenues per pupil. But if that same state is giving state funding based on a per pupil formula, per pupil revenues from the state won't increase.

Now, a charter supporter may look at this and say: "Great! In many states, there's no fiscal harm to local districts as charters come in! This proves charter schools don't harm district budgets!"

Not so fast...

Cost vs. Spending

One of the worst errors people make in trying to understand school finance is conflating cost with spending. Spending is easy to understand: it's simply the monies you put out toward educating students. OK, it can get a bit more complicated, especially when trying to categorize different types of spending... but it's important to understand that spending is not cost.

Cost is the amount of spending you need to get a student to meet a particular educational outcome: a test score, a graduation rate, etc. You'll often hear critics of public schools bemoan what they say are the out-of-control spending amounts in public versus private schools, claiming this proves public schools are wasting money. What they don't understand (or do, but won't admit) is that different schools with different contexts having different students have different costs.

A school that is located in a more competitive labor market has higher costs. So does a school enrolling more children with a special education need, or who don't speak English at home, or is located in an area with a higher concentration of poverty. Getting to a place where these children have equal educational opportunity requires more resources and, therefore, indicates a higher cost.

Charter school supporters will often point out that charters educate their students at a lower level of per pupil spending than district schools. But that misses the point: charters often have a lower per pupil cost. Charters enroll fewer students with costly special education needs than district schools. In many jurisdictions, charters enroll smaller proportions of English language learners, or students in economic disadvantage. In these cases, their cost is less than a school district's; simply comparing per pupil spending figures misses this critical point.

It also ignores the fact that most school districts have distinctly different responsibilities than their charter school neighbors. Public school districts have to be ready to find a seat for any child who comes into their boundaries at any time of year. They have to enroll students in all grade levels, and not just the ones they choose to offer. They have to offer curricular choices and extracurriculars to their students that those in charters may elect to forego when enrolling. And in many cases, school districts have to provide services for both district and charter students, such as transportation.

So it may be that districts need additional monies because their costs are higher. But it's also true that spending isn't always going to improve an educational outcome. It could be that more money put into a school doesn't increase student learning or opportunity: that spending would be inefficient. The term often carries a pejorative sense with it, as if anything inefficient can simply be addressed by better choices. But sometimes those choices aren't clear, and sometimes we expect greater efficiency from those who haven't had the power to make those choices -- like whether charter schools should proliferate.

It is, to my mind, very likely that the additional spending that accompanies charter growth is inefficient, because that additional spending is mostly for fixed costs. For that reason, it is also very likely that school districts can't improve their practices to make themselves more efficient; in other words, so that their additional spending could improve student outcomes. It may well be that the increased per pupil spending simply reflects the reality that districts need to do the same job as always, but for fewer students. For this reason, it's impractical to ask a district to perfectly reduce its administrative, support, and facilities spending in alignment with their enrollment losses to charters.

So, no, this report is not a finding that charters don't harm school district finances; neither is it a finding that they do. It is, instead, a description of what seems to be happening to school districts as charters come in -- although that description comes with many caveats attached...

Limitations

I'll be doing a wonky post about the problems with modeling spending and revenue changes when charters grow at some point in the next few weeks. But I want to address some questions I've received about the limitations on this study.

- A note on my analysis: what I'm using is known as a fixed-effects model. The basic idea is that every school district has unique characteristics, and we should account for those characteristics when estimating the effects of charter growth on district finances. We also need to account for changes that affect all districts year-to-year. A fixed-effects model allows for that, and for other varying factors that may also affect spending, such as different student populations, density, labor market effects, etc.

But a fixed-effects model cannot say with certainty that changes in charter growth caused the correlated changes in financial measures. It could be that there are other factors involved that account for the changes -- we just don't know. That said, the estimates in the report provide enough evidence that the relationship may exist that it's worth investigating further.

- My measure of charter school penetration assumes that all students in a charter school would otherwise attend public school in the district where the charters is located. There is no federal data available that directly ties a charter school student to their "home" district, so this is really the best I can do with the given data.

We know, however, that charter school students can and do cross school district boundaries, so the percentages of charter penetration are not exact. There are also quirks in some state's charter regulations (California is a good example) where distant districts can authorize charters, making the figures even more imprecise.

That said, there is previous research that uses the same methods I do and compares it to actual district-level data that gives precise measures of charter penetration. That research generally shows the measures lead to similar estimates. So, yes, I'm using a proxy measure -- but there's reason to believe it's a pretty good proxy,.

- There is one aspect to this last point that requires more caution when approaching the estimates: virtual charter schools. While the overall percentage of students in these schools is low, there is more penetration in some states and districts than others. Tying virtual charter enrollments to district boundaries is obviously not going to work, and that will bias the estimates, although it's impossible to say how much.

I did some work to try to mitigate against this, and continue to work to solve the problem. The biggest issue is the data, which is not very good. That said, I should have been more clear in the report about this issue -- and that's entirely on me.

- One of the biggest issues we came across is dealing with the problem of scale. We could, for example, ask this as the research question: "How do charter schools affect district finances not including the effects of enrollment losses?" That would allow us to control for those losses in the model... but what if we think (as I do) that enrollment losses are the primary mechanism through which charters change district finances? If we included a scale measure in the model, it would "eat up" the charter effect, because detangling charter effects and enrollment losses is impossible.

The problem is further complicated because other scale effects unrelated to charter growth are very likely impacting district finances. So we have to account for scale, but not scale changes due to charters. This was tricky, and, as the appendix on this in the report suggests, the solution is definitely up for debate. I'll discuss this more in the next post.

Let me just add this: if anyone thinks one report using one method and one set of data by one guy settles any question of public policy... then you really don't understand how social science works. Which brings me to...

My Takeaways On All This

As I've said on this blog and elsewhere many times: I am not for abolishing charter schools. I started my K-12 teaching career in a charter, run by good people who were committed to their students and their school. I have seen repeatedly in my teaching career that some students are not well suited to the "typical" public district school, and would benefit from an alternative that better suits their needs. I have no problem with charters being proud of their students and their schools, and I have never and would never criticize a parent for making the choice to enroll their child in a charter.

What I am against are the facile, often lazy, and sometimes outright mendacious arguments made in favor of charter schools by some -- some -- of their most ardent supporters.

There is no question that there are bad actors in the charter sector, and that they have caused unnecessary waste, fraud, and abuse against the taxpayers and families they are supposed to serve. There is no question that the current charter authorization and oversight system is completely inadequate to the task and needs to be reformed; consequently, many charters act in ways that are not in the best interest of citizens.

I am also deeply concerned that charters, particularly of the "no excuses" variety, are imposing a type of education on students of color that would never be tolerated by white parents in affluent school districts. The stories of students being denigrated and subject to carceral educational practices are well-known and far too common.

Some argue the gains these schools show are worth it. I first want to point out that the overall effect of charters on student outcomes has been little to nothing; at best, the positive effects are confined to "no excuses" urban charters. The peer-reviewed literature on charter schools of this type often shows a positive effect; what usually gets missed, however, is why those effects occur. I've seen no evidence that these charters have pedagogical or organizational advantages that lead to better student outcomes. What seems to be happening instead is that certain self-selected students benefit from longer days, longer years, and one-on-one tutoring.

These things cost money, which begs a question: If we can find additional funds for some students in charters to have more resources, why can't we find it for all students, including those in public schools?

My point in reiterating all this is that the debate about charter schools has to move to a new level; the old tropes weren't accurate and we have to get past them. So I have little patience at this point with those in the pro-charter camp who dismiss the many, many problems charter schools are creating for public education. And no, I don't think there is equivalent bad-faith argument on "both sides."

But neither do I think the charter-skeptics, of which I count myself, have had the issue of charter school growth's effect on district finances completely right. There are mechanisms and compensatory policies that, in many states, appear to increase per pupil spending and revenues at school districts as charters move in. This doesn't mean that districts don't suffer fiscal harm; rather, the simple story of "charters taking money away from districts" is more subtle and complex than what some have understood.

One last, completely self-indulgent thought: the more I do this kind of work, the more humble I've become about it. It is far too easy to screw up a dataset, or make a mistake when coding a model, or make a conceptual error, or overlook some critical factor. I tend to get obsessive about triple checking things, but my biggest fear remains putting something out that is just flat out wrong.

Yes, some research is more rigorous than others. Sometimes people come to conclusions their analysis doesn't warrant. Some people are clearly hacks. But if you're transparent, and you're open about your limitations, and you're willing to have a good faith discussion about your findings, I'm not going to fault you, no matter what you believe or what you find. Because I know this stuff isn't easy.

I didn't always take that view; I try to now. More to come.

* I did do some modeling on this, but I grew suspicious of the data, as it's not clear states report capital spending consistently. More later.

January, 2021 Update on NJ COVID School Opening Plans: Still Racially Biased, Still Inadequately Funded For Many

2021-02-07T09:52:00.001-08:00

The estimable Colleen O'Dea from NJ Spotlight News continues to do New Jersey a service by updating the data on school instructional models during the pandemic. I've been collecting her updates, including the latest one from late in January, and matching it to enrollment and funding data from the NJDOE.

I did my first report on this for the New Jersey Policy Perspective back in October, and have updated my findings here several times since (here and here). Let me be clear: these are not reports about how many students and families are electing to participate in remote, hybrid, or in-person learning. Rather, I'm showing what the options are for students in their school districts.

A school district, for example, may offer hybrid learning (a combination of limited classroom time and virtual learning at home) to its students; however, those students may choose to stay home full-time. But a student in a "remote" district won't have that option: they never get to decide whether they want to come to school at least part-time.

There are four categories of instructional models in the data

In-person, where all instruction takes place in school (again, NJ law says students could still elect to learn from home).
Remote, where there is no in-person learning available.
Hybrid, where there is a mix of in-person and remote learning for the district's students.
Combination (combo), where different schools within the district have different models.

The reports I've been doing, based on O'Dea's data, have been getting a fair bit of attention for two reasons. First, there is a clear racial bias in the instructional models being offered. Students of color are much more likely to be in districts where only remote learning is offered.

Some have suggested this is because Black parents are especially wary of sending their children to school, and districts are responding to their wishes. But that brings up the second finding of my reports: the remote-only districts are far more likely to be underfunded, as measured by the state's own law on school funding.

This makes sense, because a district that offers hybrid learning very likely needs more resources (per student) than a district that doesn't. Most hybrid districts are cohorting their students: dividing them into groups and then rotating them so class sizes are small and social distancing can be maintained. To do this, there have too be enough staff to deliver remote and in-person instruction simultaneously, even as fixed costs like transportation and facilities management remain the same. That's going to cost money.

Now that we've got the background, let's see where New Jersey stands as of now on its pandemic instructional plans. We'll start by looking at how things have changed since the fall.

A couple of weeks ago Governor Murphy said more schools were opening for in-person instruction. But my data-crunching shows we actually have more students in remote learning than we did back in September. Granted, we had more students in districts with unknown plans at the start of the year; still, the numbers of in-person, hybrid, and combo students haven't changed much.

What's interesting is that it appears that there were districts who tried to move to hybrid in the fall, but then stopped and went back to remote going into the winter. Was this a reaction to the wave of new cases that started when the weather got cold?

Let's next look at the racial/ethnic profile of students attending districts with different instructional models.

As I pointed out in October, Black students were more likely to be in remote districts, as opposed to hybrid or combo districts. That hasn't changed; if you're a Black student in New Jersey, you're still more likely to be in a district with fully-remote instruction than a district with at least some in-person learning.

Same thing for Hispanic students:

I'm not quite sure about the dip in combo districts' Hispanic percentage, although the number of districts using that model is small enough that only a few would have to change to see a significant shift. That said, there is a clear and persistent difference in the ethnic profile of hybrid and remote districts.

This is naturally reflected in the percentages of white students:

In New Jersey, white students are more likely to have the option of attending school in-person at least part of the time compared to Black or Hispanic students.

It's worth noting that there are also differences between students who are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, a proxy measure of student economic disadvantage:

So why is this? Well, as Bruce Baker and I have pointed out many times (here's the latest), Black and Hispanic students are far more likely to be in school districts that the state's own law says are underfunded. And it turns out the districts most likely to be fully remote are those that are underfunded—a condition that has remained the same throughout the pandemic.

You can see my figures from October in the NJPP report. Let's jump ahead a bit to November; the situation remained the same.

Almost all school districts that are deeply underfunded—more than $5,000 per student—were offering only remote learning back in the fall. That changed little in December...

And even less in January:

I don't see how anyone can argue that school funding has nothing to do with pandemic schooling: Consistently, the students in the most underfunded New Jersey school districts have been denied any opportunity for at least some in-person instruction.

With vaccines around the corner, the school year halfway over, and the new state budget season coming up, I don't know if we can fix this in the short term. But we have got to acknowledge that long-term, structural deficiencies in school funding are creating unequal education opportunities for New Jersey's students. The pandemic didn't create these inequalities, but it did make it impossible to argue that they don't matter. Addressing this problem has got to be at the top of the state's policy agenda.

I'll keep updating my findings as new data becomes available. Until then, we've got some other important things to discuss—stand by...

New Jersey's School COVID-19 Operating Plans: Still Racially Biased, Still Inadequately Funded For Many Students

2020-12-03T19:11:00.009-08:00

Earlier this year, I posted about the racial inequities in New Jersey's school reopening plans, which were all affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Following that blog post, I used some updated data, refined my analysis a bit, and wrote about it over at the NJPP website. In both of these analyses I relied on data published at NJ Spotlight (an invaluable source for news about education policy in the Garden State).

Turns out NJ Spotlight just updated their list of NJ school districts and their COVID-19 operating plans. Let's first give props to Spotlight's Colleen O'Dea for keeping on top of these data updates.

With a few tweaks of my statistical program's code, it's not too hard to see how things have changed over the last few months. But let's review what I found back in September:

About half of the state's students were in districts that only offered fully remote classes, while one-third were in districts that offered a hybrid of remote and in-person learning.
White students were more likely to have the option to receive in-person instruction than Black or Hispanic students.
The districts that offered only remote instruction were more likely to be underfunded -- according to the state's own law -- than districts offering hybrid instruction.

Before I get to the update, let me be clear about what I'm presenting. The analysis here is not what students are actually doing; it's what their districts offer. Governor Murphy has required all districts to offer fully remote instruction during the pandemic. But some districts also offer students the option of at least some in-person learning. What I'm presenting here are the options districts offer their students and their families -- it's not what those families actual decide to do.

That said, let's see what's changed:

Back in September, about one-half of New Jersey's students were in fully remote districts. That's changed a bit: somewhat fewer students are now in districts where remote is their only option. A bigger change is that the districts whose plans weren't in the data back in September are now being tracked. The upshot is that more students are now in hybrid districts than back in September: where 3 in 10 students had the hybrid option in September, now 4 in 10 do.

Let's see if that's changed the racial disparities in whether in-person schooling is offered:

So far as Black students are concerned, there's been little change. 7.3 percent of students in hybrid districts were Black back in September; now it's 7.8 percent. The remote districts were 20 percent Black; now they're 21 percent.

The graph above shows a distinct change in the percentage of Hispanic students in combination districts -- districts that offer hybrid in some grades and remote in others. But remember: these districts enroll less than ten percent of all students -- they're not a big factor. There's actually very little change for Hispanic students in their options. Like Black students, they are more likely to be enrolled in remote districts than hybrids.

In September, hybrid districts had more white students than remote districts. Again, little has changed: if you're a white student in New Jersey, you're more likely to be in a hybrid district than a remote one.

So there was a clear racial bias in COVID-19 school operating plans back in September... and that bias has not gone away. Why is that?

As I noted back in September, whether a district offered in-person learning was clearly correlated with whether that district is adequately funded:

New Jersey's school funding law, the School Funding Reform Act (SFRA), sets an "adequacy budget" per pupil. This is the amount the state's own law says a district needs to provide an adequate education for its students. SFRA recognizes that schools serving students in economic disadvantage, or who are limited English proficient, or who have a special education need, need more resources to equalize educational opportunity.

Unfortunately, New Jersey has not followed the state's own law when it comes to school funding. There are many districts that are inadequately funded -- some by more than $5,000 per pupil.

There are several different ways to calculate the adequacy gap. What I do here is slightly different than what Bruce Baker and I did for our latest report on SFRA, but by either method, there are about 130,000 students in these severely underfunded districts. In September, I found that just about all of these students were in school districts that only offered remote learning.

Well, in December we now have more children in hybrid programs. But guess what? Nearly all of the students in severely underfunded districts are still in schools that only offer remote learning.

Put another way: In September, nearly all of the students in underfunded districts were only offered remote learning. Today, in December, these students still can only access remote learning.

School districts that do not have adequate funding don't have the same access to revenues to maintain their facilities, including their HVAC systems. As Bruce and I show, these districts have fewer staff per pupil; it's much harder to offer both remote and in-person learning when you don't have enough staff to divide up the responsibilities for two modes of teaching. Underfunded districts are hard-pressed to provide their students and staff with PPE and other necessary supplies to make in-person schooling safe. They won't have the custodial staff necessary to increase work hours for extra cleaning, or the technology to implement instruction that allows for students who are in-person and on-line to learn together.

There is no question that funding adequacy is a major factor in determining whether a school district is able to offer in-person instruction. If funding didn't matter, why haven't at least some of the state's inadequately funded districts started offering in-person instruction? They've had the time to plan -- what they haven't had are the resources.

As I said back in September: the pandemic has surfaced the consequences of inadequate and inequitable school funding. More recent data confirms this basic truth. I know we're all waiting for the vaccine, and for a return to some semblance of normality -- but we can't go back to normal. The pandemic is a wake-up call. It is wrong to continue to deny schools what the state's own law says they need to do their jobs.

Much more to come on what it will take to equalize educational opportunity here in New Jersey, and elsewhere. Stand by...

Trump and Christie: Everything Teachers Stand Against

2020-09-30T13:31:00.005-07:00

Most of what needs to be said about Donald Trump’s appalling performance last night has been said. But I want to quickly add two thoughts.

First, as an educator, I want to make sure we acknowledge that the massive damage Trump has done to our country includes his corrupting influence on American children. Every day, teachers go into our schools and try to instill important values in our students: respect, honesty, integrity, civility, modesty, empathy. Donald Trump’s whole life, however, has been a wholesale rejection of every personal characteristic a citizen in a democracy should strive to embody.

Donald Trump can't even lift himself to the level of behavior expected in an elementary school. His preening, whining, blustering foolishness would never be tolerated in a second grader. His inability to accept responsibility for his actions would earn him a conference in the principal’s office with his parents. His casual disregard for the truth would result in a string of Ns ("Needs Improvement") on his report card.

We’ve had many bad presidents in my lifetime; not one, however, has been so craven, so boorish, so full of contempt for others that they didn't have some positive attribute that a teacher could point to. But not this man -- there isn’t a single quality in the leader of our nation that an American student should emulate.

The fact that a man of such low character holds high office makes it that much more difficult for teachers to convince their students that the hard work of making yourself into a better person is worth the effort. Kids need role models; foremost among those role models should be the president. Yet every time he opens his mouth, he demonstrates to our children how not to behave.

Second: for eight long, exhausting years, I watched as Chris Christie drove my beloved state into the ground. He was nearly as repulsive as Trump: he mocked women, denigrated teachers, pushed policies that were demonstrably harmful, indulged himself while others suffered, and just generally acted like a horse’s ass.

Christie was the most unpopular governor in American when he finally left office. Amazingly, someone thought that was the perfect guy to put on TV. And, true to form, last night he came to Donald Trump’s defense.

And there it is! Christie explains away Trump refusing to condemn White Supremacy tonight by:

A) lying and saying Trump actually spoke against it

AND

B) claiming Christie himself didn’t hear the answer

AND

C) saying Trump was being sarcastic (?) pic.twitter.com/CHE9YQhcS5
— Matt Katz (@mattkatz00) September 30, 2020

Donald Trump could not speak out forcefully against racism and violence… and Chris Christie made excuses for him. Why? Who knows? Maybe it’s because, like all bullies, he’s intimidated by the bigger bully.

Maybe it’s because he thinks getting a tax break is more important than saving democracy. Maybe he has deluded himself into thinking he has a chance at reentering politics at some point, and he doesn’t want to alienate Trump’s small but vocal base.

Ultimately, all that matters is that we see Republicans like Chris Christie for what they are: Donald Trump’s enablers, devoid of any honor or sense of shame. They should be shunned and mocked by decent people everywhere -- as much as Trump is.

Correcting the Hacks on NJ Taxes

2020-09-19T12:14:00.009-07:00

Nothing makes me crazier than hacky discussions of tax and fiscal policy. And if you want the hackiest hacking about New Jersey's taxes, there's only one place to go: the Star-Ledger's opinion pages, where you'll find conservative Mike DuHaime and "liberal" (snort) Julie Roginsky hacking out the hackiest fiscal hacking imaginable:

Mike: Trenton Democrats will never let a good crisis go to waste. They are using COVID to raise income taxes, raise business taxes, raise taxes on healthcare and borrow billions. I am surprised Sweeney and Coughlin are supporting an income tax increase. The top 1% of earners in New Jersey are paying 40% of New Jersey’s income taxes. The top 10% pay 70% of the taxes. Wealthy people are leaving New Jersey, and as they leave, it is the middle class who keep getting more and more of the tax burden.

Julie: This deal fell into place because Speaker Coughlin was committed to provide real relief to working middle-class families and was finally able to spearhead an agreement that does just that by providing families with children with the money to pay for back-to-school expenses and other bills next year.

Mike: This is less than one-half of 1% of a tax credit for the average New Jersey household. Taxpayers deserve structural reforms that lower the cost of government and lower our heavy tax burden.

Julie: I agree, Mike. But in all the years a Republican governor was at the helm, he never lowered the income tax rate for the middle class. This is the first real tax break middle class workers are getting in a generation.

Some debate: the Democrat agrees that New Jersey needs "...structural reforms that lower the cost of government and lower our heavy tax burden." The assumption by both, of course, is informed by received wisdom in Trenton: New Jersey is a heavily taxed state with out of control spending.

You'll also note Roginsky doesn't push back on DuHaime's claim that the state's top earners are paying an inordinately high share of the taxes. What a real debater would have noted is that simply focusing on income taxes is wrong when the state raises revenues through a mix of taxes, including gas, sales, transfer, corporate, and so on. Further, state taxes should be considered in combination with local taxes, as various states divide up responsibilities for providing services differently.

Since DuHaim is implying that New Jersey residents are leaving the state due to high taxes and high spending, let's take a moment to cut through the hackery and look at some basic facts.

1) New Jersey collects higher taxes than the US average, but is not a huge outlier in tax collections. We're number 8 in state and local taxes as a percentage of personal income, according to federal data collected from the Tax Policy Center.

But remember that taxes are not the only sources of revenue for a state; across the nation, taxes only accounted for about one-half of all general state revenue in 2017.

2) When calculating own source state and local revenue as a percentage of personal income, New Jersey is below the national average. We're ranked number 31, well below the national average.

3) New Jersey's state and local governments spend less of its citizens' personal income than most other states. On average state and local governments in the U.S. spend 18.3 percent of personal income on direct general expenditures; New Jersey, in contrast, spends 16.0 percent.

4) New Jersey is better than most of its neighboring states, and the U.S. as a whole, in tax progressiveness; however, the top 1 percent in the state still pay less in overall state and local taxes, as a percentage of income, than the middle class. In many states, the bottom 20 percent pay more of their income in state and local taxes than the top 1 percent. Thankfully, that isn't true in New Jersey; however, the top 1 percent still pay less overall than the middle 20 percent.

5) Tax flight of the wealthy from New Jersey is a myth that has been debunked for years. Let's have Sheila Reynertson of NJPP explain it:

As NJPP points out here, the number of wealthy taxpayers in the state has been growing, despite all the talk of this being a high-tax state.

To recap:

New Jersey isn't an inordinately high-tax state.
New Jersey is a relatively low spending state.
New Jersey's wealthiest residents pay less in state and local taxes than its least affluent residents.
The number of wealthy taxpayers has been steadily growing in New Jersey for years.

So please don't listen to the political hacks when they tell you we desperately need massive spending cuts. What we need is smart, targeted revenue growth that asks the wealthiest residents to pay their fair share. The millionaire's tax is a meaningful step in the right direction.

Racial and Class Bias In New Jersey's School Reopening Plans

2020-09-08T13:00:00.000-07:00

Most New Jersey school districts are starting the 2020-21 school year this week -- although the way they are starting varies quite a bit. This year, some districts are fully remote, while others are offering a limited form of in-person instruction known as a "hybrid" model. Many of the districts offering the hybrid are rotating students in cohorts that switch between in-person and remote instruction; this way, students get at least some time in their school buildings.

The Murphy administration initially wanted all districts to offer some form of in-person instruction; however, many pushed back, saying they were not prepared. A large part of the problem is staffing: many districts are having trouble finding replacements for the wave of teachers who retired early or took leaves of absence rather than return during a pandemic. Governor Murphy has since allowed districts to apply to start the year remotely.

NJ Spotlight published a list late last week of which school districts -- including charter schools and private schools approved for special education -- would be implementing which model to start the year. I thought it was worth taking some time to crunch the numbers, even if many plans are, as of this writing, still under review. The list I'm using omits almost 200 districts, including every one in Hudson County. Still, it's instructive to see where we are as of now.

I should note before I start that a hybrid program does not require a student to attend in person. Murphy made clear months ago that if a family wants their student to attend schools fully remotely, they can. A hybrid program, then, is actually the possibility of attending school part-time, if parents so choose.

Let's start by looking at how many students are enrolled in schools implementing different types of plans. I'm omitting students in private schools, but including charter school students.

About one-quarter of students are in schools where the data on their reopening is not yet available. Of the remaining districts and charter schools, only one percent are in fully in-person schools. "Combination" districts are those where some schools are remote and some are in-person or hybrid; only six percent of students are in these schools.

The remainder of students are split nearly in half: part going to fully remote schools, part going to hybrid schools. I'm going to leave out fully in-person and combination schools for clarity's sake in the rest of my charts because the numbers are relatively small. Let's take a look at what types of students are attending what types of schools.

Of all the students who are attending a hybrid program, 62 percent are white. Compare that to remote programs, where only 30 percent of students are white. That percentage is close to the percentage of unknown programs.

When considering white and Asian students together, the differences are just as pronounced. New Jersey schools using a hybrid plan are more likely to enroll white and Asian students than schools that are fully remote. Here's the data in reverse: enrollment of Black and Hispanic students by plan type.

Hybrid schools have, in the aggregate, a 24 percent enrollment of Black and Hispanic students. In contrast, remote schools have a weighted average student population that is 56 percent Black and Hispanic.

Similar differences are found when comparing schools on the enrollments of students who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, a proxy measure of student economic disadvantage.

Proportionally, hybrid schools enroll substantially fewer students who are in economic disadvantage compared to fully remote schools.

Now, as Bruce Baker and I have pointed out before, school districts that enroll larger proportions of Black and Hispanic students are more likely to be underfunded, relative to the target set by the state's funding law, SFRA. These districts should be receiving more money, either through local revenues or state aid; however, their actual revenues are under what they should be to provide what the state says is an "adequate" education.

So how does school funding align with reopening plans?*

School districts going fully remote are more likely to be underfunded compared to districts that offer a hybrid model. About three-quarters of the students attending a school with a hybrid model also attend a school that is funded over its adequacy target. But that's true for only 40 percent of students attending a remote district. And over 10 percent of those students are in a district that is severely underfunded -- more than $5,000 per pupil.

There are several possibilities as to why this is. It could be that more underfunded districts are responding to parents' desires to keep their children home. Perhaps parents feel this way because they don't believe the schools have the resources needed to keep students safe. Or it could be that parents would like a hybrid option, but districts can't make it work because of space restrictions or a lack of resources.

It's also possible this is all a coincidence... but I doubt it. Schools need more funding than they normally would to open safely in a pandemic. What we are likely seeing now is the logical consequence of years of inequitable funding -- even in a state that used to be one of the leaders in school funding reform.

I'm keeping an eye on all this and will update the data as soon as it's available.

* I omitted charter school students from this graph. The issue is tricky: some charter students attend schools in districts different from where they live, so we can't know if their resident district, which sends revenues to their charter, is underfunded or not. If and when we get final numbers, I'll try to dig into the issue further.

The School Reopening Gamble

2020-09-03T13:00:00.002-07:00

In the next week or so, schools districts all over the country will reopen their buildings as their new year begins. During our pre-service training, a teacher colleague of mine described the process as a “grand experiment.”

But he’s wrong; it’s not an experiment. It’s a gamble.

An experiment, by definition, is a controlled, scientific procedure designed to gain knowledge. When a researcher conducts an experiment, they try, as much as possible, to control for outside factors that may affect an outcome. The goal is to see relationships between causes and effects, and better understand how the world works.

A gamble, on the other hand, is a risky action taken with the hopes of getting a favorable result. A gambler isn’t trying to learn anything – all they want is a win.

America’s school reopening plans aren’t experiments; we aren’t trying to learn more about how COVID-19 spreads, or its effects. We are, instead, making a huge bet: we’re hoping that we’ll get the benefits of sending children into school buildings without making the pandemic worse.

The problem, however, is that a good gambler always knows the odds. Before placing a bet, a gambler weighs the risks of losing against the rewards of winning. Las Vegas is full of stories of sad, self-deluded gamblers who never took the time to calculate exactly what they were putting at risk before they rolled the dice.

It appears to this teacher that America, true to form, is acting like those reckless high-rollers: we’re putting all of our chips on schools reopening without ever stopping to calculate the odds. We should, instead, take a moment, before placing our bets, to weigh the rewards and the risks of reopening schools

The rewards are actually more meager than what many policymakers appear to think they will be. At best, reopening buildings means only a partial return to school for many students. While some school districts have gone all in and are opening five days a week for a full day, many are opting for a “hybrid” model, like the latest proposal for New York City.

In this model, students are divided into two, or even three, cohorts that rotate in-person schooling with remote instruction. At most, these students will attend school a dozen times a month; more likely it will be less, thanks to holidays.

Obviously, this does nothing to solve the child care crisis many pundits and politicians have cited as the reason to return to school buildings. And even if schools went back to full-time, in-person instruction, working parents would still need childcare solutions for the other hours when they are at work, because school hours almost never cover a parent’s work hours.

Some proponents of school reopening have argued that schools serve other functions besides education: they screen students for abuse, provide free meals to disadvantaged students, and deliver instruction to students with special needs. Unquestionably, that’s true – but must school buildings be open to provide these services? School districts were working to solve many of these issues last spring, when instruction was completely remote; for example, many districts started providing school meals through delivery or pickup.

Furthermore, states like New Jersey are allowing parents to opt their children out of in-person schooling altogether. So schools are going to have to check on students’ welfare and provide free meals remotely anyway.

The issue of special education is more difficult: some students have needs that are so profound they can’t be served by on-line learning. It is, admittedly, not always easy to determine which students fall into this category -- but it’s not all students. Why not open up the schools, then, just for those students with those needs? Why crowd students whose needs could be met on line into classrooms?

Which brings up what reopening proponents appear to believe is their strongest case for reopening: remote, on-line learning is never as good as in-person learning. As a teacher, I’d usually agree… except these proponents are making the wrong comparison. What we should be asking is whether remote learning now is better than part-time, in-person learning in a pandemic.

When teachers were thrown into on-line learning last spring, they were forced to make up remote-based lesson plans on the spot, with little training or preparation. Things are different now: many teachers (myself included) gained experience and feel more comfortable on a digital platform. Of course, internet access remains a serious problem, one that isn’t going away any time soon. And most teachers would agree that good in-person instruction could never be replaced by remote learning.

But in-person learning in a pandemic is also highly problematic. Forcing young children to wear masks for hours, policing social distancing guidelines, teaching some children in person while others are remote… this is hardly an ideal teaching environment. How much positive social development will children experience in conditions like these? How much real learning is going to get done?

Those are the rewards, such as they are. What about the risks?

We must start by acknowledging that we still have much to learn about COVID-19’s long-term effects. What we do know is troubling: in addition to the risk of death, some patients show a range of serious symptoms months after initial exposure. Children appear to be susceptible to these effects. It is true that the health risks for children appear smaller than those for the adult population; however, there is still substantial risk, especially for children of color.

Further, we know that children are carriers of the coronavirus, and have the potential to be spreaders. Which means that even if they do not suffer severe symptoms after exposure, their families and their teachers may.

Some have suggested the fears of American children spreading COVID-19 are overblown, as other countries have managed to open schools without seeing large outbreaks. I’d first point out that many of these other countries’ students spend less time in school than American children, which may decrease the chances of transmission.

In addition, American schools are not like those in other countries. Our chronic underinvestment in school facilities has left us with many schools that are crowded and have inadequate HVAC systems. One-fifth of our schools have no nursing care; another one-fifth only have part-time nurses. Neither of these issues are being addressed, as Washington has not allocated any additional funds to make schools safer or cleaner during the pandemic.

And again: many of the children who return to school buildings will do so only for a few days a week. If they spend the other days in childcare, they may be exposed to two different sets of peers and two different sets of adults overseeing them. The current plans for schooling are therefore likely increasing the number of possible vectors for transmission.

So that’s the gamble. If we win the bet, the payoff is, at best, a highly stunted in-school experience -- in many cases for only a few days a week -- with, perhaps, marginally better delivery of non-academic services. But if we lose, we’ll expose many more children and educational staff to the virus, with immediate and devastating consequences for many, and potentially severe repercussions in the future.

I know children need to get back to school as soon as possible. I know that, for many, school is the one safe place in their lives. I know this generation will suffer harm the longer they are out of school. I know parents have to get back to work -- and I know they really need a break.

But we have to be honest with ourselves: when we reopen schools, we are gambling with lives. Is it really worth it?