Newark Superintendent Roger Leon started off the New Year with a bang by demanding the closure of four New Jersey charter schools and calling for the denial of any new applications for new ones, “unless the applicant shows that it would serve a specific educational need.”
Leon’s unexpected hostility toward charter schools protects entrenched bureaucratic interests at the expense of students. Charter schools in New Jersey are privately operated and publicly funded. Parents can choose to send their children to a charter school if they think it is a better fit than their neighborhood public school.
Currently, more than one-third of Newark’s roughly 55,000 public school students attend charter schools. Polls show that two-thirds of Newark voters support these schools, which tend to be mission-driven and more economically efficient than traditional public school districts.
Strikingly, some charter schools in the city, including the four Leon would close, have such a high demand that there is a waiting list. According to recent data, University Heights has 995 children on its waiting list, while Roseville Community has 332, M.E.T.S has 240, and People’s Prep has 387.
This means almost 2,000 students would attend these four schools if given the chance. Those protecting the bureaucratic school system — Newark Teachers Union President John Abeigon called charter schools “parasites” — believe they know better than these families what’s best for their children.
In addition to blithely overlooking that droves of parents are seeking out charter schools, Leon also perpetuates misinformation. Leon claims that charter schools do not offer students a better education than they could receive in the district and that they do not “address the educational needs of Newark’s most vulnerable students.”
To Leon’s first point, recent data show exactly the opposite — attending a Newark charter school leads to large improvements in a child’s math and reading scores that persist over time. Moreover, the effect is particularly large for students attending the KIPP or Uncommon charter school networks.
“Attending a Newark participating charter school has a larger effect than 80% of other educational interventions that have been recently studied,” study author Marcus Winters writes.
Winters, a senior fellow at the conservative-leaning Manhattan Institute, concludes that “taken together, these findings strongly suggest that charter school sectors that enroll a substantial share of local students are capable of producing large effects on student outcomes relative to local traditional public schools.”
To Leon’s second point, charter schools disproportionately serve a population of students traditionally left behind by district public schools: low-income students of color. Leon’s abrupt shift to oppose these schools ignores the reality that Newark’s charter sector is working for the parents and children who need educational choice the most.
The state education commissioner will make a decision by Feb. 1. Let’s hope facts and parent demand cut through the noise of special interests clamoring to protect a bureaucratic district system.
Kate Hardiman is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She taught high school in Chicago for two years while earning her M.Ed. and is now a J.D. candidate at Georgetown University Law Center.
