This week started with several individuals from the Washington DC area asking if I would address a school closure/turnaround report produced by an outside consulting firm on contract with the DC Public Schools (as I understand it). That consulting firm basically made a map of the locations of the schools around the city, identified which schools had higher and lower proficiency rates, and where proficiency rates had changed over time, and then basically listed the lowest performing schools by these deeply flawed metrics suggesting their closure and alternatives for “turnaround,” essentially focusing on conversion and expansion of charter schools. Thankfully, before I even got a chance to dig into the report, two other bloggers took it to task. As Steve Glazerman explains here:

Student proficiency rates have long been discredited as a school performance measure because proficiency rates capture student achievement at a point in time, but say little about how much the school or its teachers contributed to its current students’ performance.

For example, a middle school could have declining proficiency rates if a feeder school begins sending more at-risk students to it, even if the teachers are especially skilled at working with a challenging population.

At a bare minimum, a sensible measure accounts for what a student knew before enrolling in the school (for example, using the student’s score from the prior year). This is why more and more states, including DC, have adopted student achievement growth measures instead of proficiency rates for their teacher and school performance indicators.

Using a trend in proficiency rates doesn’t help, and only creates a false sense of “gains” which is more likely to measure demographic change and other differences between successive cohorts of students cycling through a school than the performance of the schools’ educators. That’s because it compares students in one year to different students, instead of students in one year to the same students in the prior year.

By relying on flawed measures of school performance, policymakers risk closing down schools that are best equipped to work with challenging populations and replacing them with ones that would fail miserably if they started working with a different student body.

http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post/13512/flawed-study-mis-rates-potential-dc-school-closings/

Matt Di        Carlo also addressed the issue of conflating student and school performance here.

This early-in-the-week flap brought back to mind an even more crude, sloppy and egregiously flawed report that was produced last spring for Newark Public Schools by a group calling itself Global Education Advisors. Here’s a story about the report. http://www.njspotlight.com/stories/11/0607/2319/. And here’s a link to what they produced: http://www.njspotlight.com/assets/11/0306/2157

Let’s be really blunt/honest here. This stuff is hack junk, and whoever is responsible for producing it really has no business providing recommendations on anything relating to schools/education, or for that matter the basic use/presentation of data.

Because I didn’t take this report seriously at all at the time, I totally blew it off. After all, who would really make decisions affecting large numbers of low income urban schoolchildren based on such ill-conceived schlock. At least the shoddy analyses produced by the Pittsburgh based group working for Washington DC kind of looked serious.

Note that on Page 6 of the Newark report, the authors suggest that charter schools be moved into several NPS school locations including MLK, Burnet and Eighteenth Avenue. This recommendation appears in part based on the authors’ identification of “low performing schools” shown in appendices at the end of the document. The third slide from the end simply sorts schools from highest to lowest proficiency rates to identify the lowest performing quintile from 2009: http://www.njspotlight.com/assets/11/0306/2157

And perhaps none of this schlock really does enter into the current discussions on Newark school closures. One can only hope.

In any case, yesterday’s Star Ledger included a story on proposed school closures and reorganization in Newark. http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2012/02/newark_superintendent_to_annou.html

Let me start by saying that I do like some of the language/explanations being used by the Superintendent in explaining her desire to look at the system as a whole – including charter, magnet and traditional public schools – and how they each affect one another in terms of how children are distributed across those schools.

Let me also be clear that I’m all for within district school reorganization especially to optimize the efficiency of school district operations and achieve more balanced student populations across schools. Very small schools operating within population dense urban districts are a resource drain. By very small, I mean elementary schools of less than 300 students, or high schools of less than 600 students. Subsidizing very small schools’ operations necessarily takes away from other things. Also, concentrated poverty – high concentrations of children from very low income families – is very hard to overcome, as is racial isolation in schools. To the extent that school districts can better distribute/balance/integrate populations, improving outcomes can be easier. This stuff should be considered/on the table. Just to be clear, I’m all for appropriate re-organization.

What I’m not for… and I’m not yet sure what’s going on here… is pretending that we can simply shut down schools in high poverty neighborhoods, blaming teachers and principals for their failure, and then either a) replacing the school management and staff with individuals likely to be even less qualified and less well equipped to handle the circumstances,  or b) initiating an inevitably continuous pattern of displacement from school to school to school for children already disadvantaged.

Again, I don’t yet see this kind of language being used in Newark, as it has been in New York City, for example (regarding the 33 “low performers” there).

But, let’s take a quick look at the schools which the Ledger reports as being on the closure hit list: “Dayton Street, Martin Luther King, 18th Avenue, Miller Street and Burnet Street elementary schools”

Some of these schools also made the Global Education Advisors hit list, including Burnett, MLK and Eighteenth Ave.

First, here’s where the schools fit in a districtwide/citywide sort of % Free Lunch (2011):

Closure elementary schools are indicated in Red, and charter schools in Green. District average (labeled Total – sorry) is in Black. In short, these are high poverty schools, with two of them – Dayton and Miller St having among the highest concentrations of low income children.

Now, here’s how they perform on a few select tests, with the schools sorted by low income concentration and proficiency based on 2010 assessment data (General Test Takers):

In brief, they perform pretty much where you’d expect them to, with Burnett and Miller outperforming similarly low income schools in Math, with Dayton well below the trendline, and with Burnet falling down with Dayton on Language. But again these schools still fall near other similar schools.

Low income concentration alone isn’t the only reasonable predictor of performance differences across theses schools, and it’s useful to be able to bring in  – aggregate – results across all of the tests and grade levels. So, I ran a quick & dirty descriptive regression model in which I predicted general test taker proficiency rates accounting for a) % Free lunch b) % by racial composition (Black/Hispanic) c) % LEP/ELL, d) % Female (strong predictor w/NJ scores in urban contexts). And, I control for which test/grade level. Here’s a link to the output.

Then, for visual fun, I plotted the differences (standard deviations) between expected and actual performance for 2010 assessments… here:

So, what we have here is a mix of Newark schools much like other Newark schools which are very high in poverty. They have a mix of student outcomes, some beating expectations and others falling short, and they have a mix in terms of specific grade levels and assessments.

And notice the green dots in the picture – those charter schools. All of those charter schools serve substantively less poor populations than the NPS schools identified by the Ledger for closure. And some of those charter schools actually fall further below their “expected” performance levels than the worst of the NPS schools slated for closure.

Let’s be absolutely clear here – these high poverty schools slated for closure (if the Ledger is correct) – cannot simply be converted into lower poverty schools and made “more successful.”

Indeed redistributing those students among less poor students – altering the peer composition by disrupting concentrated poverty might help. But there aren’t a whole lot of options available for accomplishing that. Further, with each disruptive relocation for each child comes another potential marginal loss.

Let’s just hope those involved are being somewhat more thoughtful about these decisions and using more reasonable information to guide their decision making that what was produced for the district last spring, or that which stirred up such controversy in DC earlier this week.

UPDATE:

Here are some maps of the above data. First, here are the schools in Newark, with the regression based relative performance estimates from the last figure above. Schools in blue perform above expectations (based on proficiency rates) and schools in red below expectations. Schools with a push-pin in them are charter schools and schools with a red X are elementary schools slated for closure.  As in the above pictures (because it’s the same data), those slated for closure include a mix of higher and lower performing schools. Similarly, charter schools are a mixed bag. Note that the locations of the schools are determined using the latitude and longitude data from the NCES Common Core, which by my experience, may include some errors (school locations may be incorrectly or imprecisely reported).

Here’s what it looks like with the schools shaded according to % free lunch. Schools slated for closure are invariably among the highest poverty schools. The difficulty here is that other NPS schools around them also tend to be very high poverty, while nearby charter schools have much… much… much lower poverty concentrations.

I was reading this column by Paul Mushine yesterday in which Mr. Mulshine opines about the exorbitant property taxes being paid by our Governor. Now, personally, I’d prefer to keep our Governor out of this. This isn’t about him. It’s about an expensive house in a relatively wealthy suburban town in Morris County and the property taxes you have to pay when you live in an expensive house. Let’s keep it at that. Mulshine points to the rather eye-popping annual property taxes on the house which are over $37,000.

Mulshine attributes the high property tax bill to state policies which take suburban money and give it to poor urban cities and school districts, referring more than once to the state school finance formula.

As Mulshine argues:

Just when the heck is he going to demand we change the formula for handing out state property-tax relief?

Under the current formula, suburban taxpayers get socked to transfer wealth to the cities. And few suburbs fare quite as badly as Christie’s own home town, Mendham Township in Morris County. I like to bring that thorny fact up when I question him at press conferences.

http://blog.nj.com/njv_paul_mulshine/2011/10/youd_have_to_be_president_to_a.html

(emphasis added). Thorny fact? Really?

Mulshine seems to forget that the primary reason that a tax bill would be high is…well… because the tax is being paid on a property that has a very high taxable assessed value! In other words, the main reason someone pays a higher tax bill is because they live in a more expensive house. And, by the way, it has to be a pretty expensive house to generate a tax bill that high (over $2 million).

By Mulshine’s metric of fairness – property tax bill – the most disadvantaged people in the state must therefore be those who live in the most expensive houses – because those are the houses with the largest tax bills, even if we all paid the same tax rate on our homes.  So, owning an expensive house is the root of the greatest unfairness of New Jersey tax policy?

Let me offer up a few alternative metrics drawn from data (albeit a few years old) on municipalities and school districts from nj.com’s “jersey by the numbers.” Let’s take a look at two better measures across municipalities in Morris and Essex county. I’ve included Essex to bring some of the poorer urban communities into the picture, since Morris has few.

Let’s look first at the effective tax rate with respect to home values. That is, are towns with higher value homes paying a higher or lower percent of their home value in property taxes?

Now let’s look at whether individuals are paying a higher percent of their income in property taxes in towns with higher or lower income.

While these data are now somewhat old, there is little reason to believe that these patterns have shifted much if any, especially due to state tax and spending policies. First, these things tend to be relatively stable. Second, 2005 was around the peak of Abbott funding, the end of the major scaling up of funding from 1998 to 2005, prior to the new formula which actually spread money more widely.

Now, these are important metrics for evaluating Mulshine’s premise of the wrongs of current redistributive policies. Why? Because if current policies really do go overboard at redistributing suburban wealth to the urban core, then we should see that a) effective tax rates on properties are actually higher in the suburbs – that is the tax bill divided by the home value, and b) that property taxes paid as a share of income are higher in the suburban districts than the urban core.

Both of the above charts suggest that current NJ policies of school and municipal aid have not, in fact, over-corrected by driving too much relief into poor urban communities. In fact, effective property tax rates remain much higher in places like East Orange, Irvington and Orange than in Mendham or Essex Fells. Further taxes as a percent of income are much higher in East Orange, Nutley and Belleville than in Mendham.

But, Mendham and some other more affluent suburban communities do tend to be quite high on this measure and there are a few explanations for this. First, many of the towns high on this measure have very little commercial or industrial property to tax for public services. A tax equity oriented policy remedy to this problem is to require regional redistribution of property tax revenues from these non-residential properties (a topic of some academic literature in the past). Second, in some of these towns, we may see more individuals living beyond, or at least at the edges of their means – perhaps purchasing more house than their income can afford.

So, what is one to do if they are unhappy with a $37,000 annual property tax bill? The simplest answer is to move into a cheaper house.

First, let’s identify the players:

1. New Jersey Legislature & Governor, or THE STATE
2. Children attending Abbott school districts and their legal representation, or THE PLAINTIFFS
3. THE COURT (NJ Supreme Court)
4. Other school districts and the children they serve

Now, let’s not go too far back in history, and instead account for the last few years which really define where we are at today, and how this decision makes sense: http://www.judiciary.state.nj.us/opinions/supreme/M129309AbbottvBurke.pdf

Until a few years ago, the State of New Jersey was operating its school funding formula under a series of court orders specifically intended to ensure that children attending school districts known as Abbott districts received sufficient resources to provide them with a constitutionally adequate education (history here: http://edlawcenter.org/ELCPublic/AbbottvBurke/AbbottHistory.htm) .  The original Abbott v. Burke lawsuit was brought on behalf of PLAINTIFF children who resided in specific school districts.

A few years ago (2008-09), the New Jersey Legislature- THE STATE – adopted the School Funding Reform Act of 2008 in a legislative, pro-active attempt to move into a new era in New Jersey school funding, an era not driven by judicial mandates but rather by a legislatively adopted formula. An era where a unified state school finance formula would drive “adequate” (their words, not mine) funding to local public school districts, whether those districts were among those that had previously sued the state over funding or not.

PLAINTIFFS CHALLENGED that formula, saying it would not provide them with adequate resources and should not be considered constitutional.

THE STATE argued that the formula, SFRA, was essentially THE OPERATIONAL DEFINITION OF THEIR CONSTITUTIONAL MANDATE.  That SFRA, by its design and according to its planned implementation was necessarily constitutional.

THE COURT cut THE STATE a break, and indicated that while it wasn’t entirely sure that SFRA really was the operational definition of the constitutional mandate, it was a reasonable attempt and should be allowed to move forward. That is, the COURT was anything but activist, giving THE STATE an opportunity to move forward with their new school finance plan, but holding the STATE to their promise on a 3 year time frame. THE STATE WON, and THE PLAINTIFFS LOST.

Then, all hell breaks loose in the economy and THE STATE (which is now a different set of individuals/Governor/legislators, but that’s not relevant to the legal question at hand) pulls about $1.7 billion out of SFRA, relative to where it would have been if implemented as promised. Again, THE STATE had argued that SFRA implemented as promised was effectively THE OPERATIONAL DEFINITION OF THEIR CONSTITUTIONAL MANDATE.

So today, THE COURT had a really narrow, arguably boring question to answer. They didn’t have to answer the big question of whether SFRA in its current form meets the constitutional standard or what that constitutional standard really meant. They had decided in 2009 that SFRA as planned would meet the constitutional standard, and had accepted THE STATE’s argument to that effect.  Today, THE COURT merely had to decide if SFRA, in its current form – less $1.7 billion – was still implemented as planned? That’s a pretty simple NO.  Right or wrong in any broader sense, whether SFRA is a good formula or a sucky one, the legal question before this court was simply whether SFRA was implemented as planned. And it wasn’t.

Judicial activism? Let’s review. First a definition. Judicial activism is when the judicial branch applies the constitution to invalidate statutes passed by the legislature. While having negative connotations, judicial activism is clearly appropriate under some circumstances. Legislatures do adopt policies that violate individual rights and checks and balances are critical. I guess you could say that this decision invalidates recent budgetary decisions. BUT, and this is a big BUT, all that the court has done here is to uphold the state school finance formula that THE STATE asked them to uphold a few years ago.

The court is merely upholding a legislative action that it already upheld a few years ago (while granting significant deference to the legislature on how that formula would work).  That’s pretty mundane, if you ask me.

Are Abbott districts and Ed Law Center the big winners here? It’s really important to understand here that SFRA was considered to be a reasonable operational definition of the state constitutional obligation because THE PLAINTIFFS LOST in 2009. ELC and Abbotts did not want SFRA and felt that it didn’t provide sufficient additional resources to meet the needs of children in Abbott districts. They lost in 2009. THE STATE won, and SFRA was accepted. So, this time around, ELC and Abbotts had to suck it up and accept that SFRA was the standard, and argue that at least SFRA should be funded as planned and as accepted by the court – BECAUSE IT ALREADY WAS. This new decision today merely affirms the PLAINTIFF’s previous loss.

What about that whole bit about THE STATE only having to reinstate the cuts to Abbott districts – THE PLAINTIFFS? Perhaps this is a technicality, but children in Abbott districts are the original plaintiffs and the ones who continue to be represented in this case – THE PLAINTIFFS. So, it is technically correct in a legal sense that THE STATE would be obligated only to close those funding gaps.

BUT… and this is another BIG BUT… this does leave the door wide open to the possibility that all of those other districts whose current funding levels fall “below adequacy” under SFRA can bring separate lawsuits against the state to have their cuts restored as well (if THE  STATE were to choose to only restore cuts to Abbott districts). After all, THE STATE has said and THE COURT has accepted that SFRA as planned was constitutional. THE COURT has now said that funding below that level is a constitutional violation, seemingly making for a pretty straightforward argument for non-Abbotts below their target funding levels – adequacy funding – under SFRA.  Let the games begin!

Our current NJ State Board of Education includes former representatives of the Boards of Trustees (or Governors) of two very highly respected private independent schools – Peck (a K-8 school in Morristown) and Newark Academy (in Livingston).

http://www.state.nj.us/education/sboe/boe/

Yes, I’ve chosen to look at these schools because of NJBOE member affiliations with them.  Further, I am familiar with both schools (in addition to many other similar schools).

I do NOT see as a problem, having supporters of excellent private schools on a state board of education whose policies affect primarily the public education system. In fact, I see it as an opportunity (For those trying to read too much into this and suggest I’m being manipulative or sarcastic. Don’t. I really do think it’s important to take a close look at various types of educational institutions as models. These are a unique set of institutions with long and successful track records. Again, my private school study can be found here: http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/private-schooling-US)

There’s a lot of bluster in the current NJ public education policy debate – over such things as:

• the supposed exorbitant spending levels in NJ schools (with urban legend references to Newark’s $24k per pupil spending);
• exorbitant public school superintendent salaries;
• arguments that advanced degrees for teachers are useless;
• the relative unimportance of teacher experience (and reason there should be no pay for experience alone); and
• arguments that class size is relatively unimportant (more common in national debate than NJ so far).

I’ve suggested on a number of occasions, taking a closer look the inner workings, spending, policies and practices of elite private schools in particular – those which are not church subsidized – and those which operate on the open market for private schools.  At the very least, one might consider information on these schools for contextual purposes. For example, when considering what we spend in Newark public schools on a population that is majority low income, substantially non-English speaking, and includes 14 to 18% children with disabilities (depending on year of data).

Here are the stats on the two private independent schools, drawn from their web sites and from IRS filings:

Notably, on their web sites – both schools – like nearly any private independent school I can think of – indicate their relatively small class size or low pupil to teacher ratio. Both talk about their levels of teacher experience!  Both spend substantially more per pupil than Newark public schools and both compensate their headmasters at a rate far above and beyond newly proposed public school administrator caps.  These are the realities of the marketplace in which these schools operate.

Questions regarding different practices (with emphasis on personnel policy here), which are not generally available on school websites or in other documentation include:

a) How do  these schools recruit and attempt to retain teachers or headmasters?

b) How is compensation structured? Is there additional pay for degree levels or experience?

c) Are all employees at will, year-to-year or is there some form of continuous contract (implicit or explicit)?

d) What benefits are provided?

e) How are contractual negotiations conducted?

f) How are teacher evaluations conducted? By whom? With what frequency? or Emphasis?

There are a variety of other questions to be asked about these or any types of institutions we might choose to view as models. I welcome any responses to the above questions from representatives of these, or similar institutions, as I have requested in the past.

Newark Acad 2010 990

Newark Academy ~ Quick Facts

Newark Academy ~ Affording NA

Peck 2010 990

The Peck School_ About Peck

The Peck School_ Admissions » Tuition

For this one, the graphs pretty much tell the story. I’ve had these data sitting around for a while and just never got around to making the graphs. I’ve used data on migration patterns across cities and states from the American Community Survey in the past. The American Community Survey data are annual survey data which, among other things, include information on employment status, place of residence, place of work, wage income, household income and a bunch of other useful stuff. Since 2000, ACS has been doing annual data collection and has increased sample sizes from 2005 to 2009, increasing the questions that can be addressed with the data. The ACS data also include questions regarding whether the respondent lived in a different location the previous year. Since you have the current year location, whether an individual lived elsewhere the previous year, and where they lived, it’s relatively easy to tabulate characteristics of individuals who a) live in New Jersey in the current survey year but lived elsewhere the previous year, (Moved In)  b) live in another state in the current year, but lived in New Jersey the previous year (Moved Out), or c) lived in New Jersey in the current and previous year (STAYER).

The idea for this post had come about a long time ago, when I kept hearing over and over again how New Jersey’s taxes (which I wrote about here)  are driving out the state’s highest income (and most productive) residents. As usual, this statement was spun in a number of ways referring loosely to wealth, or income, or “rich” versus poor, but always with the implication that those who otherwise would contribute most to state tax revenues by virtue of their income are the ones headed for the exit. These claims were typically based loosely on a highly questionable secondary report of an earlier study, using data from the earlier part of the decade.

Here’s my quick run at the ACS data on individuals between the ages of 25 to 65 – the majority of wage earners.

Note that the ACS doesn’t survey absolutely everyone. It’s based on a sample. A pretty big sample for these years, but a sample nonetheless. As a result, to project the findings to the total population, one has to use weightings provided in the data (person weight, in this case).

Figure 1. Total numbers of 25 to 65 year olds coming and going

The first figure shows roughly similar numbers of 25 to 65 year olds coming and going. If anything, a few more are coming each year than going.

Figure 2. Income from Wages for those Coming and Going

Figure 2 shows that the income from wages for those coming in is slightly higher than for those leaving.

Figure 3. Household income for those Coming and Going

Household income is also marginally higher for those coming than for those leaving over time.

Figure 4. Education Level of those Coming and Going

This figure shows that on average, those coming into New Jersey have higher levels of education than those leaving. The blue bars, from associates degree or higher, through every higher level of education, are higher than the red bars. That is,those coming into New Jersey tend to be more likely to have a BA or higher, an MA or higher, or a professional or doctorate degree than those leaving New Jersey.

Figure 5. Household Income by State Moved To

Part of the rhetoric – mostly radio talk blather from NJ 101.5 – is that all of those high income earners headed to the exits are headed straight toward those lower tax burden and lower cost of living states like the Carolinas and Florida.  Well, as it turns out, the higher income earners that are leaving NJ – those that have higher household income than those who stay in NJ – happen to be moving to Massachusetts, California or New York – not states that one would typically call tax safe havens – but then again – most of the rhetoric regarding high and low tax states is misguided anyway. Those headed to Southern states and to Pennsylvania tend to have lower household income than those who stay in NJ and tend to have lower income than the average leaver.

TOTAL “MOVED TO” States

Note – The difficulty here is that with the ACS data, income is only reported for the current year, not previous income. So, income levels in this graph are income levels after the move, or in the state moved to and not the income level of the household when in NJ the previous year. That said, it is certainly the case that an income of $60k to $80 in those southern states would not otherwise be over $100k in NJ but for the supposed difference in total taxes. Yes, that lower income may provide comparable housing, etc., but that difference is largely a function of housing price and assessed value, not effective tax rate.

NPR Story: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/04/29/135813061/studies-rich-dont-flee-high-tax-states