Evaluating Newark's Education Reforms

Newark Report - Front Page

Project Status: Past
Location: New Jersey
Principal Investigators: Thomas Kane & Douglas Staiger

Synopsis: Assessing the Impact of the Newark Education Reforms
Report: School District Reform in Newark: Within- and Between-School Changes in Achievement Growth (NBER Working Paper)

 

Aided by $200 million in private philanthropy, city and state leaders launched a major school reform effort in Newark, New Jersey. In this study, researchers evaluate the impacts of Newark’s education reform efforts, starting in the 2011–2012 school year.

Resources

Working Paper

Chin, M., Kane, T., Kozakowski, W., Schueler, B., & Staiger, D. (n.d.). School District Reform in Newark: Within- and Between- School Changes in Achievement Growth. NBER Working Paper 23922 .
Chin, M., Kane, T., Kozakowski, W., Schueler, B., & Staiger, D. (n.d.). School District Reform in Newark: Within- and Between- School Changes in Achievement Growth. NBER Working Paper 23922 .

2017

Chin, M., Kane, T., Kozakowski, W., Schueler, B., & Staiger, D. (2017). Assessing the Impact of the Newark Education Reforms. Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University.
Chin, M., Kane, T., Kozakowski, W., Schueler, B., & Staiger, D. (2017). Assessing the Impact of the Newark Education Reforms. Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University.

People

Beth Schueler
Post-Doctoral Research Fellow
Harvard Kennedy School
SDP Fellowship Faculty Advisor
Beth is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Beth studies education policy and politics in the U.S. with a focus on efforts to improve low-performing K-12 schools and districts. She received a doctorate in education...
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Douglas Staiger
Co-Principal Investigator; CEPR Advisory Board Member
John Sloane Dickey Third Century Professor of Economics
Department of Economics, Dartmouth College
Dr. Douglas Staiger is the John Sloan Dickey Third Century Professor in the Social Sciences at Dartmouth College. Before joining Dartmouth in 1998, he was a faculty member at Stanford and Harvard. Dr. Staiger is a member of the National Academy of...
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Mark Chin
Assistant Professor of Education Policy and Inequality, Vanderbilt University
Partnering in Education Research (PIER) Fellow Alum
Job Market Paper: Breaking rank? An investigation of families’ preferences for schools and their causal moderators Dissertation Committee: Martin West, David Deming, Desmond Ang Research Interests: School Integration, School Choice, Racial Attitudes/Bias...
Mark Chin

Thomas J. Kane
Faculty Director
Walter H. Gale Professor of Education and Economics, Harvard Graduate School of Education
Member, Yidan Prize Foundation Council of Luminaries
Thomas Kane is an economist, Walter H. Gale Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, member of the Yidan Prize Foundation Council of Luminaries, and faculty director of CEPR. Between 2009 and 2012, he directed the Measures of...
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Whitney Kozakowski
Researcher, Mathematica
PARTNERING IN EDUCATION RESEARCH (PIER) FELLOW ALUM
PIER Summer Residency Placement: Massachusetts Department of Higher Education Website
Whitney Kozakowski

Key Findings

  • Prior to the reform, the average rate of student achievement growth in Grades 4–8 (combining Newark’s district and charter schools) was above the state average in math and comparable to the state average in English, largely driven by strong results in the Newark charter sector.
  • On net, by the 2015–2016 academic year, Newark students had seen a significant improvement in the rate of growth in English and no significant change in math.
  • The progress did not follow a straight line. Indeed, during the initial years of the reform, the rate of student achievement growth declined in both the district and charter schools in English and math before recovering to earlier levels of growth in math and exceeding earlier growth rates in English.
  • Much of the net change in achievement growth in Newark was driven by shifts in enrollment due to school closures, new school openings, and student choice, as opposed to improvements in achievement growth within existing schools. Shifting enrollment from lower- to higher-achievement growth schools was responsible for nearly two-thirds (62 percent) of the gain in English. In math, average achievement growth would have declin relative to the baseline years if students had not shifted to higher-growth schools.
  • Although many Newark parents seemed to “opt out” of state tests in the spring of 2015, we find no evidence that the gains in Newark in the 2014–2015 school year were caused by the increase in the number of opt-outs.

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