Improvement Plan Announced for All Newark Schools, Including Charters

Superintendent of Schools Cami Anderson announced an initiative Thursday night intended to close the perceived rift between the city’s charter and traditional public schools and raise the quality of the entire public school system for all its nearly 40,000 students.

“This is a joint and collective agenda between the public charter schools and the Newark public schools to get to a day where every kid in Newark is in an excellent school,” Anderson said shortly before she unveiled the plan, “One Newark,” at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center.

Underscoring the importance of the proposal was an audience that included Chris Cerf, the head of the state Department of Education, prominent Rutgers scholar Clement Price, and mayoral candidates Anibal Ramos and Shavar Jeffries.

Anderson and other speakers Thursday said a principal aim of One Newark was to change the perception of the district as split between charters and traditional public schools, a distinction many critics of the charter school movement are quick to make. Those critics fear charters are a step towards privatization and also worry that charters deprive traditional public schools of resources and attention.

“The only metric we should pay attention to is how many kids are in great schools -- not great charter schools, great schools,” said Ryan Hill, founder of TEAM Academy, one of the city’s nearly two dozen charters.

Scrolling through figures measuring the effectiveness of the schools overall -- a measurement of not just how well students do on tests, but on how much students improve over time -- Anderson outlined a multifaceted plan she described with the acronym “SUCCESS.”

That includes a uniform standard, to be applied to charter and traditional public schools, for measuring school success. It also includes universal enrollment, where students’ families fill out one application with their choices of school - charter or not --  listed in order of preference. Lottery-based admissions will be phased out.

One goal, Anderson said, is to ensure that excellence isn’t limited to a few islands within the district.

“We must reject the notion we can accel the few and neglect the many,” she said.

One Newark also calls for the implementation of a citywide facilities and technology plan to bring all district facilities up to the same standard as Newark’s newest schools. In the South Ward, schools need a total of $100 million in improvements, she said.

“We can’t have some students in a state-of-the-art facility and others where the rain comes into the biology lab,” Anderson said.

One Newark would also see greater sharing of professional development and teaching techniques instantaneously across the entire system.

Another goal is to end the “concentration effect,” where the highest-achieving students are gathered in one building and the students most in need are in another, what Anderson derided as a “lifeboat” approach to district management.

Since being appointed head of the state’s largest school system two years ago by Cerf, Anderson has come under fire for what critics said is her failure to adequately communicate her policies and for closing schools. A small group of about a dozen protesters was outside NJPAC Thursday night chanting, “Cami must go.”

Anderson indirectly addressed those critics by talking about her biography. She is the daughter of a couple involved in primary education and inner-city social activism in the Watts section of Los Angeles and grew up with nine foster siblings who came from a variety of ethnic backgrounds.

Still, not everyone was convinced of the merits of Anderson’s plan. David Alston, a veteran Science Park High School teacher, said that there still seems to be competition between the traditional public and charter systems -- and that Anderson is “undercutting” the former.

“Part of the criticism I’ve always had with the administration is that it seems like there’s a conflict of interest between charter schools and public schools,” he said. “It’s kind of like you were the CEO of Coke and you were making decisions on behalf of Pepsi.”