Education Justice News

The National Journal recently asked education experts to weigh in on the best methods for school improvement by providing examples of successful school turnaround models that could be replicated elsewhere in the country. System-wide improvement should be our focus, Linda Darling-Hammond, at Stanford University, responded, rather than simply changing single schools.

For a model of the type of change she’d like to see around the country, she cited the systemic changes made in P-12 education throughout the state of New Jersey as a result of the Abbott litigation. These changes, she wrote, have provided "an extraordinary leap in equity and opportunity that has propelled New Jersey to one of the top-achieving states in the nation and dramatically reduced the achievement gap between white students and their black and Hispanic peers."

New Jersey is not unique in seeing meaningful improvement in education as a result of school funding lawsuits; many states with successful litigation have made significant progress in ensuring that students receive an adequate education, and now can serve as effective models for school reform. This is the first in a series of articles in which we will explore the lessons that can be learned from changes implemented in response to lawsuits challenging education finance systems.

In a series of rulings in the landmark Abbott v. Burke case, the New Jersey Supreme Court ordered a set of education programs and reforms widely recognized to be the most fair and just in the nation. The Abbott "education adequacy" framework includes:

These comprehensive reforms have had dramatic, lasting benefits for students from preschool to high school.

In June 2009, the National Institute for Early Education Research and the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers University released an interim report, "The APPLES Blossom: Abbott Preschool Program Longitudinal Effects Study (APPLES), Preliminary Results through 2nd Grade." They found that for both receptive vocabulary and mathematics, at the end of second grade, children who had attended Abbott preschool programs for one year performed about one fifth of a standard deviation above their peers who had not attended Abbott preschool programs, and those who had been enrolled in Abbott preschools for two years scored approximately two fifths of a standard deviation above those who had not attended an Abbott preschool. Attending an Abbott preschool program also significantly reduced the likelihood that a child would need to repeat either kindergarten or first grade. Since these findings were based on students who attended Abbott preschool programs during the 2004-2005 school year, and the assessed quality of the programs has improved since that time, the researchers expect that "Abbott preschool programs are likely to have stronger impacts on learning and school success for children attending today than they did for the children in this study."

Though most research on the effects of Abbott reforms have focused on the benefits of the preschool programs, a recent study by Alexandra Resch at the University of Michigan found that the additional dollars directed to Abbott districts, which were largely spent on instruction and support services, also resulted in "a significant positive impact on 11th grade achievement." Furthermore, after controlling for other characteristics, Dr. Resch concluded that the achievement gap between white students and black and Hispanic students was reduced by nearly one half during the first few years of Abbott reform.

Finally, national measures similarly illustrate the benefits of New Jersey’s education reform; as noted by Linda Darling-Hammond, "New Jersey, a state where 45 percent of students are of color, ranks first in the nation in writing performance on NAEP and among the top five states in every other subject area – competing neck-and-neck with states that have many fewer low-income students of color. "

The NJ Department of Education has unfortunately never completed the Court-ordered evaluation of Abbott programs and has failed to collect detailed data, except in the case of preschool, making it difficult to determine precisely which reforms have been most effective. Nevertheless, the New Jersey case study illustrates that reforming entire districts and providing sufficient financial support can achieve noteworthy results. Moreover, the New Jersey experience provides guidance as to the types of interventions that are likely to be successful - full-day kindergarten, half-day preschool for all three- and four-year olds, supplemental or at-risk programs as needed, on-site health and social services, adequate school security, drop-out reduction programs; summer school and after-school programs, and adequate school facilities. The New Jersey example also demonstrates the importance of effective data collection for ensuring that successful programs can be efficiently replicated.

In 2004, a settlement was reached in Williams v. California requiring the state to take a number of steps, including:

While California’s reforms were not as ambitious or comprehensive as New Jersey’s, a 2009 Progress Update by the ACLU looking at schools that were ranked in the bottom 30% for academic performance reports that implementation of the settlement provisions has achieved significant gains in ensuring that students in California’s lowest performing schools have clean, safe, and functional schools, adequate textbooks, and appropriately certified and assigned teachers.

Prior to the settlement, students in many of these schools were not able to take textbooks home because too few books were available; thanks to improvements in identifying and rectifying textbook deficiencies, in the 2005-06, 2006-07, and 2007-08 school years every student attending a school in the bottom 30% had sufficient textbooks and instructional materials in the four core subjects before the eighth week of school at the very latest. Increased oversight has also been effective in indentifying and motivating the correction of facility problems that threaten students’ health and safety, and emergency repair program grants allow districts "to address emergency facility conditions without having to draw down funds set aside for major maintenance projects," which could put them "in jeopardy of experiencing more facilities problems caused by a lack of regular maintenance." More rigorous monitoring has likewise led to dramatic reductions in teacher misassignments, with particularly notable improvement in English Language Learners’ access to appropriately certified teachers. Finally, the innovative complaint process that came out of the Williams settlement has served as an important accountability tool for parents and students; close to 5000 complaints had been filed by the end of the 2007-08 school year, and most of them were successfully resolved.

Though the impact of these measures on student achievement has not yet been evaluated, the success of the Williams settlement is perhaps most evident in feedback being heard from school administrators. Contrary to the initial fears of many that the settlement provisions would create onerous burdens, staff in one county’s office of education report, for example, that "principals have come to see Williams monitoring as a support to their efforts to provide a quality educational experience to their students," a sentiment that is echoed around the state. The California example demonstrates that by both improving the detection of deficiencies and providing leverage and resources for correcting problems that are identified, education reform can empower schools to address barriers to learning in a timely fashion.