Good day, CharterFolk.
I again find myself getting this out a couple days later than planned. Weekends remain busy and the topics I seem to be taking on of late complex. I find I’m needing a little extra time to get them right. Thank you for your understanding.
Thanks also to the many of you who continue sending great posts our way. We again have more coming in than we have space for under our regular publishing calendar. So I’m reverting to what I did this spring – doubling our Contributor Columns to two per week.
Meanwhile, I mention that CharterFolk is increasing the social media work we do to amplify contributors’ content. It helps greatly if you follow us on LinkedIn and subscribe to our YouTube channel.
Please do, if you can.
When Philanthropists Give Up On Their Own Schools
My mid-ish week whip-around last week took gratitude for Starlee’s fundraising efforts as its launching point.
She makes her case just as two high-profile philanthropic endeavors are coming to an end.
The Zuckerbergs are ending support for The Primary School, the private Bay Area school they have funded for years.
And Oprah Winfrey is preparing to end operation of her academy for girls in South Africa in its current form.
The stories differ, but the similarities are striking.
Both undertakings required enormous philanthropic support: roughly $200 million for Oprah’s academy and more than $125 million for The Primary School. Both served relatively small numbers of students. Both experienced leadership and programmatic challenges. And neither developed a path toward financial self-sustainability.
Both may have changed many lives. But both depended upon their benefactors writing very large checks indefinitely.
Which makes the eventual outcome sadly predictable:
Philanthropists walking away from their own schools.
What I find perhaps most striking is that almost nobody has linked the two developments, when anyone putting on a longer-term lens would see a common origin story.
In 2010, Oprah Winfrey and Mark Zuckerberg came together before a national television audience to announce his $100 million gift intended to catalyze dramatic improvement in Newark public education.
It was perhaps the absolute zenith of public attention that education reform achieved in our country.
It was followed, sadly, by some of the most severe backlash and toxicity.
Oprah was excoriated by status quo interests for having the temerity to talk openly about the shortcomings of public education.
And Zuckerberg’s Newark investment came to be portrayed as one of the great cautionary tales of education philanthropy.
That perception was locked in by the publication of The Prize, Dale Russakoff’s gripping account of the turmoil surrounding the reform effort.
The book was published in September 2015.
And it essentially stamped a verdict on Newark:
Failure.
A billionaire swoops in.
Political leaders impose change from above.
Hundreds of millions are spent.
Communities are disrupted.
Consultants and labor agreements consume huge sums.
And little of lasting consequence emerges.
Except there was one rather significant problem with treating The Prize as the final verdict on Newark.
The results weren’t in yet.
The book described much of the early tumult accurately. But a snapshot taken in the trough of a reform cycle is a poor vantage point from which to venture a final evaluation.
And The Prize went further than assessing impact. Its title advanced a summative judgment about motivation: that what reformers were really seeking was control of Newark’s schools.
Governance mattered. Who made decisions, and how, was central to the conflict.
But that framing confused a contested means with the actual end.
For the reformers I know, then and now, the prize was not control for its own sake.
The prize was a much better education system.
One in which children long consigned to unacceptable schools could attend others where they learned dramatically more.
Fifteen years of evidence now allow us to assess Newark against that objective.
And by that measure, the evidence makes The Prize’s summative verdict look both rashly premature and grossly inaccurate.
What the Evidence Soon Began to Show
In 2017, researchers from Harvard and Dartmouth reconstructed what had been happening academically during the years surrounding the reform.
Their analysis showed that the turnaround had begun before The Prize was even published.
Newark’s performance had initially declined amid the disruption surrounding the reforms.
But then it turned.
Student growth began recovering in 2014-15 and improved again in 2015-16. By the end of that period, Newark students’ annual growth in English language arts was approximately 0.07 standard deviations higher than before the reforms, an educationally meaningful improvement researchers compared to the difference between being assigned an experienced teacher and a novice one.
The study’s most important finding was how the improvement happened.
Researchers distinguished “within-school” reforms: curriculum, professional development, leadership changes and turnaround efforts – from “between-school” reforms: closing weak district and charter schools, opening new schools, expanding stronger operators and helping families reach better options.
By 2015-16, 62% of Newark’s improvement in English was attributable to students shifting from lower-growth schools into higher-growth district and charter schools.
In math, achievement growth would have declined had students not moved into higher-growth schools.
In other words, the study not only reported encouraging results. It confirmed the very theory of action of the initiative itself, in which philanthropy played an irreplaceable role.
Between spring 2011 and 2015-16, Newark’s charter enrollment doubled from 14% to 28% of public-school students. Eleven district schools and three charter schools closed. Students leaving those schools generally moved into schools producing stronger growth, and their own growth subsequently improved.
As we would expect, the results did not support the idea that every aspect of the initiative had succeeded. But they certainly dispelled the notion that little of lasting consequence was beginning to emerge.
Then Came Even Stronger Evidence
In 2022, Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes returned to Newark.
CREDO found that Newark charter students demonstrated stronger growth than the New Jersey average in both reading and math. The pattern held for Black, Latino, low-income and EL students, each of whom outgrew their respective statewide peers in both subjects.
At roughly the same time, Marcus Winters and Colin Shanks produced an even stronger kind of evidence.
Newark’s common enrollment process incorporates a partly randomized component when demand exceeds available seats. The researchers used that feature to compare students seeking charter seats whose assignments differed because of the matching process.
Their study covered schools serving approximately 85% of Newark’s charter enrollment.
The conclusion was not merely that charter students scored higher.
It was that enrolling in a Newark charter school caused large improvements in achievement.
Not merely a correlation, but a causal effect – 0.263 standard deviations in math, and 0.246 in English language arts.
Effects of roughly a quarter of a standard deviation are enough to move an average student from around the 50th percentile to around the 60th percentile – a gain of about ten percentile points. Some researchers equate effects of that magnitude to nearly an additional year of learning for each year enrolled in a charter school.
Further, the study’s design undercut two aspersions commonly cast on charter schools as explanations for our results. The schools were inarguably not academically selecting students. Students continued to count in the later analysis even if they transferred elsewhere, and separate research found that charter enrollment reduced subsequent school mobility, not increased it.
A Picture Worth a Thousand Studies
Then, in 2024, the Progressive Policy Institute widened the lens.
PPI examined ten high-poverty cities where charter or charter-like schools had reached substantial enrollment. It asked how much low-income students citywide – including students remaining in district schools – had closed the performance gap with their state averages between 2011 and 2023.
In the report, this chart appeared.
Look at Newark.
With approximately 35% of public-school students enrolled in charters, Newark’s low-income students had closed approximately 45% of their performance gap with the New Jersey statewide average.
Among the cities in PPI’s primary analysis, Newark had closed the largest share of its gap. Only New Orleans – shown separately because its charter transition occurred earlier and reached nearly the entire city – was higher.
Not just charter students.
But across all low-income students in Newark.
PPI appropriately describes its cross-city finding as correlational.
But Harvard had already identified movement into higher-growth schools as the principal source of Newark’s English improvement.
CREDO had already shown that strong growth extended across student groups.
Winters and Shanks had already shown that the large learning gains generated by charter schools were causal.
What PPI revealed was how those developments had combined to create an urban education landscape that had been fundamentally recast in a little over a decade.
Where Newark Stands Now
This spring, the Education Scorecard – a collaboration involving researchers from Harvard, Stanford and Dartmouth – reported that Newark Public Schools students learned at an average rate of 1.23 grade levels per year in reading and math between 2022 and 2025.
That placed the district above 93% of school systems nationwide in average learning rates.
It confirms that the Newark story is not one where charter schools excel at the expense of district schools. It is increasingly the story of an entire public-education ecosystem getting better.
At the same time, the newest state data continue to show how much Newark’s charter sector is leading the improvement.
This weekend, using New Jersey’s Spring 2025 grade-level workbooks, I aggregated results across Newark’s charter local education agencies, weighting them by valid test scores.
In English language arts, grades 3-8, these were the results:
- Newark charters: 54.2% proficient.
- New Jersey statewide: 53.6%.
- Newark Public Schools: 33.7%.
In ELA, Newark’s open-enrollment charter sector, serving a far higher proportion of low-income students, is outperforming state averages in New Jersey, a state that is routinely ranked among the best public education states in the country.
In math, grades 3-7:
- Newark charters: 38.0% proficient.
- New Jersey statewide: 43.9%.
- Newark Public Schools: 22.4%.
The charter sector has not yet reached the statewide math average. But third- and fourth-grade charter students are within roughly three percentage points of the state.
And compared with district-school performance, charter schools perform much better in math. It is a pattern we see repeatedly across nearly all charter schools in the city.
Across Newark’s charter LEAs, 13 of 14 outperformed a grade-matched district comparison in ELA, and 11 of 14 did so in math.
What can one call such results other than simply extraordinary?
What Philanthropy Actually Achieved
Now return to the two philanthropic schools being wound down.
Perhaps it makes sense for donors eventually to stop underwriting individual schools requiring perpetual subsidy.
A private school supported by a benefactor may do wonderful things. But if its existence requires the benefactor to keep paying its full cost, it remains vulnerable to changing priorities.
When the philanthropy stops, the school may stop too.
Newark represents a fundamentally different investment model.
Philanthropy supplied temporary private capital to help reshape a publicly funded system. It expanded proven nonprofit operators, created thousands of seats in strong public schools, helped close weak district and charter schools, and enabled children to move into schools where they learned more.
And then the original philanthropic initiative ended.
But the schools did not.
Public dollars carried the recurring operating cost.
The Primary School needed philanthropy to sustain the institution.
Newark used philanthropy to create institutions that could sustain themselves.
That, CharterFolk, is what you call return on investment.
Silence Is Neither a Communications Nor a Fundraising Strategy
So why is Newark still commonly remembered as a failure?
Indeed, several stories covering The Primary School’s closure revisited Newark and, remarkably, still described the reform effort as a failure.
Part of the answer, I think, is that our movement has gradually narrowed the story we tell.
This is certainly not unique to Newark or New Jersey. It is an instinct that has taken hold across our movement.
We want to protect relationships. We do not want any disagreement with a district to become a public confrontation. We want to recognize progress wherever it occurs. And we hope that if we simply keep generating great results, those results will eventually speak for themselves.
All understandable.
But results do not speak for themselves.
People speak for them.
And over time, CharterFolk have become less likely to talk about public education as a whole – to name the larger problems our schools exist to solve, to recognize improvement when it occurs, but also to question choices that do not appear to be in the interests of all kids.
Consider selective admissions in Newark.
The district’s improvement should be celebrated.
At the same time, by one recent count, nearly half of ninth graders entering district-operated high schools gained admission through selective processes based on prior performance and other criteria.
Newark is hardly unique in using selective admissions, but few districts in the country have moved as aggressively to create new schools that use prior performance and other criteria to determine admission.
And that choice deserves examination precisely because Newark’s open-enrollment charter schools demonstrate so powerfully that academic sorting is not necessary to produce exceptional results.
If open-admission schools can achieve at these levels, why should access to some of the city’s most desirable public options be denied to thousands of students and families, including many who need better options most?
We should be able to ask that question without it being considered an attack on district progress or a wholesale criticism of adults working within the system.
It is simply part of telling the full story about public education.
And when we stop asking questions like these, something important disappears from the public sphere: the argument for why charter schools were needed in the first place, what our schools demonstrate can be done differently, and why public education still needs to change.
Eventually, even extraordinary accomplishments like Newark’s become rendered invisible, and investments that generated enormous returns somehow come to be remembered as cautionary tales.
Silence, CharterFolk, is not a communications strategy.
Nor is it an effective way to recruit the next generation of philanthropy our movement will need in its fifth decade.
Keeping Our Eyes on the Prize
Which brings me back to The Prize.
Its central metaphor was control.
Who would control Newark’s schools?
Who would possess the Prize?
But that was never the Prize that motivated the people who threw themselves into this work.
The Prize was better education for kids.
A public education system capable of getting better over time.
And fifteen years later, we have an extraordinary amount of evidence showing that Newark has made enormous progress toward exactly that.
And wise, courageous philanthropy played a vital role, helping expand open-enrollment charter schools that have generated extraordinary results. And now the wider public-school system is improving too.
That is not simply a story worth telling accurately.
It is precisely the story we need to figure out how to make register.
Because that is where our challenge lies.
Our movement does not suffer from an absence of evidence.
Newark alone gives us Harvard. CREDO. Causal research. Correlated citywide progress. Current results showing open-enrollment charter students matching or surpassing statewide New Jersey performance in key areas.
CharterFolk, we have the evidence.
What we have not yet demonstrated is enough courage and creativity to make the meaning of that evidence break through.
Enough to win hearts and minds in the public sphere.
Our adversaries have understood this for a long time.
The Prize registered.
“Billionaires taking over public schools” registered.
“Charter schools drain money from public education” registered.
Meanwhile, one of the most remarkable urban education improvement stories of our time somehow has not.
That is the problem we have to solve.
Not by becoming louder for the sake of being loud.
Not by becoming needlessly confrontational.
And certainly not by pretending that everything done in the name of reform has worked.
But by learning to drive narratives that do justice to the progress we are making.
Narratives powerful enough that policymakers repeat them, journalists use them as frames, families recognize their own experiences within them, and philanthropists understand what their investments have made possible.
It’s the Prize toward which our movement aspires as we prepare to enter our fifth decade:
Not control.
But a fundamentally better public education system.
And a movement with an increased ability to make the country understand the progress we are making and the role that philanthropists and so many others have played in making it possible.