Newark Settles Civil Rights Complaint Alleging School Closures Were Discriminatory, Reveals Lessons for Other Cases

The Advancement Project and Newark's Parents Unified for Local School Education filed a complaint with the the U.S. Department of Education challenging Newark's school closures. They alleged that the closures disproportionately affected minorities and students with disabilities and violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act.  Newark had closed several traditional public schools during the recession, consolidating them with other traditional public schools and/or replacing them with charters.  OCR found that the closures did, in fact, disproportionately affect minorities and students with disabilities and did not produce the benefits that the district claimed was the basis for the closures in the first instance.  Last week, Newark agreed to take remedial action.  The problem, however, is that school closures cannot reasonably be reversed  and Newark still got what it wanted.  The remedial steps Newark now promises are relatively mild:

• Identify whether any transferring students have suffered any academic deficiencies and take steps to remedy them.
• Determine whether transportation issues affected the ability of transferring students to participate in extracurricular activities.
• Investigate where disabled transferring students were provided with appropriate special education and related aids and services in the receiving school; and if not, whether compensatory or remedial services are necessary.

Nonetheless, advocates saw this as a victory, as they should.  A similar and more aggressive and disproportionate set of closures occurred in D.C. in recent years, but the challenge to them failed.  As my earlier blog post noted:

In DCPS schools as a whole, 68.4% of students are black; 13.8% are Hispanic; 3.7% are Asian, other, or unknown; and 9.2% are white. In the schools slated for closure, by contrast, 93.7% of students are black; 5.9% are Hispanic; 0.4% are Asian, other, or unknown; and less than 0.1% (2 out of 3053) are white. The figures skew similarly, if less starkly, for disabled students: 27.7% of students in the closing schools are in special education, versus 14.2% of students in DCPS overall."

There, advocates filed suit in federal district court seeking an injunction, but the court denied their injunction and dismissed the case.  Thus, by rough comparison, the Newark decision is enormous.  

One analytical difference also bears emphasis.  OCR evaluated the efficacy of the closures after the fact, which allowed it to find that the justifications for the closures had proven flawed. In D.C., plaintiffs sought to block the closures earlier and argued, based on social science and expert opinion, that the closures would harm students and not produce the benefits the district claimed to seek.  The district court, however, ignored these prospective claims and assumed the District's goals to be valid.  I have not seen any subsequent research confirming or rejecting plaintiffs factual allegations, but to the extent their factual allegations were not novel, it raises the question of whether courts should take social science and expert opinions more seriously in similar cases.  Newark's experience suggests they should.