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When Newark took its schools back after 25 years of state oversight, the moment marked the beginning of a new era for New Jersey’s largest school system.
For parents, educators, students, and city leaders, the official return to local control in 2020 represented a victory fueled by advocacy and the belief that the community should shape its own schools.
In the five years since, Newark’s schools — once called “abysmal” by state leaders — have shown signs of progress. Graduation rates are up, chronic absenteeism has dropped, enrollment has grown, and test scores have steadily improved. Programs and departments once lost under state oversight were revived, and new schools have opened under Superintendent Roger León, who was appointed in 2018 as the first to lead the district after the return to local control.
Marques Lewis, who led the Newark school board when it was known as the School Advisory Board under state control, says he’s “not totally satisfied” with the current state of Newark schools but feels “better today about the future of the district than I did during state control.”
“Where do I think we are today?” he added. “I think today we still got a lot of work to do.”
While the district has made strides, parents, students, teachers, and advocates say they want more input in decisions about the city’s schools, and have questioned whether local control has delivered on its promise of a more responsive leadership and a better education for Newark students.
“It’s all good to want to restore schools and make it accessible for the families, but we all know that without the families and the community as the driving force … that no school district can thrive, and that’s what they’re struggling with,” said Yolanda Johnson, a former Parent Teacher Association president for the district and advocate for the return to local control.
In an email to Chalkbeat this week, Paul Brubaker, a spokesperson for the district, said officials “meet with and talk to community members every day, we report on matters of public concern all the time, and we are audited by state and federal agencies frequently.”
“We remain committed to ensuring that the public understands what Newark Public Schools is doing,” Brubaker wrote.
Low student test scores, mismanagement led to state control
By the time the state took over Newark in 1995, the district had endured more than a decade of declining graduation rates, disappointing test scores, lagging attendance, and mismanagement.
School buildings were crumbling and leaking, students were not proficient in reading, writing, and math, and school board members were taking lavish trips to Honolulu and dining at fine restaurants on the taxpayers’ dime, according to state officials at the time. The state’s takeover case was bolstered by a damning report authored by Sally Ann Fields, senior state deputy attorney general at the time, that said the district had been “at best flagrantly delinquent and at worst deceptive in discharging its obligations to the children enrolled.”
Although parents and advocates had previously raised concerns about the way schools were run, some saw the state takeover as destructive. Newark was the third school district to be taken over by the state, following Jersey City and Paterson, which also enroll a large share of Black and Latino students. Advocates who criticized the state’s takeover saw it as a political and racially motivated intervention. That idea is backed up by research that shows school districts with predominantly Black students are more likely to be taken over.
Over the next 22 years in Newark, state-appointed superintendents shut down schools, laid off hundreds of employees, and oversaw the expansion of charter schools.
Education reform advocates and philanthropic donors rallied behind the idea that charter schools, which are privately run but publicly funded schools, could deliver the academic turnaround city students desperately needed.
In 2010, a $100 million donation from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckberg fueled the expansion of charter schools, which boomed across the city, causing a decline in public school enrollment, a decrease in district funding, and budget cuts at traditional public schools.
Under state control, test scores and student achievement slowly increased but Newark’s school community remained skeptical about the efforts.
Lewis, the former Board president under state control, said the board at that time “didn’t really have the power to make decisions” since state-appointed superintendents could veto board actions.
“I think the state crippled us in really being able to educate our children correctly and give them the resources that they need,” Lewis said.
And many parents agreed. “I feel like, under state control, it destroyed our community in Newark,” said Johnson, who added that school closures ordered by state-appointed superintendents were especially damaging. “It destroyed families, separated families, divided families.”
After state takeover, NPS worked to rebuild schools
When the district officially reverted to local control in 2020, after a two-year transition during which the state said it had made “substantial and sustainable progress” to improve schools, León promised to reclaim public school spaces lost under the state’s takeover and slow the spread of charter schools.
León, a Newark Public Schools alum who worked his way up the district ladder, created an ambitious 10-year strategy known as “The Next Decade: 2020-2030,“ aimed at reopening shuttered schools and programs and improving chronic absenteeism, school infrastructure, attendance, and curricula. He also pledged to expand the teacher workforce.
By this year — year six of the strategic plan — “we will have laid the groundwork for progress for all of our priorities, and we will see the image, direction, and formation of a unified school system in the City of Newark,” León’s plan vows.
But those efforts were set back by the COVID-19 pandemic, which shut down schools and caused widespread learning disruptions. Student performance dropped, mental health issues grew, teachers burned out, and the need to support the district’s most vulnerable students became more urgent.
“I’m worried about how this system recovers,” he said at the time, “not from COVID-19 — but from the state-operated school district.”
In 2022, when New Jersey students took state standardized tests for the first time since the pandemic, León called the results “horrible,” noting that just 13% of students in grades 3–9 passed math and about 27% passed English language arts.
But an infusion of federal COVID relief funds was used to overhaul the district’s after-school programming and expand tutoring and academic recovery efforts and helped put León’s plan to boost student achievement back on track.
The efforts — combined with a 2023 overhaul of its reading and writing curriculum— helped grow scores by about two percentage points every year between 2022 and 2024, but state tests showed ongoing student challenges in reading and writing. Nearly 70% of students in grades 3-9 fell short of meeting literacy rates on their state tests in 2024 and around 82% did not meet math standards.
Still, the gains were enough for the district to earn a high-performing designation from the state this year.
Since the return to local control, the district has also opened 10 new schools, including reopening a school for students with disabilities in the city’s North Ward. While districts across the country saw a post-pandemic decline in enrollment, Newark’s enrollment increased, even surpassing charter school growth in 2023. It served roughly 44,000 pre-K through 12th grade students in the 2024-25 school year, up from 37,000 in 2020, when state oversight ended.
Over the last five years, the district has also improved other key metrics. During the 2023-24 school year, the most recent year with available state data, the district raised its graduation rate to 86.3% and reduced chronic absenteeism to 11.5%, up from 75.7% and down from 32%, respectively, in the 2017-18 school year.
The Newark Teachers Union’s formerly “hostile” relationship with the district under state control has also thawed under local control. Union President John Abeigon said state-appointed superintendents “were very dismissive of teachers and their input.” But the union has worked amicably with León to resolve disputes and both parties negotiated a new teachers contract that includes salary raises and opportunities for educators to have more say in curriculum decisions.
Those wins are just a fraction of what district teachers sought, Abeigon said, but “there is more communication and a mutual respect” between leadership and educators now.
Brubaker, the district spokesperson, attributed the gains over the last five years to León’s 10-year strategic plan.
“Successful implementation of the strategic plan has been made possible by the district staff, stakeholders, students, and their families, who believe the total transformation of the Newark Public Schools is possible,” he said in the statement to Chalkbeat.
Newark’s school community wants a seat at the table
Even as the district celebrates the progress under five years of local control, community members say work remains to be done. Students, teachers, and parents have repeatedly voiced concerns about the district’s lack of transparency in decision-making and problem-solving in schools.
Attempts to extend León’s contract have been quietly moved forward with little space for public input, and parents, students, and advocates have slammed León and district officials for withholding a scathing report detailing instances of racism at the Newark School of Global Studies and recommendations to improve the effects of anti-Blackness in the school system.
Former board members have also raised concerns about teacher retention and staff morale, an issue highlighted when two former teachers filed lawsuits alleging harassment in the workplace and racial hostility in schools, and a former employee sued the district for allegedly allowing a hostile work environment.
Abeigon, the teachers union president, says it’s up to the district to resolve the problems.
“If and when we make mistakes, we have to own it. We can no longer blame the state,” Abeigon added.
At the start of the 2021-22 school year, the district started the school year with 120 instructional vacancies and recruited retired teachers amid a staff shortage. Last school year, León also said the district was working to fill “hard-to-staff positions” such as special education aides, bilingual and STEM teachers.
But Lewis, the former board president, said he is concerned about the lack of African American leadership and teacher makeup in Newark schools in the wake of issues at Global Studies. He also raised questions about the way the school board operates.
“I’m praying that the district will continue to move forward, and like I said, there’s room, there’s always room to improve,” Lewis added.
Johnson, the former PTA president who advocated for the return to local control, says the district must do more to engage parents and make them feel heard. When parents of former Global Studies students tried to find a solution to the problems at the school, Johnson was confused as to why they were not included in the process, she said.
“How do you expect [parents] to participate, or be enthusiastic about a school district where they feel like their voices aren’t being heard?” Johnson said.
Johnson said the district could also be doing more to provide services and support for its most vulnerable students. Last school year, the district enrolled more than 11,000 multilingual students and roughly 7,000 special education students, according to state enrollment data.
The U.S. Department of Justice in 2021 found “wide-ranging failures” in the district’s program for English language learners, and some families of students with disabilities have said they’ve struggled to get the services their children are owed. Although Newark has met compliance requirements to exit state monitoring over services to English learners and students with disabilities, parents of those students have called on the district for more support.
To make radical and lasting improvements for students, district leaders “need to give everyone a chance to express their concerns” without fear of retaliation, Lewis said.
“I’m just looking for the day when we can all sit at the same table and say, listen, our main goal is to educate every child in this city and give them the opportunity for a great future,” Lewis said.
Jessie Gómez is a reporter for Chalkbeat Newark, covering public education in the city. Contact Jessie at jgomez@chalkbeat.org.
