A new national report prepared by the Brookings Institution’s Sofoklis Goulas on behalf of the Fordham Foundation finds that 500 chronically low-performing schools that are seeing enrollment decline should contemplate closures. Three of those schools are in New Jersey’s largest school district, Newark Public Schools: Rafael Hernandez School, South 17th Street School (both K-8), and Malcolm X Shabazz High School.

A combination of Covid-19 enrollment drops and a decade-long drop in birth rates, explains Goulas, hit America’s lowest-performing schools hard. In fact, schools identified as chronically-low performing were “twice as likely to experience sizeable enrollment declines.” In some states, including New Jersey, there have been drops in residential population too. If demographics is destiny, school closures are inevitable (and, research shows, ultimately beneficial if those students are able to transfer to higher-performing schools.

What does it mean for a school to be “chronically low-performing”? Goulas uses as his proxy schools that are designated by the U.S. Education Department as in need of “Continuous Support and Improvement,” which includes the lowest-performing 5% of Title 1 schools, high schools with graduation rates below 67%, and Title 1 schools where low-performing subgroups didn’t improve even after district- led intervention. A 20% or more drop in enrollment, for Goulas, is a “substantial enrollment decline

“Insofar as family satisfaction depends on school performance,” he writes, “one might expect schools identified as low-performing to experience larger enrollment declines after COVID-19 than other public schools.”

Let’s look at the three Newark schools.

• Rafael Hernandez School, with 563 students, has had a 28% enrollment drop since 2019.

• Malcolm X Shabazz High School, with 272 students, has had a 25% drop in enrollment since 2019

• South 17th Street School, with 335 students, has had a 26% drop in enrollment since 2019.

(Note: Rafael Hernandez Elementary School came off the state’s list of low-performing schools last December, mostly because reading proficiency rates rose from 12.8% in 2021-2022 to 20% in 2022-2023. Yet it’s worth looking more closely because third-grade reading proficiency is considered an important milestone: In fourth-grade, students are expected to “read to learn,” not “learn to read.” At this school in spring 2022, 50 third-grade students took the state assessment and six students met grade-level expectations. In spring 2023, according to the database, 40 students took the assessment and five students met expectations, although TAPinto says only three students did. While third-graders are no better off, schoolwide increases in proficiency were enough to get off the list.)

For further context, a recent report from Bellwether looks at each state’s drop in student enrollment, birth rates, and migration among states. According to this research, New Jersey has had a 4% drop in the birth rate over the last decade. Between 2021-2022 92,000 residents left New Jersey, the fourth largest drop in population among all states and D.C.