Matthew Frankel is a veteran of the Clinton White House, the Office of the House Democratic Leader, and several political campaigns across the country.  He founded MDF Strategies, which serves a variety of NJ-based education advocates, nonprofits, and superintendents.  Over ten years ago, he served as Executive Director of Communications at the Newark Public Schools. This first appeared at nj.com.

In a tactic eerily similar to then-Attorney General William Barr’s infamous mischaracterization of the Mueller Report, Newark Superintendent Roger León released his own version of the ‘Barr Letter,’ in a failed attempt to spin a scathing audit.

Had we relied on the press release León’s taxpayer-financed communications office released, New Jersey would not know the truth. The Newark Public Schools (NPS) headline read, ‘Newark Public Schools Comes Through State Audit with Flying Colors’ and claimed the 22 months of investigation found ‘nothing.’

The State Auditor responded that NPS’s misstated his report, and thankfully New Jersey still has journalists to report the facts.

The audit tells a different story

Here is what ‘nothing’ looks like, according to Roger León.

‘Certain matters’ have been referred to the state Division of Criminal Justice.

The district overstated enrollment by 128 students two years running and collected millions in state aid it should not have received.

In a system responsible for more than 40,000 children, some employees had never completed needed criminal background checks and many more needed to updated their documentation.

León built himself a $566,000 gym with a full-time trainer, without board approval or competitive bidding. Auditors counted that an average of only seven central staff a day used it.

And let’s not forget the well-reported ‘Central Office FunDay,’ costing Newark taxpayers $57,065 and the frivolous travel of both Leon and his team, all at taxpayer expense.

Taxpayers are paying for the spin

This ‘nothing’ NPS press release came from a communications office run by Paul Brubaker, who, according to NJ.com, receives a salary of $180,000 a year, close to what the average New Jersey superintendent earns, more than any communications aide in the state’s largest school districts, and in a city where the median earnings sits around $36,670.

State taxpayers fund roughly 80% of the Newark district, they paid for the audit, and even pays for NPS’s poorly executed spin and rebuttal.

The day after NPS’s “see no evil, hear no evil” press release, the same communications office announced it had won Best in Class for Media Coverage from the New Jersey School Public Relations Association(NJSPRA). The awards were handed out Sept. 29, two days before the audit landed. Somewhere, NJSPRA judges must be asking for a recall.

A pattern of overstating success

Unfortunately, these tactics are nothing new for the Superintendent.

According to multiple NPS press releases, Leon likes to declare Newark a ‘high-performing’ district. His basis for this title comes from the New Jersey Quality Single Accountability Continuum (NJQSAC), a pass/fail compliance review that districts first score themselves. Thirty-eight of the 39 districts last reviewed passed the test.

The propensity to overstate performance has been a hallmark of Leon’s tenure. Three years prior to the QSAC review, León stood before the Newark school board and flashed slides calling schools ‘high performing.’ After the celebration, TAPinto Newarkreported that none of the district’s K-8 schools met the state’s proficiency standards.

Leon has also claimed that chronic absenteeism has dramatically fallen. In a piece by Asbury Park Press, attendance experts looking at Newark’s data questioned the claims. León has even conceded, “We did extraordinarily well this past year simply because the state of New Jersey actually changed the rules.”

When transparency gives way to control

African-American students at the Newark School of Global Studies, stood up at a series of Newark school boards describing racist slurs and harassment. Eventually, an independent review was commissioned, and the district spent years fighting to keep it secret, calling it a ‘draft.’

A leaked version reported by Chalkbeat Newark found students and teachers were “subjected to acts of anti-Blackness,” and recorded students’ accounts of an assembly where León told them, in effect, that if they were not comfortable, they could leave.

Last fall, a proposal to extend León’s contract to 2030 failed. A month later, with no public notice, it was passed at a late-night Board meeting. A parliamentary expert told Chalkbeat the maneuver was “totally improper.” Yet, the district’s press release incorrectly stated the extension followed “required public notice and hearing procedures.”

The truth Newark families deserve

Finding truth in León’s Newark is difficult.

Right now here is the one truth that matters: only 34% of Newark public school scholars are reading at grade level, and only 21% are at grade level in math.

Every turnaround starts with an honest diagnosis. A district that hides a report on racism cannot root racism out of its hallways. A district that calls 21% math proficiency ‘high performing’ has no reason to change how math is taught. A district that tells taxpayers a critical audit found ‘nothing’ will likely face the same scrutiny in the future.

For the past decade, Democrats have led the fight against a President who treats facts as optional and spin as a governing strategy. Thanks to the leadership of Mayor Ras Baraka, Newark has been on the front lines of that fight.

When people in power misrepresent the record, they weaken the public’s ability to govern itself. Newark fought for decades to win back control of its schools so its families would finally get honest answers, and right now they are not getting them. It is time to demand the truth, starting with a full public accounting of what this audit found.

The narratives that matter in Newark belong to the students at Global Studies who stood up and told the truth about what was happening to them. They belong to the two-thirds of Newark students not reading at grade level. Most of all, they belong to Newark parents, who for generations have fought for their kids’ future. Those are the stories León was hired to serve. Instead, he has spent public money drowning them out.