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Newark Public Schools leaders failed to “quickly and consistently” respond to racist and bigoted incidents against Black students and teachers at a city school designed to embrace world cultures, according to a draft of a scathing report that district officials have sought to keep private.
A copy of the 39-page draft, obtained by Chalkbeat Newark, details harrowing examples of how Black students and teachers at the Newark School of Global Studies were “subjected to acts of anti-Blackness and anti-Black racism.” The review also highlighted how the school’s response failed to address the problems, and in some cases, magnified racial issues.
The May 2023 draft of the report written by the consulting firm Creed Strategies is the public’s first look into the firm’s review of the cultural, racial, and religious dynamics at Global Studies that pushed some Black students to transfer and teachers to resign. The draft obtained by Chalkbeat is not the latest version of the report. But the district has fought to keep all versions of the report private, nearly two years after Newark school board leaders commissioned it.
Attorneys for the district have argued in court filings that the report is a “predecisional draft document” and therefore exempt from the state’s public records law. If portions of the report were disclosed, “it would have a chilling effect” on the district’s ongoing efforts “to improve dialogue and sensitivity practices” at Global Studies and other schools, according to a court record outlining the district’s opposition to the Newark Teachers Union lawsuit seeking the release of the report.
In 2023, the Newark Teachers Union filed two lawsuits against the district over the release of the report, but the union agreed to settle the lawsuits last fall without its release.
The draft report paints a picture of a campus where Black students and teachers reported being called racial slurs by Latino students, the N-word was commonly used among non-Black students, and where complaints by Black students were often dismissed or minimized by administrators and non-Black staff. A male student was repeatedly called an anti-gay slur in class while a teacher was present, and other students made threats to “take off” and “stomp on” the hijabs of Black and Arab Muslim female teachers, according to the review.
Many of the allegations in the draft report have been brought up in public, substantiated in Chalkbeat interviews, and are mentioned in lawsuits against the district. The issues also caught the attention of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, who hosted a town hall to discuss unity among Black and brown communities months after students spoke publicly about their experiences.
Former Global Studies teachers filed a lawsuit against the district alleging that school and district leaders created a hostile work environment where they experienced racial discrimination and retaliation, according to the lawsuit filed in Essex County Superior Court last spring. The lawsuit is ongoing.
The former teachers also filed claims with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. The department opened an investigation into the claim on Dec. 21, 2023, and it is ongoing.
Paul Brubaker, the district’s communications director, did not respond to Chalkbeat’s request to provide a copy of the full Global Studies report. Instead, in an emailed response, he reiterated the district’s stance that the report is “privileged and confidential.” Brubaker said the school board “reserves the right to take any and all appropriate action to prevent or redress injury to itself,” district staff, school or students.
Brubaker did not respond to questions about the district’s efforts to fix the problems at the high school, how it changed its policies to address racial problems, and the professional support it has provided teachers with since the incidents at the school surfaced.
Superintendent Roger León promised to fix the problems
Staff, parents, and students were interviewed by Creed Strategies’ six-member review team about their experiences at the high school and were anonymously quoted throughout the draft report. The research team was made up of professors and education experts with experience in school leadership and representative of the demographics at Global Studies.
In interviews with Creed researchers, Black students described a “sense of betrayal” when their peers and adults used racial slurs, according to the draft report. Most Black students “felt stunned, at a loss for words, or angry” when the incidents occurred, the report read.
When asked by researchers about the reported incidents, some of the staff responded defensively, while others said they did not know about the issues until students spoke publicly in 2022, the review found. Teachers reported that the lack of transparency about the issues at Global Studies limited their ability to understand what was happening and eroded morale, the report read. Other staff said the aftermath of the issues becoming public caused “some upheaval” at Global Studies with “very few” attributing the chaos to the racist incidents Black students and teachers had described in 2022, the draft report stated.
But emails obtained by Chalkbeat revealed that school administrators had known about the issues before they became public, and a parent begged state and district officials for an end to the harassment against her son. School leaders missed an opportunity “to address the professional learning needs” of teachers to be responsive to the incidents and create “culturally responsive” learning, according to the draft.
Some interviewees cited in the report also framed “Black women and girls” as “easily triggered and angry” when discussing the incidents at the school, the review notes. “Instead of focusing on the systemic racism that Black women and girls are speaking up against, there was a sense of defensiveness,” the draft report says. In claims filed by former Global Studies teachers, they alleged they “suffered harassment and racial hostility by students and supervisors” and felt their “worth as a teacher and human being has been diminished.”
Newark school board leaders commissioned the review of Global Studies at the start of 2023 in response to Black students speaking publicly about a pattern of racist harassment on campus. The May 2023 draft provided the district with three recommendations, which were released publicly, and meant to be “proactively implemented” to tackle anti-Blackness and build Global Studies’ understanding of diversity, the draft read.
A mix of Global Studies parents, students, teachers, some board members, and community advocates have been calling on Superintendent Roger León to release the full report on the high school and address the problems. León promised students he would fix the problems at the school but he has not said what changes or efforts have been made at Global Studies, one of the district’s top magnet schools. Deborah Smith Gregory, president of NAACP Newark, is one of the advocates who has called on León to release the Global Studies report but has been ignored, she said during a school board meeting last month.
“It seems that the rule of the superintendent is being sanctioned by the board with little oversight and question,” said Smith Gregory in December.
Despite calls for transparency, the Newark school board last month quietly sent a petition to the state to remove one of its longest-serving members after her daughter filed a legal claim against the district alleging racial harassment and discrimination during her time as a student at Global Studies. A New Jersey judge denied the petition but the state’s commissioner of education will issue a final decision by February.
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