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Commentary By Manhattan Institute

Conservative Think Tank Finds 'Meaningful' Academic Progress at New York City's Renewal Schools

Editor's note: This piece appeared at Chalkbeat (by Alex Zimmerman), based on an upcoming MI report by senior fellow Marcus Winters

Mayor Bill de Blasio’s big bet on pumping millions of dollars into low-performing schools instead of closing them down is creating “meaningful” academic benefits.

That’s according to a forthcoming report from an unlikely source: the conservative-leaning Manhattan Institute, a frequent critic of the mayor’s education policies. The report is the first independent analysis to show that the Renewal program is producing academic benefits, as measured by math and reading scores on state tests.

School Renewal — a program that infused 94 of the city’s lowest-performing schools with additional social services, nonprofit partnerships and academic support — tended to produce larger academic gains than the rest of the city’s schools, including those that had similarly low test scores before the program began.

In all, the report estimates, Renewal boosted student achievement by a “meaningful magnitude” — the equivalent of about 93 days of extra instruction in reading and 65 days in math, as measured by gains in state test scores. (The report focuses only on elementary and middle schools. It does not look at academic progress in Renewal high schools, which comprise a little more than a third of the program.)

“The evidence I find is that that the schools are better than they would have been without the label,” said Marcus Winters, the study’s author.

That finding is good news for an administration....

Read the entire piece here at Chalkbeat

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This piece originally appeared in Chalkbeat