Draft reports
Reports
Analytical reports that go beyond a single district or school — early, and shown while they are still taking shape.
draft
The dip, the recovery, and the decline after
Statewide · fall 2019-20 → 2025-26
- The pandemic enrollment dip was modest (−0.98%) and fully recovered by 2023-24 — and the decline since then is already larger than the dip was. Four NJ DOE files, every number verified by independent recomputation, full provenance in a public research notebook.
Budget pressure signals
Statewide · 250 districts
- A typed, mechanism-specific read of where NJ districts show budget pressure — deliberately not a health score or a ranking. Financial, structural, and reliability panels, computed the same way for every district.
Six school-funding ideas, reality-checked
SOMSD case study · current through FY2027
- A district advocacy package checked against enacted law, legislative analysis, NJDOE methodology, and district data—separating current policy, supported pressure, and impacts the public record cannot price.
Where did SOMSD's Black students go?
SOMSD case study · 1998-99 → 2025-26
- Everything we hold on one district's demographic change: 28 years of enrollment by race, sixteen ACS windows of resident population, where resident students actually go, and the two race-category breaks — NJDOE's in 2006-07 and the Census Bureau's in 2020 — that make the plain comparison wrong. Margins of error printed throughout.