Press of Atlantic City - N.J. students score highly on national test

Star Ledger - 'We're going to fix it': N.J.'s top Democrat blasts private special-needs school spending

November 10, 2013 - Christopher Baxter/The Star-Ledger The Star-Ledger Email the author | Follow on Twitter

TRENTON — State Senate President Stephen Sweeney wants to control the spending of taxpayer dollars by New Jersey’s private schools for students with disabilities and said he will pursue changes to ensure as much money as possible goes toward education.

With his pledge, Sweeney, the state’s top Democrat, joined a growing chorus of lawmakers calling for reform in response to a Star-Ledger investigation that found nepotism, high executive salaries, generous pensions, fancy cars and questionable business deals are common in some of the nearly 180 private schools for the disabled.

These schools are privately run but they are supported by public money. At the same time, they are not subject to the same oversight given public schools.

“As a father of a child with a disability, my motivation and passion is to improve special education,” Sweeney said in an interview Thursday. “This puts a really bad mark on it, so we’re going to fix it in a way so we’re not going to have to read stories about this again.”

Sweeney’s daughter, Lauren, was diagnosed at birth with Down syndrome, and he has said she was the reason he entered politics. Two years ago, he stood with Lauren, hand-in-hand, at a news conference to welcome the 2014 Special Olympics to New Jersey.

“We need to thoughtfully look at what happened here, because the one thing I don’t want to do is hurt children with disabilities,” Sweeney said. “But I sure as hell am not going to support the kind of spending that’s been reported.”

He added, “I’m real concerned about it, and with what’s happened, where there is abuse, it’s completely unacceptable.”

A day after the investigation, Assembly Education Committee Chairman Patrick Diegnan (D-Middlesex) and state Sen. Shirley Turner (D-Mercer), the vice chairwoman of the upper house’s panel, said more oversight and accountability should be a top priority of the Legislature.

Diegnan said Friday his committee will hold a hearing on the matter, perhaps as soon as next month, but no date has been set.

Star-Ledger staff writer Matt Friedman contributed to this report.

Press of Atlantic City - N.J. students score highly on national test

By Diane d’Amico, Thursday, November 7, 2013 10:57 am

TRENTON - New Jersey students scored among the highest in the nation this year on a standardized test often used to compare states' educational performance, and the exams revealed that Hispanic eighth-graders have made significant progress in closing the performance gap with their white peers, according to results released Thursday.

New Jersey's eighth-graders ranked second in the nation for the average score of the National Assessment of Educational Progress on both the reading and math tests. Fourth-graders were fourth in reading and tied for sixth in math.

The NAEP tests administered this spring to fourth- and eighth-graders in a handful of schools in each state offered a wake-up call again. They are given every two years. While scores have been trending up over the last two decades, the majority of students failed to score as proficient or higher in reading and math this year.

New Jersey, like most states, is rethinking elemen ts of its public schools. The New Jersey Education Association, the state's largest teachers union, often focuses on the best of the results - that students here outperform their peers elsewhere. Gov. Chris Christie and his administration, which are pushing for bigger changes, generally focus on the performance gaps, which persist between white students and blacks and Hispanics, as well as between students who do not qualify for free or reduced-price school lunch and those who do.

The gaps tend to be similar to the national ones. Hispanic eighth-graders significantly closed gaps with white students on both reading and math tests this year. The gap between the scores of white and Hispanic students also narrowed nationally. The results on other exams in New Jersey was mixed, with some gaps narrowing a bit and others widening, but none by statistically significant amounts.

New Jersey's student performances are slightly up or slightly down from 2011, depending on the exam. The trend over the last two decades has been upward, but scores have fluctuated over the last several years.

On the whole, New Jersey students topped the national marks on all four exams, but they left plenty of room for improvement.

Forty-nine percent of New Jersey students in both fourth and eighth grades rated as proficient or above in math, compared with 42 percent of fourth- graders nationally and 36 percent of eighth-graders.

In reading, 42 percent of the state's fourth-graders and 46 percent of eighth-graders hit the mark. Nationally, 35 percent of fourth-graders and 36 percent of eighth-graders did.