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Njspotlight.com - Asbury Park School Audit Digs Into NJ’s Big Spender...State auditor report finds plenty of room for improvement, from staffing to phone bill
The Record Op-Ed - New Jersey Supreme Court should stand by Abbott
Star Ledger Associated Press - U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan to talk in Newark about program that recruits teachers to work in urban areas
Njspotlight.com - Asbury Park School Audit Digs Into NJ’s Big Spender
State auditor report finds plenty of room for improvement, from staffing to phone bill
By John Mooney, April 20 in Education
The Monmouth County school district is Gov. Chris Christie’s favorite target -- well, maybe second favorite target -- when it comes to criticizing New Jersey’s education establishment.
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Nearly as much as he goes after the New Jersey Education Association (NJEA), Christie is sure to mention in stump speeches what he calls the poster child of excessive school spending: Asbury Park, which he says shells out as much as $33,000 per student.
Now, the legislature’s state auditor has taken its own look, and in a report released Monday, it found a school system with more than its share of inefficiencies and lax controls, some known and some new.
State Auditor Stephen Eells yesterday stopped well short of claiming egregious waste or mismanagement -- and his report put the figure closer to $27,000 per student -- but he pointed to a general trend of the district’s enrollment dropping while its staffing has not.
In 12 years, the report said, enrollment had fallen close to 40 percent to about 2,100 students last year, while staffing was cut only by about 10 percent. That left the district’s ratios of student-to-teacher and student-to-administrator far below the state’s averages, the latter half the state norm, the report said.
In its defense, Eells said yesterday, the district has begun to address the imbalance with its well-publicized announcement this winter that it will close the Barack Obama School only a year after naming it for the president.
"When you address some of their ratios, you are talking some real money," Eells said in an interview. "We’re talking two or three administrators where other districts have one. These are major areas and significant costs."
Eells' office also found some less publicized issues, including about 1,300 extra days off allotted to staff for "critical illness in the family," outside legal fees well above the state’s norms, and payments for 149 telephone lines no longer in use.
Asbury Park school officials could not be reached for comment yesterday, with the schools closed for the week. The district’s outside counsel, Michael Gross of Kenney Gross Kovats & Parton in Red Bank, also was unavailable to discuss the report, said his office.
But in a lengthy response attached to the auditor report, district superintendent Denise Lowe said she was already addressing some of the claims while contesting others.
For instance, she said the critical illness days were part of the union contract and could not be easily eliminated. She did say said they could be more closely monitored. She also said the district had already begun to look for a new contract for outside legal counsel and to cut out the unused phone lines.
And she said both the planned closing of the Obama School and more intensive recruitment of new kindergarten students should help address the staffing imbalances. Not mentioned is the local school board resistance that has apparently emerged over the school closing, according to news reports.
"We believe your recommendations will improve our efficiency and effectiveness in providing the best education possible for the children of Asbury Park," Lowe wrote in her response.
"We have already implemented several of the procedures recommended by your team and will continue to research ways to do so in the future," she wrote.
The Record Op-Ed - New Jersey Supreme Court should stand by Abbott
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
BY AVIDAN COVER
The Record
WHEN THE New Jersey Supreme Court hears oral argument today in the school funding case, Governor Christie's and the court's legacies may both be on the line.
What is indisputably at stake is New Jersey's long commitment to narrowing the achievement gap between wealthy white students and poor black and Latino students.
Christie has consistently criticized the court's Abbott decisions, calling the line of cases "a failed theory." But what can't be denied is that Abbott dramatically increased funding for poor students in New Jersey and led to increased standardized test scores for poor black and Latino students. Christie's criticism took devastatingly concrete form in 2010, when he stripped $1.6 billion from the recently passed and court-approved school funding formula, setting up the current showdown with the court.
Christie has two chief complaints about the findings of a special master assigned by the court to determine if his cuts deprived students of a constitutionally acceptable education. First, he doesn't want the court "meddling" in education. Christie thinks that, particularly during difficult financial times, this is a matter for the executive and legislative branches to decide. And second, he wants to change the issue entirely, suggesting that Abbott money has had no impact on education.
The court should not brook Christie's arguments.
Interpreting constitutional rights is precisely what courts do. Importantly, the court has proven to be a flexible co-equal branch of government in the face of fiscal challenges, allowing for some limitations on school districts' budgets while providing mechanisms to ensure continuity of vital education programs.
Finally, the court should not entertain arguments that money does not affect educational quality. The school funding formula is predicated on the belief that a dollar figure that provides a constitutionally acceptable education can be calculated. The other two branches of government crafted this formula, and the court sanctioned it in 2009.
Moreover, through the Abbott decisions and the resulting actions by governors and legislatures of both parties, significant strides toward racial and educational equality have been achieved in New Jersey, something all New Jerseyans should be proud of. The court's call for greater levels of funding for poor students stemmed from recognition that many issues, including poverty, substandard housing and violence, impede students' ability to learn.
These problems haven't disappeared. A recent report by Legal Services of New Jersey found that the economic gap between racial and ethnic groups grew even larger during the Great Recession. The unemployment rate is substantially higher for black and Latino residents than for whites. Black and Latino children are particularly affected; approximately one in every four lives in poverty, and they are four times more likely to be living in poverty than white children.
Stanford education scholar Linda Darling-Hammond has observed that the reforms in education compelled by this court's Abbott decisions led to significant academic improvement among New Jersey's low-income minority students. The National Center for Educational Statistics found that between 1992 and 2007, New Jersey ranked among the top four states in increasing black students' standardized test scores. A 2009 report by the National Institute for Early Education Research showed that Abbott programs had a strong beneficial effect on elementary school children's learning and increased the rate at which students were promoted based on academic proficiency.
Christie's cuts in the 2010-11 school year hurt students in districts with the highest concentrations of at-risk students the most, resulting in a $1,530 per-pupil reduction compared with $944 in districts with the lowest at-risk student percentages. As a result, cities like East Orange made drastic cuts, including terminating 157 teachers and decreasing funds for Saturday and after-school programs.
That the achievement gap still exists there can be no doubt. But the persistence of the achievement gap — what some have called the greatest civil rights challenge of our time — is no indictment of Abbott and the court. Christie's calls for education reform and slashing of critical funds to the neediest students may make good politics, but they don't make educational sense. The court should stand by its proud legacy of ensuring sufficient funding to provide equal educational opportunities for all New Jersey children and order full funding of the school formula.
Avidan Cover directs the Urban Revitalization Project within the Center for Social Justice at Seton Hall Law School, where he is a practitioner-in-residence. Seton Hall Law students Sebastian Sanchez and Megan Cate assisted with this article.
Star Ledger - U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan to talk in Newark about program that recruits teachers to work in urban areas
Published: Wednesday, April 20, 2011, 6:19 AM Updated: Wednesday, April 20, 2011, 6:19 AM
teachers to work in urban and rural areas.
NEWARK — U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan is coming to Newark to publicize a program aimed at recruiting more teachers to work in urban and rural areas.
He's scheduled to host a town hall meeting today at a Newark youth and employment center to talk about the Department of Education's TEACH Campaign.
Newark Mayor Cory Booker, community leaders and educators will participate in a discussion on how to recruit a new generation of high-quality teachers.
The TEACH program provides educational materials, information and job listings to encourage people to go into teaching and work in underserved areas.
Revamping Newark's education system has been a priority for Booker. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg donated $100 million last fall toward the effort.
