| ||||||||||||
Njspotlight.com - A Charter Conversation …” Cerf said that the state does need to take a look at the local community in deciding whether a charter is appropriate, evaluating the impact on the budget for a smaller district, for example, but also looking at whether it is serving an academic need. "Of all the questions today, this is the most difficult," Cerf said.
Star Ledger - 1) editorial - Newark's new superintendent, Cami Anderson: A capable woman who will need a lot of help, and...2) Christie names Rochelle Hendricks N.J.'s first secretary of higher education...,and 3) N.J. Senator rips court's school aid 'hijacking,' says proposal would level per-student funding
Asbury Park Press - NAACP head decries Christie move
CNN, Washington DC- At forum, N.J. governor and others call for bipartisanship to end an education crisis
Njspotlight.com - A Charter Conversation – …NJ Spotlight Roundtable brings together key players to talk charter school policy
…..“Cerf said that the state does need to take a look at the local community in deciding whether a charter is appropriate, evaluating the impact on the budget for a smaller district, for example, but also looking at whether it is serving an academic need. "Of all the questions today, this is the most difficult," Cerf said.
There’s not much agreement about New Jersey’s charter schools lately, but as the Christie administration and the legislature weigh how to move forward, some leading voices in the debate agree maybe it’s a good time to look back, too.
In a panel hosted yesterday by NJ Spotlight and held at Rutgers University in Newark, state Assemblywoman Mila Jasey (D-Essex) said she had spoken with Democratic leaders in the Senate and Assembly about taking a hard look at New Jersey’s 15 years of charter schools.
Arguably the leading voice in the legislature on charter school policy, Jasey said she was unsure how to conduct the review, be it through hearings or a separate task force. But she called it long overdue.
njsba on livestream.com. Broadcast Live Free
"It is past time for us to take a look back at the 15 years of experience we have had with charter schools in New Jersey," Jasey said. “We really don’t have any good information. There are a lot of opinions, a lot of data coming from different sources, but I think we need a very careful look back, what’s good, what’s not so good and how do we go forward.”
Acting Education Commissioner Chris Cerf seconded the idea, agreeing during the two-hour discussion for the need of a "real reflective process" to examine the lessons of New Jersey’s early experience with charters and with what he said were fundamental reforms for both charters and traditional schools.
Rare Point of Agreement
It was one of the rare points of agreement during the NJ Spotlight Roundtable on Charter School Policy and Accountability, attended by more than 150 people and also Livestreamed on the web by the New Jersey School Boards Association.
In addition to Jasey and Cerf, panelists included Carly Bolger, director of the state’s charter school office; Katrina Bulkley, associate professor at Montclair State University; Julia Sass Rubin, founding member of Save Our Schools New Jersey; and Karen Thomas, CEO of Marion P. Thomas Charter School in Newark. John Mooney, co-founder of and education writer for NJ Spotlight, served as the moderator.
Since Gov. Chris Christie has pushed for the expansion of charter schools and approved unprecedented numbers already, the roundtable discussion was intended to focus on the role of the policies, funding and accountability measures provided by the state, as well as local school boards and others.
An important ingredient in the mix is charter school authorizers -- state and other agencies that review and approve new charter schools and also provide assistance and monitoring once a school is operating, including through the charter renewal process.
New Jersey is one of four states in the country in which the state Department of Education is the sole authorizer, posing an increasingly difficult challenge for the department as charter schools have continued to expand.
Jasey has sponsored a bill that would allow up to three four-year colleges and universities to apply to be authorizers, under approval by the State Board of Education. The Christie administration has proposed draft legislation that would extend approval to all higher education institutions, as well as local boards of education.
Bulkley, the Montclair State professor who has studied charter school policy nationally, pointed out that other states have a broad range of authorizing mechanisms, with the most successful having the financial resources behind them and the independence from the political ebb and flow of different state administrations.
“It is very important that there be clear resources dedicated to the authorizing process,” Bulkley said. “We know that makes a difference. We can have the greatest structure in the world, but if you don’t have the people doing it, it doesn’t make much of a difference.”
Grassroots Group
There was hardly agreement on whether it should be in other hands. Rubin, whose grassroots group has been an outspoken voice in the charter debate, said she worried that multiple authorizers would make the charter process even less accountable to the public and the local communities. Her group has advocated for binding local votes before a charter school is approved.
"We have a lot of concerns about a multiple-authorizer model that doesn’t have a voter-accountable component," she said. "We want whoever is authorizing schools to see that the voters are involved."
Cerf concurred that New Jersey is not strong in its oversight of charters, but said that holds true of traditional district schools as well.
"The only thing we do worse than closing charters is closing bad district schools," he said. "We absolutely need to hold charters to high standards, but I wish we held district schools to the same standards."
The state recently moved in on one Trenton charter school for its poor academic performance, he said, leading the state to withdraw its charter. And he said more aggressive actions are coming.
"Without giving away too many state secrets, that is just the beginning of a process," he said. "I will say that we have done as a state extremely poorly and that is changing."
Shared Funding
Much of the recent tensions over charter schools in the state has come in the shared funding, with districts compelled to pay out of their budgets the equivalent of 90 percent of the per-pupil costs for each child attending a charter.
According to the panelists, there appeared few alternatives to the funding stream, with other states using similar formulas in providing for charter schools. Few, if any, provide money for charter school facilities, long a bone of contention for New Jersey’s charters.
Thomas, CEO of the Newark charter school, said as much as third of her budget goes to facility costs that she raises independently.
Another source of tension is the perceived sense that charter schools are selective in the students who attend. The schools are required to accept all students and, when space is limited, go through a lottery process. Yet the charter schools have lower percentages of students with special needs and limited English skills.
It is a difficult area to monitor, most agreed yesterday, with the state left to poring over data and oftentimes reacting to complaints to try to ensure schools are striving for student enrollments representative of the communities they serve.
"There is this perception that charter schools have the ability that they get rid of kids they don’t want and select kids coming in, and I think there is a lot to say about what extent that is true," said Bolger, the new director of the state’s charter school office.
"But my role as an authorizer is to look at that data and incorporate it into the renewal decisions and incorporate that into the performance contracts we are trying to implement," she said. "So we’ll look at student retention, look at English language learners and students in special education. But also be mindful to compare it to the district, where mobility rates can sometimes be high.
Thomas said her charter school is reflective of the demographics of the larger Newark community, but she said that the admissions process has indeed grown more sophisticated as both charters have expanded and parents have gained more knowledge about the schools.
"Ten years ago, parents would show up and fill out the application," she said. "But now they sit down and tell me they have the school report card and are looking at us in comparison with another school. It’s a far more savvy process. Everyone on my waiting list is probably on six other waiting lists here in Newark."
“The whole process in how parents are making decisions, we also have to be responsive from a policy perspective," she said.
Even more difficult are the rising number of charter schools with special focuses, most notably those providing Mandarin language and Hebrew language immersion. Several have already been approved in Mercer, Middlesex and Bergen counties, and two more Mandarin language programs have been proposed in Essex.
In each case, they are also in communities that regard their district schools as high performing, with some contesting the need for any alternative schools.
Cerf said that the state does need to take a look at the local community in deciding whether a charter is appropriate, evaluating the impact on the budget for a smaller district, for example, but also looking at whether it is serving an academic need.
"Of all the questions today, this is the most difficult," Cerf said.
Asbury Park Press, 5/13/11 - NAACP head decries Christie move
Compares school funding beliefs to George Wallace in 1963
NEW BRUNSWICK — The NAACP president said Thursday that he was disappointed that Gov. Chris Christie is considering defying the state Supreme Court over a school funding case, and he alluded to the situation when Alabama Gov. George Wallace refused to allow desegregated schools in 1963.
Benjamin T. Jealous, the president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, made the comments in a short interview after an address at Rutgers University.
Jealous said Christie’s recent suggestion that he could ignore a pending state Supreme Court decision raises a scary specter for the black community.
“For older folks, it brings up a lot of bad memories,” Jealous said.
Then he added, “History should have taught him that when governors defy Supreme Court orders to respect the civil rights of all children in their state are on the wrong side of history.”
Jealous nodded when asked if he was referring to Wallace’s famous attempt to stand in front of federal troops and defy a U.S. Supreme Court during the civil-rights era.
Christie reportedly had made the suggestion about defying the state Supreme Court in a recent radio interview.
Christie spokesman Michael Drewniak said Jealous’ remarks were “a truly inappropriate comment, not to mention that it is completely out of context with the issues we are grappling with here in New Jersey.”
The state Supreme Court is expected to rule any day on whether the state is spending enough money in local schools.
The court could order the state to fulfill its school aid formulas and spend up to $1.75 billion in the state budget that begins July 1.
The case was brought by the Education Law Center of Newark, which represents students in 31 low-income school districts that have received massive school aid under previous court rulings for the past 20 years.
The state chapter of the NAACP has backed the Education Law Center in the case.
Jealous gave his speech at an event hosted by the ELC. He called for greater funding for public schools and decried the high incarceration rate for black men.
Star Ledger editorial - Newark's new superintendent, Cami Anderson: A capable woman who will need a lot of help
Published: Thursday, May 05, 2011, 5:59 AM Updated: Thursday, May 05, 2011, 7:04 AM
Politics in Newark is not for wimps. Because when you propose change in this city, even when it’s clearly needed, you can count on ferocious push-back. It happened to Cory Booker when he took over city hall. It happened to Garry McCarthy when he took over the police department. And it will surely happen to Cami Anderson, the woman chosen this week as Newark’s superintendent of schools.
So let’s take a moment to root for her success, and maybe even give her the benefit of the doubt if she stumbles a few times out of the gate. Newark’s success now hinges on her success.
The enormous challenges she faces are matched by the enormous opportunity. It’s not just the potential for $200 million in Facebook money to grease reforms. It is the growing impatience with the failure of the public schools in the city. When 4,000 families join a waiting list at the TEAM charters, and hundreds line up overnight to get into Ann Street school, you can’t question the city’s thirst for something better.
And there is growing support for key reforms, like expanding charter schools and establishing more innovative schools within the traditional system. Like reforming teacher tenure and training, closing down failing schools, and holding adults everywhere accountable for student performance.
Luckily, Anderson has walked this walk before. As the former head of alternative schools in New York City, she worked effectively with the teacher’s union and community groups to overhaul the city’s GED program, and smoothed the way for traditional schools to share space with experimental ones. She closed the last of the dismal schools for pregnant students, despite pushback, and invested in better programs for teenage parents in regular high schools.
Our hope is that Anderson is prepared in the end to knock her head through brick walls to create change. Because Newark kids need a fighter. At high schools like Malcolm X Shabazz, the majority of 11th graders fail proficiency tests in both math and reading. Overall, the system graduates only about half of the kids who enter high school.
That has to change. And to get it done, Anderson is going to need support and respect from all sides. We wish her, and the city, good luck.
Star Ledger - Christie names Rochelle Hendricks N.J.'s first secretary of higher education
Published: Friday, May 13, 2011, 6:45 AM
TRENTON — For decades, New Jersey had a powerful chancellor of higher education who oversaw a large and formidable department that kept a tight rein on the state’s colleges and universities.
But in 1994, then-Gov. Christie Whitman vowed to give New Jersey’s colleges and universities more autonomy and abolished the chancellor job and the entire department.
Over the years, colleges enjoyed their new-found freedom — but many felt they had lost their voice in Trenton as the state repeatedly cut funding for higher education.
Thursday, Gov. Chris Christie gave colleges an advocate again with the appointment of Rochelle Hendricks as the state’s first secretary of higher education.
Hendricks, currently the state’s acting deputy education commissioner, will not have the power to set tuition or approve degree programs. But she will serve as an advocate for higher education within the governor’s cabinet at a time when the state’s public colleges and universities are dealing with years of funding cuts.
"This is a knowledge-based economy," Hendricks said. "Higher education has to be not only supported, but we need a passionate advocate to move us forward so that every student in New Jersey has access to an opportunity for attainment of a degree."
Christie announced Hendricks’ appointment in Jersey City alongside students from St. Anthony High School, where 100 percent of graduates are accepted to college.
Hendricks, 63, served briefly as acting education commissioner between Bret Schundler’s firing last fall and Christopher Cerf’s hiring in December. The Fair Haven resident first came to the Department of Education in 1987 under former Gov. Tom Kean after more than 15 years at Princeton University in various posts, including assistant dean of students. In her new post, Hendricks would make $141,000.
Christie said Hendricks’ appointment, which must be approved by the state Senate, fulfills a campaign promise to focus on higher education. Some legislators criticized how long it took the governor to act on that promise.
"All I can say is it’s about damn time," said state Sen. Raymond Lesniak (D-Union), who sponsored the law creating the new secretary’s position, which was signed into law nearly a year-and-a-half ago.
Assembly Higher Education Chairwoman Pamela Lampitt (D-Camden) also blasted the governor for taking 16 months to name a higher education secretary, but said she hopes Hendricks will help reduce the cost of attending the state’s colleges and universities.
"The governor has yet to make a commitment to higher education and its affordability, so working class New Jerseyans must certainly hope this is a turning point," Lampitt said.
Montclair State University President Susan Cole said Hendricks has a strong track record working on K-12 issues with the school’s teacher preparation programs. The new secretary will now play a crucial role in helping the higher education community tackle its challenges, Cole said.
"New Jersey has a substantial and very important agenda before it in correcting long-standing deficits in both investments and public policy related to higher education," she said.
Hendricks starts her new job at a complex time for higher education. A state commission is considering reforming the medical education system, including whether to merge parts of Rutgers University and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.
Staff writer Kelly Heyboer contributed to this report.
CNN- At forum, N.J. governor and others call for bipartisanship to end an education crisis
May 12 2011 Washington (CNN) – The nation's education system is in crisis, and bipartisan support is essential for reform, a panel of leading experts said Wednesday. While disagreeing on key points, they said the time for action on education is now.
"A Pathway to Excellence: The Future of Education in America" was moderated by Jessica Yellin, CNN's national political correspondent.
At the forum, Republican New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and U.S. Rep. George Miller, D-California, clashed over how much blame teachers unions should bear for the problems in the nations' public schools and whether they are willing to change.
"The single most powerful political force is the teachers union fighting this," Christie said. The governor, who has butted heads with the unions since taking office, has made education a key priority and has traveled his state to town hall meetings discussing his ideas.
He told the audience on Wednesday that union members are not the only people to blame "but they are the people to blame for the lack of change because they are the ones who stand in the way of any change."
Generally, teachers unions are major supporters of Democrats.
Miller, an influential congressional voice on education for many years, said he has had his disagreements with the unions but disagreed with Christie's portrayal.
"That is too simplistic. I see change taking place all across the country in public systems, public systems that have adopted public charter schools, that let people go to private charter schools, that have adopted open choice," he said. "There is no question that teachers unions are a powerful part of this argument. They should be. They are central to its success. They can be central to its failure."
Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colorado, who once was Denver's schools superintendent, said the various constituencies must find consensus on the problems before they can tackle reform. "Change is very hard to accomplish unless people have a shared understanding of the facts."
"If you want to make this teachers vs. everybody else, you are missing the game because school boards and superintendents and PTAs and local school boards liked their school system because it was neat and it was comfortable. It just wasn't serving the children, and so we are into the next generation," Miller said.
Christie, who has been meeting with several of the leading GOP presidential hopefuls, deferred when asked whether any of the contenders shard his views on education.
"You ain't getting me anywhere near that," which was met with laughter by the audience.
Despite widespread speculation about the possibility, Christie again said flat-out he will not be seeking the Republican presidential nomination. "My God, I am not running for president. Everyone remain calm. All is well."
All of the participants, including Harlem Children's Zone president Geoffrey Canada, agreed fostering good teachers is the key to making American education excel.
While many conservatives have said they don't see a role for Washington in terms of education, Christie and Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels have said they do. They both have offered some praise for President Barack Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan for their reform efforts.
Christie, who has pushed for creation of more charter schools and reduction in aid to poorly performing school districts, told the forum Republicans must concentrate on schools in urban areas, such as his state capital, Newark, because they are a big source of the problem.
"Folks in Newark generally aren't going to vote for me anyway. But the point is if Republicans are willing to go to urban areas where they don't get votes and say these kids are every bit as important as the suburban kids ... and the future of our state's economy and our country's economy are dependent upon those kids becoming productive members of our economy not in prison, not on assistance, not standing on a street corner selling drugs but becoming productive members of our society."
Washington will see a major debate over education policy as it embarks on reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind later this year.
"This is a unique moment. You have the president of the United States, Secretary of Education, a conservative governor of New Jersey, a Democratic member of the House, a Democratic member of the Senate all saying essentially the same thing," Christie said. "If we can't take advantage of this moment, then we deserve what we get."
Star Ledger - N.J. Senator rips court's school aid 'hijacking,' says proposal would level per-student funding
Published: Thursday, May 12, 2011, 7:30 AM Updated: Thursday, May 12, 2011, 10:08 AM
TRENTON —State Sen. Michael Doherty yesterday launched a legislative assault on the state Supreme Court for “hijacking” school funding decisions and unveiled a proposal to give every school district, regardless of need, the same state aid per student.
Citing the state constitution, Doherty (R-Warren) said lawmakers must reassert their authority to control the purse strings. He will take that message and his plan to voters in the coming weeks as part of a series of town hall meetings.
“It is my opinion that the current system, where we’re all standing here with bated breath waiting for the Supreme Court to tell us what we’re going to do with school funding, is unconstitutional,” he said at a Statehouse news conference.
Doherty’s proposal, which would shift big sums of money away from the state’s poorest districts, comes as the state Supreme Court considers a challenge to Gov. Chris Christie’s education funding cuts. A ruling, expected soon, could cost the state up to $1.7 billion.
Doherty’s harsh critique of the court echoes Christie, who often uses his town halls to lambaste the bench as being too activist. Doherty said he has spoken with Christie’s office about his plan, but Christie spokesman Michael Drewniak said in an e-mail that the governor has no position on it. The Senate Republican caucus remains neutral, spokesman Adam Bauer said.
Doherty’s plan would allocate $7,481 per student in state aid to all districts, shifting dollars from cities to suburbs.
For example, Clinton Township — part of Doherty’s legislative district — would get $11.9 million under his plan, up from about $583,000. State aid to Newark would be cut in half, from $681 million to $337 million. Doherty said 75 percent of school districts would gain under his proposal.
Critics said the plan ignores students in urban areas, where the property tax base cannot sustain the millions of dollars needed to support programs such as English as a second language.
Perth Amboy Schools Superintendent John Rodecker, whose district would see a $49 million decrease in state aid under Doherty’s plan, called it “shortsighted” and “devastating.”
David Sciarra, executive director of the Education Law Center, which challenged Christie in court, said it would be a “complete abandonment of large numbers of children living in our neediest communities.” He said many districts would get more if the state fully funded its current school aid formula, noting that Clinton Township would get an extra $1.1 million.
The school funding legal fight has long focused on a phrase in the state constitution to guarantee “thorough and efficient” free public schools.
Doherty, however, stressed a section requiring the Legislature to appropriate money for free public schools “for the equal benefit of all the people in the State.”
Sen. Paul Sarlo (D-Bergen), chair of the Senate budget committee, said he would welcome extra money for his schools but predicted the plan would not pass constitutional muster.
Staff writer Jeanette Rundquist contributed to this report.
