NJ Spotlight - Opinion: Some Cold, Hard Facts About Common Core State Standards…Teaching to the test is not necessarily a bad thing, nor is the use of data to evaluate teaching effectiveness.

NJ Spotlight - Bill Would Allow Charter Schools Geared Toward Students With Specific Needs…Lesniak seeks to allow school in Elizabeth – to be named after him – to limit enrollment to teens fighting substance abuse.

John Mooney | September 13, 2013

When state Sen. Raymond Lesniak (D-Union) was approached about having his name on a proposed new charter school aimed at teenagers with addiction problems, it was ostensibly to honor him for his work in substance-abuse services and recovery.

But it turns out that his legislative skills and politicking might be needed for the school to even open its doors.

Lesniak is sponsoring a bill, which is moving quickly through the Legislature, that would amend the charter school law to allow specialized schools – specifically, schools serving students with substance-abuse issues.

It turns out that while the Raymond Lesniak ESH Recovery Charter High School’s application, filed in April, passed the first level of review by the state Department of Education, it has been held up by legal questions over whether it can be permitted under current law.

The existing law requires charter schools be open to all who apply, space permitting, and they can’t limit enrollment to certain types of tudents.

The Christie administration “said it needs a change in the law,” Lesniak said yesterday in explaining the bill. “I commend the commissioner to allow the application process to proceed, while we change the law.”

The issue of restricting enrollment at certain charter schools has come up before. Three years ago, the state tentatively approved a Newark charter school for students with autism, but the school’s founders ultimately withdrew the plans. Others have sought to open charter schools specifically for at-risk students.

In its first meeting since June, the Senate Education Committee yesterday heard testimony on Lesniak’s bill and unanimously endorsed it for passage. Students and other advocates testified that there is a big need for such programs at the high school level.

The proposed charter would be a high school, located in Elizabeth, accommodating up to 125 students in grade 10 through grade 12 from Elizabeth and Roselle.

Led by a Roselle-based human services organization, Prevention Links, the school would offer a regular curriculum but also provide recovery programs and other monitoring and support for teens coming out of treatment programs.

State Sen. Teresa Ruiz (D-Essex), the committee’s chair, and several other members said they might be open to allowing enrollment restrictions targeting other specific groups of students, including those with special needs and those at risk of dropping out of school.

There was a brief discussion about amending Lesniak’s bill to include those groups, but Ruiz said that would probably come in a separate piece of legislation. She continues to work on a broad overhaul of the 1995 charter school law, and she said it could be part of that as well.

Still, that could prove to be a controversial measure in itself. When the Newark charter school for students with autism was proposed and approved, some special-education advocates decried it as running counter to the federal and state law and guidelines that promote more inclusionary settings.

Ruiz said yesterday that she understands those concerns, and she said the idea needs more discussion. She said one other possibility is for local districts to create charter schools within their borders to serve these special populations, which might be a provide needs programs while keeping the students within the community.

“It’s a conversation we should have, particularly in providing the best academic opportunities for those populations,” Ruiz said afterward.

Facing some of those questions, Lesniak said afterward that he didn’t want to jeopardize his bill by including other groups of students at this point. He pointed out that the school still needs to be approved by the state and, if it gets the go-ahead, would then face a tight timeline to be ready to open in 2014.

“Obviously, I don’t want to jeopardize this particular application,” Lesniak said. “Perhaps those other issues could be dealt with in separate legislation . . . We need to show movement to get this (application) approved.”

NJ Spotlight - Opinion: Some Cold, Hard Facts About Common Core State Standards…Teaching to the test is not necessarily a bad thing, nor is the use of data to evaluate teaching effectiveness.

Laura Waters | September 13, 2013

There’s nothing new under the sun, says Ecclesiastes, but New Jersey teachers, administrators, parents, students, and school board members may be forgiven for feeling otherwise as schools open this year. Beneath the familiar gush of warm, welcoming hugs is an undercurrent of anxiety. Like much of the country, New Jersey is magnifying its use of cold, hard data in order to focus on student growth and teacher proficiency.

Starting right now, our 590 school districts will implement the Common Core State Standards, an initiative that requires realignment of course content to fit more ambitious learning goals.

TEACHNJ, the tenure reform legislation passed last year at the Statehouse and primed for a full rollout this year, ties teacher evaluations and tenure decisions to student standardized test scores. And New Jersey is one of 14 states (plus the District of Columbia) preparing for the full implementation of PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers) tests next year, which assess student mastery of the Common Core.

While some welcome these new initiatives as gateways to higher academic outcomes for all students, others are less sanguine. Critics concerned with the overuse of data on teachers’ prospects for tenure and compensation point to the insensitivity of algorithms in the context of the ineffable nuances of teaching and learning, even when standardized test scores are weighted for disabilities and socioeconomics. Many teachers are daunted by the prospect of compiling the voluminous portfolios intended to prove classroom effectiveness.

Speaking for teachers, NJEA President Wendell Steinhauer promised that he would “fight for our profession and for public education” by confronting “the mistaken belief that the best way to hold teachers accountable is to measure their students’ test scores.” The president of the Paterson teachers’ union, Peter Tirri, charged that “we think the evaluation system is built to make people fail.”

While union officials worry about the impact of data on their members’ job security, the Education Law Center (ELC) is alarmed at the impact of higher academic standards on children who endure placement in one of New Jersey’s poor urban districts.

The new PARCC tests, unlike our current high school tests, require meaningful mastery of course content. A recent press release from the ELC warned that “new and harder tests are on the way, and the bar for a high school diploma is about to become a moving target . . . If NJ adopts PARCC’s ‘college and career ready’ score as the threshold for high school graduation, thousands, or perhaps tens of thousands, of students will not get a diploma.”

From the other side of the economic spectrum, a cohort of mostly suburban parents (who exercised school choice by staying away from the districts that the ELC represents) worry about the emotional impact of high-stakes tests on their children. An organization called “United Opt Out National: the Movement to End Corporate Education Reform” includes instructions for boycotting New Jersey's standardized tests.

Amidst all the catcalls, perhaps it’s useful to find a patch of common ground and defuse some of this gloomy discord. Here’s a short list to get us started:

·         Data is not evil. Using quantitative measurement as part of a profile of teaching effectiveness can aid educators and students. No one (at least no one with any credibility) claims that statistics can represent all facets of proficient classroom instruction.

·         Data-based teacher evaluations are here to stay. Gauging teacher effectiveness solely through qualitative measurement such as subjective, often cursory, classroom observations, is an obsolete model that served neither students nor educators. On the other hand, we must be wary of constricting great instructors with cookie-cutter rubrics; that’s bad for the teaching profession and bad for kids. There’s a tipping point. We don’t know where that is yet, but we won’t know until we try.

·         Any new initiative involves risks. However, unless we argue that New Jersey’s public schools are uniformly fine (and, again, no one with any credibility makes that argument), the upside of boosting student learning -- and that’s why we’re here, right? -- outweighs potential hazards.

·         Well-functioning schools have always used student growth data to inform instruction and teacher evaluations. It’s a matter of degree, not substance. Some schools are better at this than others, and a standardized system of data infusion holds all schools to similar bars, promoting equity in a state that is pockmarked by academic inconsistency.

·         Like data, tests are not evil unto themselves. We’ve always tested students, usually without harming their psyches.  Aaron Pallas, an outspoken critic of standardized testing and value-added metrics (Diane Ravitch calls him “one of the wisest education scholars in . . . the world), remarks that “teaching to the test is not necessarily a bad thing if the content on the test is a representative sample of the broad array of skills and competencies it is intended to measure.”  Like fine tuning the degree of data infusion into teacher evaluations, we must find that delicate balance within classrooms themselves.

We won’t, however, find that balance without making inherently uncomfortable and occasionally clumsy shifts in emphasis. It goes with the territory. Perhaps there’s nothing new under the sun, but most likely there are new ways to use data in a collaborative quest to improve student learning.