(From The New Jersey Spotlight, July 28, 2010)

By JOHN MOONEY

It was an illustrative pairing in the charter school debate in New Jersey: two local forums held two days and just five miles apart — but in settings that couldn’t be more different.

The first took place in Newark on a sweltering Saturday morning, inside a community center in a city at odds with itself over whether charter schools — with all their innovation and intimacy — are the answer to its embattled public schools.

The other was Monday night in Glen Ridge, a leafy suburb at the breaking point in paying for public education it boasts as among the best in the state. Its leaders now wonder whether its schools would be better off as charters, freed from costly controls — including maybe their own.

Neither came to firm conclusions, but the juxtaposition reflected the ever-growing luster — and controversy — of charter schools as a potential player in urban and suburban districts alike.

It’s a discussion that Gov. Chris Christie and his education commissioner, Bret Schundler, would surely say they encourage as strong supporters of charter schools, having made big pushes in the opening months of their tenures.

Others said it may speak to deeper concerns. When asked for common traits with Newark, Glen Ridge board president Elisabeth Ginsburg came up with one word: “Desperation?”

Glen Ridge Examines All Options

“Maybe we have the commonality in that we’re both looking behind all the doors for the right one to enter,” she said. “It may not be the same one for all us, but the state needs to know we will leave no stone unturned, and if they’re not going to help us, we’ll have to help ourselves.”

The discussion was a provocative one in Glen Ridge, where the board decided to concentrate its mid-summer retreat on weighing any and all options for surviving the financial squeeze affecting many suburban districts.

Long one of the state’s inauspicious leaders in property taxes, the district lost literally all of its state aid for next year in the budget approved by Christie and the legislature. On top of new statewide 2 percent caps on property taxes, that left the board looking at charter conversion as one possible solution.

The board invited staff from the state Department of Education to explain the plusses and minuses of converting to charter schools, a process never done in New Jersey for a single school, let alone a district of four schools and 2,000 students.

And it quickly became apparent that the process could have some unintended consequences for Glen Ridge, as the board heard details on how state mandates and regulations on charter schools are largely no different than those on public schools.

The one exception is that they would not be beholden to the local district, control that the local board seemed unready to give up.

“The local levy would be transferred to schools where basically there would be no local control,” Ginsburg said.

State officials said it came up once before in another community weighing charter conversion of one if its schools. “But they never pursued it because they didn’t want to lose control of the school,” said Jacqueline Gamba, a program specialist with the state department.

For much of the meeting, an unspoken topic in the room was whether a charter school would operate without collective bargaining, no small point in a district now negotiating its next teachers contract under the new caps. It was also no coincidence that the vast majority of the small audience comprised Glen Ridge teachers, as well as representatives from the statewide New Jersey Education Association.

But when the topic was eventually raised, the state officials said that while charter schools start without unions, a handful have seen their teachers organize. And they pointed out any conversion under law would also require approval of 51 percent of the faculty.

In Newark, Conversion or Tradition?

It was a far cry from the meeting two days earlier in Newark, where a new advocacy group in the state, Democrats for Education Reform, hosted a panel of local leaders to talk about the state’s application for federal Race to the Top funding.

The application is full of technicalities and arcane details on how teachers are paid and evaluated, how students are tested, and which models will be used to turn around which low-performing schools.

But spurring the most emotion was its emphasis on charter school expansion, something that Newark knows well, with more than a dozen charter schools in place, serving 6,000 students.

Some of the leaders of those schools were in attendance, praising the opportunities afforded by charters, a few of which are the top performing schools in the city.

But also in the audience were some community leaders who see funds flowing into charter schools and the headlines accorded them, while the local neighborhood schools continue to struggle and now face layoffs in the hundreds.

“If they truly want to educate the children in the neighborhoods, why not go into the neighborhood schools?” said Wilhemina Holder, a long-time parent activist.

She said she was struck by a specific benefit of charter schools: autonomy from some of the local rules, such as length of school day and greater power for principals.

“Why can’t we do that in the traditional schools?” she said.

And that was maybe where a common note was struck with Glen Ridge, where by the end of the retreat the focus had shifted from charter conversion and a whole new series of questions were being asked.

“In the end, we’re hoping the state starts listening to us,” said John Mucciolo, Glen Ridge’s superintendent. “That’s the conversation we hope we’re starting with this.”

(From The Bergen Record, June 1, 2010)

By LESLIE BRODY

Governor Christie threw out the school reform blueprint endorsed by the state’s biggest teachers union last week and filed a new bid Tuesday for a high-stakes federal grant known as “Race to the Top.”

Christie said his education commissioner had compromised too much in order to win the union’s blessing for a contest that could bring $400 million to the state. Christie said the new proposal reinstated key elements of earlier plans, such as merit pay for individual teachers, putting job performance over seniority when laying off staff, making it easier to fire poor teachers, and giving bonuses to successful faculty who relocate to failing schools.

The eleventh-hour change came as a shock to officials at the New Jersey Education Association, who said they learned on Tuesday afternoon – the contest deadline – that the governor had changed the application and taken off their signatures of support.

Union leaders and education commissioner Bret Schundler had spent weeks hammering out compromises on the plan, and on Thursday both parties expressed satisfaction that they had come up with a collaborative blueprint. Union buy-in wins points in the stiff competition.

NJEA President Barbara Keshishian reacted “with a mixture of deep disappointment, utter frustration and total outrage” to the news that the application had been rewritten, she said in a release. “The biggest losers in this entire fiasco are the state’s 1.4 million students.”

Christie told reporters Tuesday that he was not involved in the past weeks’ discussions between the union and commissioner Schundler, and that when he learned the details of the compromise on Friday, he told Schundler to spend the holiday weekend restoring principles such as individual merit pay. The union-endorsed plan had focused on school-wide bonuses for schools that made strong gains, and it kept seniority-based job protections.

Christie said he retained faith in his education commissioner and wanted “creative tension” within his staff.

“This is my administration, I’m responsible for it and I make the decisions and I’m happy to hear recommendations anytime that my cabinet officials want to make” them, he said. “But they need to understand, those are recommendations. I take them with real serious consideration but in the end, these are core principles that I’ve been campaigning on since I decided to seek this job.”

Schundler, reached by cellphone, said of the last-minute revision, “We made the decision together.”

“Clearly there are enormous disagreements within the administration on how they want to proceed,” said NJEA spokesman Stephen Wollmer. “That doesn’t engender much confidence among the ranks of teachers.”

The governor stressed that his Race to the Top application reflected President Obama’s push to tie teacher pay and evaluations to student achievement, judged in part by test scores. Christie’s office posted the massive application online for public review after 6 p.m.

In a letter to U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, Christie noted that the application “recognizes that after a child walks through the school house doors, no single factor influences that student’s academic success more than the quality of his or her teachers. … Special interests that have selfishly thwarted reform should not be permitted to hold good ideas hostage.”

Christie, who has sparred for months with the NJEA, wrote that he wanted to enhance schools’ abilities to measure student learning and use that data to evaluate teachers; merit pay would reward the best teachers and give “adequate teachers” an incentive to improve. Such evaluations would be the basis for tenure, promotions and job retention.

The NJEA has long fought merit pay, saying it undermines teamwork. The union also argues against relying on standardized test scores to judge teachers; it says doing so pushes them to “teach to the test” and penalizes teachers facing challenging kids. The NJEA’s rejection of the first-round Race to the Top application in January was one of several factors that hurt New Jersey’s bid.

Last week’s compromise plan called for a committee of educators that would take a year to formulate fair ways to assess teachers and school leaders using a combination of test scores, written assignments and other measures, with student performance accounting for 50 percent of a teacher’s evaluation.

Charles Barone of Democrats for Education Reform, a pro-merit pay group based in Manhattan, said Christie’s approach has been “ham-handed,” but the state’s application still has a chance for success despite the lack of union sign-on. A number of states, notably Louisiana and Illinois, have submitted proposals that don’t included full union support, he said.

Barone said he had been surprised Schundler had agreed to so many concessions since they seemed at odds with Christie’s agenda. “Why did they feel they needed NJEA support so badly that they shredded their application?” Barone asked. “Now they have a strong application but a lot of collateral damage.”

Frank Belluscio of the New Jersey School Boards Association said the compromise version of the application had “watered down” initiatives like merit pay, plus changes in seniority and tenure rules that his group supported.

The latest version – without NJEA backing — provides stronger support for those concepts and still has a good chance of winning the federal funding, he said. “Early on, Bret Schundler said union support was not integral to the application,” Belluscio said.

Senate President Stephen M. Sweeney, Assembly Speaker Sheila Y. Oliver and the heads of the Senate and Assembly education committees Tuesday blasted Christie’s “abrupt about-face,” saying it seriously jeopardized New Jersey’s chances of winning the aid. They said Christie was pressured by conservative pundits who criticized the compromise plan.

“The governor has apparently decided that hearing good things about himself over the radio is more valuable than $400 million for our schools,” said Sweeney, D-Gloucester. The compromise application “was crafted in good faith among everyone involved, and now that unity’s been blown up because some talking heads disagreed. If the governor was as thick-skinned as he likes to make people think, he would shrug off the criticism and stand by the team that put together the state’s application.”

By the 4:30 p.m. deadline, 35 states and the District of Columbia had submitted bids. The Obama administration said 10 to 15 winners of a total $3.4 billion will be announced by the end of September.

“This took a lot of hard work and political courage,” U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a news release to commend applicants. “It required administrators, elected officials, union leaders, teachers, and advocates to work together and embrace a common reform agenda.”

Staff Writers Patricia Alex and Charles Stile contributed to this report. E-mail: brody@northjersey.com

The only thing missing from this brief NY Sun story on this week’s electoral victory  in New Jersey is an outrageous/outlandish quote that angers our best friends!