Sunday Leftovers

NJ school districts continue to deal with the aftermath of the murders at Sandy Hook Elementary School, particularly parents’ concerns about security. This Record article about Glen Ridge is a good example. Marlboro (Star Ledger), for now an outlier, is hiring armed policemen for each school building, at a cost of $100,000 in overtime for the next 90 days. Further New Jersey Newsroom coverage here. And here’s a Star-Ledger editorial.

NJ Spotlight's John Mooney interviews Ed. Comm. Chris Cerf and Sen. Teresa Ruiz on their respective goals for 2013. Sen. Ruiz intends to focus on special education, specifically in regards to equity: “How do we as a state create opportunities for families who really feel they haven’t that access.”

Also in NJ Spotlight: “As Newark’s landmark teachers contract begins to be implemented, only about 20 percent of district teachers who can opt to earn bonuses for exemplary evaluations and service in hard-to-fill slots have actually decided to do so.” Superintendent Cami Anderson, however, is encouraged by the participation: ““We thought that was pretty exciting,” Anderson said in an interview. “We didn’t expect more than that. I think it is human nature to choose what you are accustomed to.”

How threatened is NJEA (NJ's primary teacher union) over blended learning schools that combine online and traditional education? This threatened: it's gone to court to shut down a blended learning charter school in Newark called Merit Prep, even though NJEA doesn’t represent Newark teachers. (AFT does.)

The Courier Post: “Officials have apologized to an 8-year-old student of Hindu heritage and his parents after he included a swastika in a holiday drawing.” The Old Bridge student received support from the International Raelian Movement, "which believes humans created by extraterrestrials” and that the swastika is a “symbol of good will." The group said school officials needed counseling and not the student.”

Asbury Park Press: as Tom Rivers Public Schools' “post-Ritacco era begins” (the former superintendent, Tom Ritacco, is in jail for 11 years after being convicted of taking bribes from a district insurance broker) the school board at Toms River is riven by two opposing factions. “The reaction from the public [at a recent meeting] was of such disgust that one woman rose to the microphone to denounce board members as ‘buffoons.’"

The Press of Atlantic City reports on state test scores for K-8 students. As the state transitions to a new national testing system, “in some grades, almost a third of all students are not meeting current state standards, according to the results released by the state Department of Education in December.” High school students did better.

John Zerillo, a retired Mercer County director of public safety and former assistant commissioner of the NJ Department of Corrections, says this in the Trenton Times:

If New Jersey is to prevent the continued growth of a racial caste system, public officials involved in education must aggressively transform failing school districts. Instead, failing urban schools are feeding dropouts into economically stagnating communities, where 18 percent of minorities are below the poverty line, and into prisons, where 77 percent of inmates are minorities.

The U.S. Supreme Court in Brown vs. Board of Education (1954) warned government that equal funding for segregated white and black schools does not assure a quality education or equal protection. Nevertheless, the New Jersey Supreme Court has frequently ordered funding of urban schools so that they receive funding equal to wealthier districts, but there has been little or no benefit: The quality of urban schools and communities is not nearly equal to those of the suburbs.

The Trenton Board of Education is unhappy that it still must receive oversight from a state Fiscal Monitor.

Sara Mead at Education Week looks at a new report from the The Foundation for Child Development, “which culls a variety of indicators of children's well-being across multiple domains of economic, health, education, behavior, and social/emotional/religious well-being to try to track how our nation's kids have fared over time.” There’s good news and bad news but, says Mead, “the education findings here are a resounding ‘Meh.’ 4th grade reading scores are up over the past decade, consistently so. But the pace of improvement has been near molasses in January slow: The authors calculate that it will take 35 years of continued gains at the current rate before 50% of 4th graders read proficiently on NAEP. That's a looooong time to wait, particularly in light of global and economic trends. Pre-k enrollment--which may have helped fuel some of the education progress--has also pretty much stalled after a decade of expansion. That said, the fact these increases have occurred even in light of decreased economic circumstances for many children shouldn't be ignored"