Sunday Leftovers

Tweet of The Week: Ryan Hill, founder and executive director of TEAM Charter Schools in Newark, responding to "data" on student mobility from Jersey Jazzman: "You're making that up." For more detail, see TEAM's graphing of "attrition" data, which comes in at 7%. The actual twitter exchange (you have to follow both) illuminates some of the problems with reducing statistical analyses to 140-character soundbites.

Stepping back, see New Jersey Monthly's crossfire edition of education reform with Bob Braun and Jonathan Alter. A sample from Braun:

Don’t call it reform, call it hijacking. A radical, top-down change in governance based on a business model championed by billionaires like Eli Broad, the entrepreneur whose foundation underwrites training programs for school leaders, including superintendents—among them, Christopher Cerf, New Jersey’s education commissioner from late 2010 until this past February. The Broad Foundation seeks to apply to public institutions, like schools, the notion of “creative destruction” popularized for businesses by economists Joseph Schumpeter and Clayton Christensen.

Um, right. Here's Alter:

All the talk of “corporatizing” schools is baloney. The benefactors are simply after better student and teacher performance—and they’re getting it. If you don’t believe me, visit Newark charter public schools like North Star Academy or TEAM Academy, where the student population is almost all non-white and the waiting lists are long. There is magic in their classrooms. With more than three-quarters of their students in grades three through eight scoring “advanced” or “proficient” on yearly assessments, they not only outperform neighboring traditional public schools by more than 30 points, they beat white suburban schools…

Yes, there are several first-rate non-charter schools in Newark that don’t get enough attention. But more than 10 percent of Newark’s 75,000 students now attend charters. Do the critics really want those parents and children to give up their dreams? Do they really mean to argue that if you can’t help all Newark students, you shouldn’t help any?

Speaking of Newark, the district's universal enrollment plan, whereby parents can choose among traditional and charter public schools, got off to a rocky start. On the second day, a parent told the Star Ledger that “It’s definitely more under control. It moved pretty fast. Yesterday, it was chaos out here.”

In Paterson, however, according to The Record, there's a growing sense of partnership among all public schools:

In many cities, including Newark, charter and traditional schools coexist uneasily, with critics complaining that charter schools siphon resources from the school district. But in Paterson on Saturday, the city’s school board president and mayor came out to celebrate the opening.
“It’s not us versus them,” said Keisha Smith, a school board employee whose daughter attends the charter school. “There are a lot of detractors of charter schools but what people have to understand is that we all have to be proponents of educations.”

See  NJ Spotlight for review of a new contract in Paterson that includes merit pay.

In Camden, another hotbed of anti-charter school rhetoric, new renaissance schools run by Mastery and Uncommon will open on time even though Gov. Christie vetoed  a piece of a bill that would have allotted generous early retirement packages to laid-off traditional school teachers.  The Legislature had passed a change to the Urban Hope Act which included those retirement packages, as well as permission for  new schools to temporarily use empty space in district buildings.  Christie vetoed the early pensions (pennywise and pound foolish, if you ask me) but Senate Pres. Steve Sweeney says he’ll allow the bill to move forward. See the Philadelphia Inquirer for details.


Also, NJ Spotlight visited Camden as Superintendent Paymon Rouhanifard led new principals in professional development.

New Jersey School Boards Association thanked Christie for "his absolute veto of legislation that would have restricted school district and local government efforts to save taxpayer funds by subcontracting services." Christie also vetoed a bill, sponsored by Ron Rice, that would have allowed school board input into school closings, reports the Star Ledger. Analysis here from NJ Spotlight.

The Press of Atlantic City looks at the increase in interim superintendents due to salary caps and notes that “the job of superintendent has become increasingly short-term.”