NJ Education Report

A little cognitive dissonance with your coffee this morning? Here’s two sentences from the same article in today’s Star-Ledger:

Only 22 percent of students in Newark’s high schools graduate. In Camden, less than 20 percent of black and Hispanic elementary school students are proficient in language arts.

New Jersey is the second-highest-achieving state in the nation in terms of education.

That perceptual clash gets to the heart of some of the politics behind NJ’s heated debate on education reform. Those who argue for fundamental changes in accountability and school choice focus on issues like inequity, fiscal unsustainability, and the lack of accountability that plague our school system. Those who distrust the prospect of substantive change, the reliability of value-added models of accountability, and the motives of reformers focus on our many high-performing students.

Here’s an example: the second sentence cited above from the Star-Ledger piece is attributed to Montgomery Superintendent Earl Kim, who is one of the authors of a new report (also referred to in the article) from a group that calls themselves “EQuATE.” The report is itself a response to Acting. Comm. Christopher Cerf’s tenure reform proposal and a preemptive retort to last week’s report from the Task Force on Educational Effectiveness, which excluded NJEA members. (The authors of the EQuATE report include NJEA members and Education Law Center staffers; the report itself is hosted on the ELC website.)

While Comm. Cerf’s tenure reform proposal and the Task Force recommendations emphasize quantifying teacher effectiveness and basing some benefits – tenure, compensation – on student outcomes, EQuATE comes to the opposite conclusion. In its section on teacher evaluations, for instance, it come up with a system that “empowers teachers,” allows functional districts to opt out altogether, and “reduces the weight given to standardized test-based measures of student achievement.”

In other words, it’s the antithesis of Cerf’s proposal. There’s no middle ground between focusing more on student growth as measured on standardized tests and focusing less on student growth as measured on standardized tests. It’s a zero sum game.

Is there a middle way? Can both camps find common ground? Can the leadership of both sides craft a compromise that acknowledges our failures yet preserves our strengths and that incorporates new accountability measures yet elevates the teaching profession?

The only item that both sides concur on is the inadequacy of the DOE data-crunching system, NJ SMART, which must be rendered capable of linking student longitudinal information to individual teacher evaluations. Estimates to bring it up to speed come in at about the $50 million mark. Well, at least that shared goal is a start to collaboration.

Side Note: the Ledger piece quotes a former teacher in the Carteret school district (Joseph DePierro, now Dean of Seton Hall’s College of Education) who says that linking teacher evaluations to student growth would have penalized him for educating students who “lacked the intellectual capacity to do the work” or “had severe emotional problems” or “could barely read.” In fact, Comm. Cerf’s proposal would award teachers willing to work in poor districts (Carteret is a “B” District Factor Grouping). In addition, all value-added models adjust for disabilities.