NJ Education Report

Tom Moran in today’s Star-Ledger has lots of praise  for gubernatorial candidate Sen. Barbara Buono’s platform.  But not so much for her education agenda:

When Buono talks about schools, she sounds like a marionette controlled by the New Jersey Education Association, the state’s most powerful union. You can almost see the strings.

She’s against merit pay for good teachers, says Moran, and charter schools and tenure reform. “Granted, Buono has no chance to win without the NJEA’s energetic backing. But Christie’s education policies are centrist, and almost identical to President Obama’s. They are showing results, and Buono will lose some progressive votes over this.”
 
Also today, the New York Times Editorial Board  looks dimly on “testing mania” in American schools and suggests that  we can take some advice from “foreign nations with the highest-performing school systems”  that have strong national curricula like the Common Core and “most important, set a high bar for entry into the teaching profession and make sure that the institutions that train teachers do it exceedingly well”:

This country, by contrast, has an abysmal system of teacher preparation. That point was underscored recently in a harrowing report on teacher education programs from the National Council on Teacher Quality, a research and advocacy group. The report found that very few programs meet even basic quality standards: new students are often poorly prepared, and what the schools teach them “often has little relevance to what they need to succeed in the classroom.”

NJ Spotlight reviews the State Appellate Court’s decision rejecting Newark School Advisory Board’s plea to end state control and return local power.

The Cape May City Council voted Tuesday to investigate leaving the Lower Cape May Regional School District, reports the Press of Atlantic City. Why? The state funding formula. Currently, according to the Council’s attorney, “Cape May residents pay $79,977 per year for each student sent to the school, compared to $7,663 each in Lower Township and $30,493 per student from West Cape May.”

“The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools recently released a survey estimating that almost one million students are on waitlists for public charter schools, an increase of almost 30% from last year.”

Gallop solicited the opinions of 11,000 superintendents on the Common Core State Standards.  From EdWeek: “more than half the respondents—58 percent—believe that the new Common Core State Standards adopted by most states will improve the quality of education in their communities; 75 percent say the shared standards will provide more consistency in educational quality from district to district and state to state. But 30 percent predict the standards will have no effect on schooling.”