NJ Education Report

NJ Spotlight drills down on NJEA’s spending on campaigns and lobbying, almost $60 million over the last fifteen years and more than double anyone else. The numbers “astound,” says John Mooney. 

The Star Ledger says the superintendent salary cap is a “terrible idea”: “The latest evidence that Gov. Chris Christie’s salary cap for school superintendents has backfired: Not only is it chasing away good school leaders, the superintendents who do stay are easily gaming the system.”

Good piece by Tom Moran on a dual-language charter school in Hoboken, where the kids are thriving and the school draws far more minority students than the segregated traditional schools. But the district is suing the charter:

The founders [of Hola] originally took their dual-language idea to the district and asked to help set up a program under district control at Connors, with all its segregation. The district said no. Hola then went to the state and asked for permission to rig its admission lottery so that poor and minority kids would have an advantage. The state told them no.

So they hustled. They knocked on doors. They went to public housing projects and handed out leaflets. They tried.

And in the end, they got twice the portion of minority kids as the city’s population. And progress continues. This year’s kindergarten class is 41 percent minority.

But the district is still pushing the lawsuit, costing taxpayers upwards of $65K at last count.

Asbury Park Schools has a new superintendent and he’s  got his work cut out for him. From the Asbury Park Press: “The most recent data from the state Department of Education showed a 51 percent graduation rate for Asbury Park Schools in 2013. That same year, state officials said, 54 percent of fifth-graders entering the middle school were reading at a first-grade level.”  Annual cost per pupil, by the way, is $28,229.

Two schools in Camden are sharing space, one charter and one traditional. Despite concerns that  “Camden’s first co-location could become a physical embodiment of “haves” and “have-nots,” reports the Philadelphia Inquirer, “the hallways look nearly identical, classrooms appear similarly stocked, and administrators in both schools say they are working together to prevent any feelings of segregation.”

In related news, the Star-Ledger has an interview with Camden Superintendent Paymon Rouhanifard.

In case you missed it, here’s my Newsworks piece this week on some of the politics within Camden’s charter school growing pains.

Five Trenton school board members have resigned over the last four months, report The Trentonian.

Lawrence Feinsod, President of NJ School Boards Association, demythologizes the Common Core. Also see NJ Spotlight. Lily Eskelsen Garcia, new head of NEA, and Wendell Steinhauer, president of NJEA plead for less emphasis on tests associated with the Common Core, as well as other standardized tests.

Steven Pinker in the New Republic considers the admissions policy of Harvard (where he teachers) and how the public has been “poisoned against aptitude testing.”

Regardless of the role that you think aptitude testing should play in the admissions process, any discussion of meritocracy that pretends that aptitude does not exist or cannot be measured is not playing with a full deck.