Fwd: Cerf uses federal SIG grants to impose Christie Administration mandates

[Coalition Effective]

----- Forwarded Message -----

From: Stan Karp <SK...@EdlawCenter.org>
To: NJSecondary <NJSecondary...@EdlawCenter.org>
Sent: Thursday, July 28, 2011 8:48 AM
Subject: Cerf uses federal SIG grants to impose Christie Administration mandates

At a recent State Board of Education meeting, Acting Commissioner Chris Cerf remarked that the NJ Dept. of Education and the Commissioner had broad powers to implement policy chances through regulation without seeking legislative approval. One example of this can be seen in yesterday’s announcement of a new round of “school improvement grants.” (SIG). The grants, which are 100% federally funded, went to 9 of the state’s lowest performing schools. Ten schools  previously-awarded SIG grants were approved for a second year. Another 180 “low performing” schools had their applications denied or were not eligible for this round of grants due to limited funding.

 

The schools receiving SIG grants are required to implement specific plans, including “transformation” which requires replacing the principal or “turnaround,” which requires replacing the principal and at least 50% of the existing staff. However, this year, Cerf added additional state requirements, beyond federal guidelines, reflecting the Christie administration’s efforts to introduce merit pay and additional testing. In order to receive a SIG grant, districts had to agree to implement the Christie administration’s test-based teacher evaluation plans for the entire district, not just the school receiving the SIG grant. The entire district must adopt the “performance evaluation system aligned to the state’s Teacher Evaluation Pilot, including at least 50 percent of evaluations using objective measures of student achievement.” The districts also had to commit to the “development or purchase of robust formative assessments,” in other words, more tests in more subjects to be used in the Administration’s teacher evaluation scheme. [Formative assessments are supposed to be diagnostic, no-stakes assessments that provide useful feedback for teachers about student progress. But increasingly, “formative assessments” are becoming mini-standardized tests, often tied to commercially-produced test instruments and data systems.]

 

 

NJ Grant Announcement and list of schools

 

SIG Grants Go to Nine of New Jersey's Lowest-Performing Schools

NJ Spotlight

Under the program, the qualifying schools are required to pick from several strategies, including replacing principals or half of their teaching staffs, or both. And this year, New Jersey is requiring home districts of the winning schools to make wholesale changes to the way schools evaluate teachers and assess students.

 

 

Nine N.J. schools to share $55M in federal grant money to boost academic performance

Star Ledger

The state’s largest district has at least $165 million in the bank from recent grants and donations, including $100 million from the founder of Facebook. And today, the Walton Family Foundation announced it would add to that total with a $1.7 million donation to bolster the city’s Teach for America corps to roughly 175 by 2013.

 

Teacher Swap Quashed

Wall Street Journal

In Newark, among the failing schools that swapped teachers, one school's test results improved dramatically, while the other two remaining schools' results barely budged or went down.

 

[Note: This article describes how when districts with multiple low performing schools are required to replace staff, it often results in an exchange of staff from one school to another within the district. The WSJ article derisively refers to this as the “dance of the lemons” and notes that tenure laws prevent the wholesale dismissal of tenured teachers. However, the more significant point may be that when some teachers were transferred from dysfunctional schools to a school, in this case Central HS, that more successfully implemented a comprehensive reform effort, the school’s test scores improved dramatically, suggesting that other factors are at work.]

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