Wednesday, May 22, 2013
State issues guidelines that are far less stringent than new rules for evaluation of district school educators.
Following a parallel but very different path from their district school brethren, New Jersey’s charter schools are finalizing plans for how they will evaluate their teachers and principals. Unlike district schools, charter schools do not fall under the state’s new tenure reform bill, known as TEACHNJ, which specifies much of how evaluations must be conducted and teachers rated. And very unlike district schools, New Jersey’s charter schools are not required at all to use student achievement measures, including in state testing, to measure their individual teachers – avoiding an issue that has roiled school districts and their educators. But the charter schools are still required to submit evaluation plans for state approval. Facing a June …
Wednesday, May 8, 2013
One of the few things educators and administrators agree on: charter schools need multiple authorizers.
By Laura Waters [Laura Waters has been president of the Lawrence Township School Board in Mercer County for eight years. She also blogs about New Jersey education policy and politics at NJLeftBehind.com. A former instructor at SUNY Binghamton in a program that served educationally disadvantaged students from New York's inner cities, she holds a Ph.D. in early American literature from Binghamton.] Here’s a rarity within New Jersey’s education reform community: consensus. The NJ Education Association, Gov. Chris Christie, Commissioner Chris Cerf, Education Law Center, and NJ Charter Association concur that the state's charter school law is broken. In response, several members of the state Legislature are working on overhauls, and last week a…
Monday, April 29, 2013
Bill sponsor -- Assemblyman Diegnan -- hopes to build consensus before Legislature tackles NJ's 18-year-old charter law.
The outlines of a new charter school bill are taking shape, with a draft being circulated by Assembly Democrats that would add tighter controls on new charters and expand the number of organizations approving and overseeing the schools. State Assemblyman Patrick Diegnan Jr. (D-Middlesex), chair of the Assembly’s education committee, has completed a draft that would require local voters to approve new charter schools and would add up to three “reviewers” from colleges and universities. The draft would also restructure parts of the application process for charter schools and place new requirements on them to annually report and post their enrollment breakdowns and budgets. Diegnan said Thursday that he expected still more changes to come …
Monday, March 4, 2013
Are charter schools the latest instrument intended to transfer wealth from public to private hands?
By Chigozie U. Onyema [Chigozie U. Onyema is a policy analyst at a national nonprofit. He is interested in the impact of race and class on public policy. He earned his J.D. from NYU School of Law and his B.A. from Howard University.] There was an interesting, and telling, article recently in NJ Spotlight. It looks at a charter school debate in Florence Township, a small suburb in Burlington County. The article sheds light on the tension between the public and private sector, and the crisis of the original identity politics -- white identity politics. It is interesting, because the local school district, and many in the community, oppose the expansion of a K-3 charter school. If the charter school expands, the district is required to foot …
Friday, March 1, 2013
Democratic lawmakers in state Assembly, Senate both drafting new legislation.
Talk of revising the state’s charter-school law is picking up again, with one major player now saying that he plans to have a bill ready by spring or early summer. State Assemblyman Patrick Diegnan (D-Middlesex), chairman of the Assembly’s education committee, said this week that he has sent the broad outline of a bill to the Office of Legislative Services. Provisions include adding organizations able to approve new schools and tightening accountability for existing ones. “It will be start to finish,” Diegnan said, “covering the whole life of a charter school.” Diegnan’s progress on his Assembly bill comes as talks continue in the Senate regarding a bill being crafted by state Sen. Teresa Ruiz (D-Essex). And Gov. Chris Christie isn’t …
Thursday, January 24, 2013
According to the administration, making it more difficult for charter teachers to earn tenure gives the schools themselves "more flexibility."
Soon after proposing that certification rules for new charter school teachers should be eased, the Christie administration is moving to toughen what it takes those teachers to get and keep tenure. In a proposal posted on the New Jersey Register this month, the administration has suggested that new teachers at charter schools would receive tenure protections after five years -- a year more than the current four years for district teachers. In addition, they would be subject to a different due process procedure in case of tenure charges, one without the arbitration process newly put in place for district teachers. Instead, the state commissioner would continue to have final say on appeals, short of the courts. The proposal also specifies …
Tuesday, December 11, 2012
Legislature grapples with basic issues concerning online charters, starting with working definitions.
As New Jersey’s Legislature grapples with how, or if, it will step up the state’s oversight of charter schools, a vexing issue remains as to what will happen with schools relying on online instruction. The Joint Committee on the Public Schools last week held the third of four hearings on online schooling, both strictly virtual and blended models, which use a combination of online and in-class instruction. The plan is to develop legislation to address the state’s oversight. But frustrating question remain about where draw the line between schools that rely on online instruction and where it is only a piece of an overall program. And regardless of the model, is cyber-education more appropriate for some ages than for others? The chairman of …
Sunday, December 9, 2012
Education Department provision would provide more flexibility in hiring, training.
The Christie administration has proposed easing some of the state’s teacher-certification rules for charter schools, saying the move would give the schools more flexibility in hiring. The provision, which is tucked deep within the administration’s Professional Licensure and Standards Code for NJ Teachers proposed new administrative code for teacher licensure], would essentially give charter schools their own alternate route similar to the state’s long-established and popular “alternate route” process for hiring public-school teachers who did earn a traditional education degree in college. The proposal, which is now before the state Board of Education, is facing some resistance from the state’s dominant teachers union, among others. But it …
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
Hearings set to define virtual schools as they evolve and fuel debate in Garden State.
Online education in charter schools -- in all its different and controversial forms -- will get the first of what could be several Statehouse hearings today, as legislators start to sort out what is growing to be one of the state’s more contentious issues. The Joint Committee on the Public Schools will host the hearing at 11 a.m., with presentations by three national proponents of online education. The three are Susan Patrick of the International Association for K-12 Online Learning; Michael Horn of the Education of Innosight Institute; and Jeanne Allen of the Center for Education reform. The new co-chairman of the joint committee, state Assemblywoman Connie Wagner (D-Bergen), said she wants the first hearing to be devoted to defining the …
Friday, September 7, 2012
Appeals court dismisses NJEA bid to block schools, but union says it will pursue its case.
New Jersey’s experiment with online charter schools has started, even while the legal challenge from the state teachers' union is also moving ahead. The first of two hybrid charters, which mix both traditional teaching and online tools, opened in Newark this week -- with the 80 sixth graders at Merit Preparatory Charter School receiving their Apple laptops. The second hybrid, the Newark Preparatory Charter School, will open this coming Thursday. It's based on the same model: students attend school every day but take many of their classes online. But that doesn’t mean the legal battle over hybrids is over. The New Jersey Education Association had sought to block the schools from opening outright, filing a challenge last week in state …
Tugwalla
9:26 pm on Wednesday, May 22, 2013
Ummmm....JoeR....Trenton, Newark and Camden. Yes highly all rated...most spent per child per year, highest teachers salaries, highest drop out rates, highest illiteracy rates, highest teen pregnancies, lowest number of HS grads going to college and lowest scores on every test imaginable. Spending more on public education does absolutely nothing to change educational outcomes. more ›