The Daily Record published this report on December 21, 2010, by Rob Jennings worth considering:
Gov. Chris Christie wouldn't last a
month as a school superintendent, a New Jersey
Association of School Administrators official jibed
Monday in charging that Christie's proposed salary
cap is both bad policy and a violation of state law.
In a meeting with the Daily Record editorial board,
NJASA Executive Director Richard Bozza - a former
Montville schools superintendent - said the
proposed cap would lead to massive turnover and
discourage prospective administrators from seeking
the top jobs.
Bozza said the state Legislature, not the Department
of Education, is responsible for setting salaries. He
accused Christie of not adequately considering the
potential ramifications on educational leadership,
arguing that top performers would be recruited by
districts in other states.
Referring to Christie's argument that no
superintendent has a tougher job than the governor
and therefore should not make more than his
$175,000 annual salary, Bozza countered that
Christie couldn't hack it as a local schools chief in
even the smallest of districts.
"If any superintendent acted the way he did, he
wouldn't last a month on the job," Bozza said when
asked about Christie's condemnation Nov. 9 of
Parsippany Superintendent Lee Seitz as a "poster
boy" for greed.
"No superintendent could get up in his or her
community and point fingers at people and degrade
them and still be kept by their school board,
because they expect more professional behavior,"
Bozza said of Christie, who has also criticized
Chatham Superintendent James O'Neill for similarly
seeking a contract extension beyond his proposed
cap.
Bozza's association filed an amicus brief last month
supporting the Parsippany school board's appeal to
the state Appellate Division seeking court-ordered
approval of Seitz' disputed contract extension,
which would bring his annual salary to $234,065
by the 2014/15 school year.
Christie's spokesman, Michael Drewniak, reacted
that Bozza's perspective is jaded by his position.
"His self-interest in on full display in his
comments," Drewniak said. "We are happy to be
defending the public and New Jersey taxpayers in
court, if that's what it takes, on this."
Bozza declined to say Monday whether his group
would eventually file a lawsuit challenging the
proposed caps, which would not take effect until
Feb. 7 and range from $125,000 in small districts to
$175,000 in large districts.
Acting Education Commissioner Rochelle Hendricks,
in the wake of the Seitz controversy, has ordered all
districts not to renegotiate any contracts expiring
after Feb. 7 unless the new terms complied with the
caps.
"It's not just a cap. It's a salary cut for 70 percent of
the people if they continue their employment," Bozza
said.
Bozza took issue with Christie's accusation that
school boards, such as Parsippany, renegotiating
ahead of the effective date are circumventing the
cap.
"There is nothing wrong or illegal about what
school boards are doing," he said.
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
Reform and Reinvention of Education in America
I read with interest an article by Federick M. Hess "The Same Thing Over and Over" in November 10, 2010, Education Week. Thought my readers would like to sample an excerpt that lays out an intelligent foundation for the need to change the way we do things in public education. What do you think?
FREDERICK M. HESS is the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, in Washington, and the author of the new book The Same Thing Over and Over: How School Reformers Get Stuck in Yesterday’s Ideas (Harvard University Press).
"It took more than three centuries after the first statutory education laws were adopted in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, in 1647 and 1652, until we actually got 90 percent of American students to show up in school every day. It’s hardly surprising that a system which spent centuries struggling to get students off the street and into schools, where they would be provided with minimal instruction, wasn’t built to educate every student to a high level.
This problem isn’t unique to education. Plenty of once-dominant private ventures—from Pan Am to Bethlehem Steel—have struggled to reinvent themselves when labor markets, technology, and customer demands have changed. Unable to refashion themselves, many have given way to younger, more agile competitors. Because that Darwinian process does not play out by itself in schooling, structural reform is essential to creating the room where problem-solving can happen.
We often seemingly fail to appreciate how much has changed since common-school and Progressive reformers shaped our schools in their battles to Americanize youths and get them out of the factories and in front of literate teachers.
Since the Progressive Era ended 75 years ago, our expectations have skyrocketed, with policymakers today insisting that all students need to master skills once thought the province of the elite. The expectation that our schools would mold students into “republican machines” has given way to an emphasis on diversity and tolerance, reducing the premium on homogeneity. The pool of available careerist teachers has dramatically shrunk as new opportunities have opened to women, even as professional mobility increased and the pool of educated professionals interested in teaching grew. And the ability of new technologies to assess student mastery, facilitate instruction, and enable virtual schooling has undergone a revolutionary expansion.
We’re hardly the first to be uncomfortable with change. While skeptics of technology today fret about the fate of the book, it was once books and the printing press that were feared by educators who worried that students would learn the wrong things, if left to read on their own. It was Sir Roger L’Estrange who wondered in the 17th century “whether more mischief than advantage were not occasion’d to the Christian world by the invention of typography.”
Reformers get swept up in enthusiasms and manias rather than in problem-solving. While some reformers tout mayoral control as a solution, the real challenge is the primacy of serial geographic monopolies that require every district to meet every need of every child—making it enormously difficult to do anything all that well. A century ago, this model was a best practice, as when people bought their tractors and their toothbrushes from Sears, Roebuck and Co. Today, however, coordination of provision is no longer a major challenge, enabling an array of providers to focus on the high-quality, cost-effective provision of particular goods or services.
Reformers wax enthusiastic about merit pay, while leaving intact notions of the teacher’s job description, school staffing, and the organization of instruction. Indeed, today’s “cutting edge” merit-pay strategies depend utterly on teachers’ retaining sole instructional responsibility for a group of students in a tested subject for 180 days. Rather than viewing pay reform as a tool for rethinking teaching, reformers wind up layering merit pay atop industrial-era pay scales.
Reformers celebrate alternative certification and extended learning time, yet seem to take for granted the primacy of colleges of education and the notion that all students necessarily require a standardized school year with a bureaucratically specified number of days and hours. Such assumptions learn nothing from promising ventures like San Diego’s High-Tech High School or New York City’s School of One.
The new decade ought to loom as a dynamic and enormously creative era addressing our educational challenges. We’ve set heroic goals, are constructing remarkable tools, and have an opportunity to rethink the very shape of teaching, learning, and schooling.
Yet we once again find ourselves rehashing tired debates between public school “defenders” and self-described “innovators.” On the one side are those who insist we cling to the rhythms of schoolhouses erected to sanitize Catholic immigrants. On the other are Race to the Top enthusiasts promising that data systems and more impassioned school leaders, along with a dollop of “science,” will set matters straight.
We don’t need “innovation” or to “protect” public schools. The truth is far simpler, and more frustrating, than that. Yesterday’s structures are ill-suited for today’s ambitions. Rethinking them is not an attack or a solution; it is just the inevitable precursor to crafting better answers to today’s challenges."
FREDERICK M. HESS is the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, in Washington, and the author of the new book The Same Thing Over and Over: How School Reformers Get Stuck in Yesterday’s Ideas (Harvard University Press).
"It took more than three centuries after the first statutory education laws were adopted in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, in 1647 and 1652, until we actually got 90 percent of American students to show up in school every day. It’s hardly surprising that a system which spent centuries struggling to get students off the street and into schools, where they would be provided with minimal instruction, wasn’t built to educate every student to a high level.
This problem isn’t unique to education. Plenty of once-dominant private ventures—from Pan Am to Bethlehem Steel—have struggled to reinvent themselves when labor markets, technology, and customer demands have changed. Unable to refashion themselves, many have given way to younger, more agile competitors. Because that Darwinian process does not play out by itself in schooling, structural reform is essential to creating the room where problem-solving can happen.
We often seemingly fail to appreciate how much has changed since common-school and Progressive reformers shaped our schools in their battles to Americanize youths and get them out of the factories and in front of literate teachers.
Since the Progressive Era ended 75 years ago, our expectations have skyrocketed, with policymakers today insisting that all students need to master skills once thought the province of the elite. The expectation that our schools would mold students into “republican machines” has given way to an emphasis on diversity and tolerance, reducing the premium on homogeneity. The pool of available careerist teachers has dramatically shrunk as new opportunities have opened to women, even as professional mobility increased and the pool of educated professionals interested in teaching grew. And the ability of new technologies to assess student mastery, facilitate instruction, and enable virtual schooling has undergone a revolutionary expansion.
We’re hardly the first to be uncomfortable with change. While skeptics of technology today fret about the fate of the book, it was once books and the printing press that were feared by educators who worried that students would learn the wrong things, if left to read on their own. It was Sir Roger L’Estrange who wondered in the 17th century “whether more mischief than advantage were not occasion’d to the Christian world by the invention of typography.”
Reformers get swept up in enthusiasms and manias rather than in problem-solving. While some reformers tout mayoral control as a solution, the real challenge is the primacy of serial geographic monopolies that require every district to meet every need of every child—making it enormously difficult to do anything all that well. A century ago, this model was a best practice, as when people bought their tractors and their toothbrushes from Sears, Roebuck and Co. Today, however, coordination of provision is no longer a major challenge, enabling an array of providers to focus on the high-quality, cost-effective provision of particular goods or services.
Reformers wax enthusiastic about merit pay, while leaving intact notions of the teacher’s job description, school staffing, and the organization of instruction. Indeed, today’s “cutting edge” merit-pay strategies depend utterly on teachers’ retaining sole instructional responsibility for a group of students in a tested subject for 180 days. Rather than viewing pay reform as a tool for rethinking teaching, reformers wind up layering merit pay atop industrial-era pay scales.
Reformers celebrate alternative certification and extended learning time, yet seem to take for granted the primacy of colleges of education and the notion that all students necessarily require a standardized school year with a bureaucratically specified number of days and hours. Such assumptions learn nothing from promising ventures like San Diego’s High-Tech High School or New York City’s School of One.
The new decade ought to loom as a dynamic and enormously creative era addressing our educational challenges. We’ve set heroic goals, are constructing remarkable tools, and have an opportunity to rethink the very shape of teaching, learning, and schooling.
Yet we once again find ourselves rehashing tired debates between public school “defenders” and self-described “innovators.” On the one side are those who insist we cling to the rhythms of schoolhouses erected to sanitize Catholic immigrants. On the other are Race to the Top enthusiasts promising that data systems and more impassioned school leaders, along with a dollop of “science,” will set matters straight.
We don’t need “innovation” or to “protect” public schools. The truth is far simpler, and more frustrating, than that. Yesterday’s structures are ill-suited for today’s ambitions. Rethinking them is not an attack or a solution; it is just the inevitable precursor to crafting better answers to today’s challenges."
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