Christie sends Legislature bills to revamp education system

TRENTON - Gov. Christie has sent the Legislature a package of seven bills that could fundamentally change New Jersey's educational system, altering the way teachers are paid, evaluated, and fired.

"The public is tired of paying $25 billion for a system that has 104,000 kids in 200 failing schools," said Christie, who is looking for legislators to sponsor his bills. "I'm not going to continue to permit a king's ransom be paid for failure."

There's no word yet whether leaders of the Democratic-dominated houses would post the Republican governor's bills for debate. Party politics is certain to play a role, particularly as all 120 legislative seats are up for election this year.

Plus, the Democrats have education ideas of their own.

"I look forward to reviewing all of the governor's education-reform proposals in detail," said Sen. M. Teresa Ruiz (D., Essex), chair of the Education Committee. "However, I am committed to continuing work on my tenure-reform legislation."

Senate Republican Leader Tom Kean Jr., however, supports the governor's education platform.

Kean "looks forward to continuing to work with the administration on their shared commitment to saving kids from failing schools and measuring educational success based on outcomes achieved by students rather than the money spent on the system," said Adam Bauer, spokesman for Senate Republicans.

If approved, Christie's proposals would:

Institute an evaluation system by the 2012-13 school year to rate teachers on four tiers, from "highly effective" to "ineffective." Half of the evaluation would be based on year-to-year changes in student performance - measured by tests, or, for example, portfolios in art class. The other half would be at the discretion of the district and could include classroom and peer evaluations. Principals also would be evaluated.

Require teachers to have three consecutive years of "highly effective" or "effective" evaluations to be awarded tenure. After that, if a teacher has one "ineffective" rating or two "partially ineffective" ratings, he or she would lose tenure, easing the way toward firing. That teacher could get tenure back with three positive evaluations. "The very simple message to the people of New Jersey is that teachers in New Jersey should be held to the same standards of accountability as everybody else is at their jobs," Christie said.

End the "last-in, first-out" system that leads to new, untenured teachers being laid off first when there are budget cuts. "If what we want is to have the most effective teachers at the front of every classroom in New Jersey, that should be regardless of seniority," Christie said.

Require both the principal and teacher to agree on a teacher's placement in a school, thereby avoiding the practice of passing bad teachers - "the lemons," as Christie called them - from one school to the next.

Eliminate the pay schedule that bases teacher salary on seniority and educational level attained (those with master's degrees are now paid more, for example). Districts would have discretion to pay teachers based on merit (through the evaluation system), need (incentives for hard-to-fill subjects such as math and science) and difficulty of assignment (incentives for struggling districts, such as Camden).

Cases in which teachers challenge firings through the tenure process would be decided in 30 days.

School districts could opt out of the civil service system, which Christie said affords teachers an extra, unnecessary layer of protection on top of tenure.

The bills were met with immediate skepticism from the educational establishment.

William Firestone, an associate dean at the Rutgers Graduate School of Education, disagreed with Christie's depiction of New Jersey as a state with schools in need of radical reform.

Overall, New Jersey schools rank among the top in the nation, Firestone said. To improve the quality of education, "you want to do it in a way that builds on our strength rather than tearing things down."

Firestone's colleague professor Bruce Baker agreed, saying that eliminating seniority as a factor in tenure would discount the well-documented value of having experienced teachers lead classrooms.

In addition, Baker said, Christie's proposals assume a pool of potentially great teachers is just waiting to be hired after bad teachers are fired.

"In fact, the alternatives might be worse in many cases, unless we significantly step up teacher pay and maintain quality benefits, including job stability and the potential for consistent income growth over time," Baker wrote in an e-mail.

Former teacher Carol Sharp, dean of Rowan University's College of Education, was more open to the bills. "I'm willing to give them a try, and then I want to evaluate [them] and see if it makes a difference," she said.

She acknowledged that, overall, the state's schools performed well, but she cited Camden's schools and said all children should have a good education.

"We can't be complacent and let another generation of children be let down," she said. "We can't keep protecting teachers who don't go in trying to help kids with everything they've got."

The New Jersey School Boards Association released a statement welcoming the bills, saying the association had been waiting more than 35 years to eliminate permanent tenure and empower local districts to control personnel decisions.

But Barbara Keshishian, president of the state's largest teachers union, said Christie's proposals to tie pay to student test scores ran counter to prevailing research.

"Too many factors beyond a teacher's control affect student test scores because they occur in the home or in the community," she said in a statement. "And the last thing we need is more testing, in more subjects, in all grades."

In an interview after the news conference in which Christie announced his proposals, acting state Education Commissioner Christopher Cerf cited studies that he said proved the effectiveness of measures like merit-based tenure.

"This is a national trend sweeping the country," he said.

But Keshishian said taking seniority out of the tenure equation was just a way to replace higher-paid, veteran teachers with lower-paid teachers and "cover up" the hundreds of millions of dollars that Christie has cut in state school funding.

One veteran school administrator in Camden, LEAP Academy Charter School founder Gloria Bonilla-Santiago, praised the idea of merit pay. LEAP is the only school in the state with unionized teachers that gives raises based on performance, and that, Bonilla-Santiago said, is part of the reason 100 percent of its students graduate, compared to 40 percent of Camden's public school students.

"Our teachers are critical to learning, and so they need to be paid well, they need to be treated with respect, and we need to pay them when they do well," she said. "Teaching quality matters in graduation rates."