A call for reform of public education

The state's public education system covers up failure, deprives students of a quality education and fosters a false sense of high achievement, the head of New Jersey's Black Ministers Council said yesterday.

"New Jersey spends more on education than any other state in the nation and we are getting so little in return for the money we are spending," said the Rev. Reginald Jackson, executive director of the council, at a statehouse news conference. "We've come today to pull the covers off this coverup."

Flanked by other clergy and Latino leaders, Jackson called for the reform of teacher tenure rules that grant lifetime job security after just three years, as well as procedures for placing teachers, testing students and assessing their progress and graduation rates.

He also called for the elimination of the special review assessment, which provides an alternate route to graduation by passing a test Jackson said almost no one fails. He said students in the 11th and 12th grades have three chances to pass the SRA.

"The SRA provides New Jersey with a means of masquerading the fact that many of its students have not mastered what is supposed to be learned," he said. "It is a coverup. It is a dummied-down route to graduation. If kids have not learned, we ought not give them a diploma."

Jackson said parents are not notified when their children graduate by taking the easier test.

He said students can graduate through the SRA route after failing the standard high school exit exam, the "eighth-grade level" high school proficiency test in which only 47 percent of language arts and 50 percent of math questions must be answered correctly to pass.

Jackson said the state also uses a "false" and "misleading" standard for measuring high school graduation rates, calculating the percentage of 12th-graders who start the school year but do not graduate, rather than the number who begin high school and then drop out.

He and the other clergy and Latino leaders also urged enactment of a bill, the Urban Enterprise Zone Jobs Scholarship Act (S1607/A2897), that would establish a five-year pilot program to provide tax credits to corporations that contribute funding to nonprofit organizations that provide scholarships to help low-income children in eight of the state's largest cities pay tuition at nonpublic schools or out-of-district public schools.

Jackson said the state needs a better system for hiring, retaining and assigning teachers. The most highly-qualified teachers, he said, have better-paying jobs in the suburbs even though their teaching skills are more badly needed in poor-performing urban schools.

He also took issue with the notion that inner-city students are less capable of learning because they come from dysfunctional families or bring other issues to the classroom.

"Let me say that is absolutely, unequivocally bogus," he said. "The problem is not the students, the problem is instruction."

Jackson urged the state to embrace President Obama's call for merit pay for teachers. While explaining he was not out to abolish tenure, Jackson said teachers periodically ought to face a tenure review.

"I am not opposed to tenure. I am opposed to lifetime tenure," he said. "Why can't a teacher teach for five years and then have to be retenured?"

Steven Baker, a spokesman for the state's largest teachers' union, the New Jersey Education Association, called Jackson's argument "a real misunderstanding of what tenure is."

"Tenure is not a job for life," he said. "Tenure is a fair job dismissal process that requires just cause. It can't be an arbitrary firing or a personality conflict between a teacher and an administrator."

He also called the clergy and Latino leaders "a group with an agenda."

"This is a group that wants to push private school vouchers," he said.