Schools
takeover leaves shaky legacy
Sunday, July 17, 2005 • BY KASI
ADDISON AND JOHN MOONEY • Star-Ledger
Staff
Ten years ago, a group of state officials
boarded a van and made the trip to the Newark Board of
Education headquarters.
Bessie White, who was director of finance
in the Newark district, remembers that Wednesday afternoon,
July 12, 1995.
"They drove up in a van on Cedar Street,
parked sideways and all these people jumped out, as though
commandos on a mission," White said.
Soon, White and more than a dozen top
officials would be fired, culminating a bitter period of
rancor, accusations and even arrests. Today, a decade after
the infamous takeover, state control has receded in many
ways. Left behind in Newark are questions about whether the
takeover was worth it and if it made a
difference.
On one hand, many say the drastic action
initially cleaned up the worst cases of district
mismanagement and abuses.
On the other, it has not solved
struggling student achievement, while other factors --
especially New Jersey's court-ordered mandates -- often are
credited for much of the progress, and the district suffered
a critical financial crisis five years ago under the state's
watch.
State officials have conceded as much in
legislation now on the governor's desk meant to revamp how
the state intervenes in schools.
"One of the problems is the law assumes
the Department of Education can take over the function of a
district better than the community," state Education
Commissioner William Librera said. "You can't do
that."
A LONG TIME COMING
Schools had been closed a few weeks when
state officials got into that van 10 years ago.
Then-assistant state commissioner Barbara Anderson was among
those who walked into the office of superintendent Eugene
Campbell, where she announced, "This is now a state-operated
district."
Her words capped an unseemly battle that
really started not long after the city's 1967 riots, when a
task force found the sad condition of the district's schools
had contributed to city's upheaval.
In the subsequent years, the complaints
grew, including the decrepit condition of school buildings,
shortages of supplies, patronage deals and a few charges of
outright corruption.
Students' achievement levels -- if they
attended school at all -- were among the lowest in the
state. In the year preceding the takeover, barely one in 10
juniors in most of the city's high schools passed the
state's proficiency test.
The matter went before no fewer than
three governors, as well as state and federal
courts.
In 1993, state inspectors descended on
the schools. Local and union officials defiantly stood
against them.
A state assistant commissioner, Hilda
Hidalgo, was arrested by local police in one particularly
contentious Morton Street School inspection in the fall of
1993. Photographs showed the 65-year-old Hidalgo being
muscled out of the building by a uniformed Newark
policeman.
Wilfredo Caraballo, now an assemblyman
representing Newark, was Hidalgo's attorney.
"What happened was a city that wound up
barricading itself in, and a state bureaucracy that was
well-intentioned but didn't understand that local dynamic,"
Caraballo said last week. "That was a rough day, and a rough
period afterward.
"Nobody ends up looking good in the
entire thing," he said. "If anybody tries to point a finger
either way, they'd better look in the mirror
first."
SEEDS OF REVOLT
The powers in Trenton -- who also took
over districts in Jersey City and Paterson -- eventually
appointed New York City school administrator Beverly Hall to
oversee Newark.
She laid off workers and decentralized
the district's governance. It was hardly a surprise that
much of the community, especially those in the Newark
Teachers Union, revolted.
"We agreed the school system was rotten
to the core, but it was the way they came in, the way people
felt treated," said Wilhemina Holder, now president of the
districts' high school parents council.
"They looked down on people," she said.
"Anything you suggested because you were from Newark, they
automatically dismissed you."
Hall left Newark in 1999 to become
Atlanta school superintendent, where she remains. She has
declined repeated requests to talk about her time in
Newark.
A year after her departure, state
officials admitted the district was more than $70 million in
the red and failing spectacularly in even the most basic
spending controls. To those ousted in the earlier takeover,
the revelations were vindication.
"Who was ever held accountable for that?"
said Campbell, the superintendent ousted in 1995. "If I had
ever done something like that, I would have been
incarcerated.
"That's what hurts."
The state replaced Hall with Marion
Bolden, a former math teacher and supervisor in the
district, who hardly has been a friend of
Trenton.
When she was reappointed in 2002 after a
contentious battle that split the city, it was a blow to the
state's power brokers, and she remains a burr in Trenton's
side as it tries to implement the mandates of the state
Supreme Court's Abbott vs. Burke school equity
rulings.
Even today, Bolden doesn't shy away from
the controversy.
"As much as people want to label me a
state-appointed superintendent, I have been here all my
life. I am a local superintendent," she said. "I was never a
puppet."
SOME PROGRESS
Since 1998, the court rulings have led to
tens of millions of additional state dollars each year for
universal preschool and vast instructional reforms in the
school system of 45,000 students.
Overseeing a budget of more than $800
million, Bolden and others credit those mandates as far more
a factor in the district's progress than anything the state
directly orders in its oversight. In the last couple of
years, the federal No Child Left Behind Act has brought more
pressure.
"The state takeover got lost after
Abbott," Bolden said. "Most of my tenure has been trying to
enact regulations related to Abbott, and now, of course, No
Child Left Behind has rolled into that."
Whatever the reason, the gains have been
more noticeable the last few years. Teachers and
administrators cite a more unified vision in schools, and
achievement is rising, albeit still far short of anyone's
goals.
Last year, half of the high school
students passed language arts section of the high school
test, and a third passed in math, far below mandates of No
Child Left Behind, but still higher than a year
earlier.
There have been better gains in the
elementary school scores. But the middle school scores
remain especially troubling, with fewer than a third of
eighth-graders last year passing in math.
"The academics will be an issue for us
for a while," Bolden said.
Conceding the state alone cannot attain
the kind of gains Newark or any district will need to make,
Librera, who recently gave Bolden a vote of confidence, has
pressed a new monitoring system he said would refine how the
state gets involved in a district and also a structure for
getting out.
The approach is more surgical, with the
state focusing on specific problems as they arise and then
giving them up once resolved.
"You don't take over; you intervene. You
go in not taking someone's job but working with them to fix
the problem," said state Sen. Ronald Rice (D-Essex), one of
the sponsors of the legislation and also a Newark city
councilman.
Librera has said that once the system is
enacted, the state could cede control of some Newark
operations within the next few of years. An exit in Jersey
City could be even sooner, he said.
Approved by the Legislature last month,
the bill awaits the signature of acting Gov. Richard Codey.
His office on Friday said it remains under
review.
In the meantime, the debate over
takeovers is soon to resurface in New Jersey and nationwide
as the No Child law demands state control be considered for
chronically underperforming districts.
Many say New Jersey's experience shows
the hazards of takeover.
"States understandably have realized that
these experiences are like the Vietnam of public education,"
said Paul Tractenberg, a Rutgers Law School professor who
has extensively studied this and other states' experience.
"I can't imagine New Jersey would willingly take over
another."
Others would just as soon forget the
entire chapter.
"It was 10 years ago," said White, who
has returned to the district, working now as Bolden's chief
of staff. "We have tried to block that out."
Kasi Addison covers Newark schools. She may be reached at
kaddison@starledger.com or (973) 392-4154. John Mooney
covers New Jersey education. He may be reached at
jmooney@starledger.com or (973) 392-1548.
© 2005 The Star-Ledger. Used by NJ.com with
permission.
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