Saturday, October 14, 2006 •
BY JOHN MOONEY • Star-Ledger Staff
In its first concrete step toward
extricating the state from three school districts it operates, the
Corzine administration is turning to teams of outside experts for
advice.
The state's program is still months
away from getting into the schools, and officials yesterday did
not set a new timetable in what has already become a two-decade-old
saga.
But acting state Education Commissioner
Lucille Davy told lawmakers at a hearing Thursday that the outside
reviews would be the first step in what she saw as a new role for
the state in Newark, Paterson and Jersey City schools.
Small teams of educators and experts
led by a veteran researcher at Montclair State University would
go into these districts in the late winter or spring of 2007, as
well as a half-dozen other districts that are under lesser levels
of state oversight, officials said.
The other districts are Camden, Trenton,
Asbury Park, Atlantic City, Salem City and Irvington.
The teams would determine how the
schools match up to an extensive checklist of standards set for
all districts under the state's new monitoring system, from their
fiscal health to their student test scores.
"We'll know once that external review
has been done where each of the three (state-operated districts)
stand in each of the areas," Davy said Thursday. "We will know very
specifically which districts, if any, can be returned to local control
and which should remain."
When asked a timetable, Davy said:
"It will depend on the review. If it comes back and says they meet
a significant number of indicators, we will be able to turn back
even immediately. If they don't, it depends on how much needs to
be done."
The first state in the nation to
do so, New Jersey took control of Jersey City schools in 1989, Paterson
in 1991, and Newark in 1995 after claims of persistent mismanagement
and dismal student performance.
The takeovers largely consisted of
the state purging upper management and the school boards, then naming
a new superintendent. But after more than a decade, state officials
have questioned the extent of the gains in all three districts.
For much of the last decade, a succession of state commissioners
tried to devise an exit strategy.
Last spring, the state finally enacted
new monitoring guidelines that focused state intervention more on
dealing with specific problems in a district than making wholesale
changes.
Using that law, the state will now
enlist a new education research center at Montclair State University
led by researcher Bari Erlichson. As a professor at Rutgers University,
Erlichson conducted much of the initial research into the effectiveness
of the "whole school reform" mandates under the state's Abbott v.
Burke school equity rulings.
"It is great that the commissioner
has turned to external teams, as nobody should be put in the position
to evaluate themselves," Erlichson said yesterday. "But it's going
to be a long process, and the strength of it will be in the quality
of the people involved."