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1-4-13 Education and Related Issues in the News
NJ Spotlight Most Newark Teachers Take a Pass on Bonus Program…Superintendent and union head both say teachers are being understandably cautious about new contract

NJ Spotlight - NJ Teachers Union Moves to Block 'Blended' Learning at Newark Charter…NJEA argues that blending online technology with traditional teaching has to be cleared by Legislature before it can be used in school

NJ Spotlight - Budget Cuts Loom as Shortfall Tops $700 Million…OLS: Sandy reconstruction, income tax surge will help, but not enough

NJ Spotlight - Most Eligible Newark Teachers Take a Pass on New Bonus Program…Superintendent and union head both say teachers are being understandably cautious about new contract

By John Mooney, January 4, 2013 in Education|Post a Comment

As Newark’s landmark teachers contract begins to be implemented, only about 20 percent of district teachers who can opt to earn bonuses for exemplary evaluations and service in hard-to-fill slots have actually decided to do so.

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"Opt" is the key word here. New teachers and those with only bachelor's degrees are automatically enrolled in the program -- defined in a new salary guide -- which pays up to $12,500 in yearly bonuses.

Under the groundbreaking Newark contract, however, teachers with advanced degrees -- about half of the city’s teaching force -- can choose to stay with the traditional salary guide, which rewards teachers according to experience and academic degree.

With the last of the selections completed at the start of the new year, district officials said this week that roughly 80 percent of those who could stayed with the traditional guide.

Superintendent Cami Anderson, who personally negotiated the contract with the Newark Teachers Union, said yesterday that the number of willing takers was encouraging and about what she expected.

The biggest raises for veteran teachers fall in the traditional guide, and she said it made economic sense for many of them. The fact that a fifth were willing to shoot for the bonuses was a positive, she added.

“We thought that was pretty exciting,” Anderson said in an interview. “We didn’t expect more than that. I think it is human nature to choose what you are accustomed to.”

Joseph Del Grosso, the president of the NTU, also said that many teachers were sticking with the familiar as the new contract was being put in place with a host of changes, including a new evaluation system that incorporates peer review.

“I think they felt more comfortable on the traditional guide, and in some cases the raises were better,” Del Grosso said in an interview yesterday. “They made individual decisions based on their own finances.”

“Peer review and the performance pay aspect will take a little while for people to acclimate to,” he continued. “I think a lot of people want to see just how it works, that it will be a fair and equitable evaluation process. Since it’s something new, I think a lot of members want to take their time.”

The choice of salary guides is just one of the steps being taken in New Jersey’s largest school district to put the sweeping contract in place, a process that both Anderson and Del Grosso said has so far gone relatively smoothly.

A big piece of the puzzle has been getting out retroactive checks to teachers and other NTU members to cover the past two years since the previous contract expired, payments totaling close to $31 million -- a sum being largely paid for through the $100 million gift from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Even that process involved a number of changes, DelGrosso said. The district and the union had to work out if recently retired teachers would be included, as well as how to get the checks issued before the end of the year and the advent of the new payroll taxes that were included in Congress’s "fiscal cliff" negotiations.

“Some follow up of that still needs to be made, but that has basically been done,” Del Grosso said of the retroactive checks.

“The transition process is always difficult,” he said in general, “but so far wherever we have found problems the district has corrected them.”

Among the next steps is putting in place the peer review process that for the first time will include teachers in the evaluations themselves and create teams of fellow educators to serve as “validators” in case evaluations are contested.

“We still need to decide what exact role they will play, whether it will be required that they observe or evaluate, and will they be those with credentials in administration and supervision,” Del Grosso said. “All of those things still need to be worked out.”

The district is also acting on provisions in the contract that will provide stipends for teachers working in nearly a dozen targeted low-performing schools who will be required to put in extra hours of training and instruction.

The contract would pay those teachers $3,000 for the additional time, including two weeks of additional professional development over the summer and an extra hour of school each day. But with the contract ratified midyear, the implementation has been modified depending on the school.

“Because we didn’t sign until midyear,” Anderson said, “while there was nothing to prevent us from implementing it, at the same time it would be a little like changing the rules in the middle of the game.”

So teachers in those schools were given a choice whether to sign on to the extra time, with no penalty if they didn’t, and schools could choose to phase in the additional hours.

“By doing that, what happened was a majority of our teachers did sign [the agreements],” Anderson said.

Overall, the superintendent said there remain many challenges ahead in making the contract work, but the progress and partnership with the union has been strong so far and helped smooth many of the rough spots.

“I’m very hopeful and also very pleased in the partnership with NTU,” Anderson said. “This contract is only as good as the implementation, and it will require intense collaboration. And we’re off to a good start ."

Del Grosso said much the same, crediting the district for addressing problems as they came along. He gave specific credit to Anderson: “She’s been pretty good, I have to say.”

NJ Spotlight - NJ Teachers Union Moves to Block 'Blended' Learning at Newark CharterNJEA argues that blending online technology with traditional teaching has to be cleared by Legislature before it can be used in school

By Jill Barshay, January 4, 2013 in Education|Post a Comment

When 11-year-old Rachelle Rosado opens up her laptop and puts on her headphones in her sixth-grade classroom, she hears an electronic voice saying something like this: The prefix "sub" goes with "mit" and that makes the word "submit.”

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Rachelle attends an unusual charter school in an office building across the street from Newark City Hall. The school, Merit Prep, opened up at the beginning of the 2012-2013 academic year with the noble mission of raising the academic performance of low-income minority students. But it is also embroiled in a controversy over how much children should be taught by computers. New Jersey’s biggest teachers union is suing to shut the school down and is hoping a state appellate court will do so in early 2013.

Students at Merit Prep are part of an educational experiment known as blended learning that combines computer software, individual instruction, and small-group learning. They spend a lot of the day in a cafeteria-sized room where there’s enough space for the entire school of 80 sixth-grade students -- mostly black, poor, and below grade level -- to sit at shared lime green tables with their assigned laptops. The plan is to add one grade a year.

Rachelle says the animated characters in some of the software programs are funny. And she especially likes going at her own pace.

“In my previous school, when we start on one thing, we spent two weeks on it, but in this school, if we get it complete, we just move on to the next thing,” says Rachelle.

When Rachelle struggled with an online worksheet, she liked doing it over and over again until she got it right.

Hundreds of schools around the country are experimenting with big doses of online instruction inside the classroom and changing the role of the teacher.

Ben Conant, a math teacher at Merit Prep, is half disc jockey who selects the mix of computer curriculum and half personal tutor who addresses each student’s weaknesses..

“I don’t want kids just sitting in front of a computer and becoming like pale computer zombies,” said Conant. “I was worried about that. That was my biggest fear.”

The online curriculum feeds each student’s answers into a data center operated by Touchstone Education, the nonprofit school management group that runs Merit Prep. The data center then spits out reports that Conant can use to monitor his students’ progress, figure out what one-on-one coaching each student needs, and adjust what he will teach when he pulls a few kids aside into glass-enclosed seminar rooms for small-group instruction.

Students don’t just work on their computers. Conant also has them do calculations on paper, which gives them handwriting practice.

“Four is messy,” Conant told one student. “I want to see it like one, two, and three. But your math is good.”

Conant says his biggest problem in the classroom is that students are playing math games that they find on their own over the Internet. He disciplines the game players with demerits. “They want to learn; that’s great,” Conant says. “It’s much better than students drawing little ink flowers that they scribble over and over again, which is what people do when they have notebooks and they’re bored.”

Ben Rayer, founder of Merit Prep, believes he can get better results for low-income inner-city children by combining technology with the best practices in classroom teaching. If he succeeds with this first Newark school, he plans to build 50 charter schools just like it around the country.

Rayer says the big benefit to using technology is that he can tailor the instruction for each student.

 “No longer do we teach just one lesson in front of a class of 30 or 40 students; we teach many lessons during a day to students based on their individual needs,” says Rayer.

This year as Rayer develops his nonprofit model at Merit Prep, his school is overstaffed with a 13-to-1 student-teacher ratio.

But he says technology should allow him to increase that. He won’t put a number on it, but his description of becoming 25 percent to 30 percent more efficient than a typical school could mean as many as 40 students per teacher.

“That is not the point of what we’re doing,” said Rayer. “But if this worked and a teacher could serve more students at a highly effective level, we would do that.”

The New Jersey Education Association, which doesn’t even represent the teachers of Newark, is worried about the specter of computers replacing teachers. The union has gone to court to shut down Merit Prep and another charter school that is also using a blended learning approach. The union’s lawsuit argues that charter schools can’t emphasize online instruction until the New Jersey state legislature evaluates and approves it.

“Should we be experimenting with students during their academic experience?” asks Steve Wollmer, the union’s communications director. “They only get one trip through the public schools.”

Computer use in education will inevitably grow, but the question is: How much?

Even some technology advocates like Doug Levin of the State Educational Technology Directors Association doubt that this model will ever appeal to middle- and upper-income families whose children are not struggling below grade level.

Levin says that’s because those children don’t need as much extra drilling and can use more of the school day for analysis and inquiry.

“I think this approach works much better for elementary school-aged children who are really struggling to build their vocabulary, to understand basic math facts and operations,” says Levin. “I think as kids get into middle and high school, what the computer can offer in that regard is less.

Levin predicts the computer drilling will succeed in raising the test scores of the low-income sixth graders of Merit Prep.

But until those results are in, this school is still an experiment.

This story is a coproduction of The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit news service at Teachers College, Columbia University, and WNYC's New Jersey Public Radio.
Jill Barshay, a contributing editor at The Hechinger Report, has been a radio and print reporter for two decades. She was the New York bureau chief for Marketplace, a national business show on public radio stations. Barshay previously worked at Congressional Quarterly, The Asian Wall Street Journal, and the Minneapolis Star Tribune. She has also written for The New York Times, the Financial Times, The Economist, and The Washington Post, and appeared on CNN, ABC News, and C-SPAN.

 

NJ Spotlight - Budget Cuts Loom as Shortfall Tops $700 Million…OLS: Sandy reconstruction, income tax surge will help, but not enough

By Mark J. Magyar, January 4, 2013 in Budget

With New Jersey facing a $705 million budget shortfall that could easily double by June, the Senate Democratic budget chairman yesterday called upon the Christie administration to lay out a plan to close the gap before the size of the deficit becomes virtually unmanageable.

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Senate Budget Committee Chairman Paul Sarlo (D-Bergen) urged Gov. Chris Christie “to face up to the realities of the growing shortfall” and make the necessary midyear budget cuts.

“Every month that we delay, the options grow more limited,” Sarlo warned. “Certainly, we don’t want to be where the House [of Representatives] was, falling off a fiscal cliff” at the end of the budget year.

David Rosen, budget officer for the nonpartisan Office of Legislative Services, told Sarlo’s committee yesterday that it would be “optimistic” to expect the current $705 million gap not to grow over the next six months.

“Every month that revenues fail to grow by the 8 percent that Treasury projected adds to the deficit,” Rosen noted, and no state in the nation is experiencing consistent 8 percent growth.

Proclaiming that the “New Jersey Comeback has begun,” Christie last year insisted upon enacting a $31.7 spending plan that anticipated the highest budget growth in the nation. He branded Rosen the “Dr. Kevorkian of the numbers” and charged that he was serving Democratic interests when he projected in May that state revenues for the 14 months ending June 30, 2013, would come in $618 million below Christie’s certified projections.

Christie spokesman Michael Drewniak dismissed Rosen’s analysis, saying the nonpartisan budget expert has been “persistently negative and persistently wrong about the state’s revenues.” Citing strong income tax receipts and an expected revenue boost from Hurricane Sandy reconstruction efforts, Drewniak insisted that there “are far too many unknowns as our state begins to recover to jump to any conclusions that the sky is tumbling down on us or engage the Democrats’ desire in making this a partisan game.”

Nevertheless, revenues have now come in below Treasurer Andrew Sidamon-Eristoff’s projections for 10 consecutive months stretching back to last March, and Rosen yesterday said his own projections will most likely turn out to be optimistic. With current revenues down $451 million and last year’s budget ending up $250 million short, hitting Sidamon-Eristoff’s original revenue projections is now virtually out of the question, Rosen said.

“As a result of revenue underperformance to date, the state would need spectacular revenue acceleration to hit the Executive’s budget targets,” Rosen testified. Where revenues have grown at 0.2 percent for the first five months, they would need to grow by 11.9 percent over the remaining seven months. Nothing in the national or state economic picture suggests that such growth is likely.”

At the current anemic 0.2 percent growth rate, the state’s revenue gap would be $2 billion by the June 30 end of the fiscal year, Rosen acknowledged under pointed questioning by Sarlo. But Rosen emphasized that he does not expect the final figure to be anywhere near that high.

Two Crises to the Rescue

Ironically, the state’s budget picture will be helped by a pair of crises that no one foresaw when Christie certified the revenue numbers last June -- Hurricane Sandy and the recently concluded congressional battle of the fiscal cliff.

Based on the experience of Louisiana following Hurricane Katrina, Rosen said it would be logical for New Jersey to expect a modest short-term tax loss for a few months following Hurricane Sandy that would be more than offset by a large boost in revenues once federal funding and insurance payments for reconstruction begin to flow into the state.

“The likely magnitude and timing of the bounce is difficult to project,” Rosen said.

Based on the schedule Republican House Speaker John Boehner laid out yesterday, it will take almost 12 weeks for Congress to approve significant aid for New Jersey, New York, and other states ravaged by Hurricane Sandy, compared with just 10 days to send aid to Louisiana, Mississippi, and other states devastated by Hurricane Katrina.

Further, reconstruction projects in New Jersey could be slowed by adverse winter weather, which was not an issue in Louisiana. Still, Hurricane Sandy is likely to boost state revenue by hundreds of millions of additional dollars in the current budget year.

So far, Rosen said, the good news is that Hurricane Sandy has had relatively little short-term impact on state revenues. He noted that sales tax collections for the year were down 0.3 percent through September and October -- before Sandy hit -- and were down just 0.4 percent through the end of November after a month in which many businesses were closed for a week or more.

The only revenue to take a major hit due to Sandy was the casino tax, which was up 4.7 percent through September, but was down 7.6 percent by the end of November. The decline is relatively unimportant, however, because casino taxes make up less than 1 percent of overall state revenues and are dwarfed by income, sales, and corporate business taxes.

The best news for New Jersey's budget is that the state income tax, which makes up about one-third of state budget revenue, is down just 1 percent, or $31.5 million, from the Christie administration’s projections. That tax could very well exceed its 5.7 percent growth projection by the end of the year.

Rosen, who has access to the Treasury database that is updated daily, said the December income tax numbers are “very good.” This year’s “April surprise” in income tax collections is likely to be a good one, Rosen said, due to decisions by wealthy taxpayers to cash in stocks or take additional income in 2012 before higher federal income tax rates and capital gains taxes kicked in on January 1, 2013, as a result of the fiscal cliff negotiations.

“While some of this activity, such as paying bonuses in December rather than in January or February, will have no net effect on state fiscal year revenues,” Rosen said, “special dividends paid in 2012 or capital gains taken in 2012 to avoid higher federal taxes later, will boost 2013 Gross Income Tax collections in New Jersey. The magnitude of this windfall may be hinted at when we see the fourth-quarter estimated payments, but will remain uncertain until April.”

Because New Jersey’s state income tax is one of the most highly graduated in the country, the wealthiest 2 percent of residents pay almost half of the total state income tax, making it likely that the final windfall will be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Doomsday Scenario

Nevertheless, despite the expected Hurricane Sandy and income tax windfalls, New Jersey’s overall state revenue trend for the year remains bleak, Rosen and Sarlo agreed. “It’s not a doomsday scenario, but the economy is sputtering,” Sarlo said.

Sen. Joseph Pennachio (R-Morris) noted that Rosen’s shortfall calculations do not include any undisclosed actions the Christie administration may already have taken to cut previously authorized spending by lapsing funds into the general budget. Nor do Rosen’s projections include the $648 million surplus built into the budget, including $183 million originally earmarked by Christie to be used for the first phase of a state income tax cut this month if his revenue projections came in as scheduled.

Prospects for an income tax cut this year -- unlikely at best in September -- were clearly washed away when Hurricane Sandy hit, wiping out the prospects for the quick turnaround in October, November, and December tax revenues that Christie was still hoping for.

“You do the math. Does it work?” Sarlo demanded, when questioned by reporters about whether Christie’s tax cut was still alive.

Sarlo noted that the New Jersey has yet to make any provisions to provide additional state aid to municipalities or school districts to make up for revenue that will be lost when homeowners and business owners file tax appeals to lower property tax payments on properties that were destroyed or severely damaged by Hurricane Sandy.

Further, the Democratic budget chair noted that the Treasury Department’s most recent budget prospectuses acknowledged that the state faced other major budget problems in addition to the current revenue shortfall. Sarlo said that the state budget could have an additional hole of up to $500 million as a result of unrealized Medicaid and Social Security tax savings, lower energy-related taxes, and unrealized one-shot revenues from the privatization of management of the New Jersey State Lottery and the anticipated diversion of affordable housing funds.

Sarlo and Rosen both said filling the state budget gap will be harder if the administration waits much longer to act.

“Clearly, the later you get in fiscal year, the harder it is to find places to cut spending,” Rosen said. “By time get into May, most of the money is spent. Most of the money that is not spent consists of commitments like Medicaid you can’t change or aid to school districts that have already built their budgets on. The two biggest pots of money left are the pension payment, which is slightly more than $1 billion and the homestead rebate program of $450 million.”

The $450 million program that provides property tax rebates or credits to senior citizens, the disabled, and middle- and lower-income homeowners would be a particularly difficult program to cut in a year in which the governor and entire Legislature are up for reelection.

Further, failing to make the promised $1 billion pension payment would immediately result in a lawsuit by the state’s public employee unions challenging the state’s failure to make its legally required contribution under legislation passed in 2010 , which raised required pension payments for every public employee in the state, Sarlo noted.

The various budget issues, coupled with the growing revenue deficit, makes it imperative “for the treasurer to give us a plan to rebalance the budget,” which is the executive branch’s constitutional responsibility, Sarlo noted. “The treasurer has to come here and show us his ideas.”

Sidamon-Eristoff declined Sarlo’s invitation to appear before the committee yesterday, and Sarlo said he has offered the treasurer several other dates this month. “If he can’t make those dates, he should tell us what day he can appear, and I’ll bring the committee in,” Sarlo promised.