By John Mooney, June 2 in Education |Post a Comment

As with many summer romances, the relationship between the Christie administration and the New Jersey Education Association barely lasted a weekend.

The true winners and losers in the breakup will take longer to determine. These include not just programs and perhaps the prospects of $400 million in new federal aid -- but also the standing of state Education Commissioner Bret Schundler.

Four days after his education commissioner and the NJEA announced agreement on New Jersey’s application for federal Race to the Top funding, Gov. Chris Christie yesterday said he had rejected the accord and the state’s bid would proceed with controversial proposals for tenure reform and merit pay that the NJEA opposed.

It was a stunning reversal on what was an unusual agreement in the first place, and one that sent pronouncements and press releases flying from all camps.

Christie said it was the NJEA and other special interests that had “selfishly thwarted school reform.” The NJEA called the reneging on the agreement a “total outrage.”

Losing Points, or Gaining Ground?

Yet after the rhetorical dust settled, questions loomed as to what comes next, not just for Schundler, who has publicly differed with Christie before, but also for the application and its assortment of proposals.

“I think it will disadvantage New Jersey on one hand,” said Jack Jennings, director of the Center on Education Policy, a Washington, D.C., think tank. “They will lose points on the application without the union’s support.”

But Jennings and others also said the changes in tenure rights and other provisions that were reinstated in the application could make up for it.

Championed by President Obama, the Race to the Top program all but demands states to overhaul their accountability systems on both schools and teachers, and the provisions included in yesterday’s bid do go further toward that end.

For instance, the application now calls for teachers with three years of poor evaluations to be in jeopardy of losing tenure. That had been removed in the accord between Schundler and NJEA but was reinstated by Christie.

In addition, Christie stepped up provisions for merit pay of teachers, taking out language the NJEA supported that called for it to be only voluntary and mostly for school-wide bonuses.

“Away from all the headlines, the application is all about the points you gain for each piece,” Jennings said. “It’s a pretty elaborate system in how the points are all accumulated. It’s not just about buy-in.”

Return of Tenure Reform

Staying out of the rhetorical fray yesterday, the state’s school board association released its letter of support for the application as it stood back in mid-May, before Schundler and the NJEA struck their short-lived deal.

The association has long pushed for tenure reform, and its leaders yesterday said they were pleased to see it back in the application.

“In our view, the application described in the Department of Education's announcement today is a conceptually stronger document than what had been agreed to last week,” said Frank Belluscio, the school boards’ spokesman.

And even while the Democratic leadership of both the state Senate and Assembly issued joint statements decrying Christie for backing out of the agreement with the NJEA, the legislators said they would not remove their own signatures of general support for the application.

Questions on Commissioner

Schundler’s standing could be trickier to determine.

Christie yesterday gave him a vote of confidence, and Schundler’s office would not make him available to reporters during the day, although he did attend a community meeting last night in Neptune.

But others said the whole episode may only make the commissioner’s job more difficult as he tries to negotiate with various stakeholders for what is an extensive agenda, including school vouchers, charter schools, testing changes and a host of financial reforms.

He has differed with Christie before as well, most notably when he tried to soften the governor’s anti-NJEA rhetoric around the school budget votes in April, only to have Christie step it up.

“I don’t know what happens in a case like this where a deal is made and then is broken,” said Lynne Strickland, director of the Garden State Coalition of Schools, representing mostly suburban districts. “Any future sense of trust could be impacted in how this all shakes out.”

Certainly, the NJEA isn’t looking to forget any time soon.

“Is this governor even in touch with his commissioner?” said NJEA spokesman Steve Wollmer. “It’s either dysfunction or deception at the highest levels of government. Neither one is good.”

Much of that agenda is woven into the application, which the administration filed in time for yesterday’s deadline. New Jersey was one of 35 states vying for the nearly $4 billion in available funds.

In addition to the teacher measures, for instance, the application outlines in detail a new statewide data system that would change how student and school performance is measured.

Under the system that the administration said would be ready for statewide rollout in 2012, students and schools would be gauged off their test scores over time, not just a single given year, and also against other schools statewide.

Teachers would also use portable computers akin to iPads to help track student performance over a whole menu of assessments, some annual and some quarterly, and drive lessons around that data.

In another controversial area, the application pushes charter schools as a tool for school districts to turn around low-performing schools, bringing in charter management firms to run the re-started schools.

In addition, the application calls for at least one more authorizing agency besides the state Department of Education to review and approve charter schools in the state.

Christie in his letter accompanying the Race to the Top application said many of the reforms embedded in the bid will be pursued with or without the federal money.

“Please know that my administration is committed to implementing these initiatives regardless of whether or not this application is successful,” he wrote.

Press of Atlantic City ‘Christie rejects NJEA compromises on grant application, includes provisions for teacher merit pay, evaluations based on student performance’

By DIANE D’AMICO Staff Writer | Posted: Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Calling it a “bait and switch” by the governor, the state’s largest teacher’s union rejected the final application for $400 million in federal education funds Tuesday because it includes merit pay for individual teachers and other accountability proposals supported by Gov. Chris Christie.

The New Jersey Education Association last Thursday agreed to endorse the application for Race to the Top funds after some modifications were made that replaced individual teacher merit pay with a school-wide bonus program and supported using multiple measures rather than primarily state test results to assess teacher effectiveness.

 The Christie administration’s application would make it easier for districts to terminate bad teachers using evaluations based on student achievement as the basis for granting tenure and promotions. In the event of layoffs, educational effectiveness would replace seniority as the main factor in deciding which teachers to retain.

 The final application, posted on the Department of Education website Tuesday, does include a school-wide bonus program and includes using multiple measures of student learning, and not just test results, as part of teacher evaluations. Still, the NJEA felt blind-sided by the changes, and found out about them only after calling the DOE to check on the application, which had to be filed with the federal DOE by Tuesday.

 “We greeted the news with a mixture of deep disappointment, utter frustration and total outrage,”

 NJEA President Barbara Keshishian said. “Instead of supporting the application agreed to by his commissioner and staff, Gov. Christie has decided to submit his own application, and to unilaterally remove the support of NJEA and hundreds of its local presidents from it.”

NJEA spokesman Steve Wollmer said it appears that the application includes some of the NJEA’s ideas, but he questioned whether there would be enough money for all of the bonus programs. The $400 million would be allocated over four years, with half going directly to districts and the rest managed by the state.

 “(The DOE) told us they took our name off the application, so obviously they did not believe we would continue to endorse it,” he said.

 The NJEA is advising the more than 400 local unions that had endorsed the modified plan to notify the state DOE and their local school superintendent in writing that they do not endorse the final application.

Senate President Stephen M. Sweeney, Assembly Speaker Sheila Y. Oliver and the chairs of the Senate and Assembly education committees issued a joint news release saying the governor had capitulated to conservatives who had criticized the compromises.

 “The governor has apparently decided that hearing good things about himself over the radio is more valuable than $400 million for our schools,” said Sweeney, D-Salem, Gloucester, Cumberland. “This application was crafted in good faith among everyone involved, and now that unity’s been blown up because some talking heads disagreed. If the governor was as thick-skinned as he likes to make people think, he would shrug off the criticism and stand by the team that put together the state’s application.”

 Derrell Bradford, executive director of Excellent Education for Everyone, said the application shows the governor continues to put students first, and he thinks the public will see that.

The NJEA is losing some ground in public opinion according to a recent poll by Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind released Tuesday. It showed 44 percent of voters surveyed have an unfavorable opinion of the association, up from 35 percent March 30.

The DOE referred all questions to the Governor’s Office, where a spokesperson said there would be no further comment on the application. 

In his letter with the application, Christie said that it is his administration’s belief that no single factor influences a student’s success more than the quality of his or her teachers. He said he believes his proposals are so critical that he will move to implement them even if the state is not approved for the funding.

“Indeed, I am so committed to them that I decided that they should not be compromised to achieve a contrived consensus among the various affected special interest groups,” he wrote.

“Special interests that have selfishly thwarted reform should not be permitted to hold good ideas hostage.”

Contact Diane D’Amico: DDamico@pressofac.com

 ‘N.J. Gov. Christie revises bid for education grant; throws out compromise’

Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Last updated: Tuesday June 1, 2010, 7:16 PM BY LESLIE BRODYThe RecordSTAFF WRITER

Governor Christie threw out the school reform blueprint endorsed by the state’s biggest teachers union last week and filed a new bid Tuesday for a high-stakes federal grant known as “Race to the Top.”

Christie said his education commissioner had compromised too much in order to win the union’s blessing for a contest that could bring $400 million to the state. Christie said the new proposal reinstated key elements of earlier plans, such as merit pay for individual teachers, putting job performance over seniority when laying off staff, making it easier to fire poor teachers, and giving bonuses to successful faculty who relocate to failing schools.

The eleventh-hour change came as a shock to officials at the New Jersey Education Association, who said they learned on Tuesday afternoon – the contest deadline – that the governor had changed the application and taken off their signatures of support.

Union leaders and education commissioner Bret Schundler had spent weeks hammering out compromises on the plan, and on Thursday both parties expressed satisfaction that they had come up with a collaborative blueprint. Union buy-in wins points in the stiff competition.

NJEA President Barbara Keshishian reacted “with a mixture of deep disappointment, utter frustration and total outrage” to the news that the application had been rewritten, she said in a release. “The biggest losers in this entire fiasco are the state’s 1.4 million students.”

Christie told reporters Tuesday that he was not involved in the past weeks’ discussions between the union and commissioner Schundler, and that when he learned the details of the compromise on Friday, he told Schundler to spend the holiday weekend restoring principles such as individual merit pay. The union-endorsed plan had focused on school-wide bonuses for schools that made strong gains, and it kept seniority-based job protections.

Christie said he retained faith in his education commissioner and wanted “creative tension” within his staff.

“This is my administration, I’m responsible for it and I make the decisions and I’m happy to hear recommendations anytime that my cabinet officials want to make” them, he said. “But they need to understand, those are recommendations. I take them with real serious consideration but in the end, these are core principles that I’ve been campaigning on since I decided to seek this job.”

Schundler, reached by cellphone, said of the last-minute revision, “We made the decision together.”

“Clearly there are enormous disagreements within the administration on how they want to proceed,” said NJEA spokesman Stephen Wollmer. “That doesn’t engender much confidence among the ranks of teachers.”

The governor stressed that his Race to the Top application reflected President Obama’s push to tie teacher pay and evaluations to student achievement, judged in part by test scores. Christie’s office posted the massive application online for public review after 6 p.m.

In a letter to U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, Christie noted that the application “recognizes that after a child walks through the school house doors, no single factor influences that student’s academic success more than the quality of his or her teachers. … Special interests that have selfishly thwarted reform should not be permitted to hold good ideas hostage.”

Christie, who has sparred for months with the NJEA, wrote that he wanted to enhance schools’ abilities to measure student learning and use that data to evaluate teachers; merit pay would reward the best teachers and give “adequate teachers” an incentive to improve. Such evaluations would be the basis for tenure, promotions and job retention.

The NJEA has long fought merit pay, saying it undermines teamwork. The union also argues against relying on standardized test scores to judge teachers; it says doing so pushes them to “teach to the test” and penalizes teachers facing challenging kids. The NJEA’s rejection of the first-round Race to the Top application in January was one of several factors that hurt New Jersey’s bid.

Last week’s compromise plan called for a committee of educators that would take a year to formulate fair ways to assess teachers and school leaders using a combination of test scores, written assignments and other measures, with student performance accounting for 50 percent of a teacher’s evaluation.

Charles Barone of Democrats for Education Reform, a pro-merit pay group based in Manhattan, said Christie’s approach has been “ham-handed,” but the state’s application still has a chance for success despite the lack of union sign-on. A number of states, notably Louisiana and Illinois, have submitted proposals that don’t included full union support, he said.

Barone said he had been surprised Schundler had agreed to so many concessions since they seemed at odds with Christie’s agenda. “Why did they feel they needed NJEA support so badly that they shredded their application?” Barone asked. “Now they have a strong application but a lot of collateral damage.”

Frank Belluscio of the New Jersey School Boards Association said the compromise version of the application had “watered down” initiatives like merit pay, plus changes in seniority and tenure rules that his group supported.

The latest version – without NJEA backing — provides stronger support for those concepts and still has a good chance of winning the federal funding, he said. “Early on, Bret Schundler said union support was not integral to the application,” Belluscio said.

Senate President Stephen M. Sweeney, Assembly Speaker Sheila Y. Oliver and the heads of the Senate and Assembly education committees Tuesday blasted Christie’s “abrupt about-face,” saying it seriously jeopardized New Jersey’s chances of winning the aid. They said Christie was pressured by conservative pundits who criticized the compromise plan.

“The governor has apparently decided that hearing good things about himself over the radio is more valuable than $400 million for our schools,” said Sweeney, D-Gloucester. The compromise application “was crafted in good faith among everyone involved, and now that unity’s been blown up because some talking heads disagreed. If the governor was as thick-skinned as he likes to make people think, he would shrug off the criticism and stand by the team that put together the state’s application.”

By the 4:30 p.m. deadline, 35 states and the District of Columbia had submitted bids. The Obama administration said 10 to 15 winners of a total $3.4 billion will be announced by the end of September.

“This took a lot of hard work and political courage,” U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a news release to commend applicants. “It required administrators, elected officials, union leaders, teachers, and advocates to work together and embrace a common reform agenda.”

Staff Writers Patricia Alex and Charles Stile contributed to this report. E-mail: brody@northjersey.com

Governor Christie threw out the school reform blueprint endorsed by the state’s biggest teachers union last week and filed a new bid Tuesday for a high-stakes federal grant known as “Race to the Top.”

AMANDA BROWN/THE STAR-LEDGER

Christie, seen at a Tuesday press conference, said his education commissioner had compromised too much in order to win the union’s blessing for a contest that could bring $400 million to the state.

Christie said his education commissioner had compromised too much in order to win the union’s blessing for a contest that could bring $400 million to the state. Christie said the new proposal reinstated key elements of earlier plans, such as merit pay for individual teachers, putting job performance over seniority when laying off staff, making it easier to fire poor teachers, and giving bonuses to successful faculty who relocate to failing schools.

The eleventh-hour change came as a shock to officials at the New Jersey Education Association, who said they learned on Tuesday afternoon – the contest deadline – that the governor had changed the application and taken off their signatures of support.

Union leaders and education commissioner Bret Schundler had spent weeks hammering out compromises on the plan, and on Thursday both parties expressed satisfaction that they had come up with a collaborative blueprint. Union buy-in wins points in the stiff competition.

NJEA President Barbara Keshishian reacted “with a mixture of deep disappointment, utter frustration and total outrage” to the news that the application had been rewritten, she said in a release. “The biggest losers in this entire fiasco are the state’s 1.4 million students.”

Christie told reporters Tuesday that he was not involved in the past weeks’ discussions between the union and commissioner Schundler, and that when he learned the details of the compromise on Friday, he told Schundler to spend the holiday weekend restoring principles such as individual merit pay. The union-endorsed plan had focused on school-wide bonuses for schools that made strong gains, and it kept seniority-based job protections.

Christie said he retained faith in his education commissioner and wanted “creative tension” within his staff.

“This is my administration, I’m responsible for it and I make the decisions and I’m happy to hear recommendations anytime that my cabinet officials want to make” them, he said. “But they need to understand, those are recommendations. I take them with real serious consideration but in the end, these are core principles that I’ve been campaigning on since I decided to seek this job.”

Schundler, reached by cellphone, said of the last-minute revision, “We made the decision together.”

“Clearly there are enormous disagreements within the administration on how they want to proceed,” said NJEA spokesman Stephen Wollmer. “That doesn’t engender much confidence among the ranks of teachers.”

The governor stressed that his Race to the Top application reflected President Obama’s push to tie teacher pay and evaluations to student achievement, judged in part by test scores. Christie’s office posted the massive application online for public review after 6 p.m.

In a letter to U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, Christie noted that the application “recognizes that after a child walks through the school house doors, no single factor influences that student’s academic success more than the quality of his or her teachers. … Special interests that have selfishly thwarted reform should not be permitted to hold good ideas hostage.”

Christie, who has sparred for months with the NJEA, wrote that he wanted to enhance schools’ abilities to measure student learning and use that data to evaluate teachers; merit pay would reward the best teachers and give “adequate teachers” an incentive to improve. Such evaluations would be the basis for tenure, promotions and job retention.

The NJEA has long fought merit pay, saying it undermines teamwork. The union also argues against relying on standardized test scores to judge teachers; it says doing so pushes them to “teach to the test” and penalizes teachers facing challenging kids. The NJEA’s rejection of the first-round Race to the Top application in January was one of several factors that hurt New Jersey’s bid.

Last week’s compromise plan called for a committee of educators that would take a year to formulate fair ways to assess teachers and school leaders using a combination of test scores, written assignments and other measures, with student performance accounting for 50 percent of a teacher’s evaluation.

Charles Barone of Democrats for Education Reform, a pro-merit pay group based in Manhattan, said Christie’s approach has been “ham-handed,” but the state’s application still has a chance for success despite the lack of union sign-on. A number of states, notably Louisiana and Illinois, have submitted proposals that don’t included full union support, he said.

Barone said he had been surprised Schundler had agreed to so many concessions since they seemed at odds with Christie’s agenda. “Why did they feel they needed NJEA support so badly that they shredded their application?” Barone asked. “Now they have a strong application but a lot of collateral damage.”

Frank Belluscio of the New Jersey School Boards Association said the compromise version of the application had “watered down” initiatives like merit pay, plus changes in seniority and tenure rules that his group supported.

The latest version – without NJEA backing — provides stronger support for those concepts and still has a good chance of winning the federal funding, he said. “Early on, Bret Schundler said union support was not integral to the application,” Belluscio said.

Senate President Stephen M. Sweeney, Assembly Speaker Sheila Y. Oliver and the heads of the Senate and Assembly education committees Tuesday blasted Christie’s “abrupt about-face,” saying it seriously jeopardized New Jersey’s chances of winning the aid. They said Christie was pressured by conservative pundits who criticized the compromise plan

‘N.J. teachers union joins Christie administration in 'Race to the Top' application’

By Statehouse Bureau Staff   May 28, 2010, 5:05AM

TRENTON — In a rare accord between two warring factions, the state’s largest teachers union has joined Gov. Chris Christie’s administration in supporting an application for a federal grant that could bring up to $400 million to New Jersey’s public schools.

The New Jersey Education Association refused to endorse the state’s first Race to the Top application, but relented after both sides compromised on what had been the biggest sticking points — merit pay, teacher seniority, evaluations and tenure.

"We are extremely pleased that the 200,000-member NJEA has agreed to endorse our application and its bold reform agenda designed to improve education in New Jersey," Education Commissioner Bret Schundler said in a statement.

Administration officials would not say whether the agreements reached for this application represented a long-term policy shift from goals Christie has been pushing since he took office in January.

Previous coverage:

• N.J. teachers union backs 'Race to the Top' application

• N.J. education chief gets mixed reviews for reform plans, 'Race to the Top' grant

• N.J. education chief proposes sweeping school reform, urges NJEA cooperation

• Coalition of Newark educators form unlikely alliance trying to reform city schools

• N.J. schools reach deadline to join bid for $400M federal 'Race to the Top' grant

• Half of N.J. six-figure teachers work in Bergen, Passaic counties

• N.J. education chief plans to lay out merit pay, benefits cuts for teachers

• N.J. Gov. Chris Christie pushes for education changes with speech in Washington

• Gov. Chris Christie criticizes N.J. schools for not stopping student walkouts

• Complete coverage of the 2010 New Jersey State Budget

The agreement came after several days of marathon negotiations between the state Department of Education and the NJEA over the application, which includes linking student achievement to teacher evaluation and pay.

Race to the Top is an initiative by the Obama administration which rewards states for school improvement plans. Chances of winning federal grant money increase with broader support. In March, Delaware and Tennessee were awarded $600 million.

According to the state’s latest application, student achievement will account for 50 percent — not 51 percent, as originally proposed — of a teacher’s evaluation and include not just test scores, but other measures of learning such as portfolios of students’ work, NJEA spokeswoman Dawn Hiltner said.

The original application included a "bonus pool" of money from the state for strong teachers. The funds would be split between teachers or teacher teams and their schools.

The new application proposes a merit pay pilot program that districts could opt to join. Instead of individual merit pay for teachers, half the money awarded by the state as bonuses would be used for schoolwide programs, such as technology upgrades or teacher training, Hiltner said.

A school’s staff would decide how to award the rest of the money. It could go to individual teachers, or divided among the entire staff, or used for a school program, Hiltner said.

"Our feeling on merit pay is, teaching is a collaborative effort," Hiltner said. "This helps people in schools work together, instead of pitting teachers against each other because they are vying for a bonus."

A second merit pay initiative, which awards bonuses to effective teachers who work in high-needs districts, remains in the state’s proposal, Hiltner said.

"We’re willing to see how it works," she said.

The Department of Education originally proposed extending the time to achieve tenure to five years, or three years of "effective" teaching. The proposal the NJEA agreed to keeps the time required to earn tenure at three years, Hiltner said.

Schundler said the NJEA’s support for the Race to the Top application supplements endorsements already received from the American Federation of Teachers affiliate in Newark, and from superintendents and school board presidents in more than 430 districts statewide.

Ben Dworkin, an political science adjunct at Rider University, said the union and administration were standing together to avoid squandering any chance the state had of receiving the money.

"The Race to the Top initiative, which is relatively small in the grand scheme of federal support for education, is really about trying to get everybody in a particular state on the same page, moving toward better educational outcomes," he said. "It was embarrassing to New Jersey — and to the governor’s office as well as the NJEA — that they couldn’t get on the same page during the first round."

By Lisa Fleisher/Statehouse Bureau and Kristen Alloway/The Star-Ledger

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