Gov. Christie moves to limit superintendent salaries and the suburbs fight back. Could this be the issue that brings the cities and the suburbs together? Listening to the suburban superintendents and school board members at a public hearing last week gives me hope that city/suburb education coalitions
Read more →Two interesting reports were released Oct 12: one on fairness in school funding and the other on mayoral control of schools. I’ll write about the school funding report later. But for now, let’s consider mayoral control of schools as a possible way to return to local control.
Read more →Most of the news wasn’t good. Spring 2010 test scores were mostly down. One hundred eighty-six seniors didn’t pass the final exit exam and were denied diplomas. The board had lots of ideas about what to do that include all of us, especially parents, in motivating students.
Read more →Yesterday I attended the Joint committee on Public Schools meeting. Here are a few things I thought noteworthy. Senator Rice asked some very pointed questions about QSAC. He wanted to know: the implementation process, how many districts had been evaluated, how many were in each level of monitoring
Read more →On Tuesday, October 5, the Joint Committee on the Public Schools will hold a hearing on state takover. Our legislators want to know how the NJ QSAC law is working. We can tell you- not very well. Ever since the first QSAC evaluation was delivered in a
Read more →Myth # 1. Paterson schools were better in 1991 than they are now. Were our test scores better? Yes. But the level of educational performance they were testing at the high school level was about our current 4th grade curriculum. Consider that in 1991, only students who
Read more →Do you know that it has been 19 years [August 3, 1991] since the State of New Jersey took over the Paterson Public Schools? Since that time Paterson has had six State Superintendents, seven Commissioners of Education and seven Governors. For a long time it seemed that
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