(From The Wall Street Journal, May 7, 2010)
By BARBARA MARTINEZ
NEWARK, N.J.–Mayor Cory Booker travels the country talking about education reform and his wish to transform this city’s few high-performing schools from “islands of excellence into hemispheres of hope.”
Some of his biggest fans wish he’d spend more time at home trying to fix Newark schools.
Mr. Booker, 41, is up for re-election Tuesday, and right after his widely expected win, “some of us are prepared to call the mayor to task and call on him to become more vocal and more hands on” in the public schools, said Rev. Reginald Jackson, executive director of the Black Ministers Council, which represents about 600 churches in New Jersey. “He ought to become the visionary that he talks about,” added Rev. Jackson.
“Mayor Booker clearly hasn’t made education reform a top priority in his first term,” said Joe Williams, executive director of Democrats for Education Reform, an advocacy group. “But we’re confident that it will be a cornerstone of his next.”
Some register disappointment in the mayor’s decision to single-mindedly target crime reduction rather than making as aggressive a push on schools. These people point to the mayors of Washington and New York, who immediately battled for mayoral control of the schools and won, and have since installed school chancellors who have made great strides in increasing school choice and closing failing schools. Newark’s schools are controlled by the state.
Mr. Booker rejects the criticism of his first term. “People are talking without knowing the intimacy of our accomplishments,” said Mr. Booker in an interview. “I’m involved in the trenches.” He said he did try to get mayoral control but was stymied by an unsupportive legislature and the teachers’ union.
“I don’t think he tried very hard to get local control,” said Joseph Del Grosso, the president of the Newark Teachers Union, which is endorsing a Booker rival in the election.
The 41-year-old Yale Law graduate and Rhodes Scholar has a flair for speech-making and has been the subject of two award-winning documentaries. While his oratory and political skills have often led pundits to suggest he could be a future U.S. president, his celebrity status has brought the city millions of dollars in fresh investments.
Some of those investments have come to Newark’s charter schools, including $22 million to create the Newark Charter School Fund two years ago. At times, Mr. Booker has called prospective charter-school teachers outside the state to convince them to come teach in Newark. The city has some of the country’s best charter schools, including Robert Treat Academy, where nearly 100% of the students, most of whom are poor and minority, outscore their suburban counterparts.
But some of Mr. Booker’s biggest allies worry about the more than 40,000 students, or about 90% of the city’s kids, who don’t attend charters. Newark’s high schools graduated 54% of its seniors last year, but that included students who didn’t pass the standard high-school exit exam and instead took an alternative test widely criticized as too easy. At Central High School, for instance, only 4% of the students last year passed using the standard state high school test.
In Newark, “we are spending $24,000 per pupil in public money for an absolutely disgraceful public-education system, one that should embarrass our entire state,” said Gov. Chris Christie in a speech in Washington this week. One study showed that in 2008, 98% of Newark students attending a local community college required extra help in math, and 87% needed it in English and reading.
Gov. Christie, a Republican, is likely to help the Democratic Mr. Booker make strides in education. The mayor said he’s already had conversations with the governor about getting more involvement in the oversight of the city’s schools, and thus accelerating his plans to improve the schools. He said he and the governor have been talking about “creating a national model for education reform,” and that Newark is on pace to increase the number of students going to charter schools to up to 25% over the next five years.
A spokesman said Gov. Christie is “highly supportive” of the mayor’s efforts and “applauds his recognition of the problems…. We expect to work with him on this critical issue and on charter schools,” he said.
De’Shawn Wright, a former education adviser and now a consultant to the mayor, said many of Mr. Booker’s moves to help the district schools are not generally known because they haven’t been announced. For one, the charter-school fund helped pay for the recruitment of 80 new teachers to the district schools last year.
Mr. Wright said the mayor and the governor agree on key issues, like getting more aggressive about closing or turning around underperforming schools, increasing choice for parents and developing a stronger accountability system for teachers and principals.
Mr. Booker said he generally sees eye to eye with the man who is in charge of Newark public schools, Clifford Janey, and weighed in on Mr. Janey’s strategic plan. Mr. Janey, who reports to the state, has adopted some typical charter-school policies, like requiring student uniforms and lengthening the school year, to 185 days. He is also pushing for the use of student-performance data among teachers to closely track and change teaching when students fall behind.”We’re so steeped in fixing the airplane and flying it at the same time,” he said.
But there are challenges. In return for the extra work year, Newark agreed to a nearly 5% teacher-pay increase last year, complicating necessary cost cuts for this year. This school year, 575 employees make more than $100,000 a year, up 71% from the number who made that much two years before. Principals, who work a contractual maximum of 29.5 hours a week, can earn up to $139,000.
Because of state budget cuts, Mr. Janey now has to lay off 357 non-tenured teachers. Due to seniority rules, 158 central-office personnel, some of whom haven’t been in a classroom in some time, will be moved into classrooms in the fall. “Teacher quality” is not a consideration in layoffs because of tenure laws and union agreements, Mr. Janey’s spokeswoman said, adding that the office staff will be replacing “some of the most promising teachers.”